Nova Roma Review

One thing that designers, and subsequently board game players, have come to rely on regularly are design patterns for games. How often have you seen a card row for card selection similar to Ticket to Ride? How often have you seen a player board that tracks the number of resources of different types? How often have you moved a token up a track to gain points? How often have you paid resources to fulfill a contract? If you responded with a non-zero number to more than one of these questions, you’re definitely immersed in the hobby enough to recognize the mechanisms that make for fun decisions while players scramble for a smorgasbord of points as fed by designers such as Uwe Rosenberg or Stefan Feld.

Also, depending on what games you’ve played as your interest in the gaming hobby has progressed, you’ve likely also encountered a few themes that seem to reappear from game to game. Perhaps you’ve built an ancient civilization similar to those that flourished around the Mediterranean Sea. Maybe you’ve gathered clues trying to defeat a dark elder god from conquering the world. Maybe you’ve been a medieval noble intent on expanding their lands, a captain of industrial revolutionizing business, a leader of settlers in a new land settling an island? Ok, maybe you haven’t been a Roman patrician trying to impress the Emperor. You can’t remember? That’s probably because for many Euro games with a buffet of points, the theme du jour gets lost, and you can’t tell if it was a Roman noble or medieval landlord for that last game.

Well, just in case you don’t care what culture it was, and you just need some pasted on conceit to motivate your point grabbing, Nova Roma, a new title from 25th Century Games has got you covered. It plays 60-120 minutes and it’s for 1-4 players with an optimal configuration for 3-4 players. You might have already guessed that.

Gameplay Overview:

Before this reviewer starts with anything else, let’s take a minute and go through the gameplay to see how many things players have seen before. The game structure is five game rounds of three turns for each player. On each turn, players place one of their three pawns. The columns and rows of this grid are randomized with actions at each endpoint so that the two actions a player receives for each turn are based on the intersection where they place their pawn. In addition, the “power” of each action is based on how many other pawns of their color (or the Emperor pawn) are in the same column or row.

Here are the actions:

• Trade Action: Gain coins based on your power and then trade coins for resources (wheat, horses, wine, wood, stone). You can also discard cards in hand for coins.
• Upgrade Action: Improve your estate and increase your Influence track (a separate resource with its own track on your player board). You can also acquire a tile to place in your player board “estate” which can be used to increase resource production opportunities or gain points.
• Recruit Action: Acquire follower cards from a card row based on your action power. You play a single card to your player board for a cost in coins based on your action power. Followers usually have instant effects, once-per-round effects, or end game scoring effects.
• Sail Action: Move one of your two ships along two similar tracks while completing shipping contracts using wine or wheat. The end of the track as well as a couple of waypoints are worth a good amount of victory points.
• Build Action: Complete a construction contract of wood and/or stone to build polyomino buildings in one of three districts based on this action’s power. As your buildings surround certain spaces, you gain bonuses. Each district features progressive scoring for occupying a majority of completed spaces.

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  Race Action: Advance your hippodrome token based on this action’s power along one of three tracks to win the current round’s preferred race. Doing so gains points at the cost of checkpoints which require the player to spend horses. This also grants additional Achievement tokens (see below).

• Produce Action: Hire artisan pawns to work on spaces of your estate which yields an income of Influence for the pawn’s location as well as any tiles placed from the Upgrade action.
• Petition Action: The player using this action may spend Influence to take the first player token and then may also spend Influence equal to the power for this action to perform any one of the other actions.

As players are completing these actions, they are also attempting to complete objectives on their personal (and randomized) “Mosaic Board” with a 3×3 grid of objectives. Any time the player completes an objective, they may put an Achievement token on it. When a player gets three in a row similar to tic-tac-toe, they get a bonus and end game points.

As mentioned before the game is limited to five rounds. After the last round, the players calculate final points (which is basically all their points) and is “the family that has done the most to please the Emperor and achieve their own agendas”. How refreshing.

Game Experience:

Nova Roma is good, very good. It has the elements that make Euro style games fun. It offers players a buffet of options but limits them to different queues based on decisions of what they want more. And not only that, competing players will get in each other’s way while actions get more powerful as pawns line up in the action grid. This grid of pain and pleasure must have been co-designed by Hellraiser’s Pinhead for the amount of each it offers. The way the Emperor’s token on the Forum (action) grid both aids and blocks spaces is a perfect concept for a game set in Ancient Rome. What’s more, it presents the perfect next step for gamers new to the hobby wanting to try something heavier.

Now here’s the problem. Excuse this reviewer from making an assumption about readers, but we’ll just assume for the sake of argument that you have eaten a slice of pizza. Most people enjoy pizza. Most people won’t mind ordering pizza when the discussion of other options falters. Pizza toppings, however, are debatable. Nova Roma is like pizza. It’s good. You can probably get into what it offers. It won’t be the best thing you’ve ever played but the specific action decisions drive the theme and the interconnectedness of actions works well towards the game’s scoring. However, for an experienced palate, readers only looking for the most cutting-edge designs with hair raising, innovative mechanisms should look elsewhere.

Now there’s also another couple of points that can create divided opinions on this title. The first is that in order to acquire Achievement tokens, players must participate in the Race Action. The degree to which this race is truly competitive depends a lot on the players and how they approach the different actions in the grid. Since the action alignment is randomized for each game, the Race action may be paired with something players want. Or it might be paired with something the table’s groupthink will dismiss. It’s hard to predict and opinions may vary on this.

The second issue is that analyzing the action grid takes time. Even for players who normally play quickly, the game state of the Forum grid changes each turn with a new pawn placed and so a blocked space now denies a combo of two actions. If a player was counting on that, they now need to reconsider their placement. With AP prone players, this will be painful, especially when analyzing the implication for future turns. For other players, patience and forgiveness for longer than usual turns will be in order.

Final Thoughts:

A lot of what has been said in this review may lead readers to think this reviewer was bored with Nova Roma. This is definitely not the case. If this game had been released 8-10 years ago, this design would have been ecstatically welcomed. Like a good pizza, it’s not revolutionary. But for those who have never had pizza, it could possibly appear to be the most amazing thing ever. For everyone else, it will be enjoyable and offer a fair amount of post game discussion on strategy and decisions. However, in terms of longevity, it won’t be the theme or the different actions that bring players back for more, it will be the nicely crafted main action resolution system that offers the juiciest, most flavorful treat.

Final Score: 3.5 Stars – A competent worker placement Euro game with a main mechanism more memorable than the accompanying mini-games or theme.

Hits:
• Engaging main action mechanism emphasizes replayability and importance of strategy
• Great next step game towards heavy games
• None of the sub-games are truly complex
• Lots of tight decisions

Misses:
• Tired theme but it’s also thin in application
• Overall game structure is cliche, but easy to digest
• Analysis Paralysis for players who belabor each action