Matthew BaileyGame 17 of the “Bailey Family Summer 2023 Board Game Bonanza” is “Rome in a Day,” played by Jack (8.), Toby (5), and myself.
“Rome in a Day” is a hex-based tile-laying game where during the course of the game, you lay coloured hexagonal tiles and place building meeples of matching colours, then score them using what I generally refer to as “Kingdomino” rules, where you multiply the number of coloured hexagons by the number of coloured meeples that are on those tiles or, in this case, on or next to those tiles.
Now, that all seems fairly standard for a tile-laying game, but why has “Rome in a Day” all of a sudden become the game that has rocketed to the top of the games we have played this summer, and what makes it so unique?
Firstly, you start the game by each choosing a colour. Now, these all have specific names such as “Vineyards,” but we essentially just called them by their colour. Each player then receives 20 hexagons in their colour, with each player receiving the exact same set of tiles to begin with. You then shuffle these tiles and place them in a pile next to you, or in the case of Jack because he insisted on doing it, in piles of five, which did actually make sense later on.
Each player is then randomly given a card with eight different building meeples printed on it in two rows, and they then place those eight building meeples onto the card for later.
At the start of a turn, each player takes five tiles from the stash and places them face up. They then place the two meeples that are on the card, highlighting this turn, on top of the two leftmost tiles. This means you are now left with five tiles, two of which have building meeples on them that may or may not be of the same colour as the tiles themselves.
Now, this is where the brilliance comes in using an “I split, you choose” mechanic. All players now take their tiles behind their screen and have to arrange these tiles into two separate piles: a large pile and a small pile. They then take a gem from their stash (each player starts with four) and place this on the small pile. Exactly which tiles go in which pile is up to you, including where the meeples are (but they must stay attached to the tile they were originally attached to). It is even up to you how many tiles go in which pile. You can have 3:2, 4:1, or even 5:0, where it’s simply all of your tiles in the large pile and just the gem in the small pile.
The other player you are passing to then, without seeing, has to choose which pile to take.
It became very apparent very quickly that there is an unbelievable amount of strategy and social deduction in how you make your piles, which pile you choose, and which of these you both do, depending on exactly who you are either taking a pile from or giving a pile to. This is evened out by the fact that each turn you alternate whether you pass left or right. In reality, this is the meat of the game, and the actual tile-laying and meeple positioning aspect is definitely secondary to the mind games that you end up playing when creating and taking your piles of tiles. I want to make a board game now called.. “Piles of Tiles!”
Interestingly, on the first game we played, all three of us went for completely different tactics. Jack generally went for larger piles, looking to increase the value of his land, Toby went for the smaller piles, looking to increase the number of gems he has, which, as I found out, actually add up quite quickly when you score up at the end of the game, and I went for a middling tactic where I spent more time trying to read and guess which pile the giver would want me to take and which pile the taker would likely choose. Needless to say, I do not know my children as well as I thought, and I got it wrong almost every time.
As you can see by the final score I got destroyed.
Normally, when we play games, everything is quite quiet and focused, but what really sums up this game is when halfway through, Jack merely stopped everything and exclaimed, “This is really, really good!” And that is extremely high praise coming from an eight-year-old.
You do this four times, make your city, add up your points, and the one with the most points wins. As this merely happens over four rounds, games take about 15-ish minutes, which makes it one of the shorter games of this kind. It also comes in a relatively small box, and it is definitely mightier than its size would suggest.
If I have to look for something to suggest, it is that there could be a little bit more complexity in the way your city is scored, with potentially different colours being scored in different ways or giving slightly different bonuses, and this is definitely something I would like to see added in an expansion.
Production quality is very good; the meeple quality is absolutely outstanding, just as good as the screen-printed ones in “Catstronauts” from yesterday. While these are not screen-printed, they have clearly been laser-cut with an extremely fine laser to give a beautiful amount of detail in them, the likes of which I’m not quite sure I’ve ever seen in meeples before. Trust me, as a design technology teacher, this is hard to achieve, and these are really good quality. If I had to nitpick, I guess I would have liked the tiles to be a tiny weenie bit thicker, but this really is looking for things to criticise.
Another personal annoyance of mine is that there is no horizontal writing on the long side of the box. So if you are someone who likes to lay their games either horizontally or alternatively vertically but with the text going down the box like a book, that is going to irritate you a little bit, but maybe that’s just me. Caezar Al-Jassar, please have both on the side of your boxes so that people with a preference can display their games how they would like to display them.
I was really taken aback by how much we all really liked this. We went into it not expecting much, but as it is, it is a fantastic smaller game that is an absolute joy to play and could potentially end up being the highlight of the summer.
“Rome in a Day” is not currently available to purchase in most stores, but pre-orders are up on most sites, and it should be in Friendly Local Game Stores towards the end of August. However, you are currently able to purchase this directly from Alley Cat Games or on their Amazon store.
One of the absolute highest recommendations I can give: “Rome in a Day” is a fantastic game.
Disclaimer: A copy of “Rome in a Day” was kindly provided by Alley Cat Games for the purpose of review and also as a donation to the school at which I work. All of our thoughts and opinions are our own (try to convince an eight and five-year-old to not give you an honest answer, and you will see why this is definitely not in doubt).
