 time of crisis, the Roman Empire and turmoil. Right. So if they bring, right. So our friends bring this, uh, Grog Nard looking war game out. Well, the box looks like a Grog Nard war game. It's a GMT game. Those, that's the company that makes the Grog Nard war game. Yup. Right. So you're looking at this thing and you're like, eh, this is not, you know, what's this going to be like, right? But if I told you it is a deck builder. Yup. Like Dominion, but it's a deck builder where every turn at the end of your turn, you pick up your entire draw deck, choose the five cards you want to draw and put the rest of your draw deck back down. Right. So that's, that's a real work of genius, right? Think about Dominion, right? So Dominion is the, like the first real deck builder, right? And it's sort of set the stage for all other deck builders and all they all follow the basic template and nothing has been better than Dominion. You have a deck, right? It starts out with just a few cards. You draw some, you play them all, you put them on the discard, acquire more cards that also go in the discard and then you draw more, but you draw, you shuffle and draw randomly. It's like, well, what if you could just stack the deck and draw whatever five you wanted? But everyone's stacking the deck. Well, it's not that everyone's stacking the deck. It's that, okay, you're stacking the deck. So for people out there who obviously are more likely to have played Dominion, imagine you're stacking the deck and Dominion turn one fucking five coppers. Yeah. Turn two. Two coppers in three states. It's like, if you blow your load on a big turn, you're aft until that discard reshuffle. What can you do? It's like, okay. And then you shuffle again. See, then you, all right, you got mine. Now I do it again. All right. I'm going to do four coppers and the village that I bought or whatever, you know, whatever card it was that I bought, right? It's like, but then you get to the end of your deck and your discard is full of all the good cards that you stacked to make beautiful hands. And I mean, Dominion is a little different because you can do the infinite draws. So stacking your deck would be ultra powerful. But there's another thing you can't do that in this. So there's nothing that lets you draw cards during your turn. So stacking your deck in this game, it removes randomness, which is actually good to make some more game of skill. And it doesn't really help you cheat. It's not OP because if you give yourself a strong turn, then you, you start to go through the whole deck before you can access the discard pile. You're going to have to have a weak turn and it's about choosing. All right, maybe I'll take the weak turn on purpose. Maybe I'll try to mix the turns together. Right. The other thing is that this text on some of the cards that does stuff, right? But really what the cards are three currencies. They're three different currencies influence with the people influence with the Senate influence with the military. And those three currencies are used to buy actions, which are the real act. You have like a menu of actions that all cost action points. Some of them cause yellow, some cost red and some cause blue. And most of them cost at least two. I don't think many of the actions cost one. So it's like, if you're, you know, as you stack your deck, okay, I want to do this blue action. So I'll take two blue cards in my hand. I want to do that red action. Ooh, I bought a strong red card earlier in the game that is on its own worth two red. I'll put that in my hand. And I want to do this yellow action. Well, that costs three yellow. Well, I can't put six cards. So you're sort of like playing your next turn. Right. You're picking the action points you need in currency from your deck of what's left of it anyway. But and here's where the game gets fascinating. Like this is what makes this game good and why like we played it multiple times that it packs when we could have played other new games. Like it's rare. We want to play the same game. We played it. We played it one and a half times. We pretty much got to the end of that one game. It was over. The writing was on the wall and I would play it a third time. Like I would play this again. I like this game a lot. But the deck building in this game is actually a rondo builder that just happens to use cards. You're basically just building a rondo. Yep. And you're filling it in in front of you. You're basically and the brilliance of this is that it basically makes the game have a very real world war game like abstraction because the games at essence really kind of war game. Basically I make my plan at the end of my turn. So I look at the board. I think about the things I want to do. I could make a really complex plan where I have the exact number of points from my hand for the next turn to do something specific and powerful. But that might not work out if someone attacks me that I didn't expect barbarians invade the board state changes in a radical way and I have to react to this terrifying new world. So I might choose instead a more safe or neutral hand to be able to be reactive. So you sort of you plan and you invest in a path but then you have to react to the world when your turn comes about because if you've invested in a military in the real world and then some shit goes down somewhere it's not like you can just teleport those soldiers somewhere different. Yeah. Also you know like we said that the cards are our currency points for different to buying different actions that are the actual doings. Yep. Right. So you start the game with I think three three and three three blue three red three yellow pretty much takes at least two to do a meaningful action you know. So you can't really do like all three different kinds of actions in one. You're going to have like a red military kind of turn or you know a people kind of turn. So you got a debate of like how are you going to focus what kind of things do you want to do. Right. You what you can't balance it out. You can't be like I'm going to do a little bit of everything every turn because your hand is not big enough and you also can't be like I'm going to go all military this game. It's like OK you go all military and turn one and turn two. You can put you have one red card left you can put in your hand which does nothing. You can't you have to do all three things and any given turn will almost definitely be not hitting on all three notes. It'll be your each turn will be focusing on one and a half of the areas of the game and ignoring one area of the game pretty much completely. Like well I did my military this turn I'm not doing any next turn. I did a little