A review of Caesar!: Seize Rome in Twenty Minutes in twenty minutes

friends romans countrymen lend me your ears no really i've not been doing very well lately so any ears that you might have if you could just pass the basket just put it in pass it to the next person and then as soon as my paycheck comes in [Music] now that i have your ears thank you i would like to whisper sweet nothings about a little board game i like called caesar sees rome in 20 minutes an absolutely ridiculous title with a pun so bad that even i refuse to play with it but whilst i'm here let me highlight the absolute best part of that title which is 20 minutes because you know how long this game takes that's right it's 20 minutes what's that a board game that takes as long as it says on the box that's right it's 20 minutes 20 minutes 20 minutes i don't know if you noticed but i'm quite enamored with the length of this game which is 20 minutes that's because i have a lot of time for a game that takes 20 minutes actually i have exactly 20 minutes length of course isn't everything i don't mean that in a naughty way i just didn't have another way to express that concept and i lost my trail of thought now length isn't everything colonoscopies also take about 20 minutes and you don't exactly see me saying to the doctor can we play again let me assuage your fears caesar sees rome in 20 minutes is just about the best 20 minutes you can spend playing a board game that takes 20 minutes talking of colonoscopies before i extol the virtues of caesar sees rome in 20 minutes a turs two-player tactical battle that feels smart clever inventive and just so darn great to play first we have to broach the uncomfortable subject of how this game looks i'm not even gonna try and defend it if you like your games pretty and won't have it any other way there's nothing i can say or do to convince you that caesar sees rome in 20 minutes is a game you should add to your collection the cardboard feels cheap the bags are made from a material that can only be explained by someone deliberately ordering the world's least pleasant fabric and they are well bye i'm still gonna say try and look past that because caesar is really good in caesar you'll take on the role of either caesar perhaps the most famous italian man or his arch nemesis pompey full name neues pompius magnus no matter which side you'll play you'll get one unpleasant to touch cloth bag an identical set of round cardboard influence tokens that are equally unpleasant to touch that you will then put into the unpleasant to touch cloth bag and as the game progresses you will put your hand into the unpleasant to touch cloth bag multiple times and draw the unpleasant to touch influence tokens when the game begins you will only have two influence tokens tucked away secretly behind your screen and then each turn you will place one of these tokens onto the map contributing towards your campaign to seize wrong aha you might ask but what do i need to do to actually seize roman win the game well that's where things get a touch tricky and very interconnected also at the start of the game you will receive 12 control tokens by winning battles on the map you will be able to place them on conquered regions the first to get rid of all of their control tokens wins the game the key phrase here being get rid of because as the times of war turns some of your control tokens might get swept away but in terms of winning the game that doesn't matter each token removed from this area contributes 112 towards your victory whether it's on the board or not you you just want that ear don't you want the people's ears can we just get the dog one of the ears thank you thank you do you want this i'm gonna have to pay people back but if you want it you can have it confused don't worry i got you let's look at how you place influence tokens first whenever it's your turn you can place any ones you have behind your screen onto the borders of these regions each influence token has a symbol perhaps swords or shields or maybe navy you can place an influence token onto a space that has a matching symbol unless you have a token garnished with some bay leaves much like bay itself it can be placed anywhere thematic and tasty you will however notice that the token itself is split into two and each side features a numerical value sometimes identical sometimes different and that's because when you place the token you place it onto the border of two different regions each value will contribute military strength to the region it's facing and of course how you orient the token is up to you which already offers a delicious pickle if let's say i have an influence token with six swords on one side and nil on the other if i place it here which of these territories am i willing to throw all my strength towards and which one i'm willing to neglect if that sounds interesting buckle up things about to get better if by placing an influence token i fully enclose a region with influence tokens then that region is scored and whoever has the highest total on influence tokens facing towards that region will win it and get to place their control marker onto it that right there is already a game perhaps even an exciting one weighing up where to focus your forces which region deserves more of your attention do you want to instigate fights all the way on the other side of the map or do you want to focus on what you think is a key region do you want to snap territories that require only a scant free influence tokens to surround or do you want an all-out war for italia which requires significant investment and attention but rewards you with not one but two controlled token placements and that is already one-sixth of your victory right there or maybe you can fight for italia in a different way instigating battles adjacent to it but always peppering a token that shares a border