This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: The Shakespeare Game
Designer: Ellie Dix & Mandela Fernandez-Grandon
Year: 2022
Country: U.K.
Publisher: Laurence King Publishing Ltd
The Shakespeare Game is a light boardgame in which every player is Shakespeare, in London to put on plays to make money and find success. The Shakespeare who first either puts on a new play at the Globe or makes 120 pounds is the winner.
At the beginning of the game, each player starts in their own countryside location which grants a starting advantage. London consists of locations with special bonuses such as an extra Performance card or theatres where you can put on plays. This is important because staging entertainments makes money.
Each player has a hand of Performance cards of different Shakespeare plays. When you stage a play, you use cards from the play you’re doing and the more you have, the more money you make. Three Romeo & Juliet cards means the minimum, while five would make you good money. To add a complication, the first player to stage a play at each of the theatres gets an extra 10 pounds, creating an incentive to stage plays at as many new venues as possible.
There’s an educational vibe to The Shakespeare Game, but at least for me 100% of the fun that was derived from the experience came from my existing familiarity with Shakespeare’s plays. It was nice to see all the callbacks or compete with the Shakespeare trivia required by certain cards.
There are special cards you get after you stage plays, and their effects are contingent on being able to answer Shakespeare-related trivia questions and perform other, similar tasks. As the game goes on, the importance of these cards grows as you can use them to sabotage your fellow Shakespeares and gain advantage.
What I liked about The Shakespeare Game was that it focused on the historical period of Shakespeare’s life and the specific milieu in which he wrote his plays. When you discard Performance cards from your hand, they go into the open rehearsal space where anybody can snatch them up. After all, in Shakespeare’s time theatre was a cutthroat business!