Medici (board game)
Encyclopedia
Medici is a German-style board game
by Reiner Knizia
. Players buy cards in an auction and match in series and in sets to end up with most points from those formations.
Before he was a game designer, Reiner Knizia was a quantitative analyst
, a profession that manages and attempts to price risk for banks. This is fitting as the Medicis were bankers and traders who improved accounting standards and as such would have built their financial empire on judging risks. In this tradition, Medici the board game is based on the pricing of risk: each lot of commodities has an uncertain future value based on how cards are drawn from the deck, what other players buy, and other factors. In order to play the game well, players must judge and price the risk attached to each lot of cards, buying them for a price appropriate to their expected value and the riskiness of the investment.
Medici placed 5th in the 1995 Deutscher Spiele Preis
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German-style board game
German-style board games, frequently referred to in gaming circles as Euro Games or Euro-style, are a broad class of tabletop games that generally have simple rules, short to medium playing times, indirect player interaction and abstract physical components...
by Reiner Knizia
Reiner Knizia
Reiner Knizia is a prolific German-style board game designer. Born in Germany, he developed his first game at the age of eight. He has a PhD in mathematics, and has been a full-time game designer since 1997, when he quit his job from the board of a large international bank...
. Players buy cards in an auction and match in series and in sets to end up with most points from those formations.
Before he was a game designer, Reiner Knizia was a quantitative analyst
Quantitative analyst
A quantitative analyst is a person who works in finance using numerical or quantitative techniques. Similar work is done in most other modern industries, but the work is not always called quantitative analysis...
, a profession that manages and attempts to price risk for banks. This is fitting as the Medicis were bankers and traders who improved accounting standards and as such would have built their financial empire on judging risks. In this tradition, Medici the board game is based on the pricing of risk: each lot of commodities has an uncertain future value based on how cards are drawn from the deck, what other players buy, and other factors. In order to play the game well, players must judge and price the risk attached to each lot of cards, buying them for a price appropriate to their expected value and the riskiness of the investment.
Medici placed 5th in the 1995 Deutscher Spiele Preis
Deutscher Spiele Preis
The Deutscher Spiele Preis is an important award for boardgames. It was started in 1990 by the German magazine "Die Pöppel-Revue", which collects votes from the industry's stores, magazines, professionals and game clubs. The results are announced every October at the Spiel game fair in Essen,...
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