tabletoppingboardgames 
Renaissance Italy must have been exhausting.
Every city wanted to prove it was richer, more cultured, more important than the next one. Art was everywhere, but not in the museum way we think about now. Back then it was politics, status, ego, competition… basically wealthy people trying to outdo each other through paintings and giant statues. And right in the middle of all that were Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Two artists with completely different personalities, styles, and ways of thinking. You can almost imagine them walking past each other in Florence thinking, “yeah… that guy again.”
That rivalry is what Maestro builds its whole identity around. One side focuses on Leonardo’s inventions, paintings, and workshop experiments. The other leans into Michelangelo’s sculptures and the Sistine Chapel. What I liked almost immediately is that the game actually tries to make those differences matter mechanically too, not just visually. It does not feel like the usual “same faction with different colours” situation.
You are not only making art here. You are trying to get attention, influence collectors, control galleries, and build reputation before the focus of Italy suddenly shifts somewhere else. One round you feel good because your workshop is finally working smoothly… and then the scoring changes and everyone starts fighting over a completely different region. That is what surprised me most. Maestro feels less like “Renaissance eurogame number 47” and more like a game that wants players to feel the pressure of artistic rivalry. Sometimes maybe a bit too much pressure, but that also gives the game personality.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 90-140 minutes
📝 Designer: Andrea Robbiani
🎨 Artwork: Leonardo da Vinci, Zuzanna Kołakowska, Michelangelo, João Phillipe & Fabrice Weiss
🏢 Publisher: Board&Dice (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
The game lasts four rounds. During those rounds both workshops compete for points by spreading artworks across Italy, controlling galleries, influencing collectors, upgrading cards, and developing their own workshop systems. That probably sounds like a lot because… well, it is.
At the center of the game is the map of Italy. Artworks move between regions, galleries appear and change value over time, and players constantly fight for majority in the places that matter most during scoring. Just because you control a region now does not mean it will still be valuable later. A place that looks important early on will suddenly become secondary once collector influence changes. That shifting focus is a big part of the game and stops the board from becoming static.
The two workshops play very differently. Leonardo’s side is more focused on inventions and blueprints. You place resources into patterns on your workshop board to unlock inventions and ongoing effects. It feels a bit like solving little production puzzles while trying not to fall behind everywhere else. Michelangelo’s side revolves around statues, busts, and the Sistine Chapel board. You remove and activate chapel tiles over time, gaining bonuses and improving your workshop. It feels less structured than Leonardo and more reactive. At least that was our experience with it. And yes, one player literally spends the game slowly uncovering the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which looks great on the table.
Every turn you perform one main action and one workshop action. The four main actions are move, create, influence, and study. You use cards for these actions, and those cards determine both the action strength and how much publicity you generate. The move action is where most of the competition on the map comes from. You move artworks between connected regions and try to gain majority in places with galleries. If you control a gallery region, one of your artworks becomes the centerpiece, which matters during scoring.
The create action is simple but important. You add more artworks to the board, either in Florence or in regions where you already have a centerpiece. Sounds straightforward… until you realise your rival is trying to push into those same valuable regions at the exact same time. The influence action uses the collector lodge, where players move collectors around to affect gallery scoring. That sounds slightly abstract at first, but during the game it becomes one of the most important systems. A region may look valuable, but if collector influence changes, everyone suddenly starts caring about somewhere else entirely.
Then there is study. This lets you move up a track to gain resources, improve cards, and upgrade your workshop. The card upgrades are especially important because they permanently improve your deck, but the timing of those upgrades matters too. Early upgrades make future turns stronger, while later upgrades will be worth more points.
At the end of every round the exhibition phase happens. Galleries score, players compare publicity in the action spaces, and Patroness or Benefactor cards are awarded. These cards add bonuses, extra scoring opportunities, and more ways to shape your strategy a little. There is also an event module for experienced players. Events change scoring priorities or tweak certain systems between rounds. Most groups that enjoy the game will probably end up using them regularly because they add extra unpredictability to the map.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
We played a preview copy of Maestro, so things may still change before release. Components, colours, icon clarity,… all of that can still evolve. But even at this stage, the game has presence.
This is not one of those clean minimalist eurogames where everything looks practical and slightly soulless. Maestro goes fully into Renaissance decoration. Gold borders, paintings, rich colours, sculptures, fresco-style artwork… the table fills up quickly. “Busy” is probably the right word in general.
The main board shows Renaissance Italy with galleries, collectors, and regions slowly filling up with artworks. Leonardo and Michelangelo each get completely different workshop boards, and those are probably the visual highlights of the game. Leonardo’s board looks like a chaotic inventor’s desk full of sketches and unfinished ideas. Resources physically slot into invention patterns, which gives the whole thing a tactile puzzle feeling. It fits the character really well.
Michelangelo’s board is even more striking visually. Tiles cover sections of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and as you remove them more artwork becomes visible underneath. Mechanically it works nicely, but watching more of the ceiling appear over time is just satisfying in a very simple way. The wooden artwork pieces deserve a mention too. The statues and busts use custom wooden shapes, and they stand out clearly on the map. Small thing maybe, but it helps the board feel more alive once everything starts filling up.
The cards continue the Renaissance theme with portraits inspired by historical paintings and noble courts. You get actual historical figures connected to art patronage, politics, and religion. It gives the game personality instead of feeling like random fantasy nobles in fancy hats.
That said, readability is probably the biggest concern right now. The game looks beautiful, but there is a lot happening visually. Icons, colours, scoring information, workshop systems, gallery values, collectors… after a while your eyes start doing their own little eurogame across the table. During the first play especially, some players may spend time just trying to understand where to look.
