Roman Emperors – Turn Summary
Play an Event
Group playing often means that most players become “spectators” most of the time, having to wait for another player to finish his turn. This game features some out-of-turn actions to reduce the downtime for group playing. The first of those is playing a Parcae (The Fates) event card against the current Emperor, just to make things “a little more challenging” for him.
The addition of events, as usual, adds replayability to the game, for they present different circumstances every time you play. Another point of adding events to a game is to increase randomness, but this is not the approach I took in Roman Emperors. In fact, the events are onset by non-active players, including an extra stage of strategic thinking and even quick negotiation among them.
The later version of the events is meant to replicate (counter) the gods powers, but to a lesser extent. This may drive the Emperor to resort to a certain god in order to counter the event effect. For example, if you are facing a Catiline Conspiracy (extra negative votes in the Senate) you may have to worship Venus yourself (for extra positive votes). Same with the Cilician Pirates sinking your fleets, maybe Neptunus can be of help there. Sometimes, countering the effect of the events is the only way to build a certain wonder (playing Minerva, goddess of wisdom, against the Heretics event), or else you won’t be able to obtain de required resources for it.
I like how this works overall, especially for experienced players, since it’ll be difficult to have a set strategy to use in every game. Fate (not randomness) will be an important factor in the availability of your choices, and you’ll have to deal with it when the time comes.
I’m attaching the events cards in the images library to give an idea of those. Thanks for all the feedback received so far. The sixth playtest version is almost done.
More to come. Keep thinking!
