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.

Norman Invasions Reveal the Weakness of a Tattered Mind: Thoughts on Learning a New Solo Card Game

I’m playing as the Saxons in the Battle of Hastings.

The Normans are cranking out more and better units than I have. My central formation is about to collapse. I’m fine with this. Satisfied and proud, even, because getting this far required me to:

• Win a battle with my resentful and frenetic squirrel brain

• Accept that for this phase of my life, I chose to be a solo gamer in every sense of the word

Things already off to a poor start in my central formation, where the Normans (blue markers) are piling on damage faster than my forces.

A few years ago I deleted both my Twitter and Facebook accounts when I found myself unable to finish a long piece in Harper’s. I couldn’t focus long enough to follow a thought through one paragraph. It was like years of scrolling had left me neurologically damaged, deaf to the form I claimed to love and practice.

I have been feeling that attenuation again — finishing a day of scrolling irritable and distracted, like my body wanted food and instead I just ate AAA batteries all day.

So I carved out a recent morning to stay off the laptop and glue my ass to the chair and play several solo rounds of Tristan Hall’s 1066, Tears to Many Mothers.

I leapt from the chair often to pace and mumble or futz with dishes in the sink. My brain started to tell me I was hungry. I wasn’t. My keening pleasure centers just wanted something with a faster payoff.

Backing Into Self-Reliance
My pride and instinct for refusal has driven me further down Colorado’s I-25 corridor for decades. When I came to rest at this location just 11 miles north of the New Mexico border, all I had were my clothes and board games — and the fantasy of a golden bachelorhood where I would conjure acolytes and debauchers out of the desert soil.

The dusty games would spring back into motion under the paws of the newly amazed. I would hit this ZIP code like a comet, architecting unforgettable nights anchored by racks of my cherry wood-smoked ribs, straight moonshine and ruthlessly vetted beats.

This has been harder to do than I thought.

Once in a while The Chaplain (and another gent who I’m provisionally calling Nasty Naz, The Cajun-Flavored Ork) shows up on the doorstep and we have a proper ripper, usually while playing Space Hulk: Death Angel.

But The Chaplain works seasonal gigs around the region and is a sporadic communicator. There are a few dozen people in town who recognize me and will chat me up, but not anybody who seems interested in learning Spartacus or Splendor or Bohnanza, even when I dangle free liquor and a summer feast alongside. (In one of the least-employed counties in Colorado, there seems to be an awful lot of wildly busy people. Or maybe they’re going crazy and need ¾ of the day to contend with themselves, as I do.)

This is my second winter here; I need new strategies to reanimate this empty table and the figure in the mirror. Nobody’s coming over. The fantasy does not nourish. I must bear down and work this soil anew until a different shoot pokes through.

When you’re running this game solo, that dial in the background has six different difficulty levels labeled and tells you how many resources the enemy has to deploy cards on each game round. In the foreground is a bunch of mom tears.

The State of the Battle

1066, Tears to Many Mothers* is a card game for two people or one irascible divorcé. There’s a big deck of cards representing Norman stuff and another deck for the Saxons.

I saw echoes of my favorite game of all time in it: four categories of card in your hand; you must manage placement of these cards and the timing/cost of their effects to not only beat the other player, but do it in a gamespace that is a story unfolding on a map. (I will bet almost anything that Tristan Hall played Warhammer 40,000: Conquest at some point in his life.)

The cards depict fighting units, key nobles and vicissitudes of the season, all of which contend for dominance in three wedges — wedges being columns of cards that can be imagined as not only major formations and their leaders, but where the influence of off-battlefield actors and events manifests.

This is accentuated by a sideboard of objective cards for each player that represent major pre-battle events: As you develop your three wedges, you simultaneously have to “destroy” objective cards until you get to the Battle of Hastings, at which point the wedges transition from positioning and harassment actions to a pitched battle.

My job today is to place enough damage markers to knock out two of the three Norman wedges or kill their CEO, Duke William FitzRobert of Normandy, who has brought hundreds of ships across the Channel and is not fucking around.

As it stands, my second wedge is due to collapse any second. Duke William cleared his objective pile two full turns before I did. The Norman deployment machine, as regulated by the dedicated rules that automate its decisions, is already spitting out ranged units and cavalry.

On my side of the field, poor Harold Godwinson, Saxon King of England, barely has any fighters. He’s wounded and he’s already been screwed over by his brother, Tostig.

I’m playing on easy mode, and will finish out the remainder of this slaughter as a learning exercise. Minor gripe: It’s especially slow going as the solo rule booklet is essentially a concordance to the two-player booklet; you can’t dive in just using the solo rules, and I’ve spent many an hour with both booklets open, scanning back and forth for all the base-game directives and solo exceptions.

All that said, I like my new winter companion so far. The flow of the game has gelled. I need another play or two to iron out some minor steps I’m probably doing wrong. I need to get more familiar with the card effects and then I’ll start to form something of a strategy. Only then will I stop reading the sheet music and start hearing the song.

But it’s only December. Plenty of cold evenings ahead to work through it and eat the occasional bowl of soup. What’s the rush? I’m too tired to flee any further south. I might as well stay here and figure it out.

Analysis: The Saxons would have done much better at the Battle of Hastings if they’d gotten their Ork elites out earlier

*Special thanks to Jason Moore a.k.a. @A_deck_of_51 a.k.a. repairmanjack, whose prodigious body of solo game reviews was pivotal to rethinking how I enjoy my hobby and settling on 1066, Tears to Many Mothers.