Age of Rome

• Designers: Vangelis Efthimiou, Antonios Yannopoulos
• Publisher: Teetotum
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 60+ minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Become the new emperor of Rome in this strategic worker placement game set in 44 BC, Rome. Each turn, you will build structures in different provinces assigned to you through a rotating board. Balance war, politics, trade, and religion while scheming against your rival players.

In Age of Rome, each player is assigned a hero with their respective player board, then are given secret quests and starting resources of Denarii, Followers, Scheme tokens, Legions, and Votes. Then they spend nine rounds competing on a rotating board to earn Glory points.

Players can earn Glory points in various ways. They may build structures, place Followers to vote and win a majority, send Legions to conquer regions, trade or collect items, or even build a Pantheon. Completed secret quests also earn Glory points. After the 9th round, the game ends. The final score is determined and the player with the most Glory points is declared the new Emperor of Rome.

To setup the game, the board goes on the table, and the rotating province board is set up so that each player is in front of a quadrant.  The population disk for each quadrant is set to 1.  The clear building tiles and Pantheon pieces are set up in a supply.  Players choose a board, and each has a unique setup for legions, votes, feuds, glory, money, etc. Players are each dealt 3 quest cards, two of which are kept and one is discarded.  

Every player starts with at least 1 glory point.  The track, in fact, starts at 1, and it is impossible to go lower. You cannot do things which would lower you below 1, and things can’t happen to you that would cause you to go below 1.  There are also milestones at 5, 12, 21, and 30 – when players cross these, they gain additional followers.  The first milestone at 5 is fixed, but all the others will move one space closer each time a player crosses it.  So, the first person to hit 12 crosses the milestone, but the next player will only need 11 to reach the same milestone.

The game is played over 9 rounds, each with 4 phases: Scheme, Building, Action, Income.

A] Scheme Phase – first reveal an event card and reward the bonus on it to whoever earns it.  The event card will also tell you which direction the play goes this turn as well as how the board will rotate at the end of the round.  Next, players can activate any previously placed schemes, in any opponent province.  You must move a Feud token from your board to theirs; if this cannot happen, the Scheme cannot be activated.  If activated, take one of the three actions on the left of your board against the other player.  All players share the same two top actions and each has a unique third scheme action.

B] Building Phase – Each player can build buildings in the sector in front of them; always building the next level of the type designated for the space; the cost and VP reward printed on the board/tile already there.  Each building increases the population by one, move the dial accordingly. You will see both the current population as well as the potential glory malus if you choose double income in a later phase.  There are three levels of buildings, and the first player to build a Level 3 building of each of the 5 types earns a medal. Each medal gives the holder a specific unique special power.

C] Action Phase – Place one follower on a turn; they can go on Building tiles or Scheme spaces in their region or on the Colosseum.  After you place the follower, take the benefit of that location.  If placing on a building, there is a limit to the number of followers equal to the level of the tile.  You may have a bonus marker (in your feud row on your board) matching the type of action; if you choose to use it, you will get +1 action of whatever you’re doing…

• Military Buildings – move a legion from your board to a Battle Region or move from one Battle Region to another.  At the end of the game, points awarded based on rank in each area; except that tied players do not score points.
• Politics – place a vote on the top of the Vote Column; there can only be 5 votes at a time, if you place the 6th, remove the bottom-most vote and give back to its owner. If you place and have 3 in a row on top, score 2VP bonus.
• Trade – draw a trade card. You can always sell them for 1 denarius. You can play a set of three cards of the same type to score end game points; max 3 sets in the game.  You can also play a single card to activate the specific effect on the card (and then discard the card).  Each card tells you when you can play it. There is a limit of 5 Trade cards in your hand. If you started with an Anchor card, this is permanently in your hand and only acts to reduce your effective hand size; you must keep it until you get a game effect that allows you to discard it.

• Religion – Build a piece of your Pantheon. There are 3 rectangular base pieces and then 4 polygonal Top pieces.  Some pieces are in your personal supply, others come from general supply with bonuses given for being earlier to require those from the common supply
• Farming – Earn money based on the current game round, see the round tracker on the board to see how much money (1 to 5 denarii) you earn.
• Colosseum – immediately gain 1 Glory Point for playing here; there is no limit to the number of followers here
• Scheme action site – play a scheme marker facedown in your region on an empty scheme space and place a follower on top of it.  On a later turn, you can flip this marker over and enact a scheme

At the end of the phase, when all players have played all their followers, the Followers, bonus markers and used Scheme tokens are returned to the player boards.

D] Income Phase – Take income from your current region.  You can take 1 Denarius per population without penalty. You can choose to take double income, but if so, you must reduce your Glory marker by the penalty shown on the population disk.  If you reduce your score past a milestone marker, you do NOT lose your extra follower. After all players have taken income, the board is rotated as directed by the Event card revealed at the start of the turn.  Advance the round marker.

After the 9th round, the game is scored. Players add up points in the following areas:

• Glory points scored during the game as shown on the track
• Military – check the 3 regions on the board and make sure they are defeated (more total troops than the number in the shield); if so, award points based on rank for number of troops, remembering that tied players keep their position but score no points for it
• Politics – score 1/2/5/3/6 for being top/2nd/3rd/4th/bottom vote at the end of the game
• Trade – Score cards for trios of cards of same type (3 to 6 points)
• Religion – points per piece in your Pantheon, 1 to 4 points per piece
• Quests – score VP if you meet the criteria on your quest cards that you were dealt in setup
• Denarii – 1 VP per 4 denarii at the game end (1 for 3 if you have the religion medal).  Discard those denarii traded in.

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with most money left over.

My thoughts on the game

Age of Rome is a fairly complex game with many different things to take into account.  It’s not quite a point salad game, but there are plenty of different ways to score points, and you’re not going to be able to do everything – but figuring out how to maximize your efforts is a big challenge here.

The game starts out slow with only a single follower – meaning that you only get a single action in the Action phase.  It doesn’t take much to unlock the next one (fixed at 5 VP), and the game will ramp up.  There is a nice catch up mechanism in the way that the other three milestones drop a point each time someone claims them; there is still definitely an advantage to getting there first, but it feels like it helps prevent a runaway winner/loser.  

Some of the quest cards

The game also has targeted attacks in the Schemes, but the Bonus/Feud area on the player board prevents someone from being constantly attacked – if your Feud spots are all full, you can’t be attacked further – though of course, this also means that you don’t have any bonus action tokens available to you…  In the end, the actual damage done by any one Scheme action is not overly great; so it’s kind of fun to be able to poke someone but it’s friendly enough in the sense that any one action is not going to derail their plans.  Also, you don’t necessarily get to pick who gets attacked – it just is whoever happens to play in the quadrant where you earlier left a trap…

I like the way that the different leaders have slightly different starting positions and components, and this in turn gives you some mild direction in how you might want to play, but it by no means railroads you into a strategy.   In one game, I got Junia Secunda – who has the fewest number of legions; but I still managed to score points via two second places in the Military scoring. That being said, it is certainly an advisable thing to lean into the areas of the game that your leader has strengths in.

Man, there are a lot of moving pieces to this game (pun intended).  The game is obviously driven by the rotating board, and there are a lot of interesting effects that happen as the board rotates around.  As you play the game, you should always be cognizant of where the board is going to move so that you can also try to look ahead at what you’re going to get to deal with in the next round (or who might be the first recipient of the scheme you place this turn).

Knowing where the board is going to rotate is a big deal.  You might do things (schemes, buildings) that will affect the next player’s turn.  You should also look ahead at the quadrant that you are going to receive and try to plan ahead if possible.  Paying attention to the starting player is also possibly important – this may help you in setting up or thwarting voting majorities, or figuring out who might be able to get a building bonus

After my first few games, I must say that this is a hard one to predict the winner because everything scores, and I’m not willing to spend the time and effort to track what points someone might score.  Also, the military situation is quite fluid as troops can be placed and moved rapidly in the last few rounds.  Also, as the quests remain hidden, you’re never quite sure what someone will score for these at the end!

Rules – this is another Spiel 2023 game with a thick rulebook – this one clocks in at 32 pages.  But no worries – there are a LOT of illustration, examples and flavor text in this one.  Heck, the actual setup doesn’t even start until page 8, so really, it’s just a 24 page book, right?  In almost every area of the rules, there are numbered icons showing where the rules each have their illustrated example.  It might actually be over-exampled (is that even a word?!), but honestly, I’d rather have too many examples than the opposite.

Components – I do like the art direction of this game; the board is pleasing, and I’m a big fan of the rotating board.  The clear building tiles are nice, and you do get a sense of the region building up as you place successive building tiles on top of each other.  The rules are fairly complex, but the double sided player aid does a good job of summarizing the turn flow as well as showing the scoring and all of the other little things you want to remember.

Most things in the game work well, but it still feels like it could use a bit more polish.  In our games, it feels like players tend to avoid building the Pantheon pieces as destroying them is so easy with the Scheme actions.  Sure, with some careful planning, you can build the full bottom level to keep it safe – but it’s a lot of work to get there.  Also, some of the Event cards seem a bit skewed… we found one in our most recent game that literally skipped a round, so we only played 8 rounds instead of 9.  I mean, sure it affected everyone equally, but it seemed a bit extreme and made that game end more abruptly than anyone would have wanted..  

Thematically, the artwork feels Roman, but the game itself is just a Eurogame.  For instance, you place “armies” in the three territories, but there’s no fighting. It’s just an area majority game.  Additionally, you “vote” in the central column, but you’re not voting to decide anything – it’s also just an area majority game – just in a different part of the board than the “armies”.  

The game can run a bit long, and I’ve yet to play a game that hasn’t been less than 90 minutes.  For me, it’s a bit long – but the box says 60+; and if you could get this game done in an hour, that would be great.  Age of Rome is an interesting debut from a new company, and I liked what I saw of their upcoming project (likely coming to KS next year), so I’ll be watching Teetotum to see what comes from them in the future.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson (one play): I’m a little more positive than Dale on this one… but his assertion that this could use a little more polish is dead on. With a low AP group, it’ll come in at 75-90 minutes… and there are some clever bits to it. 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

I love it!

I like it. Mark J

Neutral. Dale

Not for me…