with italia that way hopefully winning battles outside and eventually within but in all this you might be noticing a flaw a quirk one poorly chosen herb that doesn't quite chow let's say that caesar places one of their tokens right here and then the turn goes to pompey and pompey could put up a fight and put one of their tokens into the region as well but why would they they would be fighting against caesar's potential two tokens with just one of theirs and if they do do that then the turn goes back to caesar and not only do they get to finish this area but also they know exactly how many forces they need to contribute to win so then my only real choice is to not get involved at all which makes this about as good a game of conflict as playing dodgeball with a solo variant the whole thing just devolves into each player placing token by token into their own little regions it's just not fun okay let me tell you how this really works there's one more thing that happens when control for the area is assessed whoever places the influence token that encloses the region and trigger scoring gets a bonus regardless of whether they win the region or not and these bonuses they have to be good enough to deliberately want to lose a region so for example if i enclosed a region with this scroll bonus i would get the scroll and that grants me an extra turn imagine if this was chess and then you take your turn and then you immediately get another 10. that's good right it's not just good it's interesting because it opens up this space to be a play field instead of abstract lines on a piece of cardboard now you can finagle situations like for example deliberately losing a region but then you get an extra turn but with the same token you've placed you're empowering another region and then because you have an extra turn you get to place yet another token this time winning the region and getting the bonus and once again getting an extra turn and that is just one of the four bonuses you can also permanently increase the size of your influence token limit dislodge more control tokens from your supply and even flip other tokens face down the importance of which i'll elaborate on later i'm making this all sound very clever and it is but it's important to acknowledge that caesar is not a very strategic game turned by time you only have two tokens to choose from and those tokens dictate which battles you can engage in and which ones you can't even the bay leaf wild tokens aren't as versatile as they initially seem because whilst they do let you place a token anywhere their values are generally pretty low on both sides leaving you in a situation which is never quite perfect caesar is reactive tactical and pivoting the game into the direction you want it to go into requires more than willpower and that can do attitude but it never stops being clever because all these options and pathways remain a conscious possibility so even if you haven't quite got the right token to pull your plan off with the right draw you might just get that which does make caesar somewhat reliant on luck but never in a way that feels punishing or unfair instead he just wants you to go with the flow because there's always an avenue always an opportunity there's so much scope to become familiar and intimate with this design that you're less inclined to blame it and you just want to dig deeper and deeper and then bam 20 minutes are done can we play again not so fast there's just this one little cruel twist that pretty much cements caesar into a classic two-player banger now i don't know about you this whole thing doesn't exactly scream ancient wrong to me which is fine this is a two-player short abstract game the setting is just that set dressing but once again i want something that makes the area i play on in games of conflict feel a little bit more alive i want the map to have features and personality and so far this just looks like black lines with questionable graphic design also i want a touch of variance so i'm not just replaying the same puzzle over and over again if i didn't need those things i'd be playing chess and i'm not knocking chess here it's just that so much of chess is already mapped out and the joy of it is from getting better and making the right moves whereas the joy of caesar comes from just playing it making cool moves the variance and personality are both achieved by the bonus tokens being randomly distributed each time you play which is a nice touch but also by this wonderful little rule if you have a control token on a region and then you win a region adjacent to it you also get to place an extra control token in between those regions and now i hope you can see why flipping tokens face down is so neat which you achieve by winning this bonus if your opponent is winning region after region after reaching and just emptying the bank of control tokens this could literally stop them dead in their tracks what this brings to the game is this sense of tug with one player always leading the charge pointing to new battlefields and areas of tension and the other reacting which is obviously not a great place to be so if you're player 2 or pompey you're constantly fighting to unseat caesar from dictating flow of the game and if you're caesar you're trying to make pompey to spread themselves to thin into too many directions unless of course pompey flips the state and then the rolls become reversed at two pompy at two and that's the thing you see you're not playing a puzzle although you can if you want to there's an included solo mode you're playing against your arch nemesis john pompey embodied by the dweeb sitting next to you or opposite you hopefully you know that dweeb you know what they want what they like you're not playing caesar you're playing against them in a game of caesar thank you it's so nice that this design recognizes that and caters to