Lorenzo il Magnifico

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. alfonzos

   Draft cards in order to score building materials and victory points while keeping an eye on your standing with the church. You are penalized for being excommunicated but go to great lengths to annoy the church then you score lots of victory points. This is not my type of game.

2. 6 out of 10

   Anakin1981

   Some really nice ideas here but I didn't like how they blend in. I found the game to have too much luck with the original draw of character cards and that you sometimes depend on the luck of what are the numbers on the dice.

3. 9 out of 10

   4Corners

   A six round game of dice limited worker placement where you are trying to get resources, cards (of 4 different colors/types) and church influence in an effort to score the most points. The game lasts 6 rounds, and at the start of every round, the dice are rolled for all players; these dice are associated with the strength of the action of the worker that is used. Each player has 3 workers associated with a dice colour and one wild/no colour worker who has a strength of zero. On your turn, you take turns, worker placement style, placing a worker on the following options: start player (where you also receive a minor bonus, and you can place here multiple times if necessary/you have no other placement, just for the small bonus), gold (needed as a currency for many of the other actions), assistants (also needed similar to gold, but in this case assistants can generally be used to boost the value of your workers), green cards (there are 4 card colours and they are each located by type in a tower, in which only 1 worker of a player colour can be placed, although the wild allows for a second placement as he has no colour, and if another player has already placed there, you need to pay a 3 gold entry fee) which are used to generate resources, resource production which trigger/activate your green cards, blue cards which are personalities who generally have powers or strong one time bonuses, yellow cards which are associated with the refinement of resources into points etc., refined resources activation (yellow card activations), purple cards which are generally straight up end game points. Collection of cards is super important in this game as it is a major source of points, both directly and indirectly. Collecting green cards generates end game points if you collect enough of them (up to 20 points), but you can gather many resources from them as well. Collecting blue cards can generate up to 21 points and they can provide valuable bonuses and one time boosts, collecting yellow cards often gives direct immediate points, but can also generate more points through activating them on another action space, and purple cards are straight up end game points. Every two rounds, you have to demonstrate your piety or charity to the church, if you do you gain points, if you don't you acquire a penalty for the rest of the game (very similar mechanic to Grand Austria Hotel). In game you have a hand of 4 leaders which can come into play and provide nice abilities/bonuses/individual action spaces provided you meet the conditions for them (think helpers in Grand Austria Hotel although leaders are MUCH harder to get out in this game). At the end of the game, you get scrap points for every left over amount of resources divided by 5. The game scales very well from 2-4 players and definitely has a lot of replayability. Now the caveat: this is a very good game, but it is essential to play with the big expansion, as it opens up so much more replayability and freedom in the game, and in fact this rating is based on the assumption that you are playing the game with the expansion. Own the [boardgame=229123]Houses of the Renaissance[/boardgame] expansion, [boardgame=211904]New Leaders[/boardgame], the [boardgame=238890]New Leaders 2[/boardgame], [boardgame=211907]Bonus card[/boardgame] promo and the [boardgame=274203]Pazzi Conspiracy[/boardgame] mini expansion.