Sword of Rome: Conquest of Italy, 362-272 BC

Sword of Rome had spent years in my personal top five on the Shelf of Shame, so it was the proper antidote to any Bolshevik thought along the lines of, “Why don’t we play some trash?” For our group, it sits exactly at the upper limit of “I’ll read rules in order to come play”: heavy enough to require reading and refreshing, but before we enter the dark territory of Virgin Queen and her friends. With a whole day free and bags of dry rations from imperial quartermaster Thanous Poulous, we were ready.

In the game, players take the Romans, Gauls, Greeks, and the miserable Italian side of the Samnites and Etruscans, trying to survive and expand across a peninsula where everyone has a reason to hit everyone else. Rome has the especially frightening privilege of increasing its reinforcements as it spreads across the map, so territorial growth is not merely prestige but an engine that feeds more legionaries.

The rounds change character as minor-power activation cards appear, allowing players to bring neutral forces into play and abruptly scramble the balance. The interaction is merciless: campaigns, battles, temporary alliances, and third-party interventions can stop an apparently ready victory or leave an opponent breathing precisely when you thought you had finished them.

The roles were distributed as they should have been. Hidamiyiagi, the traditional force of law, order, and normality, with red as his kryptonite, took Rome. Our beloved journalist vermin took the Orcs of the North, meaning the Gauls. The representative of the Greek Komsomol took the anti-imperialist Greeks, and I put on the punching bag of the Italian peninsula: the poor Etruscans, or the Scorpion Clan of the age. Perfect.

The opening was predictable. Rome went after the Samnites to start its colonial machine, while the unwashed Gauls came down in hordes to loot the Etruscan mines. Samnites and Etruscans were simply trying to avoid slaughter, with no serious leader to command their troops, while the Greeks whistled innocently and looked toward exotic Sardinia. The first round ended relatively quietly: a small lead for the Gauls, Rome eager to relive the Caudine Forks, and gunpowder in the air everywhere.

In the second round, the calm ended. The Roman effectively handed Sardinia to the Greek with an incomprehensible pass, while everyone else began sticking it to one another. The Samnites finally found a great general, Pontius Gavus — a name that by itself felt like a warning from Zeus that we would not have a military future. Indeed, his troops were decimated in battles they should normally have won. The Etruscans did a little better: an alliance with the Gauls put pressure on Rome and somewhat balanced the mainland situation. When the Carthaginians, under serious management, finally attacked the Greeks, the Gaul looked like the favourite for an immediate victory in round three, with the Greeks slightly behind but in a very strong position on the map.

The third and fourth rounds were a pure bloodbath. Our hero Pontius Gavus stripped the entire youth of his kingdom bare, losing every battle he took part in — even those in which he started with a +6 advantage. Thankfully, the Etruscan hand contained some blazing events and kept things alive. The PaOrcs, Gauls looting other Gauls, denied victory to their brothers before dying loaded with Etruscan gold. The Romans recalled their good generals and sent cousins to learn from Pyrrhus what getting skinned really means.

Pontius Gavus’s final golden chapter was an encircling campaign against the Gauls that could have won us the game. It drowned, however, in an epic die roll against Panoramix, and the man went into exile as befitted a general who had turned a +6 advantage into a personal joke. By the end of the day, the Greeks were now the favourites to win. And honestly, after so much preparation, so much consumed youth, and so much mutual nastiness, Sword of Rome had triumphantly justified its escape from the Shelf of Shame.