Game: Rise of Augustus
Year: 2013
Designer: Paolo Mori
Publisher: Hurrican
Key Details: 2–6 players, 30 minutes or less
Gameplay Score: 6/10
Theme Score: 6/10
Overview of Play: This game mixes card-drafting, set-collection, and—yes— Bingo. The object of the game is to complete objectives (Senators and Provinces), which you do by putting Legions on each of the card’s resources. You get resources—some of which are rarer than others—when the caller (or ‘crier’) pulls them from the bag and announces them (hence the Bingo comparison). When you complete an objective (you’re supposed to say ‘Ave Caesar’ (‘Hail Caesar!’), but no one in my group does), you trigger its power (if it has one), which might help you, or let you attack an opponent.
Depending on the type of objective you complete, you can get victory points (VP) in a variety of ways. Some objectives will just give you VP at the end of the game, but others involve pairing them with other objectives—and this is where the set-collection aspect comes in. If you’re the first person to complete three objectives of a certain color, for instance, you’ll get a tile with some VP on it (more or less depending on how scarce that color is).
You can also get VP by being the first to complete a certain number of objectives—but once you take once such reward, you can’t take any others. For example, if you take the 4 VP for being the first to complete 3 objectives, you aren’t eligible to take the 6 VP for being the first to complete 4 objectives; if you pass up the one for 3 objectives, the next person to complete 3 can take it and gain the 4 VP. It’s a nice press-your-luck mechanic—and if you’re the first to complete 6 objectives, you can get yourself a nice round 10 VP!
Finally, there is a gold tile and a wheat tile, each worth 5 VP to whichever player has the most of those goods on their completed objectives at the end of the game.
After you’ve completed an objective, triggered all of its powers, and taken any relevant scoring tiles, you get to choose another objective from the pool in the middle (this is part of the drafting element). The game ends once someone completes seven objectives.
The other drafting element comes in at the beginning of the game, as each player is dealt six objectives, and chooses three. But my group has taken to playing this as an actual draft, where we’re still dealt six objectives each, but then we take one, and pass the stack to the left, and so on. It just adds an additional layer to the game.
Because you can move Legions around to some extent (you never run out; you just move one if you want to place it when a resource is called), the main strategy comes in trying to figure out which objectives to collect, and which to complete first. For a quick game, there are enough interesting choices to give it a little bit of weight, and makes it more of a gamer’s game than something completely casual.
Comments on Use of Theme: I want to start with the block of text at the beginning of the rules, since it exemplifies both the good and the bad of the game’s use of a Roman theme:
After the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 BC., his
adopted son Gaius Octavius decides to return to Rome. Very early
on, he displays his ambition for political domination. In 31 BC., he is
in sole control. In 28 BC., the Senate grants him the title of Princeps
senatus, first member of the Senate to speak on a topic laid before
the assembly. In 27 BC. he receives the title of Augustus, he whose
words have the strength of prediction.
At age 36, Augustus becomes the first Roman Emperor and divides
the Empire into provinces.
You are “legati Augusti”, representatives of Augustus, and your role
is to maintain the existing institutions in the provinces of the Empire.
Very ambitious, you want the title of Consul, elected each year by
the Senate. For this, you need to ensure the support of the most
influential senators and take control of provinces to gather as much
wealth as possible. Only the most powerful among you can clain
this title.
There’s a lot going on here! The basic dates and the first half are all correct, and give some sense of the rise of Augustus. But the idea that Augustus divided the Empire into provinces is false. The Romans had had provinces since 241 BCE, when they gained Sicily at the end of the First Punic War.
The bit about being consul is strange, too. Not only was the position much less important under Augustus than it was during the Republic, it also didn’t necessarily require controling provinces in any way. The idea of gaining support from Senators fits well, though, in the sense that to be consul you already needed to be a senator, and would need support from others.
This little blurb is thus actually a pretty good indication of this game’s relationship with theme: in some ways great and detailed, in some ways loosely connected. Oddly enough, though, the rest of the game is the reverse of this blurb, since it’s the Provinces that are much more well done than the Senators.
Provinces
54 of the 88 objective cards are Provinces, each one supposdedly representing a different province of the Roman Empire under Augustus. The art on these cards (by Vincent Dutrait) is the visual highlight of the game, full of details and bright colors. Each Province card has a map of the Mediterranean on it, with that province marked out in a different color, so you can learn some geography while you play.