different play styles with these four very different bonus token abilities if you know your opponent if you know what will likely entice them you can tug on their heartstrings set little traps make them fight for regions and waste resources that you don't care about and that's just the tip of it there's a gentle touch of math that is never overwhelming because each regular influence token always adds up to 6 on both sides the distribution of influence tokens is also identical so you can do things like weigh up the odds of whether the opponent can steal a region from you whether they have ships in their hand for example you can dig so deep if i had one big criticism of caesar sees rome in 20 minutes is the ending there's never a big reveal there's no clever move that clenches the game one player over the course of 20 minutes will eventually just work themselves in a situation of no outs no good placements no matter what token you put down you know it's curtains this isn't a curtain that's a bed sheet and whilst i did have a few games and on one player relying on getting a little lucky needing their opponent to not have the right token to seal the deal it was mostly just a fading sad hope rather than a momentous plot twist but it doesn't matter because there's already been plenty of clever moves over the course of 20 minutes and it all comes back to this 20 minutes caesar is so easy to teach so quick to set up so comfortable to slide into that you just can't get enough of it honestly if i didn't have other board games to review i might have just slipped into a caesar coma gradually becoming more and more a leafy salad and every 20 minutes i'd wake up to say one thing and one thing only more caesar sees rome in 20 minutes which brings us to one final awkward elephant in the senate turns out that caesar sees rome in 20 minutes is the second in a line of games then i shall now dub as in 20 minutes the first one being called blitzkrieg world war ii in 20 minutes awkwardly this doesn't have an exclamation mark after 20 minutes and this one does so i don't know what to do about that i think some folk might already be familiar with this game as it got some strong reviews in the few years since it's been released but i'm coming at this from a strange angle see i played caesar before i played blitzkrieg and i gotta admit working my way backwards was kind of weird not as weird as that opening sketch with the ears but still weird blitzkrieg is a meteor game and potentially a deeper game where caesar has four different special abilities to learn its predecessor has seven different special tokens and nine different bonuses you can get by placing tokens which is a slog i'm not gonna say this game isn't any good because i think it's pretty great actually but i think that this achieves about ninety percent of the depth of blitzkrieg with about 40 of the rules and if a friend came along and i wanted to show them a cool little game that didn't take a lot of time or brain space wouldn't only teach them this and pester them to remember 16 different abilities and then ask them whether they want to play the allies or the axis or would i just show them this and potentially get a better result out of it it's just so great to get a sequel that doesn't just add things onto a good statue to make it look misshapen and lumpy but instead chisels it to reveal an even better statue underneath i think caesar is a really great achievement a triumph and i have a lot of time for it specifically 20 minutes but maybe times 100. that's it that's the video for caesar sees rome in 20 minutes done and you might ask what do i do with myself now well the obvious answer is to of course subscribe and watch all of the other nope and included videos but what if i've watched every single one you might ask well in that case the situation is actually very simply resolved by me recommending another person you could go and watch which is something i've been doing over the last year uh but sort of paused on that but i'm now returning to that so this is back and i'm recommending other people and you should go watch them because i think they're all great and in today's video i'm recommending taylor's trick taking table hosted by taylor sometimes known as trick and sometimes known as table what taylor does or trick or table is sometimes not sometimes so it always tells you about only trick taking games and what's cool about that is that not only does taylor have an immense knowledge of trick taking games and what makes them good or what makes them mad or whatever but also just just a death of games that i've never even heard of and you know he'll be like oh this is flugenguk and you know it's obviously a german classic trick taking game that people have been playing for 40 years and i'm like what i've never heard of it but he knows all about it and what's also great is that when you have someone who delves exclusively into one genre you find some really neat innovative twists on the concept i recommend watching taylor's review on shamans which is trick taking with social deduction or ghosts of christmas which is trick taking with time travel right that sounds cool so those are the two hooks you can go watch those i'll leave the links in the description and enjoy taylor please everybody and also visit patreon.com included uh because we need money i i might have accidentally borrowed too many years and i need to pay people back for those and there's inflation and everything so if you could just go and donate i would be able to pay for the ears

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 28,403

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, caesar!, caesar, seize rome, twenty minutes, 20 minutes, paolo mori, blitzkrieg!, blitzkrieg, world war 2, world war two, two player, chess

Id: G26rxYJ0M7M

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022