I last played this back in March and the thoughts of the group were that there were some clever mechanisms, but there was a bit of a problem with downtime for some players. However, I've been keen to play it again and so introduced it to the Shrewsbury club.
The idea of the game is to place your markers into the various regions of the board (being a depiction of the Venice canal system), in order to control regions when they are scored. This is done through card play, with certain cards allowing you to place markers in a region; others allowing you to replace an opponent's marker with one of your own; some that cause markers to be removed from a region; more that allow bridges to be built; and finally some that trigger the scoring of a region. The clever bit is how you acquire those cards. Each turn players are paired up and each pair is given 8 cards (5 good and 3 bad) One of the pair chooses how to divide the cards into 2 piles and the other player chooses which pile he prefers, leaving the remainder for the divider.
This can mean that the non-divider has a long wait until the card split has
been determined. This didn't prove to be a problem as we all encouraged the slow coach to get a move on (and we all were guilty of being the slow coach at one stage or another). In fact we were unsure which was the more difficult task: doing the dividing or choosing which pile to take.
In our game, Ben benefited from a very uneven split on the first turn as the newcomers were getting used to the dividing/choosing principle. He soon established a lead that proved impossible to overcome so we reminded him that this was only due to that first turn error, not because of any skilful play on his part. I struggled to score any points early on, but managed to place a large number of pieces on the board and so control more than my fair share of regions. However, this meant me getting picked on later on and although I scored well at the end, Ben still managed to keep comfortably ahead.
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