I’ve always found board games to be an interesting area of study. They are generally contain some mechanisms of engagement and interaction between players. Some games are effectively the sum of their parts. For example, a simple worker placement game has a mechanism where you put workers down and then instantly get the “effects” of the location. Sometimes this effect is the ability to gain resources while other times it is the ability to spend your resources for some kind of benefit that may get you closer to victory. Sometimes the designer with complicate this further and make it that first you put down all your workers but you don’t actually get the benefit of all your actions until after all workers are down by all players. This makes planning required, but also gives you some insight into what your opponents are doing. More planning but also potentially more reward. Other times the draw of the game is that the placement locations allow you to engage in completely different mechanisms. A great of example of this is Kanban which is really just a worker placement with only 1 worker, but each of those worker slots lets you do a whole slew of mechanisms that you engage in.
You may think one way is better but then some designer name Karl-Heinz Schmiel comes along and goes,
Then you have Tribune, or rather as it was originally called Tribune: Primus Inter Pares which apparently means “First Among Peers” for those of you who are not well versed in your Latin. All comments I will be making about the game are for the 2021 reprint version, it is the one I have and the one I played. If you are looking for comparisons to the original you won’t find them here, so with all disclaimers out of the way lets get to it.
It is so refreshing to play a game that does not overstay it’s welcome. The ideal length of a game is as long as everyone is still interested to keep going. Usually Euro games of this weight have a fixed number of rounds where we are all earning points and at some point the game ends and we add up our score to figure out who did the best. In Tribune the system is a bit different. You have a menu of items that you need to achieve and based on player count you will need to achieve between 4 and 7 of these requirements to win depending on player count. So effectively its first to 4-7 points but each of these achievements are often permanent and each one feels both possible yet quite daunting to achieve.
How “daunting” are those goals? Well lets take one of the “simple” victory achievements, 8 laurels. Get 8 of one resource, shouldn’t be too bad right? I mean every faction starts with a Laurel on it if you go and capture them (which you will probably have a a few cards to do so with, even in the early game) or you could go for specifically for some factions that provide Laurels on takeover (i.e when you take control of them) or the one faction that potentially later in the game gives you one laurel per control, its completely reasonable for you to set up a turn where you can bag 3 or 4 Laurels which is about half of the required amount to get a point. The relatively more complex are similar in nature, they will generally require about 2 turns to fully achieve, and you will often find yourself half-achieving multiple conditions in any given turn. That is of coarse if people don’t get in your way.
While some worker placement spaces are very simple (pay a cost, get the card), most end up being a competition between players. The Atria Auctionaira has two players bid for 3 cards with the winner paying the loser the money, the Catacumbae space lets you pay simple money for one of the cards in a pool, but the earlier you want to select the card the more you are going to have to pay for the privilege. There’s even a space that earns Laurels for discard a pair of cards of the same faction, with the player that discards the highest total sum of cards getting an extra laurel. So you can have all kinds of plans but leave it to your other pesky players to wreck your day.
Topping it all off is the faction take overs that were mentioned briefly above. A faction can be taken over using cards of it’s faction. The takeover rules are relatively simple, you can either take over using a higher number of cards or a higher total sum of cards (min 2 cards), compared to the current winning set of cards. These two conditions are great because it makes it very easy to take over factions. Sure you may have 3 strong cards that add up to a great total of 15 to hold the faction, but someone can just play four 1’s and suddenly you lose the faction. That being said if they do so they probably won’t hold onto the faction for long as any two cards that add up to five or more would beat them. And this is another place where players can mess each other up as there is two places per faction for take over, but only one takeover can occur. So do you intentionally go for the space that lets you bid first and hope the second player doesn’t have better hand than you, or do you strive with confidence to bid second for the faction, also timing of this placement is important, because placing this down shows the other players you are making a bid for the faction and maybe they can get in your way by scooping up all their available cards in the current auctions. And all this for two sets of benefits, one being the takeover bonus which you get when you….well take over the faction while the other being the control benefit which you get for controlling the factions, and that’s why sometimes you want to get a really good bid on a faction so that your control can last two turns and not just one.
The most surprising thing that this game brings is how quick all of this complexity comes together. Once you know the rules a game can be easily played in under 1 hour with your first game probably taking closer to 90 minutes. It continually surprises me at every play just how quickly the game moves. I have seen several players gear up for the “long game” in Eurogame terms just to be amazed that everything ended two whole rounds before they thought it could. Obviously this is a positive, in our hobby time is often the most precious resource we have and being able to shorten the playtime without lowering the strategical and tactical enjoyment is always a plus.
As always if I am writing about it, it is probably about a game that I want to keep and continue enjoying. This one is a bit hard to get to the table because it is quite brain intensive even though it is on the shorter side and I feel like the teach ends up being about half the game length especially for the first game. I am happy to own it and even happier when I get to play it.