Have you ever been to Venice?

In Venice you play as 16th century merchants, cleverly maneuvering in the canals with gondolas, placing and training assistants in the different buildings and fulfilling contracts, all to be the most wealthy and influential one in the end. 🏅

❓ Have you ever misunderstood an important rule that rendered the game basically flat ❓ Well we did that on the first run…
One of the main mechanics in the game is to place and gradually upgrade your assistants on buildings, so they give you *all* of the benefits on and below their level when you activate them. We always just cashed in the current level, which made our actions mostly worthless, and we couldn't achieve much. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️

A quick restart later it was much better. 👍

Here is our first (or second?) impression after playing it correctly:
✨ Pickup & deliver, with careful route planning where you have to balance the cost and benefits you get by activating your assistants on the way
✨ Great combos possible
✨ Your actions get stronger as the games go on
✨ Beautiful table presence

❌ Very fiddly. Like “always knocking everything” over fiddly. You have to move your gondolas, the gondolier, assistants, cubes and money tokens around all the time. This can be forgiven though, because we play board games for the tactility, right?
❌ UI is suboptimal. The placed assistants cover up the buildings, so you don't see the name of it and what bonuses it gives on each level. So you have to keep lifting the meeples throughout the whole game to plan your moves. 😞

☯️ Playing with 2 players means you also have to move around a smuggler's boat, which is a necessary evil. Without it there would not be enough meeting of ships and upgrading of assistants, but it slows the game down. On the plus side, you have some influence over its movement and can benefit from it.

All-in-all the game was fun. It requires a different thought-process than I am used to. I also made some mistakes so there was a considerable score difference.