“It’s hard to walk away from a winning streak, even harder to leave the table when you’re on a losing one.”
~ Cara Bertoia
You and your opponents represent powerful developers in a burgeoning Nevada city. Players will earn money and prestige by building the biggest and most profitable casinos on “The Strip,” the town’s backbone of dust and sin. You start with nothing but parking lots and dreams, but from there you build, sprawl, reorganize and gamble your way to victory.
In Lords of Vegas on a player’s turn, they draw a card… the cards are important. Firstly, it gives you a reference to show you where your new plot on the board will be. You mark this with a counter of your colour.
Then, everyone gets $1 for each plot they own.
Payouts
Casinos will pay out. The colour of the card drawn determines which will pay but each player scores $1 per pip on each dice in that colour Casino.
Then you score points for Casinos. Only the Casino boss will score, this is the player with the single highest single die in connected Casino blocks of the same colour. You get 1 point per block but eventually, the scoreboard restricts your scoring, requiring a certain number of points to move up one space on the track.
Finally, after all of this, you get to take your actions.
Build
The main one is Build where you pay the cost of a plot you own to place a Casino tile and add a die matching the number on the plot.
You can also if you’re the boss of a Casino, sprawl out to adjacent plots by paying double their value. But, as these plots have not had their cards drawn yet another player could draw the card. They could then take it over so it’s risky.
Reorganise & Remodel
You can reorganise a Casino by paying $1 per pip on all dice in that Casino. Players re-roll all their dice and put them back which could lead to a new Casino boss if you’re lucky.
Remodelling means you pay $5 per Casino tile to change their colour. Why would you do this? Well, as they pay out when their colour card is drawn you may want to change it to a colour card that hasn’t been pulled as often. Cards are laid out next to the board so you can see…
You can also Gamble by betting an amount and rolling dice, hoping to win money from another player.
Eventually, the ‘Game End’ card will be drawn and the game will end, obviously. Most points win.
Lords of Vegas Summary
It’s a fun game if you’re on the right side of it.
You can get lucky with card draws and get adjacent plots and then die rolls too… All of this can help you get points and move up the track. I know this because it happened to me 🙂
For me, Lords of Vegas is like Chinatown + Luck – Aggressiveness 🙂 It’s a lot of fun.
Jesta ThaRogue