 So, uh, for a while, I would see and Scott would see Game of Conventions. We talked about this a little bit in previous episodes. Well, when you go to any library at a gaming convention, right, the tabletop library, and there's always these games you see there every fucking time, and you never ever play them. But it's like the game that's been there for years and years and years, and there's sort of like these games sort of clump up to each other. Like they're not the hot new games. You'll see like Fortress America and laying on top of that is like a red dragon in. Oh my God. And a Shea Geek. Yep. And maybe I guess sometimes when you go in there, you find a gem. For example, I found Hive in one of those piles of forgotten games. Yeah. And I'm glad we bought it because now the re-release version is not as And Hive is suddenly popular, huh? Yeah. So one of those games I always saw in that pile, but didn't realize, was a game called Glory to Rome. Now, if nothing else, the tale of this game is a tale of how graphic design actually matters a lot. A fuck ton. But I've noticed a lot of people lately, especially Kickstarter games. Sorry, Luke. Our people are making board games where all they have is graphic design and the game itself. My word. For example, that is almost more disappointing. For example, Viva Java. Haven't reviewed it yet. Got to play it again. But I worry Java is not that bad compared to a lot of the ones I'm seeing. True. But I saw one that was like beautiful graphic design. Roll your dice, move your mice. And it's like, what the fuck? But Glory to Rome at the opposite problem. It is actually a pretty great game. But if you look at this, I mean pause and click on this link and look at this game. This is the kind of game you see and then you just your brain just blocks it out. It's the kind of thing that they sell like on that table next to the counter at the checkout of the game store that never sells even a single copy. Yeah. Like you look at that. You look at the Cheapass game next to it by the Cheapass game instead. Yeah, it's sitting next to three copies. Three Zoom decks. Z-O-N. Oh my God. I remember that. Right. A copy, an old print of Cobalt's Eight My Baby. A Cheapass game. Maybe some ice house. And some ice house pieces. Not anymore though. People are buying those up. And one of those D-20s with a D-20 inside of it. And a D-6 with a D-6 inside of it. You know, every game store has that little spot. Oh, and the dice bag with the flame pattern on it. So the game was ignored by pretty much everyone because it was pretty ugly. I don't even know how those copies got distributed the fact, right? And seeing, like, trying to play it with that old set, like seeing it laid out, it's actually kind of confusing to even play. It's confusing to play even with a new set. Like it's hard to see what's going on. So there was a Kickstarter to just make the same game, but beautiful. And with a few minor exceptions. Like the sewer card? Yeah, the sewer card is beautiful. It's just very bad graphic design. Well, bad information design with the words being split up by the water spilling out of the sewer. There's a few, two different graphic designers we know said the game is beautiful, but it has a few clearly amateurish design mistakes. But it's otherwise beautiful. Much better than the old one. It is the exact same game. Yet it is amazing because you'll actually play it. And it feels good to play. It feels clean. It feels nice. So we're the kind of people. Fused to hell. We're the kind of people who always say, yeah, I don't care what the game looks like. I only care about the gameplay. And that is true to a point. Had I been tricked into playing the old Glory of Rome, I probably would have liked it and would have given it a positive review and continued to play it. But it didn't, it wouldn't have felt nice to play. There is something to be said for aesthetics. For example, playing a Tiggers and Euphrates, I think a lot is added to it by the graphic design and the way the game is put together and the feeling you get. It feels like an ancient game, even though it isn't just because of the way the iconography is. So Glory of Rome, actually kind of a complicated game, but it's interesting because elements in this game are in other games. For example, Glory of Rome is probably the first game most people would know of that has the mechanic of someone takes an action, everyone else either follows or does something else. You might notice that from Race for the Galaxy. Or Puerto Rico. Well, where you have to follow. Kind of. So Puerto Rico is the mechanic of one person chooses an action. Everyone else also gets to do the action. This is a little different. Someone chooses an action and everyone else can either follow and do the same action or think, and then they draw some cards to refill their hand. Yep. It also has the San Juan mechanic of every card is both card and currency. Yep. A lot of games have that. There are no bits in this game except the cards. I think World of Warcraft card game does that also, if I'm not mistaken. It's a common and often well. It's an interesting mechanic, though it can be done poorly. And so does Race for the Galaxy. But cards do a lot of things in this game. Cards are effectively victory points, but indirectly. Cards are actions. Actions can be either played or part of some other part of the game called clientele. Cards are also buildings. And here's what the game gets interesting. One, the card building powers are almost on the dune level. It's like you get you set up this basic summer far greater than others. Well, yes, because some are clearly more expensive and therefore superior. But it's got the dune situation going on. So if we just described the rules of the game, you'd be like, okay, it's a pretty straightforward game. I build buildings and I put some stuff in my vault and I do these basic actions and the game's really straightforward. But then you read the building cards and every card is like break this rule in a way that seems broken. Like, here's a good example. There's one card called the garden. I love the garden. Not knowing any of the, any