Total War Rome: The Board Game review – a slightly baffling triumph

It’s late Summer, 210 BC, and the Balearic Sea glows orange with the reflected light of my shattered, burning warships. I levied all the might of Rome to launch an amphibious pincer attack on the Carthaginian general Mago Barca as he advanced through Northeast Spain, only to meet crushing defeat at the hands of mountain troops who knew their homeland. Now my navy, too, is splinters and ashes. The real Scipio Africanus conquered Spain, but mine died there in ignominy – and all because I completely underestimated Total War Rome: The Board Game.

This game has been a long time coming – we first reported on its development in 2021; it then raised around $650k on crowdfunding platform Gamefound in 2022, before entering what seems to have been an extremely fraught two years of development and pre-production.

According to a recent Gamefound campaign update, the game nearly “withered and died” in 2023. But its solo designer – veteran miniature wargame creator Simon Hall – took over management and backers are reportedly finally receiving their copies of the Rome Total War board game, ahead of general online sales planned soon. With great thanks to Hall’s company CCC Games, I’ve also been able to test it out.

And what I found has by turns confused, surprised, and delighted me. In a 2021 interview with Wargamer, Hall described his creation as a “medium-weight wargame with an economic engine”, designed specifically to mirror the classic PC Total War game in every respect possible, while still working as a board game.

A tall order, I thought – but if successful, potentially one of the best board games ever (for my tastes at least). And is it successful? Yes, almost completely. 

What is Total War Rome: The Board Game?

Imagine someone who’s been designing historical tabletop wargames for 20 years, and is wildly in love with the Rome: Total War PC game. Now imagine they took the basic structure of a simple territory control game like Risk (move troops into regions, taking attrition as you go, get resources based on turf held, use resources to take more turf, repeat until you own the world), then grafted on extra turn phases to represent all RTW’s familiar grand strategy game mechanics: agents, diplomacy, intrigue, tech trees, and building developments.

Assuming it all fit together and flowed nicely, that’d be a pretty neat war board game on its own, right? Well, that’s about half what this game is. In his quest to mirror Total War’s classic, dual layer structure of bird’s-eye empire building and zoomed in tactical battling, Hall has built in RTW’s army stacks, unit recruitment, unit upgrades, generals, and battles too.

How is that possible, without either massively simplifying combat to the level of Risk, or packaging the game with hundreds of minis? Why, by designing a whole other card game within the board game, of course! I’ll get onto how this works in a moment, but suffice it to say: it really works.

In fact, it works better than I realized. In my last game, distracted by trying to work out various key rules details not explained in the manual (on which more later), I forgot how expertly the game’s combat system represents that crucial aspect of ancient warfare: terrain. That’s how I charged a legionary army into the mountains of northern Spain and lost the most celebrated Roman general of the Second Punic War to a grossly outnumbered pack of Iberian spearmen.

Like its PC namesake, this is a strategy game with hidden depths – so let’s get into them.

The components

First things first: what you get in the box is impressive, especially considering the apparently troubled, indie nature of the game’s development. The five army miniatures, two ships, and three teeny agent minis per faction are charming – just detailed enough, and cast in the semi-soft plastic and oversaturated bright colors of an old-school board game like the original 1989 HeroQuest. Identifying each army mini by the tiny number on the base is a mite aggravating, but it’s nothing a lick of brightly colored paint won’t fix.

The laminated card player boards – which track your tech advancements, diplomatic statuses, and tempting menu of military units to recruit – are neat, functional, and precisely as prettified as they need to be. No muss, no fuss.

The chunky, proprietary dice feel well made; the wooden markers for walls, roads, barracks, and markets serve nicely; and the cards for all your units, actions, and events are decent quality, with splendid original artworks. The sculpted grey plastic buildings and metal coins you see in my photos are backer bonuses, so I can’t be sure they’ll be made available at retail – but I hope they are, because they add a surprising amount of atmosphere.

