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This is a review of a modern board game called Pax Illuminaten, part of a series of games, loosely connected by their mechanics and their historical focus. My research into the topic was substantial. As well as time spent learning, playing, and discussing the game with fellow players, I studied the period in which it is set by reading articles and listening to podcasts.

Intercalary segments covering historical context break up the review. This isn't an entirely novel concept, even for board games journalism, but it is effective at keeping the reader engaged. As well as the featured/banner image, I included embed images from the game set up, edited to give the setting of my kitchen table a little more panache.

Ballroom Blitz: A Review of Oliver Kiley's Pax Illuminaten

18th Century Bavaria, a region of the Holy Roman Empire - what would become modern day Germany. Enlightenment ideals are spreading across Central Europe like the plague. Bavaria at this time is still very much controlled by the church, and enlightened concepts like Democracy, Secularism, and Equality are suppressed. 

It’s a lot harder to define what makes a Pax game these days. When all we had were Paces Porfiriana, Pamir, and Renaissance, it was a pretty straightforward rubric, considering how chaotic play could be. A card market. Tableau-building. Low luck. Unique but universally accessible victory conditions. An historical simulation using player interaction to drive emergent storytelling. 

Now, Pax games run the gamut. Pax Emancipation trades in dice rolls. Pax Pamir Second Edition scrapped the win conditions altogether and went with victory points. Pax Viking looks and feels more like the way recent wargames have intersected with economic or euro titles. And other games have gained honorary Pax status, such as Holland’s Reign of Witches or Sylvester’s The King is Dead Second Edition. These remind players of the series’ most ascribable criteria - shifting goals and odd-bedfellowship. As the collection grows, overlapping commonalities dilute the core formula. Pamir’s second edition almost synecdochally represented a shift in that formula, away from sharp-edged historicity and into the modern era. Game design for the sake of good game design. In sanding down the corners, Wehrle gave us a better game. It just wasn’t quite as much of a Pax game. 

Adam Weishaupt was a Bavarian intellectual and former Jesuit scholar, fired from his academic position for leveraging his station to acquire and spread progressive literature. Weishaupt joined the Freemasons, believing that behind their shroud of mystery, he would find a feast of forbidden knowledge. After braving a number of their convoluted, cryptic rituals and climbing the ranks, he was disappointed to find that the only thing the Freemasons hid behind the shroud were more secret rituals and more crackpot traditions. Absolutely no scientific or philosophical texts. Like his old Jesuit school, this was just another secretive community wielding power over the masses. Bavaria seemed doomed to remain backwards and stunted. 

Pax Illuminaten is Oliver Kiley’s contribution to the family. PI’s setting isn’t so much Bavaria as it is the nebulous social spheres in which the Illuminati operated. Each player is a member of Weishaupt’s inner circle, given an elaborate recruiting wishlist by their fearless leader. Every card in the deck is a different influential white guy from the period, sorted into one or two suits representing institutions like the clergy, nobility, or academia. 

Over the course of the game, you will be placing cards into a grid, a social web of professional relationships and secret partnerships. Most recruiting plots involve having your influence discs on a pattern of cards. The equivalent of these chaps typing your name into the referral box when applying for a membership at your gym. Proof that they’re your friend or colleague. If you can meet the requirements for two plots and claim them before anyone else, you’ve proven to Weishaupt just how industrious (and charismatic) you are. Thus, victory.

Introducing his friends to what knowledge he could get his hands on, Weishaupt formed a tight ring of luminary accomplices. The group sought to acquire more enlightenment texts and then disseminate the message to others - most importantly, powerful people who could make a difference. Recruitment was painfully slow. New acquaintances either couldn’t be trusted or didn’t care to be taught by this young, ostracized Jesuit about topics too complex and too abstract to understand in a single conversation. 

Weishaupt realized that in order to expose the lies of the church and the myriad secret societies in Bavaria, he would need to create his own secret society. How else could he lure strangers into the fold but with delicious mystery and the promise of ancient magical powers? How else could he vet members but to force them through layers of ritual-gated strata? How else could he acquire more progressive texts but to exploit powerful men who had risen through the arbitrary levels of a made-up hierarchy?

