Sylla - 29th January 2015

Years ago we used to play a game called "Republic of Rome". It was a pretty typical Avalon Hill game with rules that read like a legal text with sections, subsections and exceptions. It featured a interesting mixture of competition for political supremacy and having to work together to defeat crisis after crisis.

Sylla has the same theme, but with a modern approach to the game mechanisms. First though you have to get your brain past the oddity that the game starts during the Roman Republic yet features Christians. Mmm. Let's just forget the title and move on.

The game features a selection of characters - senators, merchants, legionaries, slaves and vestals. Each provides the ability to buy buildings and most have a special ability too. The catch is that you only get to use the character once per turn - so you need to plan ahead, which characters will buy buildings and which will you save for later?

There are a number of tracks representing the state of Rome - a large part of the game is being seen to be working to keep things from getting too bad. In true cynical political simulation it's not what you've achieved it's what you appear to have done.

There are also a variety of events that need to be defeated and great works to build.

Given that this was our first game we probably didn't get our balance right. Famine fear (too much Tzolk'in?) lead us to bid high for famine reducing buildings, but it never got to the point that it made that much of a difference. Andy went heavily into merchants to boost his income. David went for senators to give him political clout and Kieron went for a more balanced selection. Early on, Andy and Kieron used a lot of their characters to buy buildings, where as David saved his to use later in the turn to counter events and gain bonuses. Andy saved his money to influence a couple of key votes in order to gain high victory points.

Towards the end of the game two of our tracks reached crisis state. This gave David a large boost as he had earned the most political tokens for countering disasters (even though this had clearly been totally ineffective).

For the last couple of turns we all realised just how important (and clever) the event defeating mechanism was and there was some delightful bluff and brute force to gain maximum benefit.

Final score was David 83, Kieron 79 and Andy 72. It will be interesting to play again with a better idea of how it all fits together.