Medici: The Card Game from #GrailGames at MeepleFest. Playing this right after Railroad Ink was an interesting contrast. On the one hand, Medici: TCG is obviously a much better game. It’s got excitement in the card flips, it’s got real decisions of risk, it plays fast, and the Vincent Dutrait art is terrific. It’s all the good stuff from the classic Medici in a smaller, faster, cleaner package. It’s a classic Knizia design, elegant, dramatic, and effective. It handles 5 and 6 players well, always a big plus. Plus it’s quite inexpensive. But it’s hard to deny it’s also a bit dry. It’s extremely structurally similar to Medici, which has been around for almost 25 years so it’s not providing the novelty that new hobbyist games do require to some degree. And the setting of Italian merchants and bankers doing trading in the Renaissance is just so insanely tired at this point, having been beaten to death, run over by a car a few times, and dumped in a bog. Despite all this, I liked it! I probably won’t pick it up just because this category of games (lighter, lightly-themed, but still engaging filler) is just one that doesn’t hold that much appeal for me anymore. https://www.instagram.com/p/B0c-_mRhBKY/?igshid=113mcwhqr2zqa
