Bruno Faidutti的评价
Three years ago, in my review of Caylus, I predicted that there would soon be many other game engines making use of a road bordered with buildings on which players place their pawns before the building effects are resolved one after the other. There has been Pillars of the Earth, Age of Empires, Cuba, Stone Age ?now comes Tribun.
We are in Rome, in the Republic times. Players are politicians who try to seize the power with controlling the different factions (nowadays one would call them lobbies) in the city. The influence on these factions is represented with character cards that player will recruit with sending envoys in the important places of the city. There are people to recruit at the forum, at the market but also at the latrines or in the catacombs. Each place has different recruiting rules, with character cards sometimes face up, sometimes face down, sometimes stacked sometimes bought for a fixed price, sometimes traded for other cards, sometimes auctioned. To seize the control of a faction from another player, and receive the powers it grants, one must play cards of this faction either in a greater number, either for a higher value. At the start of every game, players can choose a different set of victory conditions, which increases the replayability, makes every game different, and help in tuning the game length.
Even when a game of Tribun rarely lasts for more than one hour, it抯 not a light game like Stone Age. It抯 a complex game, some would even say convoluted, clearly aimed at hardcore gamers. The rules for the different districts of Rome, the powers of the different factions and their leaders, the different values of the cards, all this has obviously been cleverly designed, tested and balanced. As a result, Tribun is a rich, varied and subtle game, with many decisions to make, and always many paths open for victory ?or not.
In most games of this kind, Caylus, Stone Age, Pillars of the Earth, Age of Empires III, the players?meeples are mostly here to get resources cubes or tokens, which are later converted into victory points. In Tribun, they are used to take cards into one抯 hand. These cards are not used to make combos with victory point values; they are used in the political struggle for the control of factions, which adds a whole new level to the game.
Tribun is also more interactive, one could even say more aggressive, than Pillars of the Earth, Caylus or