Not content to present gamers with a small card game (Famiglia) and another expansion for his masterpiece (Power Grid: Russia/Japan), designer Friedemann Friese will also release a new big box game through his 2F-Spiele at Spiel 2010: Fürstenfeld. Here's a game description from the publisher:

Anno 1516: As a young sovereign you are cultivating your small Fürstenfeld to supply goods to the local breweries. But you still miss your greatest dream: your personal palace. Your status will finally rise high enough to leave the vexed farming behind and to demand taxes from the surrounding rural population, so you can finally live in peace.

You harvest hops, barley, and spring water, and increase your wealth with a growing agriculture. Additional buildings help you to get the necessary funds for building your desired palace. There are only two problems:

* First, the demand for goods at the breweries is limited. The more goods the players produce, the faster the prices drop. * Second, the palace needs more and more space. The closer you are coming to finishing your dream palace, the smaller is your personal field for farming.

Fürstenfeld is a game with easy rules, which allow players to start playing immediately. Each time you are confronted with new challenges: When do you start to build your palace? Which goods do you produce? Which additional buildings are helping you the most? And when you finally master the base game, the expert game will already be waiting for you!

Henning Kröpke, who works with Friedemann to prepare games from 2F-Spiele, passed along this additional information about Fürstenfeld:

Looking at the structure of Fürstenfeld, this game is very simple: players harvest goods, sell them, and, afterwards, build houses and production spaces. The special part is the permanent necessity to replace earlier built houses by new ones. Near the end of the game, players must even give up farming to finish their palace.

The excitement of the game is to find the exact moment to start building the palaces. As players normally go through their card supplies about one-and-a-half times during a game, a player will have a good chance to win the game if he successfully manages the changing prices at the breweries to his greatest advantage. To successfully play Fürstenfeld, it helps if a player can remember the order he placed unused cards beneath his card supply. In this way, a clever player can plan future moves as he discards unused cards.

Hopefully you have a lot of fun with this challenging game.

Description written by W. Eric Martin and used with permission of BoardgameNews.com