Lorenzo il Magnifico

Lorenzo il Magnifico has some elements which I thought I would like. The first one is pain and suffering. At three checkpoints during the game if you don’t show enough piety to the church, you suffer a severe permanent disability. So at all times you need to think about how to put together enough piety. The second element I thought I would enjoy is making card combos. You buy cards with various powers in this game. Now that I have played the game, I do appreciate these two elements. Why the game doesn’t work for me yet is it mostly feels like a resource collection and conversion game. It’s more challenging than average, which is a good thing, but it’s still mostly that. I say it doesn't work for me yet because I feel I don't have a strong grasp of it yet. I might change my mind if I am able to learn to play it better. 

The core mechanism is worker placement. You have four family members (your workers) to place every round. Three dice are rolled every round, and the numbers rolled are the strengths for three of your four family members. These strengths apply to all players. Your fourth family member is a weak black sheep with 0 strength, but he has flexibility which can be helpful. 

Every round 16 new cards are made available for purchase. You need family members with high enough strengths to purchase them depending on where they are positioned. You can pay servants (a resource) to boost your strength. Cards have one-time benefits upon purchase as well as permanent powers. Some cards - territories and buildings - can be activated in future to generate resources for you. That's another thing you can do with your family members. You send them to activate either all your territories, or all your buildings. You can also send family members to collect resources, or to fight for turn order for future rounds. 

The circle is where you can place your family member to buy the card next to it. You have to pay for the card. The card cost is in the top left corner of the card. The die at the bottom of the circle indicates the minimum strength required of your family member. Those 7-pip die spaces mean even if you send a strength-6 family member, he still needs to be supported by one servant to become strength-7. The items in the circles are bonuses when you are able to place a family member there. 

This is your player board where you place the cards you buy. 

I did horribly in the first game I played. Often I could not do much because I was short on resources. I often resorted to using basic spaces which let you take a fixed amount of resources, or the turn order spaces which let you compete for turn order and at the same time give you a tiny amount of resources. A more efficient way to play would be to have good combinations of cards and to use them well to generate resources. I made one mistake in my first game. I arbitrarily decided to focus on buildings and not territories, thinking they were more or less the same thing. I thought if I focused on buildings, buying many of them, every time I activated them all, I would gain a lot. I later realised that buildings were mainly for converting resources, and territories were mainly for producing resources. I needed territories to produce my resources first, and only then I should be using my buildings to convert them into something more valuable, including victory points. 

This is why I say I don't have a good grasp of the game yet. I learned a hard lesson and I think I know the game a little better now. And then in my second game I took a hard hit for not having enough piety. So much for my learning. Halfway through my first game I thought this was a lousy game and I just had terrible luck. I kept rolling very low numbers. There was very little I could do. It was impossible to buy any card in the mid to high tiers. Then later I realised I was being stupid. The die rolls were shared by everyone. Everyone else suffered equally from these low die rolls. They did their best to survive and did not complain to me. I felt like a spoilt brat. 

When the game ended, I was surprised I did not come dead last. I was in second place out of four. That means the others were probably a little lost like me. For sure this is a challenging game. The key is to get yourself a good combination of cards, and to utilise it well. You will be constantly under pressure to amass enough piety for the three checkpoints. Sometimes you may have to take a hit because you are building up something else. Resources are tight and this is something you have to manage and plan for.