Each card in the game has a suit and a rank. Suits represent the six factions governing German society. The church, the monarchy, artists, merchants, magistrates, and scholars. A card of rank one, two, or three shares two suits. For instance, a rank two card could have the magistrate and artist suits or the magistrate and scholars, and so on. Aces and Crowns each have only one suit. And each card has up to three locations on it where your influence discs can go. As players add cards to the board, a nineteenth-century Bavarian “Who’s Who” takes shape. Like a ballroom of painted faces and white wigs. 

Every turn, you get two main actions. Things like placing a card, re-placing a card, adding your influence to it, or moving your influence around. Most actions cost favors, the currency in Pax Illuminaten. Intentionally non-descript, these could represent anything from blackmail to cash to, well, actual favors. And they come in six shades for the six suits.

Once your little disc is on someone’s location, you can also “extort” them as an action. That just means gaining favors based on their suits. For card ranks two and three, with two or three locations to a card, multiple players can influence the same convert to the cult. The last main action, “Oust!”, allows a player to force their rival’s discs off of a card. Each of you adds up your nearby influence and tosses a card in for its strength value. You’ve halted the dancing to have a duel for the sake of your new recruit’s honor…and to get them all to yourself.

Even from the start, the Weishaupt’s Illuminati bisected its membership into several ranks, each with their own responsibilities and access to the deeper lore of the order. Since Freemasonry proved not to be as old as its recruiters implied, he too made up ancient history for the Illuminati and pretended that the one and only lodge in Germany was merely one chapter in a global organization. But with only a handful of early members, he reluctantly returned to the Freemasons, seeking converts among the members of its extensive network. 

Robin Spathon Ek’s mercifully footnote-free manual for PI rarely sheds light on the historical analog to these rules. It’s not hard to imagine the parallels, but the level of abstraction creates gaps between each system. For instance, a group of three or more contiguous cards of the same suit are called a “lodge.” Outside of the game, that word refers to the Illuminati’s chapters. As secretive as churches and universities could be, I doubt they’d have co-opted that term to describe their own parishes and schools. The word was simply chosen because it’s on-theme. There are better options - clique, enclave, cabal. None of them quite evoke the setting though, do they? 

The circle of cards on the table must be an abstraction, because the plots you’re given to complete would be downright silly otherwise. The “Fringe Enlistment” plot requires a group of cards along the grid’s edge. The “Freemason Union” wants one Freemason from each faction. And guess what the “Inner Circle” plot has in store for you. The idea for Pax Illuminaten originated as a sci-fi area control 4x. It’s no wonder so many of the individual actions and effects are so hilariously labeled. It is easily the Pax game least beholden to its theme, but maybe that’s a good thing.

The Illuminati spread rapidly in just a few years, high echelon members entering the inner sanctum only to find a small library of progressive texts. One such member, Adolph Knigge, had originally joined and left the Freemasons. When he entered the inner circle of the Illuminati and found no real magic at the heart of yet another occult-peddling secret society, he threatened to expose them for their fraudulent conspiracy. Weishaupt placated Knigge by offering him a hand in building the organization and overhauling its rituals. Knigge was so interested in the occult that he agreed, becoming Weishaupt’s secret partner in charge of event planning. He incorporated earnest mysticism into the proceedings. Membership increased, but the lie grew. The cryptic symbology and spooky gatherings were just a front for adult education. Sooner or later, that lie would see the light of day. 

If you have the most influence in the largest lodge of a faction, you can claim its Faction card, adding it to your tableau - until someone claims it from you. Each of the six faction cards gives its holder a passive ability and a bonus action. For instance, the scholars’ faction card gives you a better scout action you can use once a turn to uncover a card in the grid, and it also increases your hand size by one. 

However - and I hope you’re sitting down for this - players don’t usually have tableaux in Pax Illuminaten. You can add cards to the shared map. You can spend cards in a duel. What else can you use them for?