Our Experience
For us, the strongest part was how active the board felt during the entire game. Nobody really sat in their own corner building something privately. Even when working on your own workshop, you constantly kept looking back at the map because galleries, collectors, and majority positions kept changing. We had several turns where plans completely changed halfway through a round because our rival suddenly pushed into a region we thought was safe. That happened more than once. You can prepare carefully, but the game keeps nudging players into reacting to each other.
What impressed us most was how interconnected everything felt once the systems started clicking together. The map matters, but controlling regions alone is not enough. Galleries only become important if they score well at the right moment. Publicity matters because it affects access to Patroness and Benefactor cards. Study matters because your deck improves over time. Workshop development matters because each side builds toward different long-term scoring opportunities. Almost every decision affects several things at once, which creates this constant feeling that you are trying to keep multiple plates spinning without dropping one.
The publicity system became more interesting the longer we played. At first it looked like a smaller side mechanism, but during the game it started influencing decisions constantly. There were moments where we deliberately chose weaker actions because losing an important Patroness or Benefactor card felt worse long-term. I liked that because it made cards feel useful in more than one way. They are not only actions, they are also part of this ongoing struggle for visibility and influence.
The workshops themselves also felt genuinely different during play. Leonardo’s side gave us that satisfying feeling of slowly building something efficient over time, where turns became more rewarding once the invention system started coming together. Michelangelo felt more flexible because of the Sistine Chapel board and the way resources could be spent more freely. The shared map is what really ties those differences together though. Even if both workshops develop differently internally, they are constantly pushed back into the same fight over galleries and scoring opportunities. That keeps the game from feeling like two separate puzzle games happening beside each other.
At the same time, the game asks a lot from players. There are many systems running at once, and the first play can feel overwhelming. Not because the rules themselves are impossible, but because everything is connected to everything else. One decision affects scoring, map control, publicity, card upgrades, and future actions all at once. Once the systems started clicking together, that level of complexity became part of the fun.
We also noticed that downtime could become an issue. During our plays we had a few moments where players stared at the board for quite a while trying to optimise everything. I do not think the game becomes frustrating because of that, but it works better with players willing to keep the pace moving a little.
The team mode was also interesting for us. Two players sharing one workshop while communication becomes restricted after planning sounds slightly chaotic on paper… and sometimes it is. We had moments where teammates clearly expected completely different things from each other. But that also created some genuinely funny situations at the table. I can absolutely see some groups loving that mode and others preferring the cleaner two-player rivalry instead.
Our Thoughts
After playing Maestro, what stayed with me most is how committed the game feels to its theme. A lot of eurogames use historical settings mostly as decoration. Here, the systems actually support the idea of artistic competition surprisingly well. Collectors shape cultural trends. Galleries become fashionable or less important over time. Publicity matters because reputation matters. Even the workshops themselves reflect the personalities of Leonardo and Michelangelo in ways that feel natural while playing. That thematic connection made the rivalry feel present almost all the time, even during the more mechanical parts of the game.
What I also appreciated is that the game rarely rewards narrow specialization. You cannot just focus on one part of the game and ignore everything else. A player who only chases galleries may fall behind in card quality and workshop development. Someone who spends too much time upgrading cards may suddenly realise they lost control of the map. Even strong positions can disappear quickly once scoring priorities change. Several turns came down to awkward choices between improving the workshop for later rounds or fighting immediately for galleries and publicity before scoring priorities changed again.
The gallery system may honestly be the heart of the whole design. Because gallery values shift depending on collectors and scoring order, the map never settles into a predictable pattern. The best region is not always the region with the most artworks or the easiest access. Timing matters just as much as positioning. I also really like the cleanup structure because artworks disappear from scored galleries after each round. That sounds like a small thing, but it prevents players from simply locking down one region early and sitting on it for the rest of the game. You constantly have to reinvest in your position.
The card upgrade system also became more interesting the longer we played. At first we mostly upgraded cards because stronger cards are obviously useful, but after a while the timing of upgrades became just as important as the upgrades themselves. Early upgrades improve your deck more often, while later upgrades can score better immediately. The event module adds to this as well. I can easily imagine experienced groups eventually treating events as the standard way to play because they push players toward different priorities from one game to another.
At the same time, I do think Maestro will appeal to a pretty specific audience. This is not the kind of eurogame I would casually introduce to newer players on a random evening. The visual density alone may already scare some people away, and the game expects players to care about several systems at once from the very beginning. If someone prefers cleaner, lighter strategy games, I can absolutely imagine this feeling like too much work.
If you enjoy heavier euros where the board state keeps changing underneath your plans though, I can see Maestro landing really well. Especially if you enjoy games where interaction comes from competition over shared spaces and scoring opportunities rather than direct attacks. I also think this is the kind of game that improves noticeably after repeated plays. Not because the rules are unclear, but because understanding when things matter feels just as important as understanding how they work. After our first play, it already felt like there were parts of the game we had only started understanding properly near the end.
Will everybody love it? Definitely not. But I also do not think Maestro is trying to please everybody. The game never really tries to simplify itself, and I think that is part of why it feels memorable.
Personally, I mainly want to play it again because it feels different from most heavy euros I have played recently. Not because it reinvents the genre completely, but because even after finishing the game, we kept talking about different turns and wondering what we should have prioritised earlier. For me, that is usually a pretty good sign.
If you already know this looks like your kind of game, you can currently get 10% off a preorder through Board&Dice with the code tabletopping.
📝 We received a preview copy of the game from Board&Dice.
