In Rising Cultures, you take control of one of four different civilizations — Egypt, Persia, Rome, or the Abbasid Caliphate — each with its own unique deck and abilities. Your goal is to lead your culture to fame and glory through conquered provinces or building cards. Each of the multi-use cards presents you with an important decision: Do you use them for resources, for your military, to build important buildings, or to play unique leaders? The decision is yours!
Caesar and Cleopatra is a card laying game where players assume the roles of these two great leaders. Caesar wants Rome to invade Egypt while Cleopatra wants it to remain independent and both try to influence Roman officials to support their cause.
Players take turns and send their agents, i.e. play numbered cards from 1 to 5 to influence one group of Roman officials, Aedils, Quaestors, Senators, Pretorians and Censors. They can send fewer agents face-down or more agents face-up. Additionally they can play action cards like Assassins that take out opposing agents or scouts that reveal face-down agents. Players can decide if they want to refill their hand from the agent deck or the action card deck but once one of the decks is empty they don't have access to any more of these cards.
After each players turn, a card from the voting stack is revealed and the group of officials that is indicated on the card casts their vote. The player who has the most influence points next to that group wins one official from that group to his cause and then removes his strongest agent from that stack.
The game ends when all the officials have picked a side and the player who has influenced most of them wins the game, with bonus points for the majority in each group and some simple hidden objectives.
In Æterna, you take the role of a Roman Gens (family) that will try to increase its prestige through three eras: the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire.
Your goal is to increase your influence over the city by supporting the conquest of the provinces, ruling over "the seven hills of Rome", and contributing to the construction of monuments and buildings. While doing this, you must not demotivate the people in the hills under your direct control as unrest could put you in a bad light. If you manage majorities, cards, and resources better than your opponents, your Gens will be remembered in the history books as one of the most important in Rome.
You are summoned by the Roman emperor to hear about his great plans for expansion. He wants you to found the next great Roman city and bring glory to the Roman Empire!
Carefully plan your city and efficiently connect neighborhoods to gain valuable resources! Spend coins and employ population to build magnificent monuments! Use legions to conquer distant lands for the Emperor! Produce valuable luxuries to use for scoring points! Gain the Will of the Gods and use it to empower your city! Glory is within your grasp!
Build the greatest Roman cities and bring glory to Rome in this tile-placement, city builder board game for 1-4 players!
In Magna Roma, the objective is to make the most points at the end of the game by building your city efficiently! To do so, players take turns to place city tiles in their city. A newly placed tile must be connected to at least one of the previously placed tiles. When a player places a tile, the connection with the adjacent tiles will result in producing one or more resources for the player. For example, connecting two half-circles found on the tiles produces a coin, a rectangle and triangle produce population, a rectangle and half-circle produce a legion etc. What's more, if the connected shapes are of the same color, the game rewards the player with double the resources.
With these resources, players will be able to play the other actions in the game, such as: build different monuments in your city, gain a Luxury Good, gain the Gods' Favor tiles, conquer new provinces for the Emperor all serving the same goal - to gain the most points at the end of the game and build the greatest Roman city that ever existed!
—description from the publisher
Set in ancient Rome, Trajan is a development game in which players try to increase their influence and power in various areas of Roman life such as political influence, trading, military dominion and other important parts of Roman culture.
The central mechanism of the game uses a system similar to that in Mancala or pit-and-pebbles games. In Trajan, a player has six possible actions: building, trading, taking tiles from the forum, using the military, influencing the Senate, and placing Trajan tiles on his tableau.
At the start of the game, each player has two differently colored pieces in each of the six sections (bowls) of his tableau. On a turn, the player picks up all the pieces in one bowl and distributes them one-by-one in bowls in a clockwise order. Wherever the final piece is placed, the player takes the action associated with that bowl; in addition, if the colored pieces in that bowl match the colors shown on a Trajan tile next to the bowl (with tiles being placed at the start of the game and through later actions), then the player takes the additional action shown on that tile.
What are you trying to do with these actions? Acquire victory points (VPs) in whatever ways are available to you – and since this is a Feld design, you try to avoid being punished, too. At the Forum you try to anticipate the demands of the public so that you can supply them what they want and not suffer a penalty. In the Senate you acquire influence which translates into votes on VP-related laws, ideally snagging a law that fits your long-term plans. With the military, you take control of regions in Europe, earning more points for those regions far from Rome.
All game components are language neutral, and the playing time is 30 minutes per player.