But the star of the show is undoubtedly the board, which satisfyingly recreates the PC game’s map of textured, sunlit land masses and seas from Spain in the West to Jerusalem in the East. The result is a board game that feels big and polished, despite a rocky upbringing.

Strategy gameplay

If you’ve played Rome: Total War, the game’s main strategy layer will fall into place pretty quickly. Each round starts with randomly assigning initiative scores, which you can brute force by secretly spending gold to jump the queue if you wish. The winner gets to pick who starts, and which direction play proceeds around the table, in every phase.

Second, everyone moves their agents around to conduct trade, diplomacy, and subterfuge using the multi-function Action cards. Third is payday: the taxation phase, in which you collect gold for every region you control, with some pivotal territories worth more cash than others.

In the fourth phase, you go campaigning, moving your armies to capture territories or trigger battles, and sailing your fleets around. Finally, in the spending phase, everyone gets to spend their precious Denarii on new units, tech upgrades, and buildings.

Like most aspects of this game, some of these mechanics appear bewildering and contrived, until you play through them and realize how cleverly they actually compress key design features of the PC game into simple, well paced, distinctly board gamey systems.

Take the agent phase and action cards, for example. On opening the box, you’re greeted with player reference sheets showing 13 of the blighters – “design bloat” you cry; “how ever will I remember all that nonsense?” What is this, a Warhammer 40k codex? But this is where the board gameyness comes in – in the form of that Gloomhaven special: multi-use cards.

Each agent phase, you draw a hand of five Action cards – each of which has three potential uses. You can use it to make one of your agents do the one specific agent action whose icon is on the card, or you can save the card to trigger its written ‘event’ in another phase, or you can burn it for extra gold to spend. Besides, you start the game with just two agents, each of whom can attempt one action only.

In one fell swoop, that intimidating decision space on ‘agent stuff’ is slashed down to size, from 13 to two. And instead you’re given much meatier strategic choices that encourage you to look ahead: what do I want to achieve, and what will help me most this turn – extra cash, a chance to assassinate an enemy general, or making two ‘allied’ armies fight each other later in the turn?

It’s just one of many design choices that encourage long-term thinking in a strategic campaign which – while not stretching to the 35+ hours of a RTW playthrough on PC – lasts a minimum of three hours.

Another is that taxing your provinces for their lovely gold comes before campaigning – so grabbing a bunch of land for a short-term cash injection is a risky business, because your enemy always has time to recapture it before you get a chance to reap the rewards next turn (unless, of course, you win the initiative and choose to go last – just one of various ways to get sneaky with that particular mechanic).

Spending is just as important, and just as forward looking. The 12-ish gold per turn you start the game with feels like a lot of money – but balancing your budget between military, economy, and technology is no joke, and aligning your investments with a longer term plan is essential.

In the tragic game above, I teched up to get Scorpios, imagining glorious, high-tech Roman victories in the field. Thanks to my disastrous terrain miscalculation, however, they didn’t even get to deploy, and ended up either smashed or in a Carthaginian treasure hoard. My opponent’s research funds went on a tech that gave him free Iberian mercenaries – deadly in rough terrain – and the Quinqueremes naval upgrade, which led him to smash my invasion fleet with ease.

Ultimately, as with the best strategy board games, each element is tied carefully into the next, and success in tactical battles, on both land and sea, relies on using effective strategy to stack the deck beforehand. Speaking of decks…

Battle gameplay

So, that card game within a game. When battle is joined in Total War Rome: The Board Game, we leave the main board entirely and fight in a totally separate, card driven wargame. Each military unit (and each general) has its own card, which form the tabletop version of your Total War army stacks – up to ten unit cards per army, plus a general.

