What it is
Calimala is a worker placement euro game set in Renaissance Florence. Each of you is a cloth merchant trying to make your way in the city: you produce marble, wood and bricks, weave cloth in your workshop, build shops and ships, donate materials to the great monuments (the Duomo, Santa Croce, Palazzo Vecchio, San Miniato) and ship cloth to the trading cities of Europe.
Actions are taken by placing discs on a shared board, and that’s where the interaction comes from. If you put your disc on top of other players’ discs, they get to repeat their action too. A good space helps everyone stacked underneath, so choosing where to go also means choosing who gets a gift.
Almost all the points come from majorities. Nearly twenty are scored over the game, each on a different criterion (a monument, a material, a city), and they reward whoever has donated or shipped the most at that moment. The same cube can count for two criteria at once, and the order in which the scorings come is known from the start.
How it plays
At first glance it looks like the usual worker placement with production and building, and partly it is. But everything you produce and build is for one reason only: the next majority. The winner isn’t whoever built the most, it’s whoever takes home the most points each time one is scored.
My advice is to decide early what to go for. Some majorities have to be left to the others, because if you chase them all you end up not even winning the ones that matter to you. And since you know which ones come first and which come later, the game is planned from the opening turns, looking at how they’re laid out.
The nugget
The Arte di Calimala was the guild of Florence’s cloth merchants, one of the richest in the city: it bought raw cloth in Flanders and England and finished it in Florence, in the workshops on the street that still bears its name. Among other things it looked after the Baptistery of San Giovanni, and it was the guild that held the competition among artists for its doors. Lorenzo Ghiberti won, with Filippo Brunelleschi second, and that contest between the two is one of the moments people point to as the spark of the Renaissance.
At our table
A beautiful game, and it has never come out in Italian. Such a pity!
How long does Calimala take?
The box says 75 minutes. At our table: 60 minutes at four, 70 minutes at five.
The box
Video tutorial
Show the video tutorials 1 in Italian
Tutorial in italiano di Calimala Cercatore di Perle ·YouTube
What’s the game where you win without being the strongest at anything?
The ones where coming second almost everywhere is enough to win.
