Game: Quo Vadis?
Year: 1999
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Mayfair Games
Key Details: 3–5 players, 30 minutes (can be much faster or slower depending on your group)
Gameplay Score: 6/10
Theme Score: 2/10
Overview of Play: This is a diplomacy-based game in which each player represents a Roman family full of Senators, all of whom want to reach the Inner Sanctum. Once the Inner Sanctum is full, whichever player with at least one Senator in the Inner Sanctum has the most laurels wins.
On your turn, you do one of three things: move one of your Senators onto the board; move one of your Senators from one committee to the next one; move the Caesar token.
Other than the Inner Sanctum, every space on the board with multiple openings is a committee, and to advance out of a committee, you need majority approval from its ‘members.’ But the majority is determined by the number of spaces in the committee, not the number of Senators currently there; for instance, a committee with five spaces requires three votes, even if there are only three Senators in it at the time; if there are only two, no one can advance from that committee. This means you have to convince other players to vote for you to be able to advance on the board—which is where the diplomacy comes in. (The only time you can advance out of a committee without a vote is if the Caesar token is on the space above that committee.)
As you move between committees, you pick up laurels, ranging in value from I to IV victory points (you can tell it’s a Roman-themed game because they use Roman numerals!). Once the Inner Sanctum has five Senators in it, the game is over. If you have the most laurels, but didn’t get a Senator into the Inner Sanctum, you can’t win the game.
The game changes a lot depending on number of players. Since the Inner Sanctum has five spaces, it’s a lot tougher to get a Senator in there in a five-player game than in a three-player game. The more players, then, the more cutthroat the game is—and the better. I don’t think it’s worth playing this without the full complement.
There are some optional rules and special counters in the game, but I’ve never used them. The strength of the game is its simplicity (like any diplomacy-based game, the complexity comes from the players), and my group has never seen the need to complicate it.
Comments on Use of Theme: Like seemingly every board game set in the Greco-Roman world, this one tries to evoke the setting at the beginning of the rules:
Return to Rome in all its glory. Walk in the footsteps of Rome’s elite.
In Quo Vadis? you play one of Rome’s mighty patrician families in
a power struggle that will decide the destiny of Rome, and ultimately
the world. To win, your candidate must navigate the treacherous
political waters of the empire and master the Senate.
There is a lot going on here, much of it contradictory. For instance, generally when people talk about the ‘glory’ of Rome, they tend to downplay the ‘treachery’ aspect—and there’s a longstanding tradition of talking about either the virtuous Roman Republic (where Romans were noble and admirable) or the decadent Roman Empire (where everything was orgies and murder—often at the same time!).
The references to the Empire and to the importance of the Senate are also somewhat contradictory. By the time the Empire came into existence in 27 BCE under Augustus Caesar, adopted son of Julius Caesar, the Senate had lost a lot of its significance. There were still power and influence to be had, of course, but the Senate wasn’t what it had been, say, fifty years before.
The game is pinned down in time by the inclusion of Julius Caesar, whose face is on the Caesar token. The game reinforces this time period by filling the margins of the rule book with quotations about various Romans (more in a minute on these quotations). The theme doesn’t really inform the gameplay in any way, with the exception of the fact that the presence of Caesar means that the normal rules of advancement don’t apply. The idea of a player representing a family is Roman, too, but not really developed.
But this kind of muddying of the setting reflects a general lack of concern for the theme—which is clearest in the title of the game. If you saw the name ‘Quo Vadis’ and thought, “I’ve heard that before,” you’re right. In one of the margins in the rule books, they explain the name of the game:
Quo Vadis? is Latin and roughly translates as where thou goest?
or where goest thou? (i.e., which way are you going?). It is a question
you might use to ask someone how they might act or believe or,
perhaps more importantly, vote.
But the phrase will be familiar to people because it is the title of a 1896 book, originally written in Polish, by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who won a Nobel prize in 1905. The book is a love story set in the time of Nero (emperor from 54 to 68 CE) about a Roman patrician who falls in love with a Christian woman. The book has been translated countless times, and has been made into a movie at least four times, most recently in 2001 (for discussion of its popularity see this this book).
In this sense, then, the title is perverse. It plays off of the familiarity of the phrase, and is appropriate for a game that is all about deciding how to move, but it has nothing in common with the book and movies with which it shares a title. I’m not sure anyone would buy this game thinking that it was a board game-adaptation of the book or movie(s), but this all seems oddly misleading. It’s a fascinating example, though, of reaching for recognizable—even if misunderstood or unknown—Latin phrases to attach to a game to give it a Roman feel.
Again, this kind of weird fit is indicative of the overall slapdash feel of the game’s use of theme. The components do more for the theme than any other part of the game—and while this is often true of such games, the disparity here is greater than it usually is.
The main components are the Senators and the tokens that cover spaces between committees. The Senators are very tall, and look like columns; according to the rules, they are “shaped like clusters of ancanthus [sic] leaves.” A note in the margin then explains that acanthus leaves topped columns of the Corinthian style, which were particularly popular in Rome. This is a nice thought, but the pieces don’t really look anything like acanthus, and the thought almost certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me if the rules hadn’t labeled them thus.
Predictably, the counters with victory points have laurel wreaths on them, with point values given in Roman numerals. More and more I’m convinced that everyone must know that victors or triumphing generals got laurel wreaths, because the symbol is ubiquitous in these games.
I’m not numismatist, but the Julius Caesar token looks like it’s supposed to be an image from a coin, but it doesn’t look identical to any coin I can find (again, I’m not a numismatist).
One of the optional counters depicts the fasces, the bundle of rods around an axe, which represented the authority of some high-ranking Roman officials (and the revival of which symbol gave rise to the term ‘fascism’). Another marginal note explains what these were.
The board has a nice mosaic design, but it has a lot of empty space, which the designers have filled with random images, including the double-headed god, Janus (after whom January is named), Romulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf, and the eagle from the top of a legionary standard. This is all well and good, and perfectly Roman, but elements such as the ship (which is only a rough approximation of a Roman ship) seem like a bit of a desperate stretch to fill negative space.
From a thematic perspective, maybe the most interesting aspect of the game is the use of quotations from ancient authors in the rule book. There are almost a dozen quotations from authors including Plutarch, Lucan, and Philostratus. But these quotations are sometimes strange, as are their attributions.
None of the quotations gives a real citation. For instance, one quotation about Pompey has a citation that reads, “Cato, Speaking of Pompey the Great (See Lucan).” The quotation is, in fact, from Lucan’s epic poem, Bellum Civile (Civil War), 9.192–5. The translation is taken (without attribution) from p. 272 of John Boardman’s The Oxford Illustrated History of the Roman World.
Similarly, there’s a quotation from Plutarch’s Life of Fabius Maximus, which the game attributes to “Plutarch, ‘The Makers of Rome.’” This is not the title of any work by Plutarch, but the name given to a translation of some of Plutarch’sLivestranslated by Ian Scott-Kilvert put out by Penguin in 1965, from which they quote. I don’t expect scholarly footnotes, but the use of published translations without any kind of acknowledgment seems a bit dodgy.
The only thing that is somewhat thematically appropriate—if you squint—is the idea that Rome is cutthroat and bureaucratic, and that having a rising autocrat such as Caesar in the mix means that sometimes none of the usual procedures matter.
Overall, this seems like a textbook example of a game in which the mechanics came first, and then the theme was slapped on. There is clearly some research here, in terms of finding the quotations, and figuring out the art, but none of it affects the game, and is so superficial as to not even really merit the designation of “flavor.” The title is particularly bizarre—and yet is a perfect embodiment of the random, careless feel of the game’s approach to theme.
Overall Thoughts: This game can be a lot of fun, but it really needs the right group. The name of the game is betrayal, so it’s easy for people’s feelings to get hurt. With the exception of the classic Diplomacy, it’s unlike almost any other game I’ve played. Both games rely solely on a player’s ability to work with and manipulate others, though this game is easier to learn and much, much shorter.
At one point, my group played this game a lot, and it still hits the table from time to time. But it’s not the kind of game you’ll want to play multiple times in a row, or even every week, and that’s why I don’t rate it higher. That said, it made enough of an impression that someone that I hadn’t seen or heard from in years recently wrote to me to ask me the name of this game. It’s a memorable game!
But if you’re looking for something that feels Roman, or could be used as a springboard to talk about Rome, this isn’t it. If anything, this game is best used as an example of how thin theme can be in a board game.
Have you played Quo Vadis? What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading!