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(search on Board Game Geek) 
- Replay Value (1-10): 4
- Fun Factor (1-10): 3
- Worth Buying (1-10): 2
The game comes with a deck of suitless cards that seem as if they
were designed to play Authors. The cards depict figures and scores from one of
last year's winning games, Da Vinci's Challenge. I suspect that the
cards are in 13 sets of 4, which would probably make this game playable
with a standard 52-card deck (but the game didn't fascinate me enough to
really want to find out). The game itself is another variant on
President; players
take turns playing higher and higher sets on a central pile, until all
players pass, and then the player who played last gets to lead to the next
rolling trick. However, there are a few things that are different; many
of the ranks have equal value, which means that often the value
stays at the same rank for a bit. Also, there is a rule where playing
identical sets on sets creates a small bonus, such as skipping the
player's next turn or winning the stack immediately.
Da Vinci's Challenge last year was a abstract game with no hidden elements,
and a reasonable amount of strategy that involved seeing and creating
hidden geometrical figures among a sea of black and white plastic pieces.
Well, this game has none of that. It shares a "scoring chart" with that
game, but doesn't actually use those points; you might as well replace them
with nice works of art by Leonardo and improve the game experience.
The game itself seems like the designers took a classic game, made it
boring because of their limitation with the artwork, and then attempted
to spice it up by adding some separate rules. Unfortunately, all those
rules seem to do is just to add more randomness to the game, without
giving much extra in terms of strategy. The skip rule, for example, while
adding spice to the game, creates some amount of frustration (a player
who is being skipped has very little control over whether they will
be skipped), creates a vagueness in the rules (does a skip count as a
"pass" for purposes of determining whether the trick is over?), and tends
to happen mostly as a matter of luck rather than skill.
I wasn't a big fan of Da Vinci's Challenge last year, mostly because it
was an game that managed to look like a strategic abstract game while not
completely working if players are trying hard to win. This game, to me,
seems to miss that mark by even more. Maybe it's not that different from
Leonardo's inventions: cool-sounding, but not completely realizable.
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