Roam: Built In Half an Hour

In my experience, this is the rarest of all board games: a game that takes more than 2 players, yet can be played in about 30 minutes while actually giving you meaningful decisions along the way. It's such a hard bullseye to hit that I take note when a game even manages to get near the "inner ring." Roam is one of those games.

Roam comes from designer Ryan Laukat, the creator of Eight-Minute Empire, another game in this rare space. Up to four players sit at compass points, and a 2 x 3 grid of terrain cards is laid out between them. Each card itself has a 2 x 3 grid of squares on it, where players will place tokens of their own color in an effort to establish majority control of the card.

To place these tokens, each player starts with 3 adventurer cards, each showing a character and a specific pattern of squares you can cover. On your turn, you flip one of these adventurers face down, then place tokens in exactly the pattern shown (without rotating or inverting the pattern). Your placement can spread across multiple cards, but it cannot overhang the edge of the card grid. If all 6 spaces on a card are filled at the end of your turn, the player with the majority there wins the card (while all others present take a gold coin). That card is then added to your collection, as on the back side of it is a new adventurer character with a new pattern of tokens you're allowed to place. A new terrain card is then dealt to replace the one just taken.

There are some wrinkles in the strategy. You must use all your adventurer cards on successive turns before you get to refresh them all to use again. To refresh them early, you must pay 1 gold to the bank for each card you haven't used yet. Gold can also be used to buy extra token placements; some patterns you use have optional spaces on them which you can fill only by paying 2 gold when you flip the card. And gold has yet another use: buying special artifacts tokens that each have a power to affect the game. (These artifacts also refresh when you refresh your adventurer cards.)

The game ends when one player has acquired 7 cards (adding to their starting 3 for an even 10). Cards and artifacts are each worth points, with the highest total winning the game.

There's a lot of simple and clever balance in this game. Being the player to fill a card almost certainly means you'll be the player who takes control of it. But then the next player will have brand-new territory to play on, giving them a leg up on controlling it. Since many cards have spaces that grant gold when you cover them, that player gets a boost there too.

It speeds play along that the base rules don't allow you to rotate your patterns when playing tokens. (There are artifacts that allow this, but not everyone is going to get them -- if they even come up in a particular game.) It's very easy to visualize how your patterns will play into the terrain from your specific seat at the table. And you only have a limited number of shapes to work with, making it easy to quickly review all your options and identify your best one or two. Put simply: the game moves rather briskly.

We haven't played Roam a ton, but in the games we've played so far, it has not been the player who triggered the end (amassing 10 adventurer cards) who won. Artifacts being worth points is significant, and buying them with gold -- which you amass by not winning cards -- gives you another path to victory. Final scores have always been within a point or two, encouraging me to want to play more. And, as I suggested in the beginning, it only takes about half an hour to do that, even with the full 4 players.

My opinion of Roam may rise or fall a little as we play it more. But it feels like, as fast and accessible it is, we probably will. For now, I'd call it a solid B+.