But without the excuse of a month dedicated to it, am I really going to find myself desperate to play more Medici, over other auction games I have, Ra or otherwise? Perhaps not. And I will say that in one game Medici did shine, did involve close, tense competition all the way to the end. A perusal of my finishing rank in the games I've played could certainly give you the impression that the underlying issue is simply me being totally incompetent. To be sure, there could easily be elements of groupthink here - maybe we should be working to make the game not end up in that position. Even at the end of a round, where Ra delivers push-your-luck fun as the last player left in tries to maximise their takings before ol' hawk-noggin swoops in to leave them in the lurch, Medici simply tells the last player to draw cards off the deck until their ship is full, and whether that's two 0s or (as in my last game of this) the gold 10 and the 5 of exactly the suit they wanted, it can feel anticlimactic and arbitrary in a way that its Egyptian brother doesn't. With positions settling like this - X wants cloth, Y wants ermine, maybe A and B both want grain - it seems to have been the case that the drama pushes more onto what cards get turned over, not what the players do when bidding on them, and that's a kind of drama I'm less interested in. And the opportunity cost of taking cards you don't want is so high in this game that even attempting to bid up the person who does want them feels like a bad move - do you really want to risk wasting 60% of your ship space on a spite bid, when there's a decent chance your opponent will let you have them and wait to see if some more purples turn up at a more amenable time? For another, because scoring for suits is based on relative position on the suit tracks, and those tracks don't reset at the end of a round, in the second and especially third rounds of a game of Medici, player positions can be incredibly divergent: it can easily be the case that a lot holds no interest to all players but one. This means that once a player wins a three-card lot, they're out of the bidding for any further three-card lots, and that reduces the competition over those lots. ![]() For one, the constraint on bidding is that each player can only win a maximum of five cards per round. But there are some things about Medici's structure that also contribute. In Medici an auction is one player deciding whether to turn over one, two, or three cards it can't compete with the glitz and glamour of passing the tile bag around in Ra, terrified that the falcony divinity could rear his head at any moment. But - though it's taken me five plays to figure out - what I'd say is that despite its theoretical advantages, Medici feels less dramatic. Another simple answer is that I've played Ra more. So why, then, do I find myself liking Medici less? One simple answer is that I knew Ra first. Strategy tip: going up one space on every track is not good strategy. None of your 'this tile is definitely worth six points to me': until people's ships fill up and their card inventory for the round is fully determined, how much anything might score is almost completely dynamic. Not only does the simpler lot composition make it easier to evaluate other player's holdings, but all the scoring is based on position: you don't get points for having a bunch of cloth, you get points for having more cloth than anyone else*. On interactivity, too, Medici would seem to win the fight. Player aids are still necessary to remind you of the point values, but it's a far cry from Ra, whose BGG file section bursts with custom player boards and mats designed to clarify its nuanced scoring. ![]() By contrast, Medici's cards have only two characteristics, number and colour, and (in essence) score for each of those characteristics once per round. ![]() Ra's tiles don't just come in lots, there are lots of them: none of the scoring is that complicated in a vacuum, but the number of tile types adds up, and the up-front explanation can be a bit of a burden when teaching. I'll try not to spend too much time on the ins and outs of their shared DNA, but the key is that they're both auction games, played over three identically-structured rounds, in which you're limited less by the amount of currency you hold than by a simple per-round limit on the number of bids you can win.Īnd on paper, it's a comparison where Medici comes off best. Don't be fooled by appearances into thinking it's in the same genus as Whale Riders, just because they're both Grail Games publications with Vincent Dutrait artwork.
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