Tribune
Salute your Tribune, Roman citizens!
Poor and rich, strong and weak, Patrician and Plebeian, hear the words of the Tribune! He is one of you; he is primus inter pares – the first among equals! Welcome to the seat of the most powerful empire of the ancient world – Rome... a city full of trade, politics, and intrigue. Its denizens come from backgrounds as varied and divided as the empire itself. But beneath those divisions they proudly share a common heritage – they are Romans.
Play as one of the great patrician families that once held substantial power and influence. Gain dominance over the seven controlling factions of the city, and use their resources to unite all of Rome under a common banner... yours. In Tribune, you try to become the most powerful family in Rome. Will the Legions stay faithful? Will you be honored with the favor of the Gods? Will you be hailed Tribune? Prepare to write history!
Tribune is a game of resource allocation, set collection, and bidding for 2-5 ambitious Romans, and is playable in 1-2 hours. To win, players must achieve multiple victory conditions depending on the number of opponents and the chosen difficulty of the scenario. These conditions may include the collection of denarii (money), the gathering of laurels (effectively representing influence), the backing of the Roman legions, or the favor of the gods, just to name a few... but the inclusion of these many paths to victory, along with scaleable difficulty and included variants, gives Tribune a nearly infinite replayability; You’ll find that much like the varied and colorful Roman factions themselves, no two games of Tribune are alike.
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I grabbed this game for half off during a holiday sale, knowing absolutely nothing about it other than the Classical Rome theme (which I’m a sucker for). I was more than pleasantly surprised with how enjoyable it turned out to be.
Tribune combines worker placement and set collection mechanics, and then adds a good deal of interaction as players compete for the best sets. Followers are placed on the board in order to collect faction cards, earn denarii (which is used to pay for cards), or to attempt a faction take-over. Taking over a faction requires playing a set from your hand that beats the set already in play (either in total value, or number of cards). Taking over and holding control of the various factions earns you various victory requirements (faction markers, laurels, legions, Favor of the Gods, or Tribune), or gives you resources to aid in their acquisition (denarii, faction cards, assassins, an additional follower). The game is over at the end of a round where at least one player has earned the required number of victory conditions (four to six, depending on the number of players). If multiple players have done so on that turn, everything they’ve earned is scored to determine the winner.
Replay Value: I’ve had about a dozen plays so far, and I still get excited about the prospect of breaking it out again. It includes several aspects that I love in eurogames, but constant interaction and competition between players creates a perfect amount of tension and uncertainty which keeps it engaging. So far, the game has been well-balanced so that runaway leaders are non-existent, and aggressive play is dictated more by what will benefit the acting player than simply screwing over the target. Tribune also includes multiple sets of cards with scalable victory conditions, so the game can be tailored to your number of players and preferred game length.
Components: Like most Fantasy Flight Games, production value is high. For Tribune, however, they even managed to go the extra mile by provided an extra of every token in case one is lost. There is even a constructable punchboard chariot (plus, a backup one) that doesn’t really add any function over using a simple token (the chariot can prevent a single faction from takeovers for one round), but still looks fantastic.
Easy to Learn: Unlike (thankfully) most Fantasy Flight Games, the rulebook is simple and well laid out, and the rules are designed so that the various phases of the game flow together well (which probably means that FFG didn’t design the game in-house, but only published it). The only caveat is that the rules are rather front-loaded, so you kind of have to know all of the steps before you can know how any of them are important. Since I’m always the one teaching it, it is a source of frustration, but not enough to keep me from sharing this gem with new players.