bit of people this turn I can do a little bit of people next turn but not too much on either turn and only in the latest latest late game when you have super strong cards that you've acquired from winning already basically you can do a whole bunch of things in one turn but then your next turn will still be crappy because you just spent all your huge cards in the first turn. So kind of an aside but I saw this picture I want to lose this train of thought. My main complaint with the game is that it has some like UX and mechanical problems. Well yeah because it's made it looks like a Grog Nard war game. So all the UX and graphic design of it is Grog Nard. He like to remember to know your purchasing power and everything they got to look at things like you have to confirm numbers several times just to make sure you're doing things right. Yeah. And the first thing I said after I played the game once was if you just made a simple player aid this game would actually go a lot faster. Like I can envision a very I think I mean you could just take the same as that game and re theme it. No the theme is perfect. I don't want a different you like the theme. But the point is if you just made it look like a euro right or like a you know root style you could totally pass this off to just everyone and it would be like a super popular game. But the board is fine. The only the UX board is OK. The board is fine. It's OK. I mean you're just you never actually looked at where barbarians could go with your problem. No I mean I looked at it but the point is it's just it's not you know it's not like a beautiful board right. You could give this game just a graphical only makeover and it could be like one of the most popular but all you don't even need to change the board. You just need to make a handful of player aids that sit next to the board. I mean that would tokens on that would help significantly. But I'm saying if you just made this not look like a Roman thing. But I don't know the problem is the UX not the UI. I mean I'm just saying to sell it. No one's going to buy the Roman thing. I'll buy the Roman thing. The mechanics of this game are a hundred percent. But I'm looking at the player aid for the eye for because you can like have an AI in the game and it's pretty close to what I would have made as a player aid right for the game itself. I'm saying the game is you know it's the Romani parts of it are parts that rim likes but they're not parts of you know the theme is not the theme is pretty even the core mechanics are pretty tied to the theme. That's the other things. They are very tied to the theme. Yes but those made that makes for a very natural heuristics that make the game objectively better. For example there's Italy in the middle and all the other provinces. It's a Roman crisis game. You're putting your governors out in places. You can make it a fantasy theme and it would be fine. But here's the deal. One of the cool mechanics. So one of the things you're tracking is you get points every round based on like how much control your dudes have in all the different regions and like how much you've invested into them like having buildings and things. But you also track how many turns you had you were the emperor. Yep. Meaning you control. That's really the number one way to get point. That is super neat. It's almost like a king of the hill game that's happening in the middle of the rest of this game. Right. But the thing is right unlike real king of the hill right which as you know the same sort of problems as last hitting in mobile king of the hill in this game just gets you points but also makes you vulnerable is it's not about you know king of the hill type rules often get wrong is that whoever's on the hill at the end wins and that can be good but usually it's mad like try to do better. It was really flag for the most number of seconds. Right. It's like you'll play really really really well and dominate the whole game. And then at the very end you finally run in a steam. Someone pushes you off and they win the winner and that feels like bullshit because you dominated all that time and that seems like it was much more difficult and much more worthy of being called the winner. Right. So this game it's like you're getting points for the number of turns you were on top. It doesn't matter if you're there at the end. Right. It just matters who is there the longest. Right. The longer you're there the better if you got up fall down and get up again and you're up there twice. That's great. That's just as being good as being up there twice as long. And even if you say you know dump on the last turn and have a sad ending. Yeah. You know because Rome Rome. Yeah. You will still be declared the victor. I get into a really precarious situation but then like everyone else got into some bullshit and I ended up in Italy but really weak. But everyone else was so stuck dealing with their own crap that I kind of just hung out as emperor for a few turns. Like I just held on because everyone really wanted to unseat me but no one was willing to spend their whole turn doing it because they had other like much more important things to deal with. Well also mechanically speaking you know there are many games out there that have a variety of victory conditions to choose from or if they don't have different victory conditions they have different ways to get victory points. You could go say kind of a mar you could get bread or you could go book. Right. In this game you could go and as a way to get victory points try to be the emperor the longest. That will totally help you get a lot of victory points. You can also be popular in the districts that you control. Yep. You can or fight barbarians. Right. You could just be popular in a few places or somewhat popular in a lot of places like yeah. OK. Rim you're the emperor the whole damn game but I'm super popular everywhere else. Yeah. And you're just the puppet emperor. All right. Come on. No. Right. Well yeah. You guys are all popular and whatever. I went around destroying all the barbarians and all of these different ways to get points are equally strong. I can't say that like one of them is just better than the others. Yep. Right. It's like yeah you can win in any of those ways. And one you kind of got to balance how you're approaching the game to you have to react to what the other players are doing. Yep. And three the game is more like a war game in that there's a lot of random bullshit that happens. Well the barbarian fountains are random. Well yeah the barbarian fountains are random the event cards are random like shit just goes wrong all the time. Yep. Zenobia came up like right away and it was