Last year my new gaming group and I were playing 'Betrayal at the House on the Hill' for fun, and 'Game of Thrones' for serious. Then one of us got Mare Nostrum for a birthday.

We've since played three times - twice with the basic setup, and once with the advanced. Two of the games have been short - only four players. My basic call on the game is that it is really well-crafted (as you'd expect for a game this long in development), elegant in parts, but marred by some odd design choices.

The biggest positive is the trading mechanic. This is probably my favourite aspect of the game, and it is so good as to rival long-time favourite and pretty-much-perfect game, Settlers of Catan. Relative scarcities and abundances play out really well. We've found that players actually get into the 'marketplace' feel by hawking their wares - it's a hell of a lot of fun, surprisingly strategic, and really interactive.

Another plus is the really strong separation of early, middle and late game, with differing strategies playing out in each phase. Early game the push is for cheap development of resources, with players concentrating on the 3-cost improvements. Once these improvements run out, the game shifts into a middle phase of varying length - this is where the 6-cost improvements get built, and where military units start to count. It does usually play out with Rome going after Greece, though we've seen Persia and Carthage weigh in, especially with the re-balancing errata. Sometimes the military mid-game goes on for a while, other times we've skipped it altogether.

The final phase begins after the few (if any) territorial re-arrangements, and when the second-tier, 6-cost improvements run out, and it's when everyone goes in for the kill by collecting the 9-cost wonders/heroes, or going after the 12-cost pyramids. This phase is characterised by really tactical trading, with a lot of bean-counting and gamesmanship going on. The game often ends quite suddenly, as while trading is the province of the player who's earned the "economic leader" card, it's often the player who holds the "political leader" card who dictates which of two competing players actually wins. This is definitely a game where the playing is the fun, and the end is often anticlimactic. That's not really a bad thing, in my book.

My problems with the game start with the way the mechanics are matched to the board. The resources are spread pretty evenly across the provinces, though Gems and Metal often end up scarce because they're far from the starting points. You get just enough resource cards (similar to the ones in Settlers, though there are 12 types not 5/8) to make sure you'll never run out in a given trading round. However, there aren't enough improvement tokens to allow empires to spread very far.

This means empires are curtailed in growth not by running out of room or exploitable resources, but by limits on improvements. This is counter-intuitive in the extreme. I understand why the designer made this choice - to allow the primacy of trading rather than military action - but it's infuriating in the extreme and means almost no expansion. Why pay 3 points for an influence token when you need to build up your home provinces before caravans run out?

There are far too many provinces and far too many resources. Rome rarely builds more than one province out from its starting point, Carthage rarely develops more than two new provinces before tokens run out. There are provinces that never get developed, because there's a two- or three-turn turnaround to get them influenced and built up, in which all the tokens get snaffled.

Which is connected to my final gripe - the utter uselessness of armies. The best way to keep growing once improvements run out is to invade neighboring provinces. When you do, you can give your opponent one last turn of income while you take the whole province, destroy a building and build it in your own territory next turn, or steal its production.

The problem here is that the only smart choice is to sack the building and build it in your own territory - a slow and laborious process with minimal long-term gain, in comparison to taking the whole province. The reason for this is that with only 8 legions each, an attack is invariably followed by both players concentrating all 8 legions in the contested province. If your legions get tied to that province while going for one of the high-gain strategies, you're almost utterly undefended. The military mechanics themselves are really great, as are the improvement ones, but like improvements, the game ships with about half as many legions as you feel you need.

In short, Mare Nostrum is a game I like, but one that I find frustrating even as I enjoy it. Great mechanics, innovative and tactical gameplay, and lots of player interaction that doesn't revolve around the military. The biggest issue is the artificial caps you hit, irritatingly early.