of how this game works. What the garden says is upon completion, you may take one patron action for each influence you have. Now, keep in mind as soon as you finish the garden, you get three influence for finishing the garden. So therefore you're going to take at least three patron actions, if not more immediately. I tend to build the garden early in the game. I've done it a few times so far. I built it once late in the game and drew 15 fucking patrons. If you have your own patron the whole game, sure. I used it early in the game and it's just five patrons right at the start. I won that game by like 20 points. Yeah. Well, I mean, how did 15 patrons get in the pool? Well, I actually only pulled in I think 12 or 13, but now the pool was empty. Oh yeah, you completely emptied that motherfucker. Exactly. And then I just finished the game with my million actions. Of course. So that card basically lets you do, you know, imagine if you're playing Puerto Rico and, all right, captain nine times. Just do it nine times. No one else gets to and they're all like this. The really cool thing about this game is that it's actually, despite looks really complicated, like you look at how to play it and there's a reason I'm not explaining how to play the game because without visual aids, it's impossible. There's no way I'm going to explain it in a way that you would understand. I can explain the gist, right? Is that everyone has cards in their hand and you draw more by thinking, right? And you have four, basically, there's five different places cards can be. They can be, well, I guess the deck, your hand, I guess there's going to be seven places already. The deck, your hand, right? The shared deck is the deck is shared. The pool, which is this middle of the table area. And then on each person will have four other places which are influence, their clientele, their stockpile and their vault, right? And to score points, you got to get cards to become influenced by building buildings or put them in the vault where they're worth points. Influence are victory points, but the other cool thing is that the amount of influence you have limits how many things can go in your vault. Everything else you are doing is just with the stockpiles and the clientele is a way to get more actions. The stockpile is a way to get more cards out of the pool and into your control, right? And to help you build buildings without anyone else, right? And it's really just how can I build buildings and to get more influence, to get more stuff in the vault using this machine of card playing. Yep. Now the machine gets a little complicated because it's sort of multi-staged in the sense that for trying to think a really good example of this. All right. So your vault, right? You putting stuff in the vault is the captain of this game. Just put stuff in the vault. You just get victory points. Just straight up. Just tons of victory points. But your vault is limited by your influence. You have to build buildings to get more influence to put more stuff in the vault. Yep. To build buildings, you need to take all these other actions so the crank to turn it around in your machine already is pretty circuitous. And no one else is cranking along with you, right? Everyone takes turns choosing what to crank and they're cranking out a sink with you. So how do you capitalize on that? So rather than get into the depth of how to play the game, I want to just review the game and talk about why it's good and maybe what problems it has. Reason number one, why this game is good or at least interesting. It avoids a problem that has bothered me for a long time, but I never had a good way around it. I call this problem, I'm gonna give it a long title. When you have to stop the game of Power Grid, pull out the rules and look up just what the fuck happens in phase three because nobody remembers the details. That happens in so many modern board games. You're playing, you're playing, you're playing. But then there's a game phase change or an end of game or a start of game of, ah, how many bits do we put out in a four player version? Then someone else sits down, ah, five player. All right, we need seven more bits. This game has none of that. There is one piece of setup. Every player gets five cards in their hand. There's a number of sites out. It is just equal to the number of players. That's it. Yep, no remembering there. And you just draw one card for every player in the game and that sets the pool. That's it. There is nothing to remember. The number of players determines every number that matters in the game. So once you know that the game ends, when it ends, immediately. So that's the other piece. End game. This game gets around the situation of, I almost said, do we go around another round and then it's over? Oh, so I do. We do. Everyone gets a number of turns and then it's over the last card. Does the game end immediately? I built the last building. Do we finish the round up? So I drew. I can't finish the auction phase, but there's none of that. This game fucking ends. I say fucking ends. It ends in a catastrophic fashion. The game, if you draw the last card from the deck at any point, the game immediately ends. Immediately is an interrupt, the likes of which I've never seen in games before. So there's basically no question. Well, I mean, Netrunner has the same game ending interrupt, right? True. You get seven points. Jinteki doesn't do a damage for that score. You win. You got seven points. Game over. Boom. Right. Yeah. Scott plays the legionary action. Instead of following, I think, I draw the last cards. No more actions happen. We just score. Yep. So another way the game ends is if you build the last sort of in town sites, buildings go on top of sites. This is cool mechanic there. So the rulebook even points out if this occurs, there is no possible way to finish that building. Of course not. Because there are no more actions take the game ends immediately. There is a building, a card. There are multiple of them in the deck. The catacombs. If anyone builds it, the game immediately ends. And there's another card, the Forum Romantum. The best card that I've tried