Naturelich Games

Maestro Leonardo (English title: Leonardo Da Vinci

Tonight, it was time for another gaming session. But before we started gaming, we went to eat some Spanferkel at a friend's house. My first Spanferkel ever. Pretty del.icious stuff.
After our return we lit the fireplace and set the stage for Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo Da Vinci, a recommendation by my friendly local game store, was recently published by Abacus Spiele in Germany with the German title: Maestro Leonardo. The strange title is probably owned to some copyrighting issues. The game was originally published in Italy by dvGames / DaVinci Games. The game is designed by a group of authors under the pseudonym of Acchittocca. A special website is available from the publisher that focuses on the Art of Leonardo

The game is designed for 2-5 players. Our first game took about 2 hours, although the box suggests a game length of 60-90 minutes. Maestro Leonardo runs on the wave of Italian renaissance-themed games like The Princes of Florence, La Città, Medici, etc. Although this theme might be a little bit worn out, I still like to dive into 15th century Florence. Leonardo Da Vinci lets players slip into the role of inventors who have to build amazing machines for the city council. These inventions have to be build in a laboratory with the help of apprentices, a master craftsman or mechanic human beings (robots). Different types of resources are required to create an invention. These resources can be bought in the city's shops. The overall goal is to earn the most Florins (the Florence currency) from your inventions. Players can focus their research on one particular type of invention which will reduce the time required to complete the work. However, researching in different areas is encouraged by granting huge amounts of money to the most diverse shop at the end of the game. I'll skip the rest of the mechanics for now and just describe our first session and my impressions so far.

Naturelich's laboratories researching for humanities benefit with Master Craftsman, 3 Apprentices and one mechanic human-being

The rules are too detailed. The German rulebook is eight pages long and I believe they could have explained it much much shorter on maybe four pages. The wooden components are beautiful, the cards, laboratories and the map are professionally designed but lack the elegance of illustrations by Michael Menzel or Frank Vohwinkel. Leonardo Da Vinci is a medium-weight gamer's game. Several mechanism are tied to each other and it will probably take more than one game to master them. We required this first game to learn all the rules and discover the opportunities and pitfalls in the different mechanics. From an overall perspective, the game contains slightly less complex mechanisms than Caylus and is maybe only marginally more complex than The Princes of Florence. If you like any of those, you will enjoy Leonardo Da Vinci. The three of us certainly liked the game and I am anxious to replay it. Only because I would love to get more involved with the game, it's mechanics and it's theme. But let's have a look at the session...

Leonardo has a nice start player selection mechanism: the game owner may select the starting player. This is an extremely fair way of doing this. I like to play games because I like to make choices. Here, the natural choice was Shelak as he had worked hard for the group twice this evening: first to satisfy our hunger and second to light the fire. In his first turn, Shelak focused on hiring new apprentices from the University and getting a majority in the city council. Raven followed him on hiring new meeples and decided to upgrade her laboratories. Naturelich decided to acquire resources and to invent the Frombola dimensionata. During the following rounds, Shelak and Raven focused on getting recruiting more apprentices and improving their laboratories. Although I had earned some Florins by inventing the frombola, the money had to be reinvested to overcome the dominance of Shelak's and Raven's apprentices. As it turned out, I was unable to make up for this lack in research capacity. In addition, I was lacking the diversity as I was unable to acquire enough resources to leave the field of my expertise.
In the end, Shelak came in first with 41 florins, closely followed by Raven with 39. After Raven, there was a big space of nothingness, the big Nirvana, the never-ending emptiness and only then it was Naturelich with 21 florins. Despite this devastating defeat I must point out again - Maestro Leonardo is an excellent deep game allowing for different strategies. I do not foresee the Caylus-hype for Leonardo, but it is pretty pretty pretty good.

As it had become pretty late, we decided for a game of basic Bohnanza. We were all looking for a little bit more interaction than our previous game (Leonardo requires quite a bit of thinking). Bohnanza seemed like a great fit and it was chosen above Munchkin. We all got our third planting fields pretty early in the game. Shelak greatly profited from his certified mediation skills and negotiated like an angel. I was a little bit too generous but I was in a good mood. Many favors went back and forth as Red Beans were traded against Blue Beans, etc. Shelak came out first at 23 points with his second win of the evening. Only one point behind him was Raven on second place. Naturelich had to reconcile with 20 points.