Forum Trajanum Board Game First Impressions
Forum Trajanum is a nice little Feld.
Well, I say little…
Emperor Trajan plans to have a monument built for eternity: the Forum Trajanum. It is supposed to become the biggest and most glorious Emperor’s forum that the Roman world has ever seen — not only in order to demonstrate his success as Princeps Optimus in an imposing manner, but also to foster the well-being and the fame of the honorable citizens of Rome.
Forum Trajanum Game Play
This is a quick overview, very far from comprehensive, to let you know how the game plays in general.
The board is in the middle of the table of course, with mosaic type boards used to create the Forum in the middle of that.
There are stacks of buildings by colour and cards by type around the board. There is also a pile of coins and meeples called assistants (brown), tribunes (white), builders (grey) and workers (green, blue, red, yellow.)
Finally, there are 3 Trajan cards numbered I, II, and III randomly selected from 3 decks.
Players also have a Colonia with things all over it, we’ll get to all this as we look at gameplay. But for now, know it is a 6×6 grid of streets with symbols on and around it.
The game is played over 3 years with each year broken into 4 seasons, or rounds.
At the beginning of each season, 2 Street cards are revealed from the deck and placed in the 2 slots on the board. These show the black and white symbols around your Colonia.
Simultaneously, players will take 1 tile from each street shown on the cards that were just flipped over. One you will keep for yourself and the other is passed face down to the player on your right.
Activation
Starting with the 1st player, each player will flip their tiles and activate one. What happens with it depends on what it is:
Citizen: Move it to the matching citizen row and activate it
Resource: Gain that resource, these include workers, builders, coins, Trajans or assistants.
Whenever you play a Citizen, if this is the 1st for a particular Citizen, you gain an ability to use during the game. If it’s the 2nd of that Citizen, you take an immediate reward.
The tile you have with your opponent’s colour is moved to the right side of your player board and the tile with your colour to the bottom-right corner space as an Envoy. These are used later.
You can now build a building in your Colonia spending the resources of a combination of builders and/or workers. Then you gain the benefit of that building.
For each building with a colour you place, you may use an Envoy to go to the Forum. Put the tile in the forum on an empty space of matching colour. When a player places an envoy tile that fills an area they get a bonus tribune, assistant, coin, upgrade or 2 VP.
Scoring
Now the start player moves right and a new season starts. After 4 seasons, before the new year, there is a bit of scoring.
You spend 1 coin for each active Citizen you have or deactivate it by turning it face down.
Score each of the 6 rows in your Colonia by multiplying the number of different grey buildings by the multiplier the citizen gives you.
Score 1 point for each envoy tile you have orthogonally adjacent to an Eagle in the Forum, and 2 points for each tile on an Eagle square.
For your largest connected group of Envoys in the forum, score points according to the number on the slide bar. This bar can be upgraded during the game for extra points.
The player with the most points after the 3rd year is the winner!
Setup
Lots of bits! Everything is colour coded so can be dropped in various places. Some tiles stacking and card shuffling ut nothing too bad.
Components & Artwork
The standard for this type of game, as is the artwork.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
It’s a bit of a mess with things happening all over the place, some simultaneously in parts.
Apart from the tile ‘draft’, everything is open information so no
Forum Trajanum Summary
Sorry for the very truncated rule explanation but this game is all over the place. It makes sense while playing it but to explain it with images is quite difficult. There is a lot of detail that I missed out on, it’s not important to the flow of the game but it’s important when playing.
You’re basically drafting the correct tiles to allow you to chain actions across your board and the mainboard.
My issue with games like this is that I’d rather play something simpler like Suburbia, Carcassonne etc or something heavier like Bora Bora. When it falls in the middle it needs to give me more.
But it is fun and I would play it again but it’s been a few months and I’ll need to relearn how to play!
Jesta ThaRogue