Let me introduce you to my friend, the Scheme. You can start one at any time while you’re taking your main actions. Yes, “while.” That means before, in between, after. Every luminary card has an ability on it. These abilities range from action buffs and extra actions to effects so unique that the developers didn’t come up with a quasi-historical name for them. All you need to do to start a scheme is play a card from your hand for its special ability. And then, you can play another card for its ability if it shares a suit with card number one. Want to lay down a third card? If it matches one of the second card’s suits, be my guest. And so on. Once per scheme, you can also forgo a card’s ability, grab some quick favor from it instead, and continue scheming.

While abilities tend to match up with one of their card’s suits (e.g. clergy cards tend to have oust abilities, scholar cards often give you scouting abilities, etc.), Aces and Crowns break this trend. Every Ace gives you favor for free - it doesn’t use up that “once per scheme” quick cash slot. And it counts as a wild suit, so feel free to follow it up with any other card in your hand. Crowns are basically wild too, and they give you a wild main action, but they shut the scheme down. No more scheming for you! This turn, anyway. 

In 1785, many of the order’s documents were leaked after lightning struck the traveling luminary who was carrying them. The Illuminati went from the shadows to the public eye. Their plots of overthrowing tyranny and spreading illegal knowledge were exposed. The Duke of Bavaria banned secret societies in order to break up the Illuminati before it could challenge his power. By then, as many members had turned on Weishaupt or been caught by authorities as had infiltrated rival institutions. The organization quickly crumbled.

Pax games have a tendency to plant a ton of information on the table in various areas. From the market to the map to the players’ tableaux, and then there may be additional cards to consider. To mitigate play time and downtime, it behooves players to read up on everything between turns. However, there is the unpredictability of the changing market and changing tableaux to consider. Pax Ren and Pax Porfiriana both have exponentially growing information loads, since the cards leaving the market inevitably enter players’ areas. Which also makes them simultaneously more important and more difficult to browse. 

Kiley’s design and the Ion team’s development have eliminated a lot of the public information load. The card market is a single row and is cycled and replenished with such precision that every player can easily identify the cards which they simply won’t have access to by the time their turn rolls around. You will still have a full market to choose from, though. It’s just smaller than in other Pax games. Like orders discarded into Glory to Rome’s central pool, once a luminary card is placed face-up on the map, its ability becomes moot. You’re only looking at the suits, the rank, and whether it’s a Freemason or not. After a few rounds, you get used to ignoring the other parts of the card when they’re not relevant. 

As mentioned before, the traditional tableau has been removed, and the player’s hand is doing the job that a tableau normally does. Scheming is more ephemeral than a row of cards on the table - a bit of Uno in your Pax, if you will, slapping down card after card. But it’s much more manageable for your opponents’ workload during downtime, while still empowering players to pull off exciting combos. 

The only elements in the game which mimic classic engine-building are either communal or originate from a shared space. The six faction cards are meant to be fought over. Once someone has control of one (or more), their opponents have every opportunity to wrestle for it. And it doesn’t take more than a game or two to get a sense of what the cards do and why you’d want them. Less browsing, more playing.

Events also end up in your mock tableau but only for a short time. At the end of any turn where you played Aces, Crowns, or both, you must draw two events. You pick one to keep, and the other goes back on the deck. If you kept an Edict, you play it immediately. There’s one of these for each suit. It sucks up a handful of that suit’s resources (of which there are at most ten in any game) and slowly trickles them back into the wild each round - one for you, one for the supply, one for you, one for the supply… If one of the cards you drew is a special event, that doesn’t get played immediately. It stays with you, hidden. At the beginning of your turn, you can play a special event, and it will give a new ability to everyone. Everyone. These abilities range from new ways to cash in favors to more versatile use of Freemasons in your hand. A special event goes away after that round. You can benefit a little more by timing it right, making the most use of the card, but you’re still gambling that your power play won’t be a windfall for a rival.

