Medici (board game)

Medici is a German-style board game designed by Reiner Knizia and published in 1995. It is an auction-based board game in which three to six players buy cards in an auction and match them in series and in sets to end up with the most points from those formations, with a typical playing time of about one hour for players aged ten and up. The game draws its theme from the historical Medici banking family of Florence, and it emphasizes risk assessment, requiring players to evaluate the uncertain value of commodity lots based on card draws and the purchasing decisions of other players, pricing each acquisition according to its expected value and associated risk. Medici achieved notable recognition on release, placing fifth in the 1995 Deutscher Spiele Preis and ranking in the top three of the 1995 Meeples' Choice Awards. Its designer Reiner Knizia, who previously worked as a quantitative analyst managing financial risk for banks, went on to create hundreds of published games over a long career.