We'd only played Sylla once before, in January, and James had missed out that time. Funnily enough, the prior experience of Andy and David turned out to act against us, as our imperfect memory of the game led us both to make some dire decisions.
In the previous game, famine had been relatively unimportant and Andy's cash pile hadn't stood up to David's manipulation of the event phase. This knowledge, combined with the arrival of an event that blocked the money generating stalls from working led to James picking up multiple stalls relatively easily. However David's attempt to keep the event in play failed and James was quickly so flush with cash that he was able to dominate the first consul and the great work phases. This soon led to him taking control of character recruitment and then events creating an unassailable lead. Just to rub it in, famine hit hard resulting in David going backwards on the score track. David and Andy spent the rest of the game scrapping for second place with David just beating Andy in the final scoring.
I'm not sure how often prior experience of a game has proven to be a complete handicap.
Final scores: James 85, David 54, Andy 49
Showing posts with label Sylla. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sylla. Show all posts
Wednesday, 14 October 2015
Thursday, 29 January 2015
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.
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.
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