Bridgerton: The High Society Game

With the finale of Bridgerton season three having just been released, if you’re like me, you’ve binge-watched it in one go and can’t bear the two year wait until the next series. Here’s a game perfect to while away the hours until our beloved characters grace our screens again: Bridgerton – The High Society Game.

How to Play

The aim of Bridgerton: The High Society Game, much like the show, is to secure the best match of the season based on their prestige, desirability and love. Players choose one of the characters to play as and decide together on the prospects that they will be vying over. There is an explicit rule stipulating that you can’t match with your siblings which is quite amusing, but same gender pairings are completely on the cards. Once characters and prospects are chosen, prospects are laid out on the play area in a ranking denoting prestige, with those at the top scoring the most prestige points at the end and those at the bottom scoring the lowest. Prospects each have trait cards which, when revealed, can move them up or down in prestige and add a positive or negative score to their desirability. Some of these can be at odds, for example, being arrogant can move a prospect up in prestige but reduce their desirability as a spouse. Players compete for the best prospect over a series of 8 balls (rounds), each with its own household rule that can temporarily alter some key mechanics. In each round, all players simultaneously choose a dance card from their hand to play. Once everyone has chosen, those with the highest value cards take their actions first. Players then dance with prospects and place their affection tokens, denoting who has the affections of which prospects, once a prospect has two affection tokens from the same player, the pair can get engaged on their next turn, securing their love match, but beware, for players can replace another player’s affection tokens with their own if the pair are not engaged. Once engaged, the aim then turns exclusively to increasing the value of your prospect by revealing their good traits and thwarting other players’ matches by revealing their prospects’ bad traits. At the end of each ball, Lady Whistledown spreads gossip, which can, as gossip often does, have relatively mild, or quite disastrous consequences. Once all balls have been played, points are added for each player’s prospect’s ranking in prestige, desirability, and the presence of a love match and the player with the highest score wins.

I Believe I Shall Rather Enjoy This Game

The mechanics of this game feel refreshingly uncommon. I really like that traits can have opposing values in terms of prestige and desirability because it forces some interesting strategies that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from the premise of this game. Similarly, the way that turn order is determined by card rank is really entertaining as you can, to some extent, determine where you’ll be in the order but it still remains a mystery as to who goes before and after, which may completely scupper your plans in a way that feels more engaging than random allocation would be. I’ve found that these relatively novel mechanics also make it enjoyable for those who usually have no interest in Bridgerton or aristocratic dating simulators, so you may even be able to persuade Dad to stop tinkering in the shed for an hour to come and play.

I also heavily enjoy how players interact: whilst most interaction is practically indirect, it is emotionally very direct. There are some actions that mean that players alter the hands of other players, but these are much less devastating than the consequences of a player booting your affection tokens from a prospect you were desperate for, or revealing that your betrothed is in fact a pompous drunkard and so slips ungracefully down the social standing. It can lead to a little bit of targeting of certain players, but there are rules which guard to some extent against this, such as the turn-order allocation and Lady Whistledown actions being controlled by whoever plays last in the ball, but as long as you’re not playing with malicious people, it should hopefully all be in humorous jest.

The quality of the components is also good, and clearly thought out, with pieces that move regularly (prospects, characters and affection tokens) being made of sturdy cardboard because I can see these getting dog-eared very quickly if they were just usual card material. The cards are still regular flimsy card material, but still a lot sturdier than some cards I’ve seen. There are no fancy components made of plastic or metal or anything but these often bring the price up and are not necessary, especially in a game such as this which I wouldn’t expect any hardcore gamers to be playing over and over.

Sorrows, Sorrows, Prayers

There do seem to be some hiccups with the gameplay. Winning affections seems to be the core mechanic that is used, considering the depth the instructions go into this stage and how half of the dance card deck’s actions are useful solely in this part of the game making them redundant for the rest, but when playing, this stage seems to go by relatively quickly with little genuine competition. It may well be that we aren’t playing as competitively in the first half as the game-makers expect but there seems to be no intrinsic value to be playing against others in this part at the cost of not playing for yourself. In terms of brain power and end-game scoring, it feels better to secure a match as quickly as possible regardless of their traits and then strategically reveal their traits and others’ traits to gain points rather than striving for the affections of the best prospect before attempting to get engaged. This does not necessarily make the game unenjoyable, but it does make it feel a bit disjointed and unfair when you get a hand later in the game that only has actions that are useful in the affection winning stage.

Do I burn for Bridgerton: The High Society Game?

Overall, this game would not be my diamond of the season, but would certainly secure a match in its first year out. I would recommend it highly for fans of Bridgerton, but if you’re not into the premise, the pitfalls of its gameplay may outweigh the enjoyment from the parts that work well if you buy it for yourself