“A person can’t help their birth. ”

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Welcome to The Prodigals Club! You and your fellows are proper Victorian gentlemen who have realized that the lower classes have more fun. Now you are in a friendly competition to see which of you can destroy his own social standing most thoroughly.

So The Prodigals Club is a sequel/expansion to Last Will, a game where you’re trying to spend all of your money, Brewster’s Millions style. I enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to this.

In this, you have two (technically 4) tracks and you’re trying to get them as low as possible. Firstly, you have this one…

The 2 Ladies and 2 Gentlemen start near the top and as the game goes on you move them down… I assume this is your Family and their social standing? Whatever it represents, the lower the better. This is one of your scores.

The other is this one and it’s attached to the main board.

Votes

This is your number of votes and as you don’t want to be elected the lower the better.

The lower of these two tracks is your final score, the player with the lowest score wins.

To do stuff you place workers… There are several spots around the board and each gives a few different actions.

Some of these spaces move your tracks down, mainly the people one. You can also move them sideways from column to column which is quite important, more on that later. You also have the chance to get cards and tiles which you use later too.

Actions

Once everyone plays their action pawns, you play actions and cards. There are two types of cards, Black and White.

Black ones go on your player board and can be used each turn once each but they mostly increase the effect of your White cards.

White cards are one-off abilities…

These have special abilities that mostly lower vote tracking.  This ‘Slurred Speech’ gives you one downvote (The downwards thumb) and a MegaPhone, more on those in a bit. They interact with your Black cards especially those labelled with a particular party or containing a particular symbol.

The tiles also boost the cards you played. When you gain tiles you put them in your area and you’re trying to make a square of 4 where each side matches. (Question Marks are wildcards) If you do you can move two of your people down on a track, very useful.

Those symbols also boost your cards. For each matching pair, you get a bonus to a card that activates with that symbol.

Old Lady

Then you check in with the old lady, she has a name but I can’t remember it. She has nice things to say about you and you do NOT want your reputation rising! If your 4 people are in certain configurations or in certain columns you move UP on certain tracks, not good.

The tile that shows the configuration you’re avoiding is revealed at the beginning of each round so you have plenty of time to get your people in order.

Then, you take a trip to Hyde Park to say some words to the people…

This photo is upside-down but so was Hyde Park from where I was sat 🙂

This is where Mega Phones come into play. The player/s with the Most (2nd and 3rd most too) will drop on the voting track and the player/s with the least will go up one vote.

5 rounds of this, count your tracks and take the higher of the two as your score, the player with the lowest score wins.

The Prodigals Club Summary

The Prodigals Club is a very nice game with a lot to balance. You can build a pretty good engine if you get the right cards. Mix in getting the right tiles, avoiding the kind words of Grandma, get those Mega Phones and don’t neglect either track and you’re on a winner. But everyone is doing that.

There is an optional module we didn’t play with that involves money which sounded cool. What’s even cooler is instead of just using the module you can use Last Will (the entire game) instead. I’d love to give that a go 🙂

Jesta ThaRogue