Leonardo da Vinci / Maestro Leonardo

History
Leonardo da Vinci was born in August 2002 somewhere between Italy and France during a walk on the Alps...
The first ideas, written on a scratch paper and rewritten in a work lasted 4 years, have brought to the game as it's published now. During this time it had the working title "Inventors of Florence".
In the autumn of that year, we showed the prototype to daVinci games (dV): they were immediately interested, but said also that the game was too much long and too much complex.
So we started to work to lighten the game and we arrived to a version that we hope will be published in the future as an expansion of the game.
That legendary (for us) version was very similar to the actual game, but included a distinction between Florins and Fame points: you used the Florins to buy everything you can buy now in the game (developments, apprentices, components), but you won with the fame point. Every invention gave both Florins and Fame points, but in the city there were two more zones where you could earn Florins: the construction site and the Lord of the city. You could also take some loan from the bank, with the risk of bankrupt at the end of the game!

Unfortunately, working on the game so much, we didn't realized the complexity of the prototype at that stage. We was even working on more variants as voting lexs at the council!
Trying the game with playtesters (in particular ah historic session with our friend Jamil) helped us to understand that the game was still too much difficoult for people who must learn all the rules at the same time.
So we took the scissors and cutted away the Fame point and the city areas that gave money, deciding that the Florins would have been victory points too.

We finally signed the contract with dV (end 2004), and at that time a new work on the rulebook started. The game has been modified a little, but about the council we agreed on two different versions: we prefer the Codex Leonardi I rule that gives to the game a deeper startegic level. However both dV and Mayfer prefer the basic rule (you can move only one of your apprentice) that is a less harmful rule for people who do not have an aggressive gamestyle. So in the rulebook you will find both the rules and you will be able to choose the one you like most.

Another story is about the Introductory version, a simpler version for the first game that dV asked us to develop but has not been put in the box. We present it in the variant section of this website. It will allow you to cut many rules and reduce the plying time by about 1/3.

However, now Leonardo is out and we hope that all the work that we have done during the last 4 years, togheter with the great effort of dV and the other editors that have trusted Leonardo (we would like to thank them all), will allow many people to enjoy our game.