like messing with Italy in both our games just randomly. But that's fun because that uncertainty is what makes this more like a war game. Well without it more naturalistic heuristics. Well because of this deck stacking. Right. There is no other source of randomness besides the barbarians and the event deck. Therefore without those you would just solve this game like this is the optimal play. Yeah. Try to start in these places. Stack your deck these this way by these cards or disorder best it would end up turning into Honda's Toytonica where the game is purely reacting to what other players are doing in a cycle. Right. Now the barbaric the randomness could affect one player more than others. But that's war games. Sometimes it's like sometimes like I forgot to get overrun early and that sucks if you were there in aggregate. It goes after everyone equally. Yeah. So even though the barbarians happen to overrun rim this game. Right. It's like I still had to prepare just as much for barbarian invasion because it could happen in any moment. Yep. Or I take a risk and I like don't put any armies in Africa because I got a plan. And then barbarians happen there. It's like well oops. But maybe they don't or maybe I got federati and I'm going. Yeah. But that's a gamble still. It is a gamble and it's a gamble for everyone equally even though you know the tide might splash upon one player and not another. Everyone still had to pay the price of gambling. You know one way or the other or play it safe. And I'm not going to explain all the mechanics. Like I'm not going to teach you this game. That would be the core mechanic of the game is deck building game where you stack your deck but you still can't access the discards. You play the whole deck buying power to buy more cards is based on your popularity and control of provinces. Yeah. And there's several ways to get points and control is only with the popular and killing barbarians and all three of them are equally viable ways to get points. You're probably going to have to mix it up to some extent. And there's a bunch of fun little mechanics like the only one I'll talk about like there's you know militias then you got like Roman legions and all this stuff. But there's mobs. Oh the angry mob. The funniest thing about a mob. Angry mob is the is the is the fuck you stick. It's like I just want I want and rims winning. I put mobs on rim. But mobs are real funny. There's other things that can cause mobs. But basically if a mob is usually putting them on other place if a mob is in your territory like you have a governor in a territory and there's a mob then if you don't deal with that shit before the end of your turn you get less popular. And if you're too unpopular you just get replaced. Yeah. Like you're out. Yep. One way to deal with a mob is just if you have a lesion there just go kill it. But then people get pissed off. Oh yeah. There's two different ways to or you can build circuses and run it. You can run games. Yeah. You can remove a mob with red military cards at but that costs you popularity. You can play cake with yellow people cards and placate the mob with yellow cards or you can build a build an amphitheater and then the mobs will stay and they'll still be a problem grow because also at the end of your turn if any territory as a mob it gets any two mobs. It's a bigger anger. The mob just keeps growing until you deal with it. And the bigger if you have a Coliseum the mob just stays flat. Yeah. It's like all right you gave me a mob but I have a Coliseum so it's going to be one last game we played. I just I just kept a pet mob for a couple turns because I don't want to deal with it. It's also a building you can build that will deal with Barbarians and convert them to your armies as long as your army is mostly Roman you can that's not yet a card. Federati'll do that. The building just means when barbarians come into a territory where there's Limes or Limes yeah they'll come in flipped over like inactive but then they're easy to to bring in. Yeah. You don't have to fight them right. You have to fight them next turn if they're still sitting there. Yeah but you know they'll just kill themselves effectively if you played the Federati's. Yeah. There's a lot of things. There's a lot going this game is meaty and fun. There aren't really other games like it. Right. Don't be fooled by its Gragnardi war game. Look it's basically an awesome Euro game just like all those other awesome Euro games are used to. But with a lot of it's not any harder than a dominion or a small world but with a lot of the war game type mechanics that make war games interesting. There's a lot of harder than explain. There's a lot of emergent behavior. A lot of narrative will come about and the kind of planning you do in the game isn't the math of my next turn so much as the I need to focus on this area of the board or this type of thing next turn. And I need to be mindful of the fact that based on that I will have fewer options until I reshuffle my deck. So do I blow my wad now. Do I save my wad for a later turn. What do I do not and also not enough can be said about a game. You know there are lots of games that do this where they take a mechanic from another game and sort of let you cheat. It's like well that would be cheating and dominion. So you get that extra fun of feeling like you're cheating and it's OK. But then the game is actually good so it doesn't. It's not that strong. I feel like I like but it's fun to do a thing in a game that feels like cheating and the game the mechanic came from. So I feel like that's actually for game designers out there. Find a game that has a mechanic and there's like an obvious rule for that mechanic that yeah obviously you can't do that. That would be crazy O.P. in cheating but then make a game where everyone's allowed to do that and it's not O.P. Yep. And if you keep doing that you'll just make doon. Maybe. But yeah I feel like I want to own this game. I think our New York set would like this and play it. And I would like to play it any game in New York in New York. Well we haven't been in New York for a while is the problem. Like every weekend I'm out of town or something. Last weekend I was skinned by the time you're ready to play a game in New York is going to be warm. But then I can easily bike to your place where there's critical masks because there are four gamers and I will be there. I'll be biking. Yeah. Yeah. I'll also be biking. But then that night we'll play a game. Obviously. Don't go to bed early old man. I'm going to go there right now. This has been Geek Nights with Rima and Scott special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening