Pandemic Fall of Rome
In Pandemic: Fall of Rome you are attempting to prevent the city’s fall to the hordes of barbarians flowing in from the north. Striking deals, building strategically placed forts and taking your legions to war, you will either gain the alliances you need, destroy the barbarian hordes or see Rome engulfed in flames…
If you haven’t yet played it I hugely recommend Pandemic as one of the best cooperative games out there. Throughout this review you will find terms in parenthesis where the version of a card, track or effect in Fall of Rome is identical in all but name to the version found in Pandemic.
The TL;DR
Pandemic plus - the same game with more
Some unintuitive new rules
Makes all the rules and mechanics work a bit harder
Production annoyances
Pandemic plus
So let’s get it out of the way up front – the best parts of this game are its Pandemic roots. From the simple turn structure: Take 4 Actions, Draw 2 Cards, and Invade (infect), to the elegance of the Revolt (epidemic) cards and how they intensify the game by restacking the Invade Cities (infection) deck.
This base puts Fall of Rome ahead of most games straight out of the box, but what does it do beyond that? Quite a bit as it turns out. At its core you attempt to control the flow of barbarians (diseases) long enough to form alliances (cure) and/or remove all five tribes from the board.
To form an alliance you need to collect 3, 4 or 5 player cards in one colour and then be in the same space as a cube of that colour. This doesn’t stop the flow of cubes, but does open up the opportunity to convert these barbarians into legions, this becomes increasingly more important as the game progresses and the Invasion (Infection) rate increases
Cubes can be prevented from being placed by having cities defended by legions. Without a wise general to guide them or a Fort from which to fight however, a single barbarian cube will ambush and destroy all the legions in a space, otherwise they trade on a one to one basis, so much for the might of Rome’s Legions.
Finally you can bring legions with your character to engage in battle, rolling combat dice equal to the legions you command, you remove barbarian cubes and legions as indicated. Each character, as well as having static abilities, also has a special ability triggered by rolling the imperial eagle result on these dice. Some of these are helpful but for characters who are poor generals, and perhaps more powerful elsewhere, these also risk negative results.
Set up, placing barbarians and risking decline
The set up sees you add Rome cards, one for each colour, to the Invade Cities discard before the game begins. It also always starts with a specific 9 cards for your opening invasions which sets up the flow of barbarians really well.
New barbarians enter the board each turn, but this process is a little unintuitive. Each card displays a city on the board and a route to that city. If there are not barbarians in the city when you draw it you work back along the route to the nearest empty city and place a barbarian cube there. It takes a bit of getting used to but is a clever mechanic that evens out the spread of the barbarians ensuring they make a slow progress towards Rome.
Scattered through the player deck are special event cards that will help the players keep Rome safe, but for the greedy or bold you can increase the Decline (Outbreak) track for a more powerful version of the event.
Glory to Rome
The artwork and theme are really well done and really support the idea that you’re defending Rome from these seemingly never ending hordes.
What most impressed me about this game though was the way it takes the core of Pandemic and draws a little more from almost everything:
The Decline track can be used to upgrade events
Removing cubes requires rolling dice that can trigger extra character abilities
The Invade Cities track also controls how many troops you can recruit
Forming alliances also allows you to convert enemies to your side
They did all this without the rulebook bloating noticeably and while there is a good amount to pick up it doesn’t feel like a much heavier game.
Production frustrations
Unfortunately there were one or two little issues that frustrated my first play.
The first is a minor typo in the set up instructions that refer to the same cards as both 'brown' and 'gold' bordered and I spent some time trying to determine if I was missing an entire deck of cards. The online version of the rulebook refers to both as gold bordered so this may just be an early edition print issue.
More upsetting was the way the cubes for the game were packed. The content list details that there were:
24 white cubes
22 black cubes
20 orange cubes
20 green cubes
14 blue cubes
In the box though was a large bag containing 20 of each colour and second smaller bag containing 3 black cubes, 5 white cubes, one green and one orange cube. In my excitement to play the game I assumed that the smaller bag contained nothing but spares and that the larger bag contained the cubes required to play.
It was frustrating to realise after we had lost by running out of white cubes and reset the board, that we were 4 cubes short because of the way the game was produced.
I understand that the provision of the extra 6 blue cubes and the separate bag for the extra white and black cubes probably makes sense from a production point of view, but as a consumer it is a little frustrating as my first instinct is not to count every cube on a new game.
Overall a great game, I really felt it added something to the game it stands on the shoulders of.
