All roads lead to Martin Wallace they say, errrrhhh or Rome …. or Rome designed by Marting Wallace. Ehhh who knows, just let me tell you about Martin Wallace’s new design Aeterna, created in collaboration with Ergo Ludo who helped develop the game.
Aeterna is a worker placement with strong area majority and hand management influences, which takes you back to Rome’s humble beginning. During 3 separate ages, the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire, you will strive to accumulate the most prestige (points) and ensure your family’s legacy and rightful place in the Eternal City history.
Game setup and flow
The setup is a lengthy one, I am not going to lie. Place the game board in the central of the table and next to it the personality cards, monument cards and province cards sorted by era. Based on player count, assign the reward tokens to the respective number of hills (gathering locations). In a 2-player game use 3 hills, in a 3-player game use 5 hills, and in a 4-player game use all 7 hills. Randomly assign the unrest damage tokens to the unrest track and place the phase counter on track A. Place the building tokens in the constructions area. Give each player a Domunus board, 2 citizens, 2 auras (currency of the game), 5 wheat and 1 stone. Each player receives 2 province cards and 3 monument cards.
The game takes place over 3 rounds or eras which are composed of 9 phases. No worries most of them are admin. The first phase requires players to draft 4 out of the 5 cards received in the beginning. The left-over cards are placed on the board where they can be played under particular conditions. In the second phase, which is essentially the meat and potatoes of the game, players will take several actions in turn. They can play the cards they drafted for their effect, build one of the 3 buildings available each turn, influence a roman personality or influence a hill (place a worker on the map to get the location’s benefit). After every one passes, the 3rd phase of the game takes place, the scoring phase. Players will score points from the active hills based on the number of citizens they have at that location. Having the most citizens usually guarantees you are the prefect of the hill and you will earn the most points. In the 4th phase, however, if the prefect has poorly managed their hill and it is overpopulated, devastation and unrest impact the respective player. The last 5 phases are exclusively admin work. The prefects of hills with buildings will get the building bonuses. Players will pay the unrest cost or take doom tokens. And last but not least you will have to feed your workers, just remember a hungry worker is an extra unrest token for you, so please won’t you feed your people…
The Good
I must admit that the first selling point around this game was its famous designer, Martin Wallace. Brass is one of my favorite games and I was happy to jump on another of his
designs even if I barely managed to power through Steam Power. After this pun I will see myself out now. I am happy to say that Aeterna feels a bit closer to Martin’s Brass design than any of his other games. Speaking of Brass, my second selling point for the game is its tight economy. Just like in his titular game, in Aeterna you need to focus your resources. The more you can extract out of your cards the better and any misplay can be seriously punished. Sure, the game is less punishing than Brass in the sense that if you misplayed and counted poorly or you didn’t take some extra resources into consideration, the game will let you as free action discard a card to get some variance of the missing resource you need. This is where the game differs from its predecessor. Whereas Brass will punish you severely for misplaying by taking up one of your turns and usually taking up a loan which means loss of points, in Aeterna the punishing part is a bit more relaxed, you lose a card which although bad doesn’t mean necessarily losing a turn.
A third topic I am pretty keen on is the area majority mechanic of the game. My favorite thing about board games is the human interaction so I tend to stay away from worker placement due to low player interaction. I am pleased to say the Aeterna steers away from the multiplier solitaire troop and actually gets people to into other people’s faces. It mainly achieves this interaction one of two ways. Players will fight to become the prefect of a certain area, one of Rome’s infamous 7 hills, by having the most family members at that location and earn point by doing so. However, each hill has only 3 benefits to offer up so this opens up decision space for a player “do I go for the points but forgo the benefit? or do I go to another hill but risk losing the prefecture of another hill?”. So, you see how the game manages to create player agency, a trade mark of any good game.
My fourth selling point and the one I am most keen on is the way the game unwinds. From a design point of view, a game will gradually open up possibilities and opportunities as it goes on, until a peak point from where it either closes the game out or starts to unwind and reduce the number of possibilities till its gradual conclusion. Aeterna turns this trope on its head for you see dear reader, in this design the longer the game goes on the less opportunities you have. Remember those hills we were fighting to rule as prefects? Well in turns out that if a lot of people come to that particular place, the hills get overpopulated and suffers a small destruction event the current prefect family will get some disgrace tokens (negative points at the end of the game) and from next round on that hill will offer up less points in the process. Again, this opens up an interesting decision space, “do I go to a particular hill to trigger an overpopulation event or do I go to a lesser populated hill and take my benefits from that area”. Again, player interaction and decisions making opportunities done well.
My last positive on this one is the player elimination part… and before you start forming an angry mob just hear me out, because I hate player elimination as much as the next guy, hoooowever player elimination done properly is a rare treat and I am a huge fun of that. Going mental on the unrest track can yield great benefits, but also can lead to a point from where you cannot win the game, basically your family becomes so infamous that history removes you from its pages and the game removes you from scoring by taking away your score marker. Again, there is an interesting decision-making space for the player on how greedy do they want to be.
The Bad
Although I don’t see any major flaws with the game, there are some nitpicks I need to point out. Firstly, the theme feels pasted on, don’t get me wrong the developers have done a great job putting the ancient Rome theme on top of the mechanics. There are cards in the game with some of the most influential figures in all of Rome’s history and some of the most important landmarks the Roman empire has built, but they feel some how forced. The only connection between theme and mechanics was the 7 locations or “hills of Rome” where workers can be added.
My second problem with the game, and I feel this is becoming more and more recurrent these days, is the player count. Remember that decision space of “do I go to a particular hill to trigger an overpopulation event or do I go to a lesser populated hill and take my benefits from that area”? Well in a 2 player or 3 player game that decision is totally viable and requires attention. In a 4-player game that decision space disappears due to shear number of workers. Basically, in a 4-player game you just place your workers without care about triggering the destruction event just because you need to place your workers.
Conclusion
Summing it up, I think Aeterna is a great light to mid euro game with high player interaction (for a euro game) that deserves people’s attention. A word of caution, if you plan advertising this game as a Martin Wallace design, please set the expectations right that this is a mid-weight game at best not the heavy weight hitters Mr. Wallace has accustom us with.
