Sword of Rome (GMT)

Game: Sword of Rome (GMT)
Scenario: 4-Player
Participants: John P, Rikk "Uncle Silkie" M, Chuck "Chazzy Chaz" W, Myself
Time: Fri, Mar 25th 6.00PM - 10.00PM

In a highly unusual move, Rikk (my oldest and dearest friend) decided to purchase SoR and introduce it to his gaming group in Arizona where he lives. He and I would talk about the game off and on. Recently with our playing it here in STL he finally decided to take the plunge. I believe he and his group has played it two or three times and enjoyed it. They have played it 4-player most of all, much like we have locally. I think we are only just a step or two ahead of them on the learning curve.

As I mentioned the last time we played SoR, I am still missing something around 'getting' this game. It surely is fun to play, but our experiences with it have nearly all been identical...one player usually ends up making a king maker decision once he's down on his luck (i.e. he's getting beat up by another player). The other thing we've seen is one player getting ahead of the others (again we have really only played the 4-player game locally) and finds himself getting attacked by the other three players. I was left wanting to play the game with a new set of people to see what we are missing, or in fact was this the normal state of play for this game.

Rikk decided to organize and host a 4-player game, kicking off my long weekend back in Arizona. All of us had played the game at least a couple of times and had roughly the same level of rules knowledge. We rolled for sides and I got the Gauls, Rikk was the Greeks with Chazzy as the E/S player and John getting Romans. In my previous playings I had played everyone except the Gauls so I was pretty excited. The Gauls face a tough choice of going after the E/S player (and thus making him very vulnerable to the Romans) or electing to hold back (and thus limiting the Gauls options for getting VP's).

Chuck "Chazzy-Chaz" and Rikk get ready to start

My initial hand had Brennus in it so this was my first card play. I didn't have any cards to activate the Carthaginians, so my ability to mess with Rikk's Greeks was limited on the first run. Things started off slowly with Chazzy (E/S) offering me an alliance after John's Romans started to misbehave. Rikk or John activated the TA Gauls, taking a red city and costing me a VP on the first turn. The Romans built a city while the Greeks added support and started to look closely at taking all of Sicily.

Chazzy, happy about his Alliance with the Trustworthy Gauls

With my alliance with the Estonians, Rikk and John were working together, just short of an alliance (at least initially). There weren't many battles in the first few turns. I dealt with the TA Gauls, retaking my city and leaving a minor leader and 4 CU's up there to discourage any further TA activations. They (the TA Gauls) had lost all three of their CU's so I knew I would have a few turns reprieve. Meanwhile the Greeks and Carthage were messing with each other, both John (Rome) and I were activating the Carthaginian units to keep the Greeks in check. I also lead a 10 CU Army all the way down (through Samnite territory) once the Greeks moved against them (Samnites) and took out one other their Red VP tribal locations. This caused Rikk to pull his Greek invaders out of Samnite lands and move to intercept Brennus and try and save his city from Gaelic atrocities.

John's Romans mistreating the Etruscans

This move caused me to high tail it back up the boot as I didn't want to risk loosing a battle and having to retreat. That would have cost me my army for sure as I was not allied with the Samnites (at the time), just the Etruscans. Johns Romans were starting to get the upper have against the Etruscans while continuing to poop out CU producing cities. Greece was able to defeat the Carthage forces in Sicily (getting the VP city) thus Rikk shot up the VP chart around turn 3. Rome was flat but had the largest army of all of us while Chucks E/S forces were slowly loosing ground against Roman and Greek aggression.

We broke the game on turn 5. One of us moved the Volsci out of Roman territory to try and take a Greek city as by then Rikk was starting to run away with it. We missed the movement restrictions on the Volsci and compounded it an impulse or two later by someone else activating them and attacking a Roman city. At this point we collectively decided to call it as there was no real easy way to undo what had been done and we thought that Rikk or John's Romans (huge army by this time) were very close to a victory with the rest of us only getting to decide which one would get the win (sigh).

My desire to see how the rest of the world played SoR was thus left unquenched, although I am now leaning towards thinking that sticking with TNW when we are looking for a 4-player non-Euro to play is the way to go. The exception here is that I would like to see what a 5-player game of SoR feels like. Our thinking is that with a 5th player to counter the 2v2 aspect of the game it might prove interesting. I should add though that we had a good time with many shenanigans and laughing all around the table.

Dominion (Rio Grande Games)

Since the night was still sort of young we decided to break out Dominion. I will talk about this game in another post as we played it a few more times over the course of the weekend (and I like it very much).

Sword of Rome (GMT)

Game: Sword of Rome (GMT)
Participants: Bob H, Jim D (HeavyD), Joe C (YJ) and Myself
Time: 2.00PM – 6.30PM

We were once again able to get four people together over the holidays (New Years Eve) for another go at SoR. This time we had all recently played and we were ready for action. We chose sides based on each guy getting a new power. Bob got Rome, HeavyD was the Etruscan/Samnite player, YJ was the Gauls and I was the Greeks. 

The Gauls (YJ) opened by raiding 2-3 Etruscan spaces. This prompted HeavyD to activate the TA Gauls for an incursion over the Alps, raiding a couple Gaul spaces. Bob started off building an additional city while I made a move on the Carthage VP city on the far side of Sicily. I think at the end of the first turn we were still flat on VPs. Turn 2 started a downward spiral for the Etruscans. YJ did another string of raids in Etruscan spaces while dealing with the TA Gauls, who were eventually eliminated. I took the Carthage city and Bob got another walled city up. Thus I was up a VP and HeavyD was down one or two. Rome had not taken any VP cities but was getting bigger. 