For the most part, there’s an impressive attention to detail here. In almost all cases they use the Latin names of the provinces—even using Latin et (‘and’) for areas that were joined as one province, such as Corsica et Sardinia. These cards are largely accurate in the sense that they mostly represent Roman provinces. But not all of them were provinces at the time of Augustus—and he certainly didn’t create all of them (as the blurb implies). In fact, about half of them post-date Augustus, and the list of the provinces here is more representative of a time about a century later, when the Empire is at its geographic height.
There’s a few other oddities, such as including Pisidia and Lycaonia as separate provinces, though they were both a part of Galatia. The list looks a lot like this one and makes me wonder if that’s where the designers found it. But even if it’s not a perfectly accurate list, the Province cards do a great job of outlining the game’s setting, and giving the impression that you’re fighting over a far-flung Empire.
From a game standpoint, though, it’s a bit odd that all of the Province cards have pictures of goods on them, but that only the wheat and the gold matter. There are about fifteen different goods on the Province cards, but only two of them matter: gold and grain. Things such as horses, marble, grapes, and amphorae have no in-game function. It’s a little confusing, from a design point, because it means that most of these cards have goods depicted that have no game function—and sometimes the two are mixed. There are some Province cards that only have gold or wheat on them, but some have, say, gold mixed with elephants.
While the choice of goods depicted on the Province cards doesn’t appear to be completely accurate, they’re also not done randomly. For instance, Sicily has grain, Syria has purple fabric, Numidia has elephant tusks, and Aegyptus has elephant tusks, grain, and gold. All in all, it’s a pretty nice attention to detail. It just takes a certain getting used to to only pay attention to two of the types of goods depicted on these cards.
Senators
The remaining 34 of the 88 objective cards are Senators, and as good a job as they did on the names of the Provinces, that’s how poor of a job they did on the Senators—every one of which, as far as I can tell, is an invented name. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with making up names, but if you’re going to choose a specific time period, and go to the trouble of getting the Provinces (mostly) right, it seems like you’d want to get real names for the Senators. And it would be relatively easy to get a list of aristocrats from the period.
The way they created the names, though, is pretty interesting—and not without a sense of humor. The names chosen reflect some understanding of Roman naming conventions, especially the so-called tria nomina (three names). Under the system, a lot of upper-class Romans—but far from all of them—had three names, like Gaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Tullius Cicero, or Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.
The first name is the praenomen, or ‘forename.’ This is kind of like a first name. There were so few of these in Rome that they were generally just abbreviated, Marcus as M., Lucius as L., and Gaius as C. (because sounds and orthography had changed, meaning that Caius became Gaius, but the original abbreviation stuck). A man’s first son tended to have the same praenomen; thus, the father of Gaius Julius Caesar had the exact same name, and the son of Marcus Tullius Cicero had that same name. Only men had true praenomina (more on that in a sec.).
The middle name, the nomen (the word for ‘name’—and the origin of the English word ‘noun’), is the name of your gens, or ‘clan,’ so sort of like our last names. This is the most important of the three names, and the one that people would often use in address unless they were on particularly close terms (e.g., more people were going to call Caesar ‘Julius’ or ‘Caesar’ than ‘Gaius’). Female children got the feminine form of the nomen. Thus, Marcus Tullius Cicero had a daughter named Tullia. If he had had a second daughter, she would have been named Tullia, too. Same thing for a third, and so on. Apparently the Romans used nicknames to differentiate (‘the older,’ ‘the younger,’ etc.).
Most Roman men, whatever the class, in theory had a praenomen and nomen. Having a third name, a cognomen or ‘nickname,’ was a sign either that your family tree had a lot of overlapping names and so it was necessary to distinguish between branches and/or you or one of your ancestors did something so notable that they earned a cognomen.
The Greek biographer Plutarch (Life of Cicero 1.2) tells us that the cognomen ‘Cicero’ derived from one of his ancestors, who had a scar shaped like a chickpea (cicer). The cognomen ‘Naso’ may have come from the fact that the poet Publius Ovidius Naso had an ancestor with a particularly large nose (nasus). It is impossible to know whether these stories are true, but they show how Romans viewed their names. And these were longstanding family names, but Gnaeus Pompeius (better known now was Pompey) didn’t get his cognomen ‘Magnus’ (‘the Great’) until he was in his mid-20s, by which point he had already made a name for himself as a leader.
Every Senator in Rise of Augustus has the tria nomina—but a lot of them are nonsensical. I mentioned above that none of them is real (as far as I can tell), and many of them mix praenomina, nomina, and cognomina in seemingly indiscriminate ways.
