Next we decided to try a new Martin Wallace design, published by Kosmos/Mayfair. This is a game about Italian merchants trying to set up trading networks with various sized settlements across northern Italy. Connecting to large cities is good as there are more customers there than in the smallest hamlet but, if your opposing merchants also move into the city, this reduces your profits and you might have been better with a smaller settlement that others avoided. On your turn you get 6 movement points and you get to spend these on connecting from your existing network of settlements to one you haven't yet reached. You can save points for later rounds but only up to a maximum of 4, so you can only use 10 movement points per turn at most. Every settlement you connect to, you place a marker on it and play continues until someone can no longer make a legal move. Then you count VPs for each settlement you're connected to, the more in the settlement, the lower everyone scores. Most VPs wins.

This is a very quick game and is very easy to play. There is an element of trying to block opponents, but this is quite difficult. We all thought that there was a big advantage to the first player but that player, me, didn't end up winning. Mark K played well and critically blocked me from one of the cities I was aiming for and, deservedly, won. We were all a bit luke-warm about this one. Turns come round very quickly and it is easy to see what's going on but it didn't seem to be very balanced, This may have been because the board set-up we played was unbalanced but I'm not sure this is going to see too much repeat play with us.