Rome, If You Want To
On Sunday, I went over to play long boardgames at Laz's. Because I was late in RSVPing, I ended up in an alternate spot for the game Laz really wanted to play: Republic of Rome. It's not one I'd've chosen. RoR is a complex, bureaucratic simulation of the Senate of Rome. Each player takes control of a faction or Roman Senators vying for influence in Rome while also working together to keep the state running and fighting wars. We played for about five hours, and the game ended with all of us losing when Carthage overwhelmed us.
It's from 1990, made by Avalon Hill, so a lot of its design feels terribly outdated now. There's lots and lots of chits, and lots and lots of rules, and it was never fully clear at a given time whether we were following the rules correctly. In representing the Senate, its gameplay is deliberately obfuscatory and bureaucratic. Like many diplomacy games of this era, game balance is not apparent, but instead relies on individual players knowing strategies not immediately clear in the rules or their interactions.
And in beyond the internal diplomacy, there's also a cooperative game going on, in which players have to keep Rome alive in multiple wars and quell state unrest. This aspect of the game also appeared to be brutally difficult, with the odds spiraling rapidly out of our favor. It feels like a strong influence on more modern cooperative games where everything is going wrong all the time, but for us, at least, the numbers just didn't work out to be winnable. And unlike a game of Pandemic I recently played where the deck was completely unwinnable, working through our unwinnable RoR game took hours not minutes.
I suppose it does what it's supposed to do very well. I just don't understand why anyone would want to do it.
This journal has moved to Dreamwidth. Entry originally posted at http://tablesaw.dreamwidth.org/500335.html.
Comment(s)
It's from 1990, made by Avalon Hill, so a lot of its design feels terribly outdated now. There's lots and lots of chits, and lots and lots of rules, and it was never fully clear at a given time whether we were following the rules correctly. In representing the Senate, its gameplay is deliberately obfuscatory and bureaucratic. Like many diplomacy games of this era, game balance is not apparent, but instead relies on individual players knowing strategies not immediately clear in the rules or their interactions.
And in beyond the internal diplomacy, there's also a cooperative game going on, in which players have to keep Rome alive in multiple wars and quell state unrest. This aspect of the game also appeared to be brutally difficult, with the odds spiraling rapidly out of our favor. It feels like a strong influence on more modern cooperative games where everything is going wrong all the time, but for us, at least, the numbers just didn't work out to be winnable. And unlike a game of Pandemic I recently played where the deck was completely unwinnable, working through our unwinnable RoR game took hours not minutes.
I suppose it does what it's supposed to do very well. I just don't understand why anyone would want to do it.
This journal has moved to Dreamwidth. Entry originally posted at http://tablesaw.dreamwidth.org/500335.html.
Comment(s)