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When you look at these designs, along with 2018's Outback, you might think, "Wow, Michael Kiesling really wants us to organize things in grids in a complicated manner!"
What you're organizing in Sanssouci are the gardens at the Schloss Sanssouci, a summer palace built for Frederick the Great, with the name being French for "without concerns" or "carefree" because this was a palace for hanging out, not for governing. You are not hanging out, of course, but trying to get a job, so you have to show that you can design more attractive gardens than the other wannabes, and to do this, you have to draft random garden elements and put them in predetermined locations under somewhat restrictive guidelines — just as Frederick the Great wanted.
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Garden in progress
Each player gets their own garden board, and each turn you play one of two cards in hand, draft a tile from the central display, add that tile under the aforementioned guidelines, then (ideally) move a noble in your garden to look at something, for which you receive points because you've satisfied their desire to look at something beautiful.
Cards feature one of the nine garden elements, two colors, or all five colors. If you play the five-color card, you can draft any tile from the ten available on the display; if you play a two-color card, you can draft only from the four tiles in those colored rows; and if you play a garden element card, you can draft only a tile that features that element — unless none are available, in which case you can draft anything.
When you draft a tile, it must go in the column matching the garden element on it and in the row matching the color from where the tile was taken. In the image below, for example, if you drafted the fountain in the gray row, then you must place that fountain in the gray row on your personal game board — unless that space is already occupied. If that happens, you flip the tile upside down to show only paths, then place it in any empty space in that same row or same column.
Each noble only wants to look at one thing — statues, fountains, etc. — and once they've seen a thing in a row, say, the second fountain from the palace (scoring you 2 points), they won't go back to look at the first fountain (for 1 point). They need novelty, so you better keep building paths that give them new things to look at. (Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time comes to mind here, and I'd love to see someone gamify that series of novels.)
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Two final gardens, with the central tile-drafting board
At heart, the challenge of the game is that you can't take any tile and place it anywhere in your garden, but are instead restricted in what you can take and where you can put it. Azul and Miyabi have similar restrictions, and such restrictions are why I prefer any of these titles over the far more chill, take-what-you-want-and-place-it-anywhere tile-laying in Cascadia, as I detailed in my video overview of that game.
For me, games are a designer creating rules in a tiny world, and I have to figure out to live under those rules and prosper better than anyone else, assuming the game is competitive. If the rules allow too much freedom, as I feel to be the case in Cascadia, I find the challenge uninteresting, akin to plain ice cream that offers the same flavor with every spoonful. The first bites are fine, sure, but then it's more of the same.
By having complications, you're mixing nuts or candy or marshmallow or fudgy bits into the ice cream, and the bites have more variety to them, with you now taking more care with what ends up on the spoon so that you can maximize what you get out of the experience. In game terms, what tiles am I allowed to take now? And what will I need later in order to make the best use of them, to connect the paths and get those fickle nobles where they want to go? Will I be able to get what I want or make productive use of what's available?
Mostly happy nobles, while using the two expansions
Given the number of tiles in the game, you don't know whether you'll be able to get what you want, whether because those tiles will be placed in rows where they're not useful or because an opponent will snatch them away, so your plans might fail. You know all the cards in your deck, but you don't know what you'll draw when, so again your plans might fail.
Or, with experience, you might not, because the more you play, the better you get at creating possibilities for yourself. You're not relying on any particular tile in any particular row, but increasing your odds for success no matter what comes up — at least that's what I feel like after having played nine times, with all player counts (2-4), on review copies of both editions.
For more thoughts on the game and demonstration of both expansions included in the Fractal Juegos edition — one of which is new but can be backported to the original edition — check out this overview video:
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