Ruling the market can get pretty bloody.
Age of Renaissance, is a game in which you attempt to control regions of the board to make money. The regions pay out whenever a player plays the commodity card that the region produces. To complicate life a little, there are a lot of advances, such as "Caravans", "Seaworthy Vessels", "Patronage" and others which affect the play. The beginning of play consists of moving into unoccupied regions as rapidly as possible, and trying to get the majority in specific markets (hopefully one that you have a card for). The later game play consists of trying to oust other players out of their markets, and using cards such as black plague to influence the other empires. This game is complex, and will take an evening just to learn the rules, but is well worth the effort with the complex blend of strategies that will arise.
A game turn consists of bidding for how many units to play (the highest bidder will move last), drawing and playing a card, buying advances for oneself (such as improving sea travel), expanding into new territories (or onto others territory), and then collecting income for all of the territories owned. The rules are very well balanced in many different ways. For example, when trying to take over a region that another player owns, one must place double the region unit number down and then roll the dice. If the attack die is higher than the defense die you take it over, otherwise you fail at the attack. This makes it expensive to attempt to take over regions, and easy to hold them, but it is still possible to move into already occupied regions.
The most interesting aspect of the game besides interplayer diplomacy is deciding which advances to take when. Many advances do subtle manipulation of the play of the game, such as "Patronage" which allows one to utilize other players leader discount cards. When a leader discount card is played, it gives a discount on one particular advance. So "Patronage" does nothing by itself but influences the other advances you may have access to. The interplay between the available options you have at any moment and the advances possible to get allow for a huge set of interesting choices.
The flip side of this is that the game can be a bit of work to learn the first day. There are a lot of different cards that do specific things, and combined with all of the advances one feels like one has jumped into a game of magic the gathering without knowing all the ground rules.
Overall, this game is excellent fun and is definitely recommended.