The first thing to be made clear is that this game has nothing to do cardinals or kings. It is simply a very lightly themed abstract game of placement that happens to be played on a map showing part of medieval Europe. The theme starts and ends with the use of the map and the names for the pieces. That said, the good news is that it is a rather good abstract game of placement, which crams an impressive amount of interesting play into a short space of time. It is also a welcome addition to the rather thin ranks of games that are not merely playable with three but probably at their best with three.

The map shows nine of the countries, duchies and principalities of medieval Western Europe--France, England, Bavaria, Burgundy and so on. Snaking across is a simple road system and dotted along the roads are sites for monasteries. In the centre of each of the nine regions is a placement area for "counsellors". Each player has a set of playing pieces made up of cylinders (counsellors) and houses (monasteries) and the game equipment is completed with a deck of cards. Eight of the nine regions are paired off by colour. So, for example, England and Swabia are the same colour, as are Bavaria and Burgundy. The odd one out is France, which is the largest and has a colour to itself. The cards are in the same colours and carry the names of the corresponding countries. Thus a green card simply has on it the names 'Bavaria' and 'Burgundy'.

Play is governed by a '3-2-1' rule. On your turn you may play up to three cards (from a hand of three) in order to place up to two pieces, but if you place two they must both be in the one country. The cards determine where the placements can be made. In order to place a piece in a country you must play either one card of the same colour or a matching pair of a different colour. For example, if your hand consists of one green and two pink cards, your options are:

1. place a piece in either a green or a pink country, leaving yourself with two cards;
2. place two pieces in a pink country, leaving yourself with the green card;
3. use all three cards to place two pieces in one of the green countries.

After you have made your placements, you replenish your hand back up to three by selecting from two face-up cards and the top card of the face-down deck.

Getting the restrictions right is one of the two key steps in a placement game. The other is the scoring and here it comes in two stages: a smallish one at the halfway point and a larger one at the end. At the halfway point the scoring is just for monasteries and there are points to be gained in each of the nine countries. The player with the most monasteries in a country receives one point for each monastery in the country. The next player receives one point for each monastery belonging to the first player. And so on down the line. For example, if blue has 4 monasteries in France, green 2 and red 1, the scoring would be 7 to blue, 4 to green and 2 to red. Players with no monasteries in a country get no points from it. (There is always one chancer who asks about this. Hit him.)

Scoring at the end consists of a repeat of the intermediate procedure, together with bonuses for chains of monasteries (one point per monastery in any chain of at least four) and a scoring for the counsellors. The latter works as follows. Numbers on the board indicate 15 possible 2-country alliances--usually a country and one of its neighbours. If you are either first or first equal in counsellors in both of the countries in one of these alliances, you score a bonus equal to the total number of counsellors in the two countries.

The shape of the game tends to be mainly monasteries in the first half and mainly counsellors in the second. There are three reasons for this. The first is the chains. They will be important at the end and you won't build them up unless you make an early start. The second is the intermediate scoring. Provided you all take it seriously, you are likely to come out of it fairly level. But you do need to take it seriously, as the difference between first and second in a well contested country is significant and so are the cheaply bought second places. Somebody has four monasteries in France, where he is trying to build part of a chain. If you place one monastery for a second or joint second place, it is going to net you 4 points while only giving the leader an extra one. These are not bargains that you should pass on. The third is a restriction which ties the number of counsellors in a country to the numbers of monasteries currently there and this stops an early rush for the counsellor spots, even though you all know that they are going to be important at the end.

As I said at the start, this game packs a great deal into its 45 minutes and what it does, it does pretty well perfectly. If you like abstract games, you will almost certainly enjoy it.