Way back before we even went to Gen Con, we started a game of De Vulgari Eloquentia. In the game the players are creating a new language. One that will be commonly spoke in all of Italy. The aim of the game is to gain victory points (or Volgare points) by reading manuscripts, looking for important documents, and by improving their social status. Sounds exciting doesn’t it. It’s actually not too bad. During a turn you get to take a number of actions. Each of these actions cleverly move you towards victory. Whether it’s discovering the lost manuscripts in an area of Italy or gaining profit from your small business.
During our game, I found it difficult to figure out just what I should be doing. One of the plethora of actions you can take during a turn is to “buy†the support of Politicians, businessmen, and others. These are represented by cubes of various colors and are kept behind a screen. During the last part of the game, these are used for voting and can grant you a lot of VP if you play your cards right, which I didn’t. It seems that if you were taking your actions later in the turn, all the good support was already gone. That was my problem, so I majored in manuscripts, for which you get direct VPs from. It didn’t help.
It also didn’t help that we played half the game and then came back three weeks later to finish it. Although we weren’t crazy about the game, I think we’d all like to play it again now that we have an idea of how the VPs work.
Ben won our game with 42 points. Owen was a very close second with 41. I had 27 and Mike had 24. So much for our manuscript reading skills.
We got done a little early and decided to play a game of 7 Wonders. I love this game. This game does not love me. As this picture shows:
Chaos Steve