We hosted gaming tonight, you can read the session report. The one new game — Palazzo. Good game, theoretically. We played Princes of Florence later, and I got the same feeling. Palazzo doesn't have that 'multiplayer solitaire' vibe. It just feels ... subtle. An undercurrent of evaluation, drafting money, working out timing issues. There's no big "Aha" here. No tactical cut. Consider the money. Values range from 3-7, but with Alhambra style suit management. Wild '2s'. Playing three different colors with the same rank is worth 15. Money enters the game for all players at the same time, but it's drafted with the active player getting two cards to everyone else's one.
Every single mechanism smooths out differences and bunches the players together. The highest value card slightly doubles the worst, except for the card that can be used in any auction (it triples that). If you pull a triplet, you can ignore the rank, which helps the low value cards and hurts the high value cards. When you get money, everyone gets money. So, unless one player spends everything for one auction, everyone will have roughly the same number of cards. And it's tough to spend everything because you can only use one suit at a time (barring wilds and triplets).
Now, there's certainly luck in how buildings appear. But the aspects that deal with purchases and auctions, which the players are control, all push players together.
If you play carefully, counting cards (for drafting) and tracking tiles, I suspect Palazzo has nice depth. But at 30-45 minutes, I'm not doing that and neither is anyone else. So what decides the game are gross mistakes and butterflies flapping their wings.
For some, a deep subtle game. For me, something I break out rarely, admire, and put back in the box. It just doesn't move me.
Ditto Princes of Florence. I'm done with it for another year or five. [I last played in '01].
Update: "Alhambra done right" strikes me as fair. Palazzo doesn't claim numbers that don't work (say, five or six players). But mainly, Palazzo has less luck of the "Hey, that tile/money is just what I need." [Since some of the tiles that appear are auctioned and money is drafted. Getting good money usually meant you spent an action. But you can still get lucky.]
There is certainly room for skillful play, and a poor player won't win often; luck isn't large enough to help (usually). My gut feeling is that great play won't win much more than good play, though. But even if I'm wrong, that doesn't change the fact that there's no visceral attraction here.
There's a lot to admire. But I'll do it from a distance.
Princes, on the other hand, is much heavier, has far less luck, and is a true gamer's game (and a tremendous one at that). I believe it has considerable depth (although I usually just play it tactically, taking advantage of how things develop, while keeping in mind certain strategic requirements for different approaches). I realize you weren't comparing the two games directly, Brian, but they really have nothing in common.
The idea that Palazzo works even better, though--that's what I'm wondering about.
The view that it's a bit academic I find more sympathetic, though. Of all the Knizia games that I liked last year, Palazzo seems the least fundamentally engaging, the closest to the stereotype (an entirely inaccurate one, IMHO) of a dry, weakly-themed Knizia game. It is definitely short a fun factor that Beowulf and Tower of Babel have, for me anyway. But I still like it quite a bit. And the brevity, as Larry mentions, is a big win.