I took Friday off work, and drove up to Niagara Falls to meet up with my friend Chris - he was on vacation all this week and hoping someone would be available for a game or two, and I was more than happy to take a day off work. He was gracious enough to reserve a room at the local library and set up to teach me Footsore Games' Gangs of Rome.
For those unfamiliar, Gangs of Rome is a game of... well, exactly what it says on the tin! Players take on the role of gang-leaders in Ancient Rome, sending henchmen out to engage in various crimes and rumble with rivals to ensure their own gang's status and influence. It is, as Chris explained, a game that truly shines in scenario play, and games go quickly enough that you could probably run a decent campaign of linked games over the course of a single day. We played two games in slightly under three hours.
The first game was the basic "here's how to play" scenario; Chris and I each took control of a small gang and tried to claim as many (out of three) objective tokens before the game ended; every game of Gangs of Rome is a strict five turns, encouraging you to get a move on and engage instead of faffing about!
The game swung pretty wildly, and ended with me in control of one objective token and Chris taking two; I'd had two, but in the last turn he managed to off my gang-member who was carrying the second one and jumped on the token! One of the entertaining points was I had a character trying to climb the side of a building to get the token on the roof; she kept failing her activation rolls, meaning she sat at the foot of the wall getting more and more stressed about it!
The second game was a scenario involving a smuggling run - my gang started the gang moving contraband through the city, and Chris' gang had to seize the goods from me. Again, I held on to my objective tokens pretty well until turn 4, and suddenly Chris was taking them from me right and left. Ultimately he managed to seize all three objectives and wipe out my entire gang.
Best part of the second game was making good use of the game's rules for crowds. Rome is, of course, a crowded city, and the scenarios call for multiple crowds (five civilian figures in a group sabot base) to be on the table. They move around and react to the gangs fighting, which is very cool. At one point, two of Chris' figures attacked one of mine to seize a token (see above); I got the opportunity to activate a crowd and got it to attack Chris' gangsters, killing one and giving my guy an opportunity to run away, buying him a little bit of time.
I had a great time, and we're discussing our next meet-up - somewhere closer to me, and maybe playing A Fistful of Kung Fu. We were thinking maybe hitting up Casual Dragon (less than ten minutes from my house) and seeing if we can reserve a table. I paid them a visit today, but the guy manning the front counter was a new employee and seemed a little overwhelmed so I didn't ask about table reservations. I did clear out some vintage "Clan War" samurai figures that Reaper made 24 years ago that they had marked down. I maybe feel a little guilty about that, given how little I've accomplished in terms of painting this month, but not so guilty that I didn't buy them, you know?
Miniatures Acquired: 121
Miniatures Painted: 87
Terrain Acquired: 3
Terrain Painted: 5
Scatter Acquired: 0
Scatter Painted: 4
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