Glory to Rome: Smudge’s THC Resource Strategy Pays Off
Some of you may remember Smudge’s tale about how a college poker group devised a comeuppance for a cheapskate who liked to drink, but who didn’t have five on it.
Smudge had an extra story to tell about another group and the 2005 classic, Glory to Rome.
It went like this:
So, the first few times I played Glory to Rome, I was never sober for it. The host of an irregular game night was a gregarious fellow with an interest in high-interaction board games, and his collection of both games and friends was delightfully eccentric and rarely the same.
On this occasion, we had been casually hanging out most of the afternoon and playing various games while sipping drinks and having snacks, but around 11:30 p.m. our host brought out the Kickstarter version of Glory to Rome — along with a THC vape pen. We asked the table to make sure that everyone was OK with folks smoking during the game, and everyone was chill with it—including one of the party who preferred to remain sober, who we'll call Adam.
The game started out fine — everyone had played before, so there were no delays for rules, but the vape pen continued to make its way around the table. The game got more and more eccentric the longer it went on, both as folks built up power combinations and as everyone but Adam got stoned out of their gourds on top of tiredness from a long afternoon, laughing and getting distracted.
Adam's patience for the table was growing shorter as we crept past midnight and towards 12:30 a.m. - the rounds were taking longer and longer as he had to remind almost everyone else whose turn it was, clearly signaling that we weren’t taking the game seriously enough for him. I apologized for it profusely, with a real sense of guilt at the excellent time we were all having largely forgetting to play the game, but I was actually serious about trying to win it even though we were all completely out of it.
Adam had what looked like a clear lead over the rest of us, but Glory to Rome is nothing if not unpredictable, and believe it or not there was a plan in the fluffy cloud passing for my brain. It was almost 1 a.m. and it looked like Adam was about to win the game on points — but on the last turn I managed to complete an instant win condition to the delight of the entire table. Except Adam.
I'm still not entirely sure whether Glory to Rome is the best game from its creator or of similar mechanics — it's chaotic, and messy, and patently unfair at times —but it will always remain wrapped in a warm, minty vapor mist of nostalgia from that night for me.