ROME IN A DAY
A Slice of Civilisation
Designer: Evgeny Petrov | Publisher: Alley Cat Games
I hate to be the one to break this to
you, but the Roman Empire has
fallen. Hooray! Too many people
focus on the loss of a long-standing
culture and collapse of a civilised
society into barbarism, when instead
they could be divvying up those tasty
vineyards and deciding who swiped
the coolest stuff.
Rome in a Day proves
that, whilst it may have
taken longer than 24
hours to build, it’ll take
you less than 30 minutes to dice and
disseminate. Over four rounds, players
will create a new land
by grafting together Roman
remnants
into the
optimal,
point producing
position. Everyone starts
with the same stack of 20 lands, which
are shuffled and revealed over the
game, with five new tiles every turn. Of
these tiles, the left-most two will each
have a little building placed on it.
To score points, players need
to combine same tiles AND have
buildings with the matching colour
either as part of this arrangement
or adjacent to it. For example, my
four red town tiles are worthless by
themselves, but if if two theatres on
tiles are next to them, that’s eight
glorious points for New Rome! (I’m
not the best at naming places…)
Once you have your five tiles
arranged, you must conceal them
behind your screen and divide them
into two sets. You can split them
however you want, but must add one of your diamonds to the smaller
selection. Once everyone has divided
their lands, they reveal and o er them
to an adjacent player (alternating
each round whether it’s the person
on your left or right.) Everyone then
secretly chooses which of the two
options offered to them they want,
announces their choice simultaneously
and get to add the tiles
taken from their opponent AND
whichever personal tiles they
have left to their new empire.
If you’ve struggled teaching
people how to share, this is
the educational game for you. It
perfectly showcases the old adage
of ‘one cuts, one chooses,’ as you’re
always incentivised to make the
decision of what to pick difficult for
your opponent. Surely you can’t risk
putting four tiles into one group?
They’ll grab it for the sheer value, but
maybe you really need that one tile
with a building on it, so that’s exactly
what you want to trick your opponent
into doing.
Rounds speed by rapidly, with
the most contemplation being how
you choose to split. Knowing what
buildings each opponent is already
scoring will always bias your choices
(you don’t want to be the one giving someone their fourth matching
building) but can also help you create
an irresistible selection.
The components are bright and
cheerful, with the added designs
helping provide a colourblind-friendly
way of knowing which tiles are what at
a glance. I also appreciate having the
buildings to not only add variety, but to
make it clear exactly how many points
everyone stands to earn.
My biggest complaint is that things
can get a little too easy in terms of
laying out your tiles. Provided you
always leave one gap of a
grouped set you can
almost always earn something from
every placement, so
having some way of
forcing you to keep an arrangement
as drafted might have helped make
things tricker and more competitive.
As it stands, Rome in a Day is a fun,
fast and ultimately favourable game
to play in quick bursts. It doesn’t quite
have the staying power to keep me
enthralled for back-to-back plays, but
it’s a good experience that you won’t
regret bringing to the table.
MATTHEW VERNALL
WHAT'S IN THE BOX?
◗100 land tiles
◗40 WoodenBuildings
◗20 Plastic Gems
◗20 Game Cards
◗5 Player Screens
◗Scorepad
WE SAY
A quick little game of competitive
sharing, it won’t enrapture you but it
will certainly entertain.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED KINGDOMINO
Both games use
a multiplying
score system
that encourages
grouping similar
tiles together,
swapping turn
bidding on dominoes
with drafting
hexagons.