This review was originally posted in my GeekList "Essen 2008 - Strategic Gamer's review" http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/36149:

Saturday morning saw us running towards the Tengkigames stand to grap a table with Comuni. The day before, Comuni was ranked 2nd in the Fairplay list - so, were we about to play the contender for the strategic game of Essen 2008 ? Here is the story:

5 cities (players) were developing their Italian towns in medieval Italy. The game is played in 4 rounds in which at least 15 town developments (i.e. buildings) are offered to the players (4 predefined piles of cards). There are 4 types of buildings that produce respective resources (cubes): commercial (=> gold), churches (=> faith), manufacturing (=> builders) and military (=> armies). The buildings have values of 1 to 4 and are placed in predefined groups of 1-3 cards on the board for auction.

In their turn, the player has to choose one major action. This could either be
- bidding for one of the building card groups by marking the group in the player's colour. The bid can be supported by gold cubes. If the bid is for a group for which another player has already made his bid, the bid needs to be at least one gold cube higher. The displaced player can immediatly choose to switch his bid to another group for the fee of one faith cube.
- collecting card groups: If at the players turn, there are still open bids on one or more groups, the player can decide to collect the cards.
The emptied group is then refilled from the card pile.
- collecting income: for those buildings that were newly built/extended in previous rounds, resource cubes can be collected.

After this phase, the building phase starts. The player can build for free 1 town building plus one city wall. Town buildings can reach a maximum height of 4. Ideally, the building sequence is increasing (e.g. from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 => a 4 storey building with a value of 1+2+3+4=10. This value is marked immediatly as VP). However, the players can also place lower valued buildings at higher levels - but then they need to pay the difference in builder cubes (e.g. to build a type 2 building on the 4th level, 2 additional builder cubes have to be paid).
The city wall is build from unused buildings by turning them to the back side.
If the player wants to build/extend more than one city building, he can do so for 1 builder cube fro each additional building.

Once the card pile is exhausted when filling up the card groups on the board, an invasion occurs, i.e. Italy is attacked. The strenght of the attack per player depends on each player's current VP and an adjustment based on the last player's VPs. In general, the more development a player has, the stronger the attack on him. There are 2 ways to fight back the invasion: each player can choose to send armies for the combined Italian army or keep the armies for the defence of the own city. The players decide hidden and simultaniously. Those players, providing the most and second most armies for the Italian army, gain VP.
Invasion resulution: First the strength of the Italian army is evaluated and substracted from each players invasion attack value. If this value is greater than 0, the player can still defend himself with the armies which he left at the city (city walss add bonuses). Is the attack value still greater than 0, the player receives malus VP. He can subsequently diminish the malus by paying faith cubes in subsequent turns.

The game ends after the 4th invasion. The player with the most VP wins(from buildings, bonuses for highest/most buildings per type, bonuses for Italian armies, bonus for the most remaining cubes of one type at the end of the game and maluses from lost invasions).

The game offers some interesting game mechanisms: the city building construction (considering the levels), the income of only those types of buildings that were recently built/extended, the communal vs. the individual defence against the invasion and the triggering of the invasion by number of buildings drawn. All these mechanisms are well sewn into each other. There might be different strategies for building city developments, although armies are kind of important - unless you keep for some rounds a low profile and have only few city developments that are ideally saved by the Italian army provided by the other players...
Interestingly in our game, the 3rd invasion came somehow unexpected. We all had to draw at least 15 malus VP...

I rate Comuni as a good mid-complex and easy accessible strategy game with an acceptable playing duration (~2hr).

Action at Essen 2008: no buy. I would like to play it some more times to see, if the strategies and game experience differs from game to game.