LogFAQs > #934185825

36. Glory to Rome (2005)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tableau-building, multi-use cards, role selection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 45-75 minutes
Experience: 8+ plays (2015-2018) with 2-5 players
Previous ranks: 83/100 (2016), 27/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a hand of multi-use cards: they can be played for their action, as buildings in your tableau, or as materials to construct your buildings. The game works with a role selection mechanism. A leader plays a card for its action, and others may use cards to follow that same action. There are myriad different buildings, but they all fall under the six types of actions: engine-building for action selection, erecting buildings, gathering materials, and banking materials.

Experience - My first two plays of Glory to Rome were relatively early on, with five players, one of whom was very slow and kind of airheaded while playing. The games lasted well over an hour, which... they shouldn't.

I had little interest in playing GtR again until my friends decided to print their own copy of the out-of-print game. Given that everyone else was requesting a copy, a bit of FOMO got me in. I wound up bringing the game to meetups and other game nights and started developing a much greater appreciation for it. Once it's played with players who know what they're doing and are committed to playing relatively quickly, you can knock out two games in the time of another middleweight euro.

Design - Glory to Rome is a mess to explain, and its player mat is hilariously messy before you know the rules. But once you get it, it's clean to conceptualize the flow: cards only become buildings if you draw them; wasted "pool" cards go into material slots; materials become used for buildings or the vault. It's an elegant system that requires nearly nothing except the massive deck of cards, player mats that only serve to organize your cards, and the foundation cards.

Decision-making is always tough in a games where cards are both the tableau items and the resources used to build those items. Only one in every three or four or cards in your hand, or even less than that, will ever actually go under construction. The rest will be used to take actions or fill those orders. There's other stuff to decide - which role you want, or what cards you can afford to throw into the pool to get snatched up by others' Laborers - but for the most part, you only have to understand the six suits and not the 50+ different cards. This eventually speeds up play a lot.

One of the pleasures in Glory to Rome, like in so many tableau-builders, is watching your engine spiral out of control. The buildings you construct give you powers like increasing your hand size or using different building materials in the future, while adding clientele increases your capacity to take actions both as a leader and as a follower. As the game goes on, you'll be more and more likely to follow each action. The pool of materials will also grow and shrink with time, providing a nice flow of materials from wasted-in-hand to stashed-in-buildings-or-vaults.

Future - Lacking a real box for Glory to Rome is probably one of its biggest hindrances in getting my attention - well, that and requiring three-to-five players to make it good. Two-player didn't work out well. I think I'll have to make a concerted effort to get this to the table again, because it's worth it.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness