Pax Illuminaten
- Board's Eye View
- Aug 15
- 4 min read
When we think of the Illuminati we usually have in mind a shadowy elite of puppetmasters controlling the strings of power. It's the mythological stuff of conspiracy theories. But there really was an Illuminati; established in 1776 by a group of Bavarian intellectuals at the University of Ingolstadt promoting the philosophy of the Enlightenment in the face of opposition from the established Church. It's this historical group that's the subject of Pax Illuminatem. The game is published by Ion Game Design as part of their series of Pax games, tho' this card-driven Pax game is designed by Oliver Kiley and differs from previous titles in the series.
In Pax Illuminaten, each of the 2-4 players (and there's a solitaire version too) is an Areopagus - a founder member of the Bavarian group seeking to recruit new members with the notional aim of reforming society. For each game there will be public and individual private Plot cards which set out the objectives to be achieved, and to win you need to be the first to be satisfying the conditions set out on two of these cards; for example, controlling a group of cards from the same faction in a particular pattern on the map grid. The cards in the grid are initially all face down but one of the actions you can take is to pay a favor token to scout a face-down card, draw it into your hand and place out in its space a face-up card (which could be the card you've just scouted).
The cards in the grid and in players' hands are all luminaries based on historical figures. They are mostly freemasons or Rosicrucians. They also have faction icons representing their profession or key interests so that each is, in effect, in two of the game's six suits. The factions also correspond to the favor tokens that are the currency of the game. You pay various combinations of these to spread 'influence' (in effect, your control) to adjacent cards in the central grid, and you can collect favor tokens by taking an extort action from adjacent cards over which you have influence.
In addition to taking actions extending and using influence on the shared grid, players can spend the cards in their hand to 'scheme', benefiting from that card's text. You can play as many cards as you like to your scheme, benefiting from the text on each of them, provided you can chain them so that each card shares at least one faction icon with the card that preceded it. Hands are replenished at the end of each turn but you never draft more than two cards from the market display, so if you use all your cards you'll be picking up at least half your hand from the face-down draw pile.
Pax Illuminaten offers huge opportunities for collecting and using resources and for manipulating the cards in the grid. It's especially satisfying when on your turn you are able to chain together several scheme actions that then let you take particularly powerful actions on the grid. Where on the grid there's a faction of three or more adjacent cards, the player with the most influence can claim the corresponding faction card, giving them an additional bonus ability. These faction cards are quite powerful and you can expect them to change hands during the course of a game as area control fluctuates, much like the non-player Houses in Tiny Epic Game of Thrones (Gamelyn Games).
Tho' you need to satisfy two Plot cards to claim victory, you can only ordinarily claim a single Plot card on your turn. In our plays at Board's Eye View we found that it was almost inevitable that other players responded to a claim by using their next actions to undo it. However, designer Oliver Kiley has anticipated this by specifying in the rules that the one-per-turn limitation on claiming Plot cards only applies to new claims. That means you can achieve an immediate two-Plot victory by recovering a previously claimed Plot and successfully claiming a new Plot on the same turn. Most of our plays have ended this way but there's also a game timer that's triggered by particular Event cards and if a game ends that way, the victor is determined by the number of influence tokens in the largest contiguous area for each faction.
Tho' the theme is there, and most players are likely to leave the table knowing slightly more about some of the figures at large in 18th Century Bavaria, Pax Illuminaten feels less rooted in its theme than most of its predecessors in the Pax series, and particularly the early titles created by Phil Eklund. With the benefit of art by Madeleine Fjall, and a smattering of recognisable persona like Mozart and Goethe, the Illuminati provide a colourful backdrop, but once play is underway Pax Illuminaten feels much more like an abstract strategy game where players are collecting resources and using them to manipulate the board layout and claim area control. That's not a criticism tho': we've been entirely engrossed in our plays, with games mostly running to around 60 minutes. We've especially enjoyed Pax Illuminaten as a two-player head-to-head. You'll get a special kick out of successfully chaining together scheme and board actions, and even moreso if you've been able to seize and use a faction card in the process.
And without giving away any Spoilers we should probably mention that, in keeping with the secret society theme, Ion Game Design have hidden a major surprise in Pax Illuminaten. Indeed, it's so well hidden that it's probably only going to be found by those who decide to sleeve their cards. Just saying.
