Zena 1814

About this board game

Zena 1814 is a board game for 2–5 players, played in about 90 minutes, set in Genoa during the eight months between Napoleonic domination and the Restoration of the Congress of Vienna.

Players take the roles of the city’s great families, cooperating with their rivals to benefit from shared commercial ventures and successful military victories. Yet every partnership serves a larger contest: the ultimate goal is to surpass the other families in the race for prestige.

Each round, players move their pawns through the game’s areas and may play cards from their hands that belong to areas where they have at least one pawn. The game’s central mechanism is its highly interactive influence system: players can place influence cubes on cards, including cards played by their opponents.

• The player who plays a card must influence it.
• Other players decide whether to influence it to obtain the card’s effect.
• When a player influences an opponent’s card, that card’s owner receives a smaller, one-time bonus.

This participation system creates meaningful choices throughout the game. Supporting another family may provide an immediate benefit, while also granting that family a bonus, reflecting the cooperation and rivalry among Genoa’s historical families during this period.

In Zena 1814, commercial cooperation, military success, and direct competition are closely connected. Players must decide when to advance their own interests and when to participate in an opponent’s plans, because cooperation and competition always go hand in hand—but only one player can ultimately win.