Tetrarchia (detailed review and description here)  is a beautiful, small, quick but quite deep game published by Nestorgames company. It shows the Roman Empire in the crisis of 3d century AD and how the Tetrarchy (rule of the four) managed to finally cope with it. What I like about that boardgame is possibility to easily change its difficulty levels.

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Four emperors

The game can be played from 1 to 4 players and there are 4 different parameters allowing for gradual increase of the game difficulty:

  • Number of control tokens (like garrisons or armies) each of the 4 emperors can place (more tokens makes it easier for you).  Value: 3, 4 or 5
  • Number of fleets allowing emperors move across water (more fleets makes it easier for you). Value: 1, 2 or 3
  • Number of extra rebellions placed during setup (fewer rebellions makes it easier for you). Value:  0, 1 or 2
  •  Number of barbarian invading armies during setup (fewer makes it easier for you). Value: 0, 1 or 2

Game with difficulty 4222

I am usually playing that game with Marcin, each of us leading two emperors. We already had a longer session couple of months ago, familiarizing with the game – session report here – and then we jumped, or let me say, we tried, to the higher difficulty levels – another session report here. Due to the fact that we lost miserably our last encounter, we planned to replay it.

We set-up pretty difficult game – normal number of emperor tokens (4), normal number of fleets (2), very hard number of additional rebellions (2) and very hard level of external armies attacking (2). So in short 4222. Below follows the AAR in a form of photo session report.

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Game set-up – I will lead Maximian and Constantius, Marcin will be responsible for Diocletian and Galerius
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The whole game we were constantly harassed by umpteen numbers of barbarians coming from North Africa
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That meant some respite on other fronts, allowing us to pretty quickly close 3 out of 6 borders needed for victory
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The time has come, the preparations were finished. It was last moment to neutralize Mauritanian menace, as there were already 2 armies approach Gaul and then Italy!
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Then the mop-up activities continued and the final victory was in no doubt!

That was much better prepared and executed game on our end then the previous disaster with difficulty 4222. What next? Well, I think for now we will focus on specific scenarios prepared by the designer for the game – like Carausian Revolt or Danube Wars. Should be fun!