Description

Cesare Borgia. We are in the Renaissance period in Italy. You are a hired hand of Cesare Borgia, the fearsome Commander of the Papal troops, and son of Pope Alexander VI. The Borgia clan gained power due to bribery, murder and intrigue which resulted in a lot of enemies. To keep them under the thumb, more bribery, murder and intrigue is required. All these actions are, of course, performed in the interests of the Holy Church and to protect the salvation of the poor Christian souls.
Religion is not your concern. You’re hired for the money.

Cesare Borgia a board game of skills management and determination for 2-5 players set in the Renaissance period in Italy.

GAME IDEA:
Players try to perform missions in Italy and move therefore from city to city. To perform the missions, players require a mix of different skills: sabotage, theft, assassin and intrigue, represented by colored tokens. Money can be useful to acquire missing skills. Finally, to move, travel tokens are required.

On your turn, you draw 2 tiles out of a bag and place them on the corresponded grid. The purpose is to form series of similar tiles. When this is done, you can exchange the tiles for tokens. With the right tokens, you can move and perform the missions in order to gain victory points (VP).

GAME SET-UP:
Place the game-board in the middle of the table.
Each player gets a player board. Select one randomly or choose one. Make the choice by common agreement. Each player places his player board in front of him.
Each player gets 6 tokens, one in each color. Three tokens are selected and placed on space 1 of the player board. The other three form a reserve and are placed on space 0. Each player takes his Heroic Exploit card which is placed next to the player board.
Each player places the pawn of his color in Rome
Shuffle the Mission cards and pile them in a facedown stack next to the game-board. Draw a first Mission card and place it face-up on Firenze (city n°1). Then, draw a second Mission card and place it on Napoli (city n°2). Draw a 3rd and 4th Mission card and place it respectively on Siena (city n°3) and Ravenna (city n°4).
Put all the tiles in the cloth bag.
Shuffle the Event and Upgrade cards separately and pile them in 2 facedown stacks next to the game-board.
Place the Reference sheet next to the game-board. Keep the tokens and markers in a reserve aside of the game-board.
Select a Start player randomly, which starts playing his turn.

HOW TO PLAY?
Starting with the Start player, each player completes his turn in clockwise order.

A turn consists of:

drawing and placing tiles
scoring lines
exchanging tokens
moving around the map
executing a mission.

You can mix up all these actions and perform them in any order. However, after executing a mission, your turn is immediately finished.

EVENTS:
Some mission cards mention “Event”. After placing a new Mission card, the player at the left of the active player draws an Event card and places it face-up upon an available Mission of his choice. Place the card in this way that all important info remains visible.

Events mostly make the achievement of the missions more difficult by increasing the number of required tokens. Sometimes events yield an extra reward. In this case, keep the card among your fulfilled mission cards as a reminder. Other events are discarded when the corresponding mission is fulfilled.

Some events show the roadblock icon. In this case, place or displace the roadblock marker on a path leading from one city to another. A path with a roadblock marker cannot be used. There is only one roadblock marker which must always be displaced, once it is put in the game. Discard the Event card after placing or displacing the roadblock.

When the stack of Event cards is depleted, shuffle all discarded cards again and form a new Event stack.

END OF THE GAME:
The game is nearly finished when a player has reached or exceeded a certain number of victory points. Finish the ongoing round in order to give each player the same number of playing turns:

Two players: 12 victory points required
Three players: 11 victory points required
Four players: 10 victory points required
Five players: 9 victory points required

The winner of the game is the player who has the most victory points. Occasionally, check the following tie-breakers in descending order: number of fulfilled missions, number of upgrades in hand, number of yellow tokens in stock or number of other tokens in stock.

-description from the publisher's website