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Re: [Board/Tactical Game]: Struggle for Rome, reviewed by ShannonA (5/3)
I'm a little surprised by your comparatively low rating for substance on this one. While I agree that trading has been de-emphasized, it's been replaced with a lot of other activity and with many interesting tactical trade-offs: in the early game you have to balance the need to acquire plunder with the desire to be on good production numbers; if you plunder too aggressively, you find yourself without production, and short critical resources. But if you don't spend enough time plundering, you may be beat to easy pickings for plunder and the prime settlement areas by more aggressive tribes.
Also, there is a big decision point on how long to continue plundering before settling down. Plundering can be lucrative, gets you those Scourge or Rome VPs if you keep at it, and staying mobile allows you to move your tribes to resources you need at the time. Once you're settled down, your stuck with the resource hexes you've got until you can further expand (which can be expensive if you settle in productive areas, which are typically well-defended), and have fewer options - but if you wait too long the best spots will be taken and you may find yourself boxed in and without good options. And the dynamics of all these choices change as your tribes take losses (or not) while plundering. There is a lot of subtlety to all this; the game asks you a lot of interesting questions for which there are no easy answers, much moreso I felt than is typical in a German-type game.
I also liked that this has a very fast endgame. Once players have settled down, the end of the game isn't far off. An occasional complaint about Settlers is that the last quarter of the game or so can see two players who are ahead fighting to see who will win, while the also-rans watch. While this part of the game is somewhat inevitable in a game like Settlers, in Struggle for Rome it seems to have been greatly compressed.
I really liked Struggle for Rome, and found it easily more entertaining than most of the other Settlers spin-offs (like Stone Age, Nurnburg, or the two "historical" scenario boxes). It's a little longer than basic Settlers, but the slight flattening of the resource production curve, the smaller number of resources required to do individual activities generally, the fact that you can pass your turn to get needed resources, the fact that you can always be active in the game (moving your tribes around) even if you aren't producing anything, and the more incremental, pressurized, and more highly tactical nature of the play meant it held my interest more strongly.
Like Settlers of the Stone Age, I also felt it did a really good job of capturing the theme - the wandering of the tribes looking for plunder and good lands, and the need to balance resources between the military and development.
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Linear Mode
