First play: Alea Iacta Est

I've had this game for over a month, having bought it due to it being from the great publishers Alea and having been co-designed by Jeffrey Allers, the designer of the lovely Eine Frage Der Ahre. We finally got to play a game of it last night and impressions were pretty favourable.

In short, it's a dice game with a bit of area-control and some collection elements for scoring at the end. It's all quite simple to explain and we only struggled a bit with the scoring. But it was lightning-quick to play with 5 players, mostly cuz we didn't know what we were doing at first. I get the feeling that we were playing the strategy a bit wrong because the conflict was pretty minimal through most of the game and no one really got dumped in the latrina (yes, the latrina). Further plays will help me decide if I'm right, and happily everyone was up for trying it again next week. Great.

On the subject of Alea, I'm chomping at the bit to get an English copy of Macao. Looks great. And more dice!