twice and got close once. So the Forum Romantum. If you will know, there's one other end game condition before I talk about the Forum Romantum. It is in the book. If all players agree unanimously to surrender the game to a single player for any reason at any time. That's in there for whatever reason. Well, I guess someone could just start running away with it and you don't want to finish it. Yeah. So the Forum Romantum, if anyone builds this, and again, there are multiple of them. And all of these conditions are true simultaneously. It is a completed building in front of them. They have one of every type of card in their clientele. They have one of every type of card in their stockpile. Very hard. They immediately win. The game immediately ends. Scores do not matter. Reason number three, why this game is actually pretty cool. The game is set such that the number of things you need to finish a building is equal to the victory points that thing is worth. And the colors all line up. And if you play the game, you'll see what I mean. Everything lines up. Every number makes sense. You don't have to think about anything except how you're trying to win. Like all the numbers of nouns of things to put in things is just so intuitive. And the last reason why the game is great beyond all that is that scoring is dead simple. The game ends and just up. That's the score. Scoring takes basically zero time. You count your influence. You count the number of points in your vault. You hand out these bonus cards to whoever earns them. And then you add three points to whoever got a bonus card per bonus card. Now, in terms of game play and winning the game, I've won almost every game of it I've played since we played it with our friend Pete and his associated crew who are playing it wrong the entire time they own the game. Yep. I read the rules once and realized they were playing wrong. I feel bad for them. But that's how the cookie crumbles. But I win a lot and I got the opportunity at Nerd NYC last week to teach the game to a bunch of people who never played it before. Never even heard of it. I wasn't there as playing that runner and play it with them multiple times. And it was interesting because it was a smart group who took their turn. And the first round I ran away with the game. Like it was just pointless. I just won. Like I didn't even have to do anything. The second game was super close and I didn't win. So after that initial learning phase, people who are smart pick the game up right away. But the end game strategies I think are very complex. This game, if I had to say, probably breaks down like a dominion in the sense that based on the set of cards that people have in their initial hands and the flow of cards into their hands, you're trying to come up with the most efficient machine simultaneously trying to deny and hurt other people's strategies based on the machines they're making. Yeah. One thing that I only thought of doing since I've last played the game is I realized the true power the games I've played in the Legionary was not used much. Right. And I was trying to think, well, why wasn't the Legionary used very much? Right. You know, it's like people, you know, should, you know, everyone just just labor and craft and architect. See, I don't. I lesion a lot. Legionary forgot. Okay. It's because people want to build their buildings. Right. So they keep choosing architect, labor and craftsman. And I realized, no, what you have to do is if the people around you are doing better than you and you're getting behind, right? If you try to build the buildings with those actions, you're also going to build you're helping them build buildings. Legionary is the it's a it's it's a catch-up action that people don't realize a catch-up action. What you do with Legionary is you don't think and here's the other mistake. People took Legionary and they looked at the buildings they were trying to build and asked for that reason. No, no, no, no. You look at the buildings other people are trying to look at the buildings. The other people are building you asked for that resource to come on over to fuck them from building their buildings. That's what the Legionary is about. Legionary basically is a cool mechanic. It's not obvious to do that. This is another reason why I like this game. Anytime games present rituals or things you're supposed to say or do in the course of the game that makes sense, I generally like it. And Glory to Rome, you might people who play the game will always be like Rome demands, you know, blow jobs because if you play Legionary, you go around clockwise, everyone to Legion takes their hand, puts one card from their hand, face up. You got to have the thing in your hand to demand it. Yeah, you got to say like this, you people who don't speak Roman, put it down and say these Rome. See what this is. I don't and any player who does not have that thing in their hand simply is instructed to say Glory to Rome. Yep. I have nothing to offer Rome but glory. Yeah. Rome comes over and points at a pile of rocks and says, give me those. And Rome demands a rubble and they say, there's no rubble around here. Glory to Rome. And I usually we just say, Rome, go fuck itself. Fuck you, Rome. The game encourages the sort of, you know, renaming things. I noticed I started, I just said to Blutom every time we reset the pool and not only did no one blink at that, but they all understood exactly what I meant because they'd all played Puerto Rico before. Yep. There's one problem with this game. This is a few. Well, here's the biggest problem. Remember way back and we told everyone how Sanctuary and Eagle are these great manga, but all you can't buy them. You can't buy Glory to Rome. That is a problem. Glory to Rome. This new re-released awesome version was a Kickstarter. And as far as I can tell, there's basically no way to get it unless you Kickstarter did. I bought it at a significant premium from someone who got it in the Kickstarter on Amazon. Second hand, you might be able to get one in eBay or who know, right? Something like, check the eBay, see if there's any on there. I'm checking the Amazon. You also might