Some thoughts on Justinian

Justinian was a game I purchased recently, at only 2.99 Euro. As you can see from the picture the theme is Roman....primarily trying to get more influence for the characters you hold in your hand. The mechanics are pretty straightforward and can be learned fairly quickly. Basically you place influence tokens face down on the characters on the display you wish to influence, either positively or negatively. Or you place tokens on the display under the main one to gain enough points to trigger a scoring round. This is where the problem lies, and has been discussed on BGG. The number of points you need to trigger a scoring seem to be much too high. As you can see in the picture it's 5 for the first round, then 9 and lastly 12.

When we played at first we ran out of tokens either in the second or third phase before having enough points to trigger a scoring round. After about 3 games of this we just adjusted the numbers down, to 3, 5, and 7. This seemed to make the game flow much better. The look and quality of the components is top class and for the price I paid I am happy to have it on my game shelves.



Today we played a couple of games of Oltre Mare. Tina hadn't played before and we shared a victory apiece. This game was one of Emanuele Ornella's first offerings and is still a good game. Again the rules are fairly straightforward and after a couple of turns it all becomes clear.

Happy Gaming!!