Note: From posts on Discord; edited for clarity and grammar, sometimes; additional text added at the end.

Excuse me while I scream in detail and at length about Joe Klipfel’s Rome: Fate of an Empire

I won my first game on Casual (after four previous games on Standard) and it was one of the most thrilling resource, engine-building, tableau, deck-building, traversal map games I have ever played and let me tell you, after playing a few hundred different games across all genres, that is saying something.

Even on the arguably easiest mode – the Casual Short game – nothing came too easily. Everything came down to the wire, literally the final “the last round is over but you have an incomplete hand draw from your deck, you get one final turn with what you have left” and that was two cards. Yet by then I had the flexibility to actually do the last item I needed to fulfill my Glory to Rome edict – building the last of five level II developments.

And the entire last half of the third round was a dead heat, a race to get in those five expensive advanced developments in on borrowed time.

I had to play at the edge of my ability the entire game to manage this. I know once I have more experience I can tighten that down to hit Easy and maybe Standard.

And I have been working through four previous games on standard difficulty before this one, and every leader I’ve chosen has been so different. Mastering this game will take ages, and afterwards the replay value will be immense.

Folks, this is the Dark Souls of this type of board game.

And amazingly the rulebook is readable and parseable! There are sections to bookmark that cover each element in a sensible, understandable way! The editor should be proud, they had to work quite hard.

I do think Klipfel is a skilled designer, and that rulebooks are hard to write, and this is why you usually want a dev team, especially behind a game as complex as this.

I don’t know what else to say. The pledge manager is still open as of the time of this writing, and you can get a print copy for $25 plus shipping (some countries restricted from shipping), or if you’re a PNP enthusiast like me, you can dig straight into game after – well, for me it was four hours of pleasing meditative crafting. It’s a lot of business-card sized cards.

This game may not be for you, and that’s okay. It takes a certain mindset, not better than other mindsets, to enjoy a deep and complex and punishing solo game of a somewhat dry genre like this. It’s actually relatively quick for its depth – 60 mins for a short game, 90 mins for the long game; normally games of this type stretch into 3-6 hours. Also they cost more than $25 typically – they really go all out on components in a way Rome: Fate of an Empire was designed to not need.

Oh, it’s good. A high recommendation from me. Unless something truly stellar and affordable for me comes along, this is the last solo game of its type (a subtype of deep economic euro with more stacked on) I will get. This is akin to how Pax Pamir is likely the last area influence card-driven war game I will get. (These are highly personal opinions, and come after 20 years of exploring board games across the, well, board.)

I do recommend the following learning path:

  1. read the rules
  2. play a standard short game all the way through a couple times
  3. pick out your weaknesses and then do brief runs until you manage a gold engine by the end of round 1
  4. once you manage step 3, you can take it down to Casual or Easy to more deeply learn the ropes.

It’s been nearly half a day since my last game and I’m still thinking about it.

At some point I should do an actual review, but that will take a while to come out, because this game is a Lot to come to grips with.

For the record I have loved all the games in Gabe Barrett’s Solo Game of the Month series, and they cover a wide breadth of genres, themes, and complexity. Not all of them are going to be Rome: Fate of an Empire; the others so far have been far less heavy. Thus far I’ve made PNPs of the ones for whom the PNP has shipped, which includes:

  • Hunted: Kobayashi Tower 2nd Edition - an excellent push your luck, action movie card and dice game, your Die Hard in a box.
  • Dieson Cruesoe - a wonderful dice placement rondel game of surviving on a desert island, intensely tactical 30-minute games.
  • Quests Over Coffee - fluffy light parody “what if the Office involved dungeon delving” dice chucker, a cult favorite of sorts with a new adventure mode.
  • Rome: Fate of an Empire - Mage Knight meets a lot of traditionally “euro”-style mechanics and it’s spectacular in a hardcore, punishing kind of way.
  • Hunted: Mining Colony 415 2nd Edition - somewhat similar to Kobayashi Tower, but harder, meaner, and involves dexterity incorporated into the game itself, rather than being the only point of the game. Now adds a way to replace the dexterity component, so that even those who can’t play dexterity games can also enjoy trying to escape Alien-like aliens.

Right now I’m waiting on the recent Okinawa: The Last Battle of World War II (a war-themed game with cards and dice, and a rondel mechanic that actually reminds me of mancala more than anything else), and the most recent Cursed Castle (a hardcore dungeon delver that takes after the video game Darkest Dungeon in more than just aesthetic), both of which look to also be good times.

No idea what happens next in this series. It could literally be almost anything as long as it can fit in a VHS cassette box.