Lords of Vegas
Las Vegas. The Strip. To the untrained eye, it's a sleepy desert crossroads. A wasteland of cheap hotels, gas stations, and dust. But to you, it is Paradise.
Your brilliant plan? You will construct a magnificent chain of casinos and fill them with light. You will manufacture the ultimate dream of easy money and impossible luxury. You will sell-basically-nothing. You are not alone in this plan. In Lords of Vegas, you and your friends play rival developers, building on the Las Vegas Strip. You can get ahead by building the glitziest, most glamorous, and most popular casinos. But you can fall behind by letting your enemy become your boss.
Lords of Vegas is a clever strategy game with all the thrills, risks, and rewards of the casino business. You start out with empty lots, build small casinos, and expand them as your bankroll grows. Your rivals can build next door, and they just might take you over with a clever paint job or a lucky roll of the dice.
Buy, sell, trade, and gamble your way to the top as you build your empire along the storied Strip.So come on, roll the dice, and build your piece of Paradise!
User Reviews (3)
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Hardcore gamers have an iffy relationship with luck. Luck disrupts strategy. Luck takes the beautiful, crystalline mountains of game theory math and shatters them on a lucky dice roll or the draw of a card. My more mathy and logical friends lament that something should or shouldn’t have happened, that it was “pure luck.” And if you’re the kind of person that feels this way…..
….Lords of Vegas is going to drive you insane.
I’ve played the game maybe five or six times, and I’ve seen probability stretched and twisted and bent and outright broken so many times it’s ridiculous. My brother-in-law gambled $25M at a casino controlled by my sister, rolled double-sixes, and won $50M from her — every last cent of her money for that turn (and spawning an impressive marital argument!). But the very next game, a random card draw gave her control of his sprawling eight-lot casino. You can plan and scheme and strategize to great effect in Lords of Vegas, but luck is always going to be a factor. And really, that’s part of the charm of the game.
Playing Lords of Vegas is a lot like gambling in Vegas. You can be on top of the world one turn, see your empire crumble the next, and then ascend to even greater glories three turns later. It’s a roller-coaster ride of greedy expansionism, lucky payouts, and struggles for control via reorganizing, repainting, and rezoning casinos.
Every lot has a die placed on it that determines the amount the casino there pays, and similarly-colored adjacent casinos count as one large casino for the purpose of victory points….and only the boss of the casino (controller of the largest die in the complex) gets the VPs. However, anyone who’s willing to pay $1M per pip of the dice in the casino can force a reorganization — a reroll of every die in the casino, which can result in a new boss. I’ve seen a player with a single die rolling a six beat a player rolling six dice. Like I said, probability itself warps around this game, and stunning upsets somehow seem to be more usual than predictable losses.
There are a couple of small issues with the game: there’s no real come-from-behind mechanism beyond those swings of luck (though they definitely can let you come back). On top of that, while the cardboard casinos are pretty thick and sturdy, I did tear the bottoms of a few of them slightly while punching out their square centers.
The game is sheer fun, a solid strategic base combined with an exhilarating dollop of luck. Enjoy the ride, hang on, and make the smartest decisions you can to come out on top!
Lords of Vegas has been our latest “rage” game (what I call those games that completely take over all other games for a certain amount of time and that I lay in bed devising new strategies to play better next time). It is an incredibly dynamic game of strategy, mind-games, muscle-flexing, scheming, and of course, luck! The uber-conservative will not win nor will the extremely aggressive. You need to find the right balance of each (which changes each game depending on who you play with and how the game plays out!) to pull off the elusive win.
The turn mechanics are very simple: Take over a new lot. Get paid by vacant lots you own. Get paid by casinos. Get points by being the boss. Take your actions. Done. Clean and simple, just how I like it. The money grossed is used to take one of four actions: 1. Building on a lot you own, 2. Sprawling onto a lot you don’t own, 3. Remodeling (meaning changing the color of your casino), and 4. Reorganizing (meaning mixing up a casino’s power structure!). Remodeling and reorganizing cause some very tense, even heated moments as you vie for control of ever-expanding casinos. I’ve bruised my fist many a time slamming it on the table when my hard-earned investment goes right out the window. But just as many times I’ve pumped my fist when a well-devised risk pays off massive dividends!
I am a reward-sensitive person, essentially meaning that my genes make me love the thrill of high risk/high return! This game is that outlet for me. There is a high risk/reward component that is a blast. Manage it well (as you would in Vegas!) and you’ll find yourself at the top of the food chain. Mismanage the risk/reward paradox and you’ll crash hard. Have an extra risk/reward itch to scratch? Once per turn, you can also straight up gamble at another boss’s casino!
Favorite moment: when I own a single, hapless tile in a large casino and the two leaders are in a heated battle to become boss. One of them pays a fortune to reorg and guess who the lucky new boss is? Me! Hahahaha!
Most frustrating moment: when I’m one of the two leaders in the situation above.
The Up! expansion takes Lords of Vegas to a whole new level…literally. Instead of playing on just a flat plane, you build your casinos vertically to increase their returns, make them more difficult to be taken over, and paint a bigger target on your back! This expansion also allows for 6 players instead of 4.
Overall, this game is so much fun. It’s relatively quick, simple in construct, has an incredibly high replay value, has a fantastic balance of strategy and luck, is completely consuming…and has an awesome game board with chips, dice, and cards! Tell me, what more could you ask for? I give it an extremely high 9 out of 10.
Well, nobody did a review for this while it was explorable, so I’ll take a shot.
I like this game. My cousin learned it from his brother-in-law who is from Vegas. He showed me how to play and we both played it a lot. There is risk taking and it feels very Vegasy. Play this if you get a chance (see what i did there?), you will have fun like we did.
Good: Vegas baby!
Bad: No Drizzt. 🙁
Ugly: it really needs some Drizzt. Can we get a Forgotten Realms expansion for this? Please Mayfair? Pretty please.