Fine porcelain! Bolts and bolts of fabric! Spices for sale! Dye! Dye here! Rare and precious metal! These are the sounds as you walk through the Italian marketplace. In MEDICI you are a merchant sailor whose job is to buy the most valuable loads for your ship. In addition, you are also trying to corner one or more of these commodity markets. However, your ship can only carry a maximum of five loads of goods at a time. Therefore, you have to be careful in your bidding at the auctions where one, two or three loads are available for purchase in a lot. You also have to beware because your competitors are also bidding for these valuable goods. Once you have purchased your five loads, you are finished buying for this buying session.
Then each of the merchants sell the loads on their ships. The more valuable the items you are carrying, the more florins you will receive. You will also receive florins for purchasing the most goods in any of the five different commodities. After three buying sessions, the game ends and the merchant who has the most florins wins the game.

Each turn, the dealer turns over up to three cards one at a time. The dealer can decide to stop turning over cards after one, two or three cards have been revealed. Most of the cards contain one of the five commodities and a value of 0 to 5. There is one special card with a value of 10 representing bulk cargo. This card is neutral and does not represent any of the five commodities. So while it is helpful in letting you have the most valuable loads in your ship, it does not help you corner any of the commodity markets. The revealed cards will then be auctioned off amongst the players. Each merchant gets one bid on the revealed cards, starting with the player on the dealer's left and ending with the dealer. The high bidder takes the cargo and adjusts his money indicator. The deal then passes to the left and the process continues until all of the players have five cargoes or the deck is exhausted.

Once the buying session is complete, the merchants sell their cargoes. The players adjust the commodity markers to indicate the commodities purchased in this buying session. Each player totals the value of the cargoes carried on their ships. The merchant with the greatest total value receives 30 florins, the next highest merchant receives a lesser amount of florins and so on to the merchant with the lowest value receives no florins. Then each of the commodity markets is evaluated. The merchants with the greatest and second most amount of each commodity purchased receive florins. In addition, if a merchant has purchased six or more of any commodity cumulatively over the three buying sessions, the merchant will receive bonus florins during the payment for the individual commodity.

Players may participate in one or more heats of five-player games. The winners of each game in each heat plus enough second place players to complete the field will then advance to a semi-final round on Saturday. The winners of each of the semi-finals will advance to a final immediately following.

Like most German games, MEDICI is long on strategy and short on details/theme simulation. There are a couple of rule variations between the American and the German version; we will use the following:

1. Starting money for a 5- or 6-player game will be 30 florins as in the German version, not 40 florins.
2. The American version has an extra five-florin bonus space in each of the commodity markets. This space will not be in effect for this tournament.
3. In 6-player games, we will use the American payment chart, which has 15 florins for the third highest merchant instead of the 10 florins used in the German version.