be able to buy the original version with the shitty graphic design. You may be also there are three available right now on Amazon for 60s, $75 each plus significant shipping. Yeah. So I guess it's possible to get it if you have dollars. No. One of these says plastic shell version. No. Don't want that one. You want the black one. That's right. I'll link to a picture of the good and bad one so you can't mess this up. You want to get the one that looks like it's a Nazi game. That's the one that's the good one, sadly. Up in a Roman game. The black box looks like it's got that friggin Nazi eagle on the front. It's not a Nazi eagle. It's a Roman eagle. Was originally with the Nazis stole it from the Romans. So anyway, and it doesn't help that he's got a red flag under him. So other problems with the game are that it's really fun, but the actual directional heuristics in this game from playing competently to playing well against experts are incredibly obtuse. I think I've got to handle on a few of them, but I haven't played enough to be sure. And I'm not sure how deep that rabbit hole goes, but I've noticed that counting cards doesn't matter that much because the deck is huge, but paying attention to which cards have come out or not is a big deal. If you know that all three catacombs were used as materials early on, then you don't have to worry about the game ending early. Because there are ways to set up a combo, lay down a catacomb and finish it in all one go. I mean, think about this, right? You can build a stone building early. Catacombs only cost three to right. I built gardens early. So why not a catacomb? I've seen people win the game with five victory points. They just build the catacombs right away. So if you do an early merchant before anyone else, and then you do a catacombs, the catacombs is three points and the merchant puts you ahead of everyone else probably by at least three points. But if you see someone start to build the catacombs just immediately and you merchant, you're basically preventing them from finishing the catacomb because they'll you lose because you might have more. You will have more points probably. Maybe depends how much you merchant doesn't matter because even if you merchant a wood with that three point bonus for having the most wood, you'll have four extra victory points instead of his three extra. Well, ideally, you would remember what he merchant did and merchant two of whatever he's trying to blitz catacomb. He hasn't merchant a dick because he's trying to just finish as quick as possible. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Tough call. It's a pretty fun game. I'm surprised at how quick it is to teach and how quick it is to play. Like I'm actually really surprised concerning how complex it feels like it's a you think you look at it and like this is going to be pretty confusing to a lot of people, but people sort of get it actually relatively quickly to what you would expect. So Scott, there's the so the play sheets are really well designed, but what Scott uses, there's two sides. One side just summarizes what he's action does and one side shows this really complex overengineered diagram of the flows of cards. The car, the chart is way better. Yes, one in five people think that Scott's side is better. Every time I run this game for people, it's always five players. One dude puts that side face up and everyone else puts the other side face up. Chart side is way better because it's because the cards are in different places in that side. How many games of Glory to Rome have you won? Shows you arrows from which place they go to. What does that do with which side is better? So I wonder if that side is seeding your brain in a poor way. Maybe. The real problem with Glory to Rome is that the there is a large random card element, right? Like you could draw some awesome buildings at the beginning and also the cards required to build them and to play them. It could just happen. And then you're going to get off to a great start no matter what anyone gets around that by there aren't really direct paths to building buildings and finishing them from your hand. There's one action that does that. The craftsman, you had to be able to effectively crank your machine. You got to be building from multiple sources. So you need to get materials not just from your handout but into your stockpile and then out. Yeah. Because someone else might pick architect and then what do you do? Think. And the pool is only refilled by the actions you're taking. So there are actually really complex directional heuristics around do I lead merchant because I want to do the merchant action or do I lead merchant with two other cards to be a wild card because I don't want any stone to go into the pool. Yeah. The more you know cars. Yeah, yeah. The moral of this review is if you can get ahold of this game and you're a gamer. It's a gamer's game. This is a great game to whip out with other tabletop gamers because one, they probably take that long. It doesn't take up a lot of space. Yeah. One, you can just play it quickly. Actually, it takes up more space than you'd expect. I mean, it's space in the box. Oh, yeah. But two, most people are not going to have this game. So there's a lot of novelty and you can teach it quickly. And if you whip this out at a boardgamer party, it's going to play it all night because people just don't have access to it right now. And people like saying Glory to Rome. Yeah. The game's just really fun. And I see if you're a boardgamer of any stripe, this is just one of those games you should own. Yeah. Straight up. I unqualifiedly say that you should own it even though I'm pretty sure it's going to break down far more rapidly than, say, Puerto Rico under continued play of my experts. This is not like some all-time great game but it is a game that you should play. This has been Geek Nights with Rim and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Kat Lee for Web Design, and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news, and more. Remember, Geek Nights is not one but four different shows. SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.