Stan Kordonskiy has built a reputation as the designer of heavy eurogames for a range of publishers, including Minos for Board&Dice. That company has a prediliction for packaging its heavyweight games with titles beginning with T, so it's fortuitous perhaps that it's Hobby World who have published this game about Ivan IV, the Grand Prince of Moscow and All Russia, or they'd have surely titled the game Terrible, which would be terribly misleading! This then is a game set in the rule of Russia's first Tsar, known to history as Ivan the Terrible.
You're not playing as Ivan, however. The First Tsar is actually an economic area control game for 2-4 players who each represent the powerful boyar families (Russian nobility). It's played over four rounds of worker placement and bribery in the Kremlin and on a map of 16th Century Russia as the boyar families vie for prestige from their estates and through foreign trade, build armies and city fortifications, and fulfil royal assignments. Each round represents a decade of Ivan's reign.
You select actions by placing boyar meeples out in the Kremlin and you can enhance the action by adding your seal, tho' you may first have to sweeten the deal with a bribe to ensure your family takes precedence over others... The game benefits from some great artwork from Michele Esposito, including a board that manages to be detailed without ever looking cluttered.
As with Stan Kordonskiy's other designs, players can pursue a variety of different strategies in their pursuit of power and prestige (ie: victory points). Our plays at Board's Eye View have mostly run to around 2 hours; less with just two players but pushing closer to 3 hours with a full complement of four. It's awakened players' interest in a period of history of which we weren't previously very cogniscent - so several of the Board's Eye View team have sought out Sergei Eisenstein's 1945 and 1958 movies that tell the story of Ivan the Terrible, including, in the case of the second film, 'the Boyars' Plot'...
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