Pandemic: Fall of Rome

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

When I first played the original Pandemic, I never expected I would be playing so much of this game series. It was an OK game for me, decent but not earth-shattering. It was very popular when it was first released. It was a refreshing setting. It was easy to teach. People understood it instinctively. The Intensify mechanism was clever and effective. The main reason I have played this much of the Pandemic series is this group of friends - Benz, Ruby, Xiaozhu and Edwin. When they first heard of the game, they were keen to try it. After I taught them the game, they fell in love with it. Since then, we had journeyed through Legacy Season 1 together, we did Legacy Season 2 too. The original Pandemic had a number of expansions. There was a dice game, and then the versions featuring specific countries or regions or periods of history. I have played Iberia several times. I have bought Rising Tide (set in the Netherlands) but have not played it yet. I recently played Ivan's copy of Pandemic: Fall of Rome at Boardgamecafe.net.

In this Rome version, you play generals of the Roman Empire. Your job is to fight the barbarians threatening to bring down the empire. You need to create alliances with them, thus bringing them into civilised society. You can also wallop them back to where they came from. You need to save Rome from falling to the barbarians.

Let's look at the game board. It shows Europe and the Mediterranean Sea region during the time of the Roman Empire. There are five barbarian tribes (as opposed to the four diseases in the original Pandemic). The tribes have preset migration paths, and most of these eventually lead to Rome. To win, you need to neutralise all five tribes. You do that by either allying with them, or exterminating them. To form an alliance with a tribe, you need one person to collect a certain number of cards of the tribe's colour, then go to a city with that tribe's tribesmen (cubes), then perform the alliance action. So this is similar to discovering cures in the original, just that you don't need a lab. You need to talk to the tribesmen.

There are several ways to lose. Whenever a city is to get the 4th tribesman of a colour, the city is sacked instead, causing tribesmen to pop up in all neighbouring cities. You lose the game on the 8th sacking, and if Rome itself is ever sacked. The 8th sacking is similar to Outbreaks in the original Pandemic. If you need to place a new tribesman on the board but the supply has run out, you lose too. Rome has failed to contain the spread of this tribe. If the player deck runs out, it means you have run out of time to complete your mission, and you lose.

Every player draws a character card. You get some special abilities and one combat ability (eagle icon). There are battles in this game, and dice are rolled. If you roll the eagle icon, you get to use your combat ability. My character's combat ability is she gets to convert a barbarian directly into a Roman legion. The two cards on the right are player cards. Those tiny numbers at the bottom right indicate how many cards of that colour are in the deck.

One big difference between this Rome version and the original is the need to roll dice. In the original, treating diseases is deterministic. One action to remove one disease cube. In Rome, one action can be spent to battle once. In one battle, you get to roll as many dice as the number of legions you have, up to three dice. The die rolls determine whether you get to kill barbarians, or your legions get killed, or both. You need to have legions to fight the barbarians, so one of the actions in this game is recruiting armies. Armies can only be recruited at forts, so there's another action which let you build forts.

When barbarians invade, they follow certain migration paths. This is quite different from the original. When a barbarian card is drawn and a city is specified as the target, the new barbarian may not necessarily appear at this city. He only does so if the previous city in the migration path already has a barbarian of the same tribe. Else, you trace backwards along the migration path until you reach a city with a barbarian next to it. Because of this rule, barbarians progress step by step towards Rome, and you have a bit more predictability.

This section tells you how many cards you need to collect to form an alliance with each of the five tribes. The black and the white tribes need five, because there are many black and white cards in the deck, more so than the other colours. The blue tribe only needs three cards.

The white building is a fort. You need to be at a fort to recruit armies. If a barbarian attempts to invade a city containing legions, the barbarian cube is not placed. The legions prevent the barbarian invasion. However all legions will be sacrificed. If you happen to have a fort in the city, or a player pawn is present, then only one legion needs to die per invasion thwarted. Legions don't automatically remove barbarians (cubes) already present in a city. You need to perform the battle action to try to remove them.

Since the setting is the classical age, you don't have airplanes, and your pawns don't get to fly to any city you choose. However you do get the sailing action. You can move from one port city to another in one step, if you expend a card of the same colour as the destination.

There are event cards in the player deck, similar to the original. However there is a new mechanism. Event cards give you two options - normal event and super event. The super event is usually much more powerful, but to use it, you need to move your sacking marker one step. That is a big deal. You get closer to losing the game. In the game we played, we did not use the super version of any of our events, but the option to do so was tempting. One more thing to think about, one more option to help you save Rome.

After forging an alliance with a barbarian tribe, you become able to convert their tribesmen to legions. So doing the alliance thing is not just an arbitrary goal to allow the game to have a victory condition. There are practical implications which help you defend Rome and push back the onslaught.

The Play

I played with Ivan, William and Irvin. One difference between Rome and the original is the game setup. The initial cubes (barbarians) will always be placed in 9 predetermined cities near the homelands of the tribes. The setup varies only in the number of barbarians being placed. This is logical and thematic.

There were five tribes we needed to "settle", and there were two ways of "settling" them. It was either we befriended them, or we kicked them back to where they came from. Both were valid and realistic. Since there were five tribes as opposed to four diseases in the original Pandemic, having the same person collect cards of the same colour felt more difficult. Thankfully not all colours required five cards, some needed fewer. Due to the difficulty in collecting cards, exterminating tribesmen was sometimes tempting. The invasion of barbarians followed predictable paths, so extermination felt like a manageable option. If we could clean the table of a particular tribe, and quickly wallop any new invaders, we would not need to bother with the card collection effort. As the game drew on, we found it harder and harder to contain the tribes. Barbarians were everywhere and it was too late to push them back. Eventually we went the alliance path for all five of the tribes, and we brought peace to the Roman Empire.

It is difficult for one person to collect many cards of the same colour. You need to get your friends to pass you the right cards. Going solo is high impossible.

You can see the port icons (anchors) at the port cities. Moving from port to port takes one action only if you spend a card of the destination colour. That city at the lower left is black, blue and white. To travel there by sea from any other port city, you can spend a black, blue or white card. Rome is a port city and has all five colours, so it's easy to rush back to Rome by sea if there's an emergency.

At one point we had only three green barbarian cubes in the supply, which was dangerous. We needed to quickly convert some barbarians to legions, or kill some of them, to prevent the cubes from running out.

Lutetia was the reason for almost running out of green cubes. It was sacked multiple times, causing green cubes to pop up in all neighbouring cities.

In this Rome version of Pandemic, you need to lead legions into battle to get rid of barbarian cubes. There is some randomness now and things are no longer deterministic. You can sometimes get an unlucky streak, losing legions without beating back the barbarians. You lead legions in offensives, and you also shift them around as defensive measures to slow down the advance of the barbarians. Although there is some randomness, I feel it is not too much. You do generally expect to lose troops, and you also expect to be able to kill barbarians. So you will plan to replenish your troops. Best to recruit early in the game, when the recruit action is more effective.

The alliance token of the white tribe was still in the supply, which meant we hadn't established an alliance with them yet. This was the last tribe we needed to ally with before we could win the game.

The Thoughts

Fall of Rome looks very different from the original Pandemic. If you count the rule differences, you will find many. However it somehow manages to feel very familiar. This is despite the different problems you have to solve, and new options you have to help you win. If you like the Pandemic series you will enjoy this game. Very different, yet familiar. Kind of like Johnny Depp in a different role.