‘Honored guests, in this room is an actress, a spy, a governor, a gallo- Roman chieftain and even my own son!
Why? Because you are the finest that Rome has to offer and I intend to put all of your intelligence and cunning to use in the service of my glorious destiny!
In the name of Julius Caesar, you are charged with pushing back our borders and bringing the entire world under my domain! At least, almost...
But do not concern yourselves with those indomitable Gauls. Nothing should distract you from your objective: all roads must lead to Rome!
Let the games begin! Upon your return I want to hear Veni, Vidi and, a over all Vici’
3 words to describe this game: Roads, resources and cities
Gameplay:
‘In Caesar’s Empire, players will be building Roads to connect Rome to new Cities across the map. Every new City you reach will provide City and Treasure token that will be worth points at the end of the game. You also score points for the path that leads back to Rome. The game ends when Rome is connected to every City on the board. After adding the value of City and Treasure tokens to the points scored during the game, the player with the most points wins!’
Taking turns, you place your roads to connect Rome to new cities. You can place as many roads as you want as long as you do not pass through an available city or pave over other peoples roads. You collect the resource and city token that you connected Rome to. You then gain one point for every road you have in the shortest route back to Rome. If you collected gold this turn as your resource, then you can double your score. Resources score according to how many of the same resources you obtain and how many different resources you obtain in total. Gold scores separately. An additional 10 points are awarded to the player with the most roads left at the end of the game.
Components:
Double sided game board - the game board is double sided depending on player count. The board is large with the score track around the outside. It forms a map of Europe for you to build roads across!
5 player boards - the player boards help you to score your resources. Initially it might look confusing but when you place the tokens on the board you can see how many points you get for amount of the same resource and for different resources
125 roads (in 5 player colours) - Roman soldiers walking on a road. They are a good size and easy to manipulate on the board. Clear and easy to score.
5 score tokens - coloured cardboard tokens to denote different players - double sided so when you score over 100 you flip it over and carry on scoring round the board
40 city tokens - these have Roman numerals on them and are worth different amounts of points at the end of the game. This adds some strategy to the game because you have to work out which roads are more lucrative to connect
40 treasure tokens: (meat, wheat, gems, olives, grapes, wood, oil, wine and gold) - cardboard tokens with different pictures on them that you place on the player boards and score at end of the game.
Overall thoughts: This game intrigued me. Initially, the box stood out and I was hooked in because it had the Astérix name on the front. It was a bit disappointing that it wasn’t much to do with Astérix at all other than the artwork. The board looks striking and the Roman soldiers on the roads look great. I was excited to play and wanted to get it to the table. It’s quite quick to set up and definitely easy to pick up after just reading the rules once or twice. It would be easy to teach to others. I think that this game is more a family game than a game for couples or serious gamers. There just wasn’t enough strategy in it for me but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good game. I think my daughter would love playing this and I enjoy the theme of this game. I just don’t think I would choose to play this as a two player game with my wife. I definitely think this is one that works better at a higher player count because then the choices for where you can build your roads might be more limited and there would be increased differences between the scores of different players. When we played as two players, we didn’t add the score to the board for the resources in both games we played because we scored the same despite having different resources. I can see how in a bigger player count game that there would be more difference in the scores - although it is down to luck of which tokens you pull.
This is a quick game to setup and play, it’s easy to teach and explain to others and would be a great family game to add to your collection if you like the theme employed.
Thank you to Holygrail games for sending me this copy for review