I’ve had the pleasure of playing this game solo several times, but more importantly opposed at least 4 times. Each one has been a riot of fun. A lot of time spent digging into Bergian logic, Alan Ray revisions, and convoluted rules that stretch belief.

All that said it was and remains a blast to play and when all said and done, decipher and decided, you come down to a game in of itself that is pretty simple to play.

At a high level it goes something like this:

Each side allocates chits to a cup for Leaders who manage armies or fleets. When your chit is pulled you may move, sail, fight, raise manpower do other types of specific actions like raids and generally carry on as far as you like subject to two or three key constraints.

1. You must pass a die roll check against your command rating after each ‘stop or action’ as dictated by the charts.
2. You must pay attrition for the land crossed, or if naval the seas traversed with either Attrition as a function of size of force and distance. Or if a naval force then it’s a straight roll against a table based on distance and a few other factors.

   Move a long way, say from one end of Italy to the other with 2 Legions expect some fellas to fall by the way side along the way. Move shorter distances with less men you might not suffer any attrition. You might use that as a tactic, especially with a robust leader who has more than one chit in the cup and a high chance of ‘continuation rolls ‘ being successful.

Once all the chits are pulled and units moved a set of actions then occur for both sides to wrap the year up and you move to a new year where you conduct the allocation of new Roman Consuls, check the political mood for the Barcids and plan shipbuilding, port expansions or Legion rebuilding [ you will be doing a lot of that, trust me]. Along the way crews for ships gain experience, armies become more proficient and hopefully the truly awful Roman E rated leaders die off quickly.

Combat is its own beast. It has somewhat I think to be pretty clever tactical, leadership, and random results that can take place. But more on that later as the game unfolds, we shall explore that. Much has been made of Roman elections, Dictators, Praetor Urbanus, Consuls etc etc. The original rules were a bit opaque, but they netted out to lining up the Consuls and their ‘operating area chit’ [i.e. Sicily] and then either keeping the same guy or electing a new one [random draw from a pool], you go in a seniority-based way and your done. The Barcids will usually stay in control but may get punchy and allow a 3^rd army, which is always awesome. However here is one of the many subtle and potentially fatal changes to the system that will tweak balance. Carthage can no longer have more than two armies, and those armies can now draw from smaller pools of resources. Placement restrictions have however been relaxed which is kinda cool from what I recall.

On the flip side of this Rome can have an unlimited number of Legions. Yes unlimited. As we walk into this play with the new rules I wonder how this will be handled? Will consuls take on more Legions than they can ‘effectively manage’ [earning a malus in combat], or will extra magistrates rome the country…[see what I did there..] and conquer all before it? How will this affect the pool of Roman Leaders? What happens if a bunch of them die off. Well, we will soon find out!

This operational scale game brings a lot of rich choices to the table that are best explored in the campaign. What approach will Rome take to defeat Carthage? How will Carthage choose to beat Rome? The Naval approach, Land? The sides must acquire both political and military control of regions for them to count. This involves forcing the submission of towns via siege, treachery, or butchery [it’s a thing]. The area covered is pretty vast, and sea movement can be dangerous when even trying to get from the mainland to Corsica.

In any case more on this as it evolves.

I’ll have some write ups coming but all of that will be after I play through as I hope to explore tactical choices as we go.

We have the first two turns done. One more via vassal then we switch to face to face gaming – THANK YOU LORD!!!