Country: Italy

An auction game where income and resources are automatically gained at the beginning of each turn. Then the money is used to bid on more resources, then the resources can either be used (along with money) to build cities, or "displayed" to qualifying for "roles" (like political appointments) which gain influence/VP-graft plus a special power such as income boost, resource boost, VP-boost, or resource re-display.

Building a city gains the player VP but also gives VP to the opponent(s) with matching role/graft color.

The board does triple duty, containing the scoring track, a map of some part of Italy, and staging area for the "role" tiles.

From the ZuGames website:

In the year 1338 the Siena’s Town Council charged the famous artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti to paint a fresco showing the town and its commerce. You will play the game above the painting that he made. You will start as Peasants, sowing the ground and selling your crop along the Via Francigena. If you will save enough florins you will be more comfortably off, trading in cloth and spices throughout Tuscany. But your dream is bigger: to enter the Council of the Nine, the town’s government. Therefore you will have to change into Bankers and use your money to obtain the Senesi’s consent: will you finance the artists of that time or contribute towards the construction of the new Torre del Mangia? Be careful, the florins that you have saved could not be enough! Behind every corner of the town other players’ pitfalls hide themselves: beggars, thieves, pretty women inside the inn...
Be prepared for a unique game experience.

Another Reiner Knizia standby, this game plays very well with varying numbers of people. The object is to accrue the most points during three rounds, which you do by spending your points to bid on sets of cards. Each turn the current player turns up one to three cards for all the players to bid on, with the highest bid taking all cards. The cards denote a commodity type and quantity/value. The round ends when each player's ships are full, or the commodity card deck is exhausted. After each round, points are awarded to each player having the most of a given commodity, and to the one with the most valuable total "cargo load".

Part of the Knizia auction trilogy.
One of the Knizia Florentine auction games.

Related Games:

Medici vs Strozzi (two-player version)
Strozzi

In the Ancient Greece, the poleis (city-states) thrived increasing their population and culture, occasionally waging war against each other, erecting buildings and celebrating ceremonies to get the favour of the deities abiding on Mount Olympus. The players will lead one of these city-states (like Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Argos and others) expanding it and worshipping the various gods in order to become the hegemonic power of the Peloponnesus!

Olympus is a deterministic (i.e., non-random) strategy game, based on worker-placement, resource management and building an efficient engine to score victory points (VPs). It also features a few more aggressive options than the average game based on the same premises (but the savvy player knows how to defend against them, if he prefers to quietly develop his own position).

Each player leads a city-state that is defined by six values representing population, culture, military and productivity of the three resources (grain, venison and fish). During your turn, you send one of your three priests to worship one of the ten deities (Zeus, Hera, Demetra, Artemis, Poseidon, Athena, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus or Apollo). Each opponent can now send one of his priests to celebrate the ceremony with you. After that, the deity grants his favor to whoever has sent a worshipper: the favor is larger for the leading priest (the one of the active player) and smaller for all the others (for example, Athena boosts culture by two points for the city of leading priest and by one point for the others; of course no boost is given to those who refused to send a priest to worship her). That deity cannot be chosen again in the current turn.

Since almost all deities are specialized in a certain field, the players must choose which ones they prefer to worship sooner (also guessing which ones may be of interest for the opponents and which ones are safer to skip as they will not be chosen until later) and when it is better to get a smaller benefit following the priest of another player rather than saving a priest to get a greater boon but in a field that may not interest them as much (sort of quality over quantity).

The resources your city produces (worshipping the correct deities) can be spent (worshipping other deities) to create buildings giving a variety of effects (and VPs), thus offering a lot of different strategic approaches to the game. Victory can be achieved with a plethora of buildings but also with very few ones. There are 45 different buildings: 33 can be built by anyone (even if someone else already did), while the other 12 are unique as only one copy of each can exist (introducing another element of contention between the players). You can also wage war to steal the resources of the other cities (if they were so foolish to keep their warehouses full and their military underdeveloped, it's just what they deserve) or invoke a terrible plague to decimate their population.

All the actions (development, production, building, war, scoring, etc.) are done by worshipping the proper deity (and some gods give you a choice like "do you develop your grain productivity – thus receiving more grain the next time you will produce it – or do you produce it now even if you won't get much?", adding crucial tactical decisions to the game).

When all the priests have been used, there's a brief upkeep to check some simple conditions (e.g., players with more than five unused resources must discard those in excess) and then a new turn begins (all priests return home and all deities can be worshipped again).

Being the first to reach the maximum value in a certain field (e.g. culture 10) gives you an award worth two VPs. When four of these awards are claimed, the game ends. Each player receives bonus points based on how developed his city is and the highest score wins.

Italy, late Middle Ages. The fabric merchants need to write down their contracts in a language that everyone can understand and the literates are looking for an alternative to the elite of the traditional Latin language. So, the Volgare, the language spoken by the common people, taken from the dialects spoken in the various Italian regions, starts to gain relevance.
During this period, Francesco D’Assisi writes his famous Canticle of the Sun and Dante writes the Divine Comedy both written in Volgare.

The players will have to do their part in the creation of this new language! But who will provide them the proper knowledge to understand the manuscripts in the different dialects? Who will succeed to uncover the secrets of the books inside the Papal Library? Who will embrace the religious life and who will remain a merchant? Some of the players can become a famous banker, someone else can climb the church’s hierarchy to be the next Pope! But in the end, who will be the most appreciated and respected for his status and his culture?

The aim of the game is to obtain more Volgare points. The players will gain VP from reading manuscripts, looking for important documents like the Canticle of the Sun or "The Riddle from Verona". Players can also gain VP by improving their social status, for example, if the merchant become a banker or the Friar becomes a Benedictine Monk or the Cardinal becomes Camerlengo or Pope.
Moreover, VP can be gotten with money and with the support of Politicians, Noblemen, Abbesses, and of the Amanuensis.