I played (most of) a whole 2 player game of this at the UK Board Games Expo 19, and ended up preordering it ("August at the latest" they said). In this post I'll go over my first impressions of it and why I felt it worth the investment; so it won't have exhaustive details of all the rules or the experience of multiple plays to draw on.
Rules: The map is a made up of hexagons. Some are outside the city, and contain raw resources, some are inside the city of Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) and are more traditional "action spaces" (upgrade your resources, get points for things etc.), and there are also some coastal tiles, containing fish (another raw resource).
Every turn you build one of your little buildings on one of the vertices of these hexes (though some combinations are not allowed if you have insufficient wood/stone, two of the raw resources). You do what is indicated on the three hexes you are next to. And finally, the novel aspect of the basic rules is that most of the city spaces trigger again for everyone else who has build touching that hex. This brings a whole world of tactical options into play, which we barely explored in our 2 player game, but we got some inkling into the depth that exists in this area of the game.
Theme: Whilst not the most immersive in terms of theme, I thought it worked pretty well. I felt that I was helping to develop and urbanise the city and the area, and one of the actions in the city involved building part of the city walls (you get bonus points for your longest segment). However I was also doing it for my own benefit. I guess we played the part of local businessmen? It wasn't really explained to me (or I just forgot).
Artwork: I liked the artwork; it looked really professional and pretty. I'm not one to decide on the artwork but it makes a nice bonus. The city walls are a nice touch, and by the end of the game we had a nice looking board. I imagine this would be even more the case if we played for a whole game, or with more players.
Replayability: This comes in two aspects. 349
Firstly, there are objective cards - all the ones I saw gave 2 points for each "thing" you got up to a max of 12. These things were either resources in the game, or "luxury goods" that you could get on ships. There are 5 ships, and when ships are bought (via a town action) they are replaced with new ones.
Player count: 1-5. I'm not sure what different rules apply, but from what I saw I can easily see it working well at least 2-4 players. I appreciate games having a 5 player option too.
Summary
This game looks like it has real strategic depth thanks to the re-activating hexes bringing a new dimension compared to a more traditional worker placement game. This wouldn't be enough to make me buy it, but there are two other things that struck me. One is the speed of the game. Having depth like this in game that plays in under 90 minutes (more like 40 for 2p I think) is impressive. The other is that there is little downtime (a problem in many 4-5 player games). Even if it's other player's turn, you may still have actions to do if your hexes are activated. There is a small amount of randomness, which is just the right amount for me, to keep replayability without the frustration that too much luck can bring. Finally there are several different ways of scoring points (ships, completing objectives, having certain resources in certain combinations...) which gives me more confidence that the depth I felt I could see in the game is real. 629