Some turns, you’ll just scheme for the quick favor and not spend any other cards. And some turns, you will have multiple faction cards, a special event, passive income pouring in from an edict or two, and a perfect hand. Forget two measly main actions. With that crowd, you could pull five or six actions from schemes and faction cards alone. It’s a game of building up these dramatic moments and then releasing them upon your rivals like the Count of Monte Cristo enacting his revenge. 

Adam Weishaupt fled Bavaria, but he continued to write about illuminism in exile. He revealed the cult’s secret truths in order to spread them to a populace that was finally ready to listen. He wrote about cutting-edge scientific information. He penned lessons on philosophy, medicine, and political systems. His writings may have influenced the French Revolution. It’s possible that the infamy of exile did more to spread his word than clandestine rituals ever did. Some historians believe that the organization’s own hypocrisy led to its downfall. By definition, the Enlightenment encouraged free will and independent exploration of new ideas. In the Order of the Illuminati, members were divided into a hierarchy of classes, progressive texts were only accessible to a select few, and these books were assigned as part of the dogma and read in secret.  

Oath reminds me a lot of Pax Illuminaten. Both games have six suits of cards which represent factions, as well as fluctuating favor pools for each. Oath’s banners mirror PI’s faction cards - public representations of status which can be fought over. Minimal tableau building. Map made of cards players put down. Individual victory conditions which remain secret until flipped. I could go on.

Oath, published by Leder Games. Photo courtesy of Sam Lin on boardgamegeek.com.

Oath’s resource system and card pool are impressive. I would even call the cycle secrets and favor revolutionary. As a single mechanism, it’s a joy to engage with it, because its rules are simple but its implications and interactions create emergent complexity. However, Oath suffers from a slavish devotion to portraying its theme. This mimesis crowds its ruleset, creating additional systems, sub-systems, and exceptions. Even once you internalize the whole thing, it’s both unwieldy and restrictive in its overproduction. The elegance of the resource system is overshadowed by these myriad rules, and the whole thing often buckles under its own weight. 

Obviously these two games were developed concurrently and don’t necessarily have any influence over one another, but Pax Illuminaten feels to me like a parallel universe where a few of Oath’s core systems were allowed to shine on their own. Because Oliver Kiley isn’t bending over backwards to serve a rigorous theme, and because his historical setting is so laser focused and diminutive, nothing in the game needs to “tell a story” or “create history.” It’s still an ambitious game, but in how understated and elegant it is. Yes, it is heavy. The rulebook is 44 pages. But it’s all lean meat.

The favor dance and the map control are the whole game. Some Pax games, like Pamir and Transhumanity, have this tendency towards tactical thinking, but it occasionally gets muddied by thematic reconciliation. I see a card and need to think about how it fits the narrative as much as how it fits into my strategy. With more narrative-forward games in this genre, like Stationfall or Pax Ren, the theme is so omnipresent and apparent that there’s no cognitive dissonance. PI is a swing in the other direction - it is such a tactically focused game that I never need to consider the thematic implications of what I’m doing. They are still there. But they are absolutely abstract.

The trappings of the Illuminati’s secret society were not the actual purpose of the organization. A parody of the Freemason’s occult rituals, they were only meant to lure in a certain crowd. The true purpose of the organization was to educate people with the power to change Bavarian society for the better. This is why Weishaupt’s Illuminati was doomed to fail - because the people he was recruiting with these rituals were less interested in new ways of thinking or the commoners' welfare than they were in the kooky rituals themselves. 

Pax Illuminaten is entirely centered around meaningless recruiting practices, which Weishaupt only constructed as a front. The plots necessary to win are just shapes on a board. As thoroughly researched and carefully applied as PI’s theme is, the game underneath is bigger and better than it - the best compact, tactical area control game I’ve played in years. Despite its little abstractions of history, in this way, Pax Illuminaten is a perfect expression of its theme. The surface level narrative isn’t what matters. Some players will be put off by that disconnect, as brilliant as it is. Especially old school Pax fans who are here for something else... So whether Oliver Kiley’s contribution to this series will outlast the Illuminati itself remains to be seen.