Since Doug asked, the Roma house rules (from Mark Delano & Mike Fitzgerald, although I don't know if they developed them).
- The second player gets an extra VP at start (to compensate for attacks they may suffer on the first turn).
- No player may place more earn more than $6 or draw more than 6 cards per turn.
I've played ten games (and watched several more) and we usually see losses from lack of VPs, instead of running out (via the Forum). The forum is certainly powerful, but there are 6 of them out of 52 cards.
As for yesterday's games, I forgot to mention Mauer Bauer, described as "A Colovini game you won't hate." And what do you know, I don't hate it! [I find most of his games cold and dry]. Players take turns dividing a triangular grid by placing walls, then rolling dice to indicate what color tower you place, and what two colors of buildings you place. But if you have two open tower spots (at the intersection between walls) you pick which space the obligatory tower goes, and can pick the other space. You also get to decide which side of the wall to place each building (they must be on seperate sides). When the walls form a city (via a closed loop), each player scores.
The trick here is that each player has a hand of cards that indicate how you score. These run the gamut, for example:
- Score two points for each white tower in the recently completed city,
- Score 6 points if the city is only one triangle big,
- Score based on the number of colors in the city,
- Score for each [wall/ white tower /etc] that is not part of a city,
- Score houses [of a certain color/in a certain region] not in cities
And, each time there is scoring, you can play one or two cards, but you only draw one, decreasing your hand size for the game. Or you can decline to score, and discard a card to draw two. When a city finishes, before scoring the player who closed it can merge it with an adjacent city, too.
And there are a few other complications, but that's it.
Overall, Mauer Bauer has enough randomness (via dice, and scoring cards) to keep it from registering as an abstract. And it fills the 'mid-length' niche fairly well (I think our game took 45-60 minutes, but it was everyone's first game). I played with four, and I think it would be better with three. Is it a great game? No, but I'd certainly play it again. Of his thirty odd games (listed on the geek), I've played exactly one game multiple times (Europa 1945-2030, two or three plays). I doubt I'll play it again. No other game got a repeat play. It's safe to say that I'm not Colovini's biggest fan. After one play, I consider Mauer Bauer a cute 45 minute game. Not mindless, but not too heavy.
Nothing new today (other than TTR: Marklin, which I already discussed). However, I have cast stones, read the stars, and generally asked around. And I see Here I Stand in the future.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Wrap up
- The Power of Story
- New Titles in unfair nutshells ...
- A few words on a few games
- Mauer Bauer, Roma House Rules & other oddities
- More from the Gathering
- Greetings from Lovely Colombus
One note on the rules. Rule 2 doesn't clarify that in the original a card would be drawn for every die placed on it. Under my version you can place one die at a time, drawing that number of cards. Another die lets you look at more cards (to a maximum of six cards), only one card is kept. Once a card is selected no more dice may be placed to look at cards.
With these rules it becomes much harder to depend strictly on the Forum or Mercator. Prior to this change I think 90% of the wins we saw were from the Mercator or Forum. The official change (only pump up to 6 gold into the Mercator a turn) addresses the Mercator adequately, but does nothing about the Forum.
When I looked at the defensive possibilities of the situation it became apparent why. It was far too easy to get a lot of cards and a lot of gold. With those two resources even an effective destruction strategy is helpless. Destruction should be able to remove about a card a turn, less if a Turris is in play more if it has an Essedum (assuming actual destruction, not Gladiator, and Forum defense value of 5). Using 4-5-6 rolls for gold and 1-2-3 for cards generates 7.5 gold and 1.5 cards a turn. Those resources are more than able to keep up with destruction. This all assumes you aren't rolling your Forum numbers. Any 6 VP Forum activation allows at least 3 more turns of life.
I think destruction might be a bit too powerful with these changes, but I have seen the bank VPs run out about 10% of the time. The more common Forum win I see is to have the destruction player run out of VPs themselves while barely keeping the Forum player from running out the bank. Sometimes this results from a suprise destruction move on the part of the Forum player. It's to the Destruction player's advantage to not have too many VPs, that takes them out of the bank and sets the target number for the Forum player lower.