I was finally able to get a foursome together for this intruiging new game from Phalanx/Fantasy Flight that I was able to purchase at Origins (I gather copies are even now not yet available through regular channels). So Matt, Rich, Kim & I sat down to give it a spin.

First impulse of turn one, Matt slapped down an Ave Caesar card to immediately become a contender, then dashed to Rome to become Emperor. Rich then followed suit on his first move. Most of the remainder of the first turn was spent waging various border wars against our neighbhors - when you defeat an enemy in combat, one of his legions switches sides, and this is (more or less) the only way to build up your forces.

So after seeing that isolated legions were vulernable to being picked off, towards the end of the first turn there began the process of consolidation into huge stacks - by the end of turn one, each player had managed to get 90% of their legions into one place. The game then devolved into just pushing around these big stacks, with nobody actually wanting to make a move.

Thankfully, Rich managed to win at the end of the second turn by hoarding enough cards that he could take a significant number of actions after everyone else had played out, which gave him an uncontested run on the board for a few minutes, allowing him to take control of three areas while Emperor (one of two) and finish it off.

These two turns took roughly 2.5 hours to play. While we definitely played quite slowly in fact, I'm hard-pressed to figure out how the game could possibly come in at the 2 hours listed on the box. Previous playtime estimates on Phalanx games boxes have been pure fabrication, and I think that is the case here also. In a full game, you've got 160 cards that have to be played, plus all the peripheral activities. You're going to have to be playing pretty fast and be very familiar with the game to get the time down to 2 hours.

No question, we were disappointed with the game. Everyone at the table kept saying "we must be doing somthing wrong", but we kept poring over the rules and kept not finding anything. The game hugely encourages large stacks, which is very bad (we thought there must be some sort of stacking or activation limit, but we couldn't find anything as hard as we looked). Very few of the events on the cards seemed worthwhile - since you seemed to get an Emperor right away, and since assassinations are rare (and no Emperor in his right mind is going to stay in Rome very long), Senetors were completely worthless, bribes only slightly less so, and Praetorean Gaurds pretty marginal. That's about half the deck, near as we could tell. The whole bit with tallying up the declaration points to become Emperor took us a while to figure out how to play right, only to see that it seemed worthless, since one player dropped an Ave Caesar right away and simply became Emperor - thus making the political angle irrelevant (you can't be "declared" Emperor if there already is one).

Also, running out of cards is really ugly - other players can attack you and know exactly how much they need to defeat you, making your armies largely completely defenseless. Given this, there developed a huge reluctance to actually play cards, with all the players wanting to pass most of the time, not seeing any upside to acting.

It seemed to us, on completing the game, that we *must* have been playing somthing incorrectly, but we just couldn't figure out what. I'd welcome some help in this matter. Until we do, though, nobody in the group had any desire to play this one again. This was a game I was definitely looking forward to, as sort of a low-complexity Successors - Successors is a game I think quite highly of, but it's got complexity issues - but Successors this one definitely isn't.