Game: Roma
Year: 2005
Designer: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Queen Games
Gameplay Score: 9/10
Theme Score: 7/10
Overview of Play: This is a two-player game that can be played in about 15–20 minutes. (The box says 30–45, but that seems long to me, at least after you know how to play.)
This is a dice-allotment game, meaning that every turn you roll three dice and allot each one to an action tile. In Roma, there are eight action tiles between the two players: one each for numbers 1–6, a money space, and a card space. You can put one or more dice on these spaces; if it’s the money space, you get that many coins (called sestertii here); if it’s the card space, you draw that many cards, and put one of them into your hand; if there’s a card there, you activate that card’s power.
There are two types of cards, Characters and Buildings. Each one has a unique power that you use when you place a die on the tile where it’s played. Some cards give you victory points (VP), while others allow you to move or remove cards. Some cards have a military aspect, and allow you to attack your opponent’s cards, thereby removing them.
Removing cards is extremely powerful, because the game’s most unusual mechanic is that you start the game with 10 VP—but at the beginning of every turn, you lose 1 VP for each die tile that is unoccupied on your side (you can only play cards on the tiles for the numbers 1–6). Since each player starts with cards on four tiles, at the very beginning of your very first turn, you lose 2 VP!
The game ends either when all of the VP run out (at which point whoever has more of them wins) or when a player has no more VP (at which point he or she loses). I’m a big fan of this mechanic, and it really messes with your head. The fun of the game comes from figuring out how to position your cards and how to combo them most efficiently, while making sure that you’re not going to run out of VP at the beginning of your next turn.
(There’s a standalone expansion—Arena: Roma II—that adds one more tile, the ‘bribery’ tile, which you can activate by placing any die there—and a number of sestertii equal to the value of that die. In my experience, the expansion isn’t really necessary, and I generally ignore it.)
Comments on Use of Theme: A running theme with any kind of themed game (especially historical ones) is a block of flavor text at the beginning of the rules to set the stage. Roma is no different:
Rome is in a state of emergency, the Senate and the Guard are
embroiled in fierce arguments, the people are divided. Many roads
lead to Rome, whether you decide to use powerful cards such as
the Turris and the Praetorianus to protect the power and victory
points you have, or instead prefer to use the Consul and the Tribun
to skilfully pull the strings behind the scenes. Whoever succeeds in
using their connections and manages to play their cards cleverly
will at the end deserve their victor’s laurels.
Although this blurb doesn’t mention a time period, we get an indication from one card, ‘Nero,’ since this emperor ruled from 54–68 CE. More importantly, though, any mention of Nero conjures up all of the negative connotations of the Roman Empire, including its debauchery and backstabbing—which is at the heart of this kind of head-to-head game. In that sense, the theme is OK, and fits with the balance of military cards that allow you to attack your opponent’s cards directly, and trickier cards that let you move cards around or copy other cards’ effects.
The most obvious sign of the game’s theme is the names of the cards, all of which are in Latin. Since there are 17 Characters and 8 Buildings, that’s a lot of Latin! And for the most part, the names fit the powers of the cards pretty well. For instance, the ‘Haruspex’ allows you to look through the deck and add the card to your hand; this looking through the deck is appropriate, since the haruspex was a type of Etruscan seer. Similarly, the ‘Sicarius’ (‘daggerman’ or ‘assassin’) allows you to eliminate an opponent’s character card, and the ‘Architectus’ (a word the Romans borrowed from the Greeks) allows you to build Buildings.
Appropriately enough, the ‘Nero’ card is arguably the most powerful card in the game, since it allows you to destroy an opponent’s building. This—and the fire on the card itself—allude to Nero’s rumored role in starting the great fire of 64 CE. In some ways, it’s this fire that has defined Nero for subsequent generations: he supposedly set it to clear space to build a new palace; he reportedly sang The Sack of Ilium while Rome burned (hence the expression “Nero fiddled wile Rome burned”); and according to some authors he blamed the Christians for starting the fire. Even though it’s possible (or even likely) that none of these is true, they have defined the popular picture of Nero almost since the time of his rule.
