Praetor: Zum Ruhme Roms!

EvEvanstar2,5

This game breaks my heart. For the first half of the game everyone was having a fantastic time. The last half, things turned very sour, and the game revealed many many flaws, all of which would have been easily fixable. Let me begin by saying what this game does right. I love the dice as workers, and I love how they get stronger and do their jobs more effectively when sent to build new tiles or take the actions on red tiles. I love how when the workers hit the 6 side, they retire to a special part of your board where you still need to pay for their upkeep but they can't do anything. I also love how many games these days have you build an engine, but then the game ends pretty much as soon as it's built. Here, the game's timer is a little longer, so you can really enjoy your engine. Note, we played with the errata posted by the designer. Here's what's wrong with the game. 1. There should only be one spot to activate a retire worker, and there are two. Not being able to use retired workers is a core limiting mechanic in the game, and being able to undermine it twice per turn seems a bit much. 2. The promo building that lets players take starting player negates the important catch-up mechanic of forcing the player with the most points to go last. 3. The buildings are not consistent. Some of them activate based on strength of worker. Others, just activate once. 4. Buildings that give you points for resource stockpiles, firstly should only convert resources to points based on the strength of the worker, and second, should spend those resources. The way it's written now, if you have 11 marble and send a level 1 guy, you get 22 points and keep the marble to take the action again on the next turn. When you build new tiles for points you spend the resources. I feel using these tiles should be the same. 5. The building that generates points for retired workers is too strong, as the player with retired workers is likely in the lead anyway. 6. The mini-game of placing tiles so the corners match with other corners takes too long for what it is, and adds nothing to the fun of the core game. I've seen users comment that they ignore this,and just add 4 to the VP printed on the tile. I think this is the correct approach. 7. The game doesn't come with nearly enough resources or claim disks. The rule-book has an error which says only the resources are supposed to be unlimited, but the designer claimed here that the claim disks are also supposed to be unlimited, and I wish I had known that since I wasted a good number of turns sitting on a lot of resources in our game before looking at the forums. I would be happy to play this many more times with the previous fixes applied, along with the variant of making the game 5 rounds shorter. That being said, I have so many games, it's hard to pick one that needs heavy house rules to be playable. :nostar: Art, Iconography and components functional :star: Clever or interesting mechanisms :star: Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players :nostar: Multiple plays stay interesting :star: Low or mitigatable luck elements :star::nostar::nostar::nostar::nostar: Raw enjoyment

Carlos Correiastar5,2

Strategy 2–5 Players 75 Min