Tribune: A Mini-Game Review
Aug. 30th, 2008 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aThursday we played two games of FFG's new release Tribune. It's a worker placement game set in Ancient Rome where you're trying to collect victory points from a variable menu of possibilities, and get there faster than your opponents.
The Good: I like worker placement games, as they tend to offer a lot of variety of tactics, and this one is no exception. However rather than the bone-standard choice of selecting different actions you instead select a variety of means to purchase cards: through purchases, through blind flips, through auctions, and through purchases from sets. There's then a second level of play where you use those cards to form sets and take over various factions, which give you components you need to declare victory.
The worker-placement system is, as usual, threaded, which means that things go quickly. I'm always a tiny bit leery when games go 5 players and up, but this one played well without notable downtime except in infrequent cases.
It was over fast, it was fun, and I know we're not the only group to play a second game immediately after the first.
The Bad: I have some minor complaints about the iconography of the board (which was good, not great) and the fiddliness of constantly handing things back and forth.
However my biggest complaint is in the victory conditions. The game could end quickly, often by surprise, which is never a very good thing in my viewpoint. It also felt like it was too early: there were just 3 turns in the first game (which means that we got 12 worker placements each) and 4 turns in the second game (which means we got 16).
I might have been OK with this, because it is a fast game, but the suddenness of things made it seem overly abrupt. Mike B. suddenly announced he'd won in the first game, catching us all by surprise (though he correctly noted that he mentioned every time he'd earned a victory condition, we just weren't payng attention). In the second game we counted our scores each round, to try and keep things in better balance, but given that I jumped from 1 victory condition to 4 victory conditions on the fourth turn (winning) that didn't help a lot.
Overall, I would have preferred using this fun system in a slightly deeper game--and that's rare for me to say that I prefer a long game to a short one. However, measuring what they decided to do rather than what I wanted, I will say it's quite a nice release. On the RPGnet scale I'd give it a 4 (out of 5) for Style, losing points only for the fact that some things aren't iconified which should be, and 4 (out of 5) for Substance, losing points due to the abruptness of the game's ending.
Which makes it a good game. I'd definitely keep a copy if I had it, and I'd be tempted to buy it if I didn't have mountains of games that are already at least this good.
The Good: I like worker placement games, as they tend to offer a lot of variety of tactics, and this one is no exception. However rather than the bone-standard choice of selecting different actions you instead select a variety of means to purchase cards: through purchases, through blind flips, through auctions, and through purchases from sets. There's then a second level of play where you use those cards to form sets and take over various factions, which give you components you need to declare victory.
The worker-placement system is, as usual, threaded, which means that things go quickly. I'm always a tiny bit leery when games go 5 players and up, but this one played well without notable downtime except in infrequent cases.
It was over fast, it was fun, and I know we're not the only group to play a second game immediately after the first.
The Bad: I have some minor complaints about the iconography of the board (which was good, not great) and the fiddliness of constantly handing things back and forth.
However my biggest complaint is in the victory conditions. The game could end quickly, often by surprise, which is never a very good thing in my viewpoint. It also felt like it was too early: there were just 3 turns in the first game (which means that we got 12 worker placements each) and 4 turns in the second game (which means we got 16).
I might have been OK with this, because it is a fast game, but the suddenness of things made it seem overly abrupt. Mike B. suddenly announced he'd won in the first game, catching us all by surprise (though he correctly noted that he mentioned every time he'd earned a victory condition, we just weren't payng attention). In the second game we counted our scores each round, to try and keep things in better balance, but given that I jumped from 1 victory condition to 4 victory conditions on the fourth turn (winning) that didn't help a lot.
Overall, I would have preferred using this fun system in a slightly deeper game--and that's rare for me to say that I prefer a long game to a short one. However, measuring what they decided to do rather than what I wanted, I will say it's quite a nice release. On the RPGnet scale I'd give it a 4 (out of 5) for Style, losing points only for the fact that some things aren't iconified which should be, and 4 (out of 5) for Substance, losing points due to the abruptness of the game's ending.
Which makes it a good game. I'd definitely keep a copy if I had it, and I'd be tempted to buy it if I didn't have mountains of games that are already at least this good.