Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Oh, there is something deliciously slimy—smarmy, even—about the game Pax Illuminaten, designed by Oliver Kiley. (BGG says that Pax Illuminaten is based on Kiley’s earlier title Emissary, a game I have not played.)
One pass of the rulebook for Pax Illuminaten had me very excited. I’m not a dedicated scholar of Pax games, having only played Pax Pamir Second Edition (although Pax Hispanica, Pax Emancipation and Pax Porfiriana are currently on deck here at Casa de Bell). I HAVE played Pax Viking Junior, although I am sure a purist would not count that one.
But the core Pax system of historical, card-driven play with multiple end-game conditions and a closed economy is on full display with Pax Illuminaten, and I was further excited by the relatively straightforward rules and a playtime listed as 20-30 minutes per player.
A Pax game, in about 90 minutes? Sold, I said out loud to no one after that rules readthrough.
Then I got the game to the table…and I was mostly impressed. Pax Illuminaten is for a certain kind of player, especially one who likes to understand what is mostly possible in a strategy game, with ample space for a few surprises and a boatload of secondary actions.
Sorry, When Are We, Again?
Pax Illuminaten is a sneaky game of intrigue for 1-4 players. Using the solo game as a teaching tool, I found that the game could last anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours depending on not only your player count, but the game’s Plot cards…a player who is able to quickly meet the conditions of one or both public Plot cards (or one of their private Plot cards) might drive the game to its completion really fast, especially if other players are slow to derail an opponent’s plans while keeping their own plans in motion.
It’s 1776. Players take on the role of an “Aeropagus”, a fancy-sounding title for disciples of the Order of the Illuminati. The main “board” is really a set of 57 Luminary cards, representing famous figures of the era that must be influenced in order to control the series of symbols and suits on each card. Some of these Luminary cards are laid out in a grid sized to the player count, while others are left in a five-card market that can be drawn from at the end of each player’s turn. Player actions require the Luminary cards on the board to be scouted (flipped to their face-up side), influenced, extorted, or ousted by being challenged by other players.
Luminary card movement and control is a pretty fluid situation; over the course of the game, market cards are constantly being swapped out for other cards from hand or the board, mainly to help a player meet Plot conditions. Each player has Luminary cards in their hand as well, and those can be used for all kinds of wacky business, from being played in “Schemes” to create shenanigans with cards in the main grid, to being used to collect influence tokens from a very tight closed economy. (This, like the way cards move through a public market, very much reminded me of the fun shenanigans on display in Pax Pamir Second Edition.)
Each player’s goal is simple: meet the conditions of two Plot cards, from a pool of three—two that are available for all players to meet, and one private Plot that only the card’s owner can meet. (Each player gets one private Plot card dealt during setup.)
Each player can only claim one Plot on their turn at a time. Multiple players can claim each Plot, so Plots are never closed when someone lays claim to one of them. A player has to maintain a Plot’s condition to keep one of their tokens on that Plot, meaning that a player might gain, then lose, then regain their spot on a Plot card because of everything going on.
The rules looked simple in the rulebook, with turns consisting of two actions following an “Event Phase”, before a final phase on each turn mainly to check win conditions. But now that I’ve gotten a couple plays under my belt, I am really impressed with the idea that Pax Illuminaten is easy to learn but difficult to master, and that starts with the Plot cards.
The Plots Thicken
Each Plot card lists a condition, and some of them are very, very straightforward, such as “Dispersed Contacts”, where players simply have to control a certain number of Luminary cards on the main map based on player count. Others are frankly ridiculous, such as Fringe Enlistment. This plot requires a player to control a “Lodge” (3+ cards with the same color suit) of at least four cards, as long as that Lodge runs along the outside of the Luminary board.
In my second game, Fringe Enlistment was one of the public Plots, and all three players tried their best to both build up the right color mix of cards as well as scout the specific cards along the board’s edges…while everyone tried to mess with everyone else’s control of those cards. It was war, but card war, with powdered wigs and influence tokens and battles (whoops, “challenges”) between players trying to gain control to meet the Fringe Enlistment conditions.
The real beauty of Pax Illuminaten came in trying to figure out what the other players’ secret Plot cards contained. What’s Gideon really trying to do by moving that blue Luminary card from the inner edge of the third row? What’s Joseph really trying to do by collecting a bunch of those orange tokens? And that’s before we talk about all manner of extras, between Faction cards (given to the player who controls the largest Lodge of a given color, which grants them an ongoing power) and Event cards, which may change the game’s rules for a few turns.
There’s a lot going on in Pax Illuminaten, but I’m surprised to share that none of it was overwhelming. And after a few turns, all players know that nothing they control is safe, putting everyone on edge and giving players better chances to plan for the chaos. You may not know what specific brand of chaos is coming, but you know that your neighbor always has something up their sleeve.
The Downsides of Power
Pax Illuminaten is not all roses, and in my limited experience with the game, that was always tied to the difficulty of the Plot cards.
Simply put, I wish the Plot cards were tiered, so that each game featured, say, one simple Plot card and one complex Plot card that were public and available for all players to attempt. Then, each player’s secret Plot card would be something of medium difficulty, a Plot card that could be achieved through crafty play.
Instead, Plot cards can be all over the map. 13 are included in the box, and some are just easier to parse than others. Rosicrucian Foil was featured in one of our games, but it was a private Plot card for one player. All game long, that player found himself hunting for one specific card type, while other players generally didn’t care about card symbology in the way that player did. Cards regularly get burned for Scheme effects, so in that game, I was spending cards from that suit having no idea that they were a win condition for another player.
Plot cards like Influential Converts are really simple—control two Aces in a three-player game. There are enough Aces that move through the market that a player can usually find ways to draft those cards and play them at just the right moment.
Difficult Plot cards slow the game down, and I liked Pax Illuminaten when it was in that 20-ish minutes per player place, easy to do when players have a straightforward sense of what to do to achieve at least one of the public Plot cards. But when the game’s hardest Plot cards are the two everyone is chasing, I didn’t enjoy Pax Illuminaten quite as much.
The shenanigans, however? I enjoyed those every time, and that’s the best reason to grab a copy of Pax Illuminaten. It’s easy to teach, has a great player aid (with everything you need on a double-sided, small square-sized card), and usually plays quickly. Three players is enough for me, but I could see why some players try this at four for maximum chaos.
