A Resource Management and Tableau-Building Game Set in Imperial Russia
Saint Petersburg is a resource management and tableau-building board game published by Hans im Glück. The game takes players back to 1703, when Peter the Great founded the city of Saint Petersburg. Each player acts as a developer of the city, hiring craftsmen, erecting buildings and courting members of the nobility to accumulate victory points. The game's originality lies in its decreasing-cost system: a card becomes cheaper if a player already owns a card of the same name, and unsold cards gradually drop in price over the following rounds. This mechanic creates constant tension between buying immediately and waiting for a better price.
Setup and Game Progression
Each round of Saint Petersburg unfolds through several phases: the Craftsmen phase (green cards), which generates most of the income in roubles, the Buildings phase (blue cards), which grants victory points every round, the Nobles phase (orange cards), which provides both money and prestige, and finally the Upgrade phase, which lets players replace an already-played card by paying only the price difference. On their turn, players can buy a visible card, take it into hand (up to three cards) or pass. This rotation of phases forces players to plan purchases ahead while managing limited funds.
Victory Conditions and End of the Game
The game ends as soon as one of the card decks is fully depleted, at the end of the current round. Final scoring then takes several elements into account: an increasing bonus based on the number of different nobles owned, the conversion of remaining roubles into victory points, and a penalty for each card left unplayed in hand. The player with the most points wins the game. This new 2026 edition of Saint Petersburg keeps the heart of the original game while offering entirely new artwork and including the In allerbester Gesellschaft expansion in the box.
