Wouter & Ymke 
Old Prague has seen better days. A great flood has damaged the city, its neighbourhoods need rebuilding, and apparently ordinary construction workers aren’t going to be enough. Hidden among the streets are four rather unusual groups: the Horned, Vodniks, Golems and Robots. They have spent centuries mainly looking after themselves, but now it’s time to work together and get Prague back on its feet.
In Prague Unseen, we play as burghers putting these inhabitants to work while new businesses appear, bridges are rebuilt and the different parts of the city slowly become active again. Behind the slightly strange setting is a medium-to-heavy Eurogame with worker placement, resource management, influence and four different neighbourhood systems. There’s quite a bit on the board when you first sit down. And quite a few unusual residents to put to work.
Prague Unseen will be released at Spiel Essen ’26 this October.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 120 minutes
📝 Designers: Jindřich Pavlásek, Michal Peichl & Petr Vojtěch
🎨 Artwork: Jindřich Pavlásek
🏢 Publisher: Albi (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Prague Unseen takes place over three eras. During each one, you have four workers available, one Robot, Vodnik, Horned and Golem, but you’ll only send three of them into the city. On your turn, you can place a worker in a neighbourhood, move one of your workers from a neighbourhood square into a building, construct a building, build part of a bridge or pass. When you pass, your remaining fourth worker goes to the bench.
Placing a worker is where most turns begin. Any worker can visit any of the four neighbourhoods, but the type you choose changes what you receive. Send a worker to its home neighbourhood and you gain three rumour. Send one of the other types and you instead gain that neighbourhood’s basic resource. After that, you perform its minigame. There’s also a witch moving around Prague. If you visit the neighbourhood she’s currently in, you move her somewhere else and collect the reward from her new location.
Each neighbourhood handles its minigame differently. The Golems move around a marketplace, collecting rewards and guild symbols needed to build bridges. The Horned take magical items from a rotating cauldron and arrange matching items in their display case. The Vodniks move their boat along the river and collect rewards from the mill wheel, which changes as those rewards are taken. The Robots use a clock mechanism with crates and an idea track, with the worker you send determining how the clock moves and what becomes available.
The resources you collect, including beer, cogs, fish and books, are mainly used to construct buildings. Rumour can substitute for resources in certain ways, while garnets are even more flexible. Buildings are added directly next to the shared board. A worker waiting in a neighbourhood can later enter an appropriate building there and perform its action. Completed bridges connect two neighbourhoods, allowing workers to access buildings on the other side as well. Once a bridge is complete, everybody can use it, regardless of who built its two sections.
Building and adding bridge sections can also increase your influence in a neighbourhood. Moving along these influence tracks can provide bonuses and upgrade cards, while progress in the four minigames can earn milestones. These give one-time benefits such as a garnet, extra influence, a building activation or access to additional end-game scoring.
At the end of each era, the players with the most influence in each neighbourhood score points based on its current popularity. Popularity then changes according to how often each neighbourhood was visited. The least visited moves to the top for the next era, while the busiest drops to the bottom. After the third era, you also score your progress in the four neighbourhoods, buildings, bridge sections and any end-game bonuses you’ve claimed. Add everything together and the player with the most points wins.
Artwork & Components
Prague Unseen is quite a sight once everything is on the table. The board combines old Prague architecture with fantasy characters, machinery and waterways, with each neighbourhood using its own colours and illustrations. The Horned area uses warmer orange tones, the Robots have plenty of purple machinery, while the Vodnik side is surrounded by water.
There’s also a lot printed on that board. Tracks, symbols, building spaces and the four minigames all need room. During our first game, we regularly searched for something that was sitting directly in front of us. It became easier once we knew our way around Prague, but I wouldn’t exactly describe the board as restrained.
I particularly like the custom wooden workers. Each creature has its own shape and printed character artwork, while the player colours still make it clear who owns which piece. There are also boats, gargoyles, the witch and plenty of wooden resources, alongside the various cardboard pieces. The building cards look like windows in Prague’s buildings, with little scenes and characters visible inside. I like those a lot too. As more of them appear around the board, the city gradually fills up.
The Horned have their rotating cauldron, the Robots their clock, the Vodniks their mill wheel and the Golems their marketplace. The large cardboard clock tower serves as the first player token and adds some height to the table too. All those pieces mean setup isn’t particularly quick, and Prague Unseen needs a decent-sized table.
The insert is really good, though. Everything has its own place, including separate trays for the wooden resources, and the side of the box shows you exactly where everything goes. That made packing the game away considerably easier than we expected after seeing how much was spread across the table.
