Fall of Rome: Fighting the Horde Mentality

Our defenses are feeling the crunch! Mogontiacum is caving in; Philippopolis has sprung another leak. Send the Mercator east! He's in Lugdunum, finishing the previous patch-up job.

Still, the hordes don't stop seeping down from the North. Vandals capitalize on the northern diversion to sneak down the west coast and set off a chain of revolts that forces us to skip our planned meeting in Ravenna, one step short of clinching that crucial alliance with the Visigoths.

Wow, it almost makes you feel sorry for us Romans. What can we do against this endless barbarian tide?

Well, we can build our sandcastle forts against the waves. We can spread our legions across the map as thinly as the last scrapings of a jam jar.

And we have Magister Militum on our side, our great military hope - a pink, modest-looking pawn which we slide from skirmish to skirmish, hoping his luck holds with the dice.

In Pandemic: Fall of Rome, you’re going to be hoping a lot that your luck holds. Being Roman here is tough. No wonder we went nuts that time we saved Rome on the very last turn. The event is preserved on video for posterity. Madly shaking images of jubilant grins mark our last-card, last-gasp defense of The Eternal City. The empire's iron fist prevailed to fight another day.

That victory certainly earned its place in the family game annals. Not that we'd normally be caught celebrating the survival of a ruthless imperial bully-machine. We're quiet, peace-loving folk at heart.

So what made us lose our marbles? What exactly is the pull of this game?

Well, it's not in the components. Fall of Rome isn't a looker. It's bare, it's beige, it's functional. The barbarians are cubes. Cities are spots on map cards. Your heroes are unadorned pawns.

No, the lure lies elsewhere. It creeps out across the frontiers, runs along the cube-infested roads, down the revolt/decline tracks, across the icon-engraved dice, through the shifting city card order and up towards the promise of forged alliances hovering just out of reach.

It's in making disparate things coincide just at the right moment - a meeting, a smart exchange of cards, a spot-on hit to cut a barbarian arterial line, a rescue of a fort. It's in the adrenaline of fighting together, back-to-back - all for one and one for all.

This togetherness is what makes the game shine. It's quintessential co-op – best at three players, we find. One player grinds out the general strategy, another flits between cities, another is the lubricating support ... our roles shift with our moods. Never at loggerheads with each other as in other games, we form a gritty triumvirate. United, we stave off the hordes.

Here, back-to-back is the only way to fight. We must keep 360° vision to have any chance of success. Cut off those Vandals skating down the West coast. Put a doorstop in the Byzantine east. Pick off the Visigoth Rome-crashers with our best sniper-legions.

And keep the lid on those Anglo-Saxon and Frank hotheads up North.

Yes, this game gives me a dire new perspective on my Anglo-Saxon ancestry! Worse than soccer hooligans they were, prone to revolt. See their imperialist aspirations here in embryonic form, engrained up to their last vertex.

With these and the other tribes all with their own expansionist agenda, you'll always be frantically mopping up the latest tribal revolt-spillage, battling against a shortage of resources and stretched to the limit as you spread legions to dampen barbarian fury.

And remember: never leave a fort unattended.

There are never enough forts, but when placed in the right positions, they can hold your act together amazingly well. Still, keeping them up and running is like doing the spinning-plates-on-sticks circus act. You're dodging back and forth keeping your forts and hot points secure, till, crash! A plate falls, revolt spreads.

Revolts used to faze us more at first than they do now. I guess we've learned to stop tearing at the barbarians' throats as though they were the Romans and we were the barbarians. We've learned how to quell their fury, mitigate their wrath, play it cool and preserve the status quo.

But in those earlier days, things got fraught.

We would send an excess of legions to a premature death, react in extremis to border dangers while failing to cover key routes and zones and forts.

We were firefighters without a truck, lugging our legion fire-extinguishers on our backs, spurting foam in all the wrong places in the wrong quantities at the wrong time. Always showing up late on the scene, rarely anticipating the real dangers or leaving those tinder-dry spots previously doused in anti-inflammatory legion-liquid.

Since those days, we've mellowed. Instead of hurling our legions into the jaws of death or madly crisscrossing the continent to arrive one move too late, we have learned to hold back, leave a foot in the door, preserve our forces for another day.

We no longer throw our cards away to fuel frantic plans. Instead, we court alliances, let things breathe, take the lid off a bit.

Yes, we’ve become smart diplomats, defenders of Rome, even though we secretly despise Rome and all it stands for. We defend it to protect ourselves, our own integrity, to satisfy our instinct for defending the underdog.

Even if the underdog is Caput Mundi itself.

Being with your back to the wall though has never been such fun. The camaraderie, the unified vision, the shared tasks - this is one mighty, legendary game that will force you to keep your board game annals regularly updated. Not to be missed.

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