Board Game Review - Foundations of Rome
Rome, built in a day
When you think of a Kickstarted game, Foundations of Rome might be exactly what comes to mind — an enormous box (that just barely fits in a Kallax shelf) full of over-engineered plastic pieces with fancy metal coins and a raft of small expansions, to boot. However, while it’s perhaps the archetype for the overindulgence this hobby has fallen prey to in recent years, Foundations of Rome is a simple and addictive little (big) game that serves as a fantastic introduction to board game skeptics who might not know just how beautiful this hobby can be.
While it boasts an impressive collection of massive pieces, the core gameplay loop of Foundations of Rome is extremely simple. You can do one of three things on your turn — gather income, buy a deed to claim a square on the board, or use the spaces you own to build a building. Over the course of the game you’ll generally get into a rhythm where you trade off taking these actions until, eventually, the last deed gets bought and the game comes to an end. Other than some semantics about how you can place buildings and the details of how to score points and collect income, that’s pretty much the entire game in a nutshell.
Each player will start with a handful of deeds on the board, and the rest will come down the line in a simple crawling card row, with the deck split up into thirds to signal when intermediate scorings will occur. If you’ve got the required money, and at least one deed marker left in front of you (and not already out on the board), you can use your turn to buy one of the face-up deed cards, sliding the rest down the line and making them cheaper. Then, congratulations! You just got some land that nobody else will be allowed to build on.
If you don’t have the money you need, you need to take income, a simple procedure of grabbing five dollars from the bank plus more based on how many commercial buildings you’ve built. You see, buildings in Foundations of Rome come in three flavors: commercial buildings, which dictate how much income you collect (both on turns you use that action as well as passively between rounds) and give you a few points, residential buildings, which increase your standing on the population track to earn a few points, and civic buildings, which … give you points. Are we sensing a pattern?
Indeed, almost everything in Foundations of Rome gives you points somehow. If you’re at the top of the population track, you get a big bonus every time scoring occurs, and otherwise earn a number of points equal to the position of the next person ahead of you (as long as you’ve got at least 1). Otherwise, you can focus on the commercial buildings, which just have points baked into each of them, again to be earned during the scoring phases. The size of each building determines how much money/points you get, in the case of the commercial buildings, or by how much your population increases, for the residential buildings.
The civic buildings are the most interesting and the trickiest. They earn you points at round’s end based on what they’re adjacent to, both of your own buildings and your opponents’. There’s a subtle bluffing game baked in here, where you don’t want to play it too early lest your opponents choose to build something unhelpful to your adjacency benefit, but you don’t want to wait too long, either, in case someone ends the round before you’ve got the chance to put it down and get those sweet points. There’s also some size considerations to take into account, as well, and you may benefit from putting a smaller one down in an early round and substituting it out later.
You see, while building is free — you just have to own the deeds to the spaces you wish to build on — there are some restrictions. Chief among them is the fact that once you’ve built a building, the only way it’ll ever come back off the board is if you upgrade it to a larger building. It doesn’t have to be the same type, but it has to be at least one square bigger (and still, obviously, made up of squares you own the deeds for). As such, you might find yourself laying down a bunch of small, one-square buildings early on, only to shift to a completely different strategy later as the layout of the board takes shape. A surprisingly interesting amount of depth for a game so relatively simple in its mechanics.
Foundations of Rome also comes with a slew of mini-expansions baked into the box, plus one fairly sizable one with the addition of Monuments. Monuments are basically supercharged versions of regular buildings that might take up a lot of extra space or have other requirements before you can build them, but the tricky thing is that everyone has access to them. It’s first come, first served, so you’ll have to pay extra close attention to the deeds your opponents collect.
Other modules include things like deed trading, hidden objectives, or unique player powers that get assigned at the start. While none of these feels particularly revolutionary, they’re all simple enough that you can add a handful of them to a game without feeling like it’s getting too bogged down.
While I wouldn’t probably say it’s worth the massive expense, Foundations of Rome is undoubtedly a marvel to behold. It’s an impressive specimen as a work of art (especially with the ink wash) and I think a perfect introduction to the hobby for someone who doesn’t play much other than Ticket to Ride. This isn’t really much more complicated than a game like that, but it’s a whole lot more impressive to look at, which might just be the push someone needs to explore other avenues in the hobby. After all, you know what they say about all roads …