Eventually HeavyD lead the Samnites against Rome’s Southern most city capturing it before Bob could get there. HeavyD then had to rush the Samnite army up the Etruscan lands to help them out as they were starting to go under due to Gaul pressures. Having taken the Carthage city I moved against the captured Roman city, taking it on turn three. Thus at the end of turn three I was at +2 VP, with a total nearing the auto-victory level if I held on over the course of the next turn. 

This of course led to the other three players doing everything in their power to lower my VP levels. I lost the Carthage city and the Roman City, and then was forced to recapture a couple of my own cities due to loosing battles and event cards as well as Carthage incursions. Eventually they removed the auto-victory threat, but by then it was really a two player race as HeavyD had lost nearly all of the Etruscan starting lands and YJ was on his heals having lost three battles in one turn. All this time Bob was quietly building new Roman walled cities (for the extra CU they generate each turn) amassing a huge army (20-25 CUs). 

HeavyD moves the Etruscans while YJ watches.

In spite of this, HeavyD kept on messing with me and tried to liberate Etruscian lands, now being conquered by the Romans. So by turn 6 Bob was clearly going to run away with the game. I had gained about three VPs and was still in the lead, but Bob was going to be netting +3 or 4 VPs a turn while I was flat and HeavyD and YJ were too far back to get back in the game. Bob had a huge army and was clearly going to run away with the game, so we called it at the end of turn 6 or 7, Bob getting his 2^nd win in his 2^nd game. 

This game is pretty interesting in the way that is drives players to do certain things to stay in it (i.e. keep the game going by not allowing another player to win). This is generally a mechanic of multi-player games and usually not a pretty one, as one player gets ganged up on while if he gets too far out in front. For our group this is sort of new as we play TNW mostly when we do MP games and that game is a little more linear in its multi-player dynamics. The thing we found in our last two playing was that one player would get out in front, then the rest gang up on him, staying on him perhaps a turn too long, allowing another player to suddenly shoot out to a win while the other two players are hopelessly left out as they are so far behind.

The other aspect of this game that is a little troubling is what I’ll call the slippery slope phenomenon. This is when one player starts off by being aggressive and suffers setbacks, losing a battle or two or a VP city or two. Once he falls behind, he is faced with getting even more desperate and doing desperate things to try and right his ship. The combat system in this game is extremely risky, one should only fight when he can win and win big, otherwise it’s better to sit back and be conservative. This has lead to one player being effectively out of competition very early in each one of our games. Once this happens that player is in a spot to become a king maker due to the way the game handles minor power activations. We as a group need to figure out how to get out of this cycle. I am guessing that once we get some games in with other people (new people that we haven’t played with) that might enlighten us a bit. 

Until then, SoR will go back on the shelf and we’ll stick to the highly reliable TNW for our multi-player wargame needs, coming back to SoR when we need a break from TNW.

Sword of Rome (GMT)

Game: Sword of Rome (GMT)
Participants: Jim D, Joe C, Bob H and Myself
Time: 11.00AM - 5.00PM

This was our first 4-player game of SoR in several years. HeavyD and I were playtesters and played it several times back when it was released. With the Release of the 2nd Printing, we decided to give it another go as we've been trying to get back into multiplayer games with more regularity.

The game is a 2-5 player game (best with 4-5 players, in my opinion) covering Rome's assent to power from 386BC to 272BC. It is a card driven game with many of the features of this genre; leader activation, political control of spaces and a very interesting combat mechanic.

In the past few weeks I've re-read the rules and played a 2-player and 3-player game, both were more or less trainer games, getting ready for this event. The 3-player game was ok, it was our first time back with the game and it was ok. The Guals are handled abstractly, by rolling on a chart once a turn, the players then play Rome, Etruscan/Samite and Greece. The Guals being abstracted really changes the dynamics and makes for an ok three player experiance, for my money, TNW is the better choice when you only have three players. The 2-player game is ok, but I'd rather play something else if there are only two of us, too much of the interesting bits are missing when each player is controlling two powers, however it was a good experience for learning the ins and outs of the games mechanics.

Today's four player version was hands down the best of the recent playings. We had three players that had experience with the game and one player with no background. In spite of this, today's game was one heck of a good time. I was Rome, with HeavyD taking the Gauls, YJ on the E/S and Bob with Greece. We played the 6 turn version and it came down to the last impulse of the last turn. Bob won with Greece, with my Romans a VP or two behind. HeavyD had Gual in third place with YJ a distant fourth with his Etruscans and Samnites.

I'm sure if you asked the players involved you'd get several different explanations of why the game turned out like it did. But in the end it was essentially the three of them trying to get Bob the win over my Romans. An early alliance (and some would say a poorly conceived one) gave Rome a very safe and strong position in turns 2-3 allowing me to boost my support in my cities while also creating several more walled cities, thus by the last couple of turns I was getting 7-8 CU's a turn as reinforcements while everyone else was struggling to keep an army in the field. All of the Etruscan starting lands were overrun in this period, knocking YJ out of the running for a victory. This also made it very hard for HeavyD to raid and thus get VP's...so both of them, around turn 4-5 started to play king maker, essentially doing what they could to assist Greece and trying to bring down the now very strong Romans.

Despite this (three against one) I had a fantastic time. The constant conflict (in spirit at least) between HeavyD and YJ on their differing takes on what should be done was an especially entertaining diversion. The next time have a multiplayer game day, I hope we have half as much fun as we did today...

I would move SoR up to nearly neck and neck in the 4 player game area after today's experience (after TNW of course). I shall try to set up another game of this in the coming weeks.