Episode 265: Nova Roma

In Nova Roma you compete as the head of a noble house to please the emperor as he builds Nova Roma or new rome. The board consists of multiple areas. Those areas are as follows: an area where you build structures, a sea track you can move your ship on, a chariot race, an area to acquire new artisans, a market to purchase cards that give you effects, a market to sell and acquire goods, an area that duplicates an already taken action, an area that lets you activate the resource collection on your player board and one additional area that allows you to gain tiles for your personal player board that you can activate.

The real meat of the game is action selection which occurs on a grid of 4 x4 spaces. Randomized action tiles are placed at the end of each. Where you place your workers allows you to take both actions, of the row and column, it is in. There is a power modifier that can increase the power of those actions by either the amount of your workers already in that column or row or if the emperor (who is placed by the first player at the start of a round) is in that column or row. If someone has already placed a worker in a spot it cannot be used again. Thanks a lot Patrick for taking the good spot.

There are a pile of ways to score points and this is just a gist but suffice to say most areas of the board will score you some points at the end of the game. After five rounds the game ends.

Now back to the studio to see if the pegs think “What we did in this game echoes in eternity” or if it’s just the fall of Rome all over again.