Board Game Review:

Catan Histories: Struggle for Rome
# of Players: 3 – 4
Mechanics: Trading Area Movement

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Game Review:
This is one of the “Catan” flavored games where you have resources on different numbers that get rolled by 2 dice, and then you use those resources to do things. Then the rest is where this game differs from the other Catan Games a bit. Struggle for Rome is closer to Stone Age of Catan in theory than the normal Catan game. Where in Stone Age of Catan you could discovery abilities(that could be combined into victory points) by being able to move around the board after researching different technologies, in Struggle for Rome, you Plunder different cities with the 2 tribes you start the game with, and then use them to get riches or other advantages that can help get victory points.

Play in Struggle for Rome comes in two phases, The Plunder phase and the conquest Phase. The first phase is where the map of Europe (the playing board) has different color plunder markers on each city with 2 to 5 guard towers guarding them. Before a tribe can conquer a city it must first plunder 3 different color cities. Each city can only be plundered once, and each tribe type can plunder 2 of each color type, making it very hard for some tribes that are down on their luck to recover, and get the 3 colors needed to start the conquest part of the game.  Before you can Plunder (or conquer a city) you must first move to the crossroad beside a city. You can move as far as you want in one turn as long as you have the grain and/or cash to support it. Thus you can move the entire length of the board if needed with the right resources. To Plunder a city, the tribe must be at a cross road beside the city, and have more troops in the army than the number of towers on the city. When plundering you always get cash, and you may loss troops, and gain extra plunder. For each tribe that can plunder one of each of the different (5 in total) colors, they get a 2 victory point card. Once a tribe gets 3 different color plunders they may choice to conquer a city (and it is now theirs for the game). This moves the tribe into the Conquest phase and it can no longer do any part of the plundering (normally not that big a deal as most of the cities have already been plundered by then. Each player starts with two tribes, so you can settle down with one tribe while the other goes around to plunder, before it too also settles done into conquest mode.  While in conquest mode, you can conquer any un-owned city that is one arrow away from a city you own if you have a supply wagon to move into the city and the troops greater than the number of guard towers. To show you own a city you move a man from the army and the supply wagon into the city thus forcing the need to build more troops and more supply wagons to keep conquering.

There is three special victory point card each worth 2 victory points:
Diplomat (for the person that plays 3 of this card and then who every has the most)
A few for each tribe that plunders all 5 types of cities
One for any player that can grow each tribe to owning 4 cities (thus also ending the game as that is 10 victory points).

The Turn play is done by first getting resources (roll 4 times rerolling duplicate roles), then buying supplies (everyone does this), moving the horse tribe (everyone) and then moving the foot tribe (everyone).

The game is played until some gets 10 victory points, and ties are picked via cash.

Thoughts:

This is not a bad version of the Catan game, and I like how you roll 4 times per resource per turn, as that helps remove some of the luck in the game. I think the 4 player version plays a lot better then the 3 player version, but the 3 player version can hold it’s own. I also enjoy how the crossroad you pick to plunder also selects the numbers and resources you now get on your turn (making picking where to move per turn so critical). I have enjoyed playing this game many times and will play it many more, but I do not think of it as a strong strategy game as luck will rule over skill most of the time.

The parts of this game is that I do not like are: once you get unlucky and fall behind there is no way to catch up (if playing with semi good players). The first lucky people get all the 2 and 3 tower cities forcing the behind player to build even more troops up to get the same number of plunder tokens to start the conquest phase. Very rarly is the loss of troops while plundering not made up via the free resources you get from the plunder itself While there is a “robber’ called a centurion, he does not really hurt the players in the lead, but he can destroy the players that are behind as they have not expanding their empire very far and have less numbers they get resources on. The other part of the game that is harsh, is there is very little you can do to try to stop the player in the lead. The Centurion is but a small pin prick in their side sometimes. So while they have tried to lessen the effect of luck in this game, the game mechanics have made it such that there is almost no way to stop people from winning.

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I look forward to seeing what else might come from the Catan History line of games.