Each unit card shows its types (infantry, cavalry, skirmisher, foot, mounted, etc.) and which colored dice you’ll roll for it in combat. Each round, you deploy cards and roll your dice against each other, with better color dice giving better chances to wound and kill enemy units. Cards are deployed face down until combat begins, but if your general is better than the enemy’s, you get ‘reveals’ – allowing you to see what they’ve played and swap out your units for an advantage. So far, so board game.

Where things get all spicy and wargamey is, once again, terrain – because every unit has different dice to roll depending on whether it’s fighting in ‘good going’ (i.e. flat plains) or ‘in terrain’, where it’s got mountains and forests to contend with. Many units have a special ability (triggered by ‘S’ dice rolls) that can prevent damage or instakill certain enemies if you’re in your preferred terrain.

This remarkable battle system (termed ‘StratPlay’) is designed in multiple phases, representing the broad strokes of how ancient battles were generally fought and won. First, skirmisher units fight to exploit any difficult terrain and harry the enemy force if they can. Next, cavalry and chariot units clash on the flanks. Then the main forces battle for the center; and finally any mounted units held in reserve can attempt to envelop the enemy.

Like its PC forebear, this game uses terrain to tie the strategic and tactical layers together – because the number of terrain symbols on the region where you’re fighting dictates how many skirmisher-dominated rounds you play, before the main forces collide. In an open Gallic plain, my three Legionary cards, supported by Scorpios, would likely have minced Mago’s forces. In the forested mountains of Osca we were cut to pieces by throwing spears before we could land a blow.

I could go on about the excellent design points here – like the fact that choosing to have a sliding scale, instead of the binary ‘terrain/no terrain’ setup it could have used, adds loads of strategic variance and immersion, in exchange for just a few extra mountains drawn on the map. Or how representing the presence of terrain or extra cavalry with extra, optional battle phases (rather than an arbitrary dice modifier, for example) further cements the feeling that the battle is really taking place, in that place, with those armies, rather than comparing numbers in a vacuum.

But the crux is this: with minimal rules complexity, 22 cards, and a handful of dice, the game manages to simulate battles where the location, the army compositions, the generals, and your tactical decisions all meaningfully and satisfyingly count towards the result – and all feel properly situated in the broader flow and story of the game. It’s miraculous, is what it is.

In its current state, there’s only one major problem I have with this game, and the Gamefound updates make it clear the developer is well aware and working on it: the rules manual(s). They’re rich in detail, with worked examples and strategy tips that even the best mainstream board game rulebooks would benefit from – but they’re pretty terrible at helping you set up and play the game for the first time.

A one-sheet setup guide (seemingly added to the box as a sticking plaster for this issue) helps somewhat, and the series of lengthy video tutorials on the game’s website are essential. But even after consuming all of that, I had to guess a few things out, to do with action cards, agents, turn order, and some of the battle system’s moving parts. For me it was annoying; for a non-wargamer it might be a real brick wall. As drawbacks go, however, it’s perhaps the easiest to resolve – and it seems clear it will be.

Verdict – who is Total War Rome: The Board Game for?

Assuming the ‘onboarding’ side of things gets fixed by the time the game is widely available, I reckon it should completely accessible and a ton of fun for anyone comfortable with mid-weight strategy games like Root or Scythe – and of course, fans of Rome Total War (the primary target market) should have a spectacular time. The only turn-offs for some will be the occupational hazards of large scale games: long play time (3-5 hours), and the need for a lot of table space.

In fact, for me personally, the janky instructions are the only thing that hold this game back from a perfect score. It sits at the confluence of three things I love – strategy board games, tabletop wargames, and Rome Total War – and, thanks to brilliant design and gorgeous presentation, it does a far better job of melding them together than I ever expected.

I’m genuinely itching to play a lot more of it – which is lucky for me, because the (as yet dormant) CCC Games store, where this game will be sold, already has preposterous amount of expansion material in the works, including an Alexander addon that doubles the map size, several more factions, and more.

Hall also says he has a 10-year plan to make more Total War board games; if they’re anything like this triumph, I say bring them on.

Source: Wargamer