Build Your Own Megalopolis in the Board Game Nova Roma

Rome wasn’t built in a day, so why you think you can build a new Rome in under two hours? Nova Roma is a new, fairly heavy worker-placement game from the designer of Endless Winter that pits players against each other on a big board where they’ll compete in several smaller spheres to rack up the most points over a tight five rounds. It’s one of the strongest complex games I’ve seen so far this year.

In Nova Roma, players will place their three workers (patricians) on a 4×4 grid to determine which two actions they’ll take in that turn, one for the row and one for the column (like in Targi), giving them 30 regular actions over the course of the five-round game. Every action has a power or strength associated with it based primarily on what else was in that patrician’s row/column: The patrician you just placed gives the action strength 1, and you gain 1 more for every other patrician of your color in that same row/column, plus one more if the emperor token (placed at the start of the round by the first player) is also in that same row/column. There are also many Follower cards that can grant you additional strength, although the maximum strength for any action is 3. Opponents’ patricians don’t count, nor do neutral ones in the solo or two-player game.

I don’t think there’s anything more important in Nova Roma than this mechanic: You want to take as many 2- and 3-power actions as possible, which will mean leaning into certain areas of the board more than others, because that’s the way to maximize your points regardless of what strategy you pursue. The game offers resource management, some light set collection, objective cards, and even a racing mechanic, only one of which I think is weaker than the others, but again, the key is to pick something and go for it often.

There are seven possible actions on the board, plus an eighth that lets you claim the first-player token and then take a wild action of your choice. The sailing and building actions both work similarly: you must fulfill a contract by paying the resources shown, and then you sail your ship as far as your action strength will let you, or you place some of your building cubes in one district of the new city in the shape shown on the contract card. You get points at game-end for the progress of both of your ships, with the biggest rewards coming for getting to Constantinople, the end of the route, sooner than other players; and you get points for every building card you’ve completed, plus you compete for area majority bonuses in all three districts.

Racing at the hippodrome is also potentially quite powerful, as the leader on the favored track in each turn gets a three-point bonus. There are three tracks, with one random one chosen in each round as the favored one, with the leader at the end of the round granted a 3-point bonus. You get small rewards for passing specific thresholds as you advance, paying the cost in horses (one of the game’s five resources) at each of those. One of those potential rewards is unlocking achievement tokens that you’ll need to use for further bonuses.

Other actions include gaining and playing Follower cards, which can make your actions more powerful or grant you end-game point bonuses; trading, which gets you coins and lets you buy resources; production, which lets you add Artisan workers and move them to your estate board to gain resources; and upgrades, which lets you increase your Influence and take a tile to put on your estate board for future production.

Each player also gets a separate Mosaic board with three rows of achievements they can reach during the game, placing an achievement token on up to one per turn once they’ve met the criteria. Placing a token gets you a free resource, while finishing a row, column, or diagonal gets you more bonuses, and all of these things are worth points at game-end.

Still with me? It’s a lot, but we’re building a new capital city here. If you want to play your fiddle, go watch the old one burn. Two aspects of Nova Roma really make it tick: the action strength mechanism, and the limited number of total actions. That first bit should define your strategy more than anything else, followed by the direct competition in the sailing, building, and hippodrome areas, where more points for you will also mean fewer for your opponents. The game’s length means you get time to do some long-term planning and build up in some areas, but you have to be efficient with your choices. Taking an action with strength one with your second or third patrician in a round is a lost opportunity – you can’t avoid it some of the time, but every time you choose this, you’re losing out on something else you could be doing. It’s quietly tight in that way, although I could see this leading to some serious analysis paralysis for some players.

The game is clearly designed for three or four players, with some small modifications for two players. In that two-player variant, each player gets two neutral legionnaire meeples to place on the action grid after their first and second turns, further blocking spaces for their opponents and potentially themselves, to simulate having a third player on that part of the board; I’ve seen this a ton in two-player and solo games and I find it annoying. Nova Roma works fine without that. The other changes make a bit more sense: You place some neutral cubes on the three building districts, and players must get at least that many cubes of their own to pass the neutral player and score; you also place neutral tokens on the fourth space of each hippodrome track, and again, players must pass those to be considered the leader in each. 

Many players have compared Nova Roma to Trajan, a Stefan Feld game that is also set in ancient Rome; Nova Roma does have some of that Feld-y point salad feel, where you’re gathering points from a lot of different areas, but I’d argue that Nova Roma connects those areas through game play better than most Feld games do. The art is by Mihajlo Dimitrievski, whose style is unmistakable and probably best known for his work on the series that started with Raiders of the North Sea, perhaps a little cartoony for the general theme of this game. My one caveat is that I haven’t played Nova Roma with four players, so I can’t vouch for the box’s playing time range of 60-120 minutes; I can think of people I wouldn’t want to play this with because I know their turns will take too long, and that might drag this well over the two-hour limit. With the right people, though, this is a medium-heavy game that keeps things tight by limiting your total actions and forcing you into competition with other players no matter what route you take. I found it hit the right spot for me as someone who likes a game that makes me think and requires that sense of urgency that comes from limited actions, but who also has an upper bound and has often shied away from games that are longer than two hours or heavier than this.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.