I'm Martin Wallace's huckleberry; so I bought Byzantium (and I'm certainly going to get Tempus, should it ever be produced).
The Byzantine and Arab worlds clash, with each player controlling both sides. The map shows the varies cities, and armies. Cities are rated 1-3 in strength, and connected via land, sea or desert connections. Each player also has a board that shows the strength of each army (Byzantine and Arab), their treasuries (one for each country) and their reserves.
During each turn, players rotate performing a single action. Actions cost cubes. Want to claim a city? You need a cube. Army strength? Measured in cubes. Special actions cost, you guessed it!, a cube. Cubes in your reserve are free to use; or you can take a cube from your casualties (unused) or armies. Those cost $3 per cube from the treasury of the country you are benefitting. So if you claim an Arab city with a dead (casualty) cube, it's $3 from the arab treasury.
As with money, VPs are earned for each empire. You have Arab VPs and Byzantine VPs.
Armies are rated in four areas — elite, regular, militia (levies) and movement (representing supplies). To move an army you spend one or more cubes from your army's supplies. Armies roll one die per regular, to a maximum of three dice, and another die for each elite. Each 4-6 is a hit. After one round of combat, smaller army retreats. If the attacker is then at an enemy city, the city throws one die per point of it's rating. Then if the besieging army is still larger, it sacks the city, earning VPs, plunder and converting it.
Levies let you defend your cities without having an army there (one die per levy, again maximum three).
At the end of the turn, you earn income per city, but have to pay your armies. This can be expensive, so players will tend to whittle their armies away just to cut costs.
In addition to claiming cities, and moving armies, there are other actions a player can take:
- Build up your army,
- Claim the title of Emperor/Caliph (which earn you VPs and a free elite unit for the turn),
- Tax the people (spend cubes for money),
- Have the Bulgars (barbarians) attack,
- Claim the byzantine/arab navy for the turn
- Conduct a civil war (arab v arab or byzantine v byzantine)
- Build the grand church/mosque
- rebuild a city
- fortify a city
- Pass
So players claim cities, earn money, spend money and fight amongst themselves. After three turns, the game ends. Each player earns 1 VP for each city owned. A player's VPs are 'balanced' if one score doesn't double the other. In that case, you add both scores. If you are unbalanced (one score is more than double), then you only score the higher value. So each player will have to deal with both sides.
And the sides are not equivalent. All players start with a large Arab army and a small Byzantine army. But Byzantium starts with many more cities. As in Liberte, there's the possibility of sudden death. If an Arab (or Bulgar) army sacks Constantinopole the game ends, and only Arab points count.
I was intrigued enough to buy this, and on reading the rules it seemed good. But after my first game, I'm just shaking my head. Byzantium bores me. Reasons why:
I don't understand why we control both sides. Perhaps it's historical, but I don't know the story.
The 'sacking constantinopole' rule allows an Arab army to try for the win, but a careless play can set up the next player for a lucky chance at victory. Which is exactly what happened. The sacker gets 5 Arab VPs, so I sacked it and won by something like 28 to 27. You start with 10 VPs, this luck shot accounted for over a quarter of my earned score. I can see that if you race up the Arab score, you could set up a shot to end the game that nobody else could take. Which just means that nobody should ever let you get 6+ points ahead.
With all of the special cases and chrome, I expect lots of thinking. But my turns were usually just "Eh, I'll claim this city" or "Eh, I'll sack that one" or "I need to build up an army." Seeing as how I was doing fine (winning the straight VP race), this isn't encouraging. I like plenty of games that deal with minor optimizations and reactionary play, but this isn't one of them.
The combat is very unsatisfying. Larger armies win. The end. If there are near size armies, then the dice matter, but it's just an attritional system.
I've played games with the same flaws (or worse), but they grabbed me. This doesn't. The end. I'd like to try this with strong advocates of the game, just to get a glimpse of what they see in this.