Lorenzo il Magnifico

13th July 2021

It's a Tuesday evening and I'm at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club. 

Where would eurogaming be without Renaissance Italy? The pageantry, the politics, the scheming and the vying for power, you know how it goes: A seemingly limitless mine of game design opportunities.
This is where Lorenzo il Magnificio comes in, a game where players control noble families in Florence competing to be the most prestigious, famous and of course.... most pious!

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What's in a game?

• Game board: Lorenzo il Magnificio is a worker placement game, as such, many parts of it are given over to spaces for workers. Unlike most game boards, this one sits in the portrait orientation, it depicts a scene from Renaissance Florence with a street and some businesses. However, towards the top, the lion's share of the board's space is given over to 4 towers.
  The 4 differently coloured towers each have spaces for 4 cards, going up each tower are a set of steadily increasing dice values and resources associated with those spaces.
  Below the towers is an excommunication space.
  Next to the excommunication spaces is The Council Palace.
  And below that, there's also a faith track, I guess it goes hand in hand with the excommunication spaces. Looks like things are getting serious!
  At the bottom of the board are spaces for resource gathering, whether they be building resources, money or whatever.
  A military track runs along one of the boards long edges.
  The board also has a turn order track and a scoring track that runs round the board's perimeter.
• Development cards: These come in 4 different colours which correspond to the tower colours. Going further, each colour is subdivided into 3 periods, (Labelled 1, 2 & 3.). There are 8 cards for each period in all colours, which adds up to 96 cards in total.
  Development cards come in 4 types; territories, buildings, characters & ventures.
• Leader cards: These cards represent individuals which can be recruited to a player's cause, they have bonuses that can be used once per round to aid players.
• Resources: There are shaped tokens to represent some of the game's resources, stone, wood and.... servants. That's right, there's human resources in the game! Well it's renaissance Florence I guess.
• Cash: Standard card tokens to represent money.
• Excommunication tiles: There are 7 of these for each period. These tiles may hinder players during the game.
• Dice: These are 3 normal six-siders, which come in white, orange and black.
• Personal boards: Player's personal boards are identical. Each one has 2 tracks; a building track and a territories track, both of which run from left to right.
• Personal bonus tile: This neat little long, vertical tile slots in next to personal boards and provide extra bonuses, they are double-sided to provide different sets of advantages.
• Workers: Each player has 4 workers which represent family members.
  3 of these family members are in the player's colour, on top of each one is the colour white, orange or black, which corresponds to the dice.
  Finally, each player has an uncoloured neutral family member, however, the top of this family member is coloured in the player's colour.
• Player tokens: Each player also gets some scoring/tracking discs and excommunication cube tokens in their colour.

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The boards and tiles are suitably thick, the resource cards are of a standard quality as you'd expect.
Tokens are all made of wood, which I always like, including the nicely rounded dice. The standout components however, are the family workers, instead of discs, they're these tall cylinder shapes that are easy to pick up. It makes sense as I'm sure they're going to be the components that get handled the most; practical and appealing.
Lorenzo il Magnificio features attractive artwork throughout, the boards all display pretty, somewhat stylised art work cleverly produced to incorporate all the game's worker spaces.
Art on the cards is little pared back to make room for iconography. Talking of which, all the game's symbols and text was easy to read. Lorenzo il Magnificio has good, solid components and presentation.

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Example of a leader card; that guy sure has a cool first name....

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How's it play?
​Setup

• Development cards: Sort the development cards by colour and then by period, there should now be 12 decks of 8 cards in total, then shuffle each deck.
  Next create 4 face-down decks, one for each colour. For all decks, the period 3 cards form the bottom of the deck, period 2 the middle and period 1 the top. Place each of the 4 decks above the tower with the corresponding colour.
• Excommunication tiles: Sort the tiles by period and deal one from each on the pertinent excommunication spot on the board.
• Leader cards: Deal 4 leader cards to each player face-down. Now each player chooses a card to keep and passes the remainder to the left. Repeat this until all players have drafted 4 leader cards.
• Personal board: Give each player a personal board, bonus tile and workers in their colour, as well as starting resources.
• Determine starting order: All players then receive starting funds according to their starting position.

On to play
Lorenzo il Magnificio is played over 3 periods, with 2 rounds per period, which equates to 6 rounds in total.
Each round has its own setup phase before the players act in turn order, additionally at the end of every period (2nd, 4th and 6th rounds.) there's an additional step; the Vatican report step.
A round progresses as follows:

• Development cards: Deal cards from the 4 different development decks on to their respective tower, starting at the bottom and working upwards.
• Roll the dice: Whoever is the starting player for the current round rolls the 3 dice and places them on to their allotted spot on the board. The dice will remain on those results until the following round.
• Actions: Beginning with the starting player, all players carry out their actions, i.e., places their workers on the board, how's that done? This is where the game starts to show its complexity.
  Value: Each worker has a value equal to the value of the die with the corresponding colour. If the white dice is showing 5, then white workers are worth 5 and so on. The neutral workers always has a value of 0. Players may temporarily raise the value of a worker for the round by spending servant meeples. Why are values so important? It may determine where a worker can be placed, speaking of which.
  Placing workers: Every space on the game board will have a minimum value which must be met by a worker in order to place it there.
  Development cards: Each tower has 4 development cards with rising costs of 1, 3, 5 & 7 the further up the tower they are positioned, thus the highest spot requires at least 1 servant acquire, the higher will also give players some resources.
  Most cards also have an additional cost in cash or resources, even more so if another player has put a worker somewhere in a tower first. Depending on the card, these costs might come from any of the resources.
  Additionally, only 1 worker of a colour can be used on a tower at a time, however, a neutral family worker does not have a colour and doesn't count towards this limit.
  Development cards provide a once-only benefit when acquired, this may resources or points, most also provide some sort of ongoing benefit. They're 4 types of development cards.
  Buildings: Generally buildings allow players to convert one kind of resource into another, like wood into cash, i.e. selling wood. Buildings have worker values that can be used to trigger their abilities (More on this below.).
  ​Territories: These cards produce goods such as wood or stone, like building cards, they come with worker values that can be triggered. Territory cards initially have no specific cost, however, after acquiring more than a couple, it will cost military points, as bonus though, they will confer victory points in the endgame.
  Characters: Character cards always cost cash generally provide a once-off benefit and then an ongoing benefit.
  Ventures: As well as once-only benefits, ventures also grant bonus points the game end. Ventures tend to cost military points or resources
  When building and territory cards are acquired, they are placed on their respective tracks on a player's personal board from left to right. Character and venture cards are placed to the right of a player's personal board.
  Wood/stone production: Players may use workers to gain these 2 types of resource. For the 1st worker used this way, the minimum value is 1, for workers placed after this, the value must be higher.
  When a worker triggers wood/stone production, it can also trigger the personal board and building/territory cards placed on it.
  Personal board bonus tile: When wood/stone production is triggered, the active player's bonus tile is also triggered and they gain those benefits. Additionally, buildings or territories may be activated.
  Wood production actives the active player's row of territories, however, only cards with a worker value equal or lower than the worker that was played on the wood production spot are triggered. Furthermore, they are activated in the order in which they were placed on the personal board.
  The same is true of stone production and building cards.
  Thus territories and buildings are key to building an engine to generate or change the game's many resources.
  Market: There are 4 market spaces, these confer, money, servants, military points or council favours, which in turn may provide some of the game's resources. Each of these spaces has a minimum value of 1, only one worker may be placed in a market space.
  Council Palace: A worker must have a minimum value of 1 to be placed here, doing so will change the turn order for the following round and also confer them a council favour.
  Leader cards: Each player will have a hand of leader cards, each one has a requirement to bring into play, once this is met, the card can be put into play, players don't need to spend the requirements. Leader cards have either permanent or once per turn benefits without needing a worker.
• Vatican Report: A Vatican report occurs at the end of a period, i.e. rounds 2, 4 & 6.
  At the end of these rounds, players must have faith points equal to a certain amount as specified by the round.
  A player who does not have enough faith points during a Vatican report is excommunicated and suffers the penalties listed on the current excommunication tile for the rest of the game, this is marked on the relevant tile with a cube in their colour.
  A player who has reached the current threshold for faith points may spend those points to avoid excommunication and earn some victory points along the way. However, they may choose to retain the faith points and instead suffer whatever excommunication penalty there is.
• Round end: At the end of every round, the following actions occur.
  Development cards: All unacquired development cards are discarded from the game. An entirely new set of cards are drawn and placed for all 4 towers.
  New turn order: A new turn order is established as per the workers positioned in the Council Workers.

Once all 3 periods are completed, it goes to the endgame.

Endgame
Calculate points from the following:
Current score plus points for acquired territory cards and character cards, end-of-game victory points for venture cards.
The player with the highest military score gains an additional 5 victory points, 2nd highest acquires 2 extra victory points.
Finally, every set of 5 combines resources scores an additional point.
All points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​Lorenzo il Magnificio sits towards the heavier end of games in my opinion, mechanically speaking, at it's core it's not a particularly complex game, but there's a lot of exceptions and variations to consider when trying to buy those all-important development cards and managing faith and military scores and the resources required to do all this. Don't forget those 2 engines you'll need to build either in order to gain and change those resources, or the abilities that character cards confer or the endgame points that venture cards grant.
Like I said, a lot to think about.

The game uses 4 types of resource and 3 types of score (Two of which can also be spent at times.) and mixes a few types of game mechanics; there's a bit of worker placement, a bit of engine building and a bit of resource management. Where it throws a spanner in the works though, is the use of dice to randomise the value of workers. A couple of low rolls can force players to change their strategies, particularly when competing for development cards, however, the use of servants can potentially mitigate low rolls, even so, players will have to adapt to circumstances.
Furthermore, players have relatively limited moves to play with, each player has 4 workers they can use over 6 turns, giving 24 placements in total, which is why building the engines that essentially get triggered for free is so vital. Synergy and move optimisation are also key to this game.

There are several approaches to scoring points in Lorenzo il Magnifcio, although these strategies are down to which development cards are acquired, development cards are the game's most vital element to winning and most actions are in service of getting those cards. However, the game seems a fairly well balanced, nothing felt overpowered or unimportant, decisions always felt meaningful and because of limited moves, these decisions generally felt tricky.
​If I had one criticism of the game; it's the excommunication tiles, they feel negative, but I guess that's the point of them.

If someone wanted to play this, I'd have no qualms joining in. It's not one of my favourites, but it's still enjoyable.

If you have a hankering for a heavy-ish worker placement game set in Renaissance Italy, you'll probably like this.