But not all of the names work equally well, in part because some of the cards’ powers are so abstract that it’s hard to tie them to any particular person. The ‘Consul,’ for instance, allows you to raise or lower the value on a die by one point; this is pretty powerful in a dice-allocation game, so it kind of fits one of the higher offices in the Roman Empire, but that’s a bit of a stretch. Still, some serious thought has gone into all of these names.
A few points of note, though. One involves the spelling. There’s a commitment to using Latin spellings throughout the game (including in its title, using Roma instead of Rome), but the ‘Legat’ card betrays the game’s Germanic origin (the Latin would be legatus, which can refer to a variety of positions, from a lieutenant in the army, or an ambassador, or even a governor). The same thing happens in the little blurb I quoted above, which refers to the ‘Tribun,’ though the card has the proper ‘Tribunus Plebis’ (‘the People’s Tribune’). It’s funny the little things that get missed in translating from one modern language to another.
There are a couple other odd choices. One is ‘Scaenicus’ for ‘actor,’ where we might expect histrio (cf. English ‘histrionics’)—but the card’s power is appropriate, since it copies another Character. The inclusion of the ‘Essedum’ is also a little strange, since it’s a Celtic word originally, and refers to a kind of war-chariot used by the Celtic peoples. So, it’s not really a Roman thing. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s just kind of a weird thing to include.
The only thing that’s really a mistake is the ‘Aesculapinum,’ a card that allows you to get a Character card back from the discard pile. The power is appropriate, since this is supposed to be a temple of Aesculapius (the Roman name for Asklepios), and so in some sense a hospital (there’s still a hospital on this site in Rome!). But the form Aesculapinum doesn’t exist; it should be Aesculapium. All in all, one misplaced ‘n’ in 25 card names is pretty good!
(The names in the expansion are more of a stretch, and show that the designers had to reach to add so many cards and keep the Latin theme. It also adds ‘Maecenas,’ who died in 8 BCE, long before Nero became emperor!)
The art is colorful, and shows a nice attention to detail. The ‘Velites’ (‘skirmishers’) have their characteristic wolfskin pelt, for instance, and the ‘Senator’ has the purple stripe on his toga, marking his status. The rest of the components, however, aren’t as clearly Roman as you might expect.
The victory points do have laurel wreaths on them (which is a common move for this type of game), but they use Arabic numbers instead of Roman numerals. The same is true for the money: even though the game refers to the coins as sestertii, the coins have no art on them, and only show Arabic numbers. It’s odd that a game that shows so much attention to detail in choosing Latin names for all of its cards wouldn’t go the extra step to add these seemingly obvious touches, but it might reflect a concern that not everyone knows Roman numerals—which seems fair. If there’s any risk of confusion, why take the risk?
Finally, the title is simultaneously vague and ambitious, implying that the game somehow encompasses the essence of Rome. And the names of the cards reflect this notion, from the ‘Forum’ to the ‘Basilica’ to the ‘Senator,’ the ‘Gladiator,’ to ‘Nero’ himself. The game presents the Romans as builders and as warriors—and also nefarious schemers. This fits into the generally dark view of the early Roman Empire, under one of the most infamous ‘bad’ emperors, Nero.
Overall Thoughts: This is one of my favorite two-player games. It’s not quite as easy to learn as Battle Line, but the basic rules are very simple. While the idea of losing VP most turns is a cool dynamic and defines the game, it does take some getting used to. The complexity of the game comes from how many different cards there are, and the fact that the symbols on the cards aren’t always self-explanatory. I’ve played this game a ton, and I occasionally still have to check the text explanations of how the cards work.
The theme is not essential to the game in a meaningful way, but there’s a lot to be said for a game that gives all of its cards (mostly correct) Latin names, and pairs them with appropriate mechanics and art. It would be an easy enough game to teach students, and they could pick up some good vocabulary from the cards. All in all, this wouldn’t be bad in a classroom or for some kind of Latin Club.
Thanks for reading! For next time, I promise a game that plays more than two!