Mare Nostrum: Empires

Mare Nostrum: Empires arrives with a lofty reputation, friends I trust who bring it out regularly, and a theme and ruleset that ought to be entirely my sort of thing. Yet it was one of my worst experiences of the year. The anticipation was considerable; the result had all the pleasure of finding a bad pistachio in an otherwise respectable bowl.

In play, its central rhythm seems to require everyone to approach their decisions in a rather particular fashion. It is not enough to sit down, understand your options, and pursue your own advantage; the group also needs to grasp the spirit in which the game expects to be played. That is a fair amount of work for a system that ought to create its own momentum.

The player interaction, meanwhile, did not naturally generate tension so much as depend on everyone noticing the same details and operating within the same unwritten boundaries. When that does not happen, the game does not merely go awry; it goes flat. A design that needs the whole table to adopt the correct collective posture before it starts working has outsourced part of its own job.

I do want to try it again, because people whose judgement I value return to it regularly and perhaps we missed the key. For now, though, Mare Nostrum: Empires is a substantial disappointment with an excellent reputation.