Our Experience
Our first game included plenty of moments where we knew exactly what an action did without really knowing why we should be doing it. We could understand the cauldron, move along the river and collect things from the marketplace, but initially we looked at those systems too much on their own. I definitely spent a few actions taking something simply because it looked useful, only to discover later that I hadn’t actually given myself much to do with it.
The workers were probably where this became most obvious. Having four different workers but using only three didn’t seem like a particularly severe restriction at first. Then we repeatedly sent exactly the worker we needed somewhere else. I’d use my Robot because an immediate reward looked good, then notice shortly afterwards that the Robot would have been far more useful for something I had planned in another neighbourhood.
This happened more than once. Apparently I don’t learn particularly quickly.
We weren’t much better with the four neighbourhoods. During our first plays, we tried to make progress in almost everything because everything was sitting there looking inviting. We didn’t get particularly far in any of it. Later, we concentrated mainly on two neighbourhoods and visited the others when something gave us a reason to. Sometimes that was the witch. Sometimes somebody had built exactly the building we wanted. And sometimes another player was getting a little too comfortable on an influence track.
Rumour and garnets saved a few of our less organised plans along the way. Missing one resource wasn’t necessarily the end of what we wanted to do, although it’s much nicer to have the right resource in the first place.
The shared buildings led to some of the better table moments. Someone would pay to construct a building, sit back looking quite pleased, and another player would immediately find a use for it. Bridges weren’t much safer. We’d spend our guild symbols, complete a connection and then realise we’d just given everybody else the same access. I mean, yes, we’re rebuilding Prague together. We just hadn’t expected everyone to be quite so enthusiastic about using our work.
Three players has been our preferred count. Influence changed hands more often, and buildings and bridges were being used by other players regularly, without turns taking too long. Two players was quicker, but there was less competition around the city.
Popularity caught us out a few times too. We’d spend an era paying plenty of attention to one neighbourhood, only to see it drop down the popularity track while the neglected part of Prague suddenly became much more interesting.
Our games generally came close to two hours. With our group, that was fine. Someone who wants to calculate every possible consequence before placing a worker can make Prague move rather slowly, though. There’s also a solo mode against an automated Councillor, but we haven’t played it, so I can’t really comment on that side of the game.
Our Thoughts
We liked all four neighbourhoods. They’re different enough that concentrating on the Horned feels quite different from spending most of your time with the Vodniks or Robots, without each one feeling disconnected from the rest of Prague.
You probably won’t spend much time with all four in the same game, though. I don’t necessarily mind that. Concentrating on certain neighbourhoods gives us something obvious to approach differently next time. But it does mean you can spend two hours with a rather elaborate part of the board sitting there mostly untouched.
So far, the different buildings and upgrades have changed which neighbourhoods we’ve wanted to concentrate on, and there are optional setups that alter the river and Golem marketplace. We’re not ready to say much about long-term balance yet. Some combinations may turn out to be more efficient once people have played the game many more times.
I particularly like seeing Prague at the end of a game. The buildings and bridges everyone has added mean the city isn’t the same place it was during the first era. There are actions and routes around the board that simply weren’t there at the beginning. The theme is still mostly there to support a eurogame rather than tell a story, but rebuilding the city isn’t just something written in the introduction.
Luck hasn’t bothered us much. A different building appearing can make one option suddenly more attractive, but we never felt that a lucky reveal had decided a game. Sometimes we changed our plans for it, sometimes we didn’t.
The amount of information on the table is more likely to cause problems. It’s easy to start comparing one possible placement with another, and then another. The crowded board doesn’t help during the first game either. Add the setup, table space and roughly two-hour playing time, and this isn’t something we’d choose for players who are still getting comfortable with modern eurogames. It could also be a long evening with a group that likes to inspect every possible move before committing to one.
For us, those practical issues haven’t stopped us wanting to play again. There are still neighbourhood combinations we haven’t really explored, and I suspect our next game will start with someone announcing that they’re definitely going to focus on something different this time. Whether we actually stick to that once the witch starts moving around Prague is another question.
I think Prague Unseen makes most sense for people who already enjoy medium-to-heavier eurogames and like figuring out how different options can work together. We certainly haven’t tried everything we want to yet, and we’re quite happy to head back and see what we end up building next time.
📝 We received a copy of Prague Unseen from Albi.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? You’ll be able to try Prague Unseen there with Albi.
You can also find all of our pre-Spiel ’26 coverage here.