But they draw on a lot of famous Roman names, and mix them. It’s like they took a list of the names of famous Romans and jumbled their three names and created a whole bunch of new ones. For example, the names of emperors appear in new form, so there’s a Nerva (Italicus Curtius Nerva), a Tiberius (Tiberius Pompeus Cursor), and a Nero (Silius Lucretius Nero). They’ve also taken famous authors’ names, such as Ovidius (Atilius Ovidius Canina), Petronius (Servilius Petronius Tucca), and Tullius (Fuscus Tullius Cotta). Most of these names are theoretically possible, but—as I mentioned—I don’t think any is the name of a real person from the time of Augustus (or any time). People more interested in prosopography might find this more interesting than I do, or be able to track down connections (or errors).
But my favorite name of the bunch is Spartacus Locundus Ludens. Now, ‘Spartacus’ is not a Roman praenomen, and is clearly a nod to the famous gladiator who led a slave revolt in 73 BCE (10 years before Augustus was born). The word ludens (never used as a cognomen, as far as I know) can mean two things, either ‘playing’ or ‘appearing in games’; the latter would obviously be appropriate for a gladiator, but the former could also signal that it’s a joke (this verb is also found in the English ‘illusion,’ ‘allusion,’ and ‘collusion’—the last referring to when you are ‘playing with someone’). Finally, at the risk of reading too much into all of this, ‘Locundus’—which is not a Latin word or Roman name—may recall locut-, a root involving ‘speaking.’ Is it possible that this is a playful nod to the famous “I’m Spartacus” scene?
Unlike on the Province cards, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the details depicted on the various Senator cards. There’s also very little attention paid to accuracy in dress or hair—presumably because that would entail a bunch of middle- to old-aged men wearing the same thing, with similar hair cuts (no facial hair at the time). Instead, each Senator looks different, and not all of them wear togas. There differences serve no purpose, but they help make everyone’s set of objectives look different, and help reinforce the idea that you’re getting something different each time you take a new objective. That’s understandable reasoning—and it does help make the game look good, since everyone has a brightly colored tableau in front of them. (And the objective cards, which are square, look and feel nice, and have lots of space on them for the Legions, without obscuring other key details.)
Other Details
Some of the shared details on the objectives show nice attention to detail. The resources you need to complete them, for instance, are a gladius, a shield (of the appropriate legion type), a chariot, a Roman standard, etc. And, as seems to bede rigueur for such games, the victory points show (Arabic) numbers surrounded by laurel wreaths.
All in all, the game is pretty abstract, and it’s hard to make the argument that the theme and rules have a super close fit mechanically, but the theme is not just slapped on. There’s a nice attention to detail, and the art is quite nice. The closest connections to the theme are in the components and in the scope of the game. The sheer number of objective cards gives a nice impression of the massive scale of the growing Roman Empire.
The idea of people and places as objectives in one’s path to power is thematic enough, if not particularly Roman. But because there’s nothing that differentiates the Senators from each other except for in-game details (i.e. what resources it takes to complete them, what power they give you), they don’t give that Roman feel in the way that the Province cards do.
Perhaps the most interesting choice here is Augustus himself. Julius Caesar is certainly more famous now (and appears in many more games than Augustus). And though he’s connected here with provinces, the view of Augustus seems largely positive, so he’s likely chosen for the positive connotations of the so-called Pax Augusta (‘Augustan Peace’), which refers to the peace of his reign in most parts of the Empire relative to the civil wars that had dominated really the previous century, often spilling over throughout the Mediterranean (if you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘Pax Americana,’ it’s modeled on that idea). There is very little sense of the ruthless ruler that many 20thcentury scholars see (especially in the middle of last century, with the rise of authoritarian leaders).
Overall Thoughts: This is a fun light game, and it’s easy to teach. Because it accommodates 6 players without being a party game, it fits a niche, either as filler between games or at the end of the night when you want to squeeze in one more quick game but don’t want to reach for party games. The Bingo aspect, though, makes the game more random than I would like. But it’s fast enough that it’s not the kind of game anyone is going to take too seriously or get too worked up over.
The player count and simplicity of rules could make it useful for the classroom, too, and it would be particularly good as a way to learn about geography, the provinces, and the goods they produced. Even though the names of Senators are made up, it would provide a way to talk about Roman names and how they do (and don’t) work, and it would be easy to send students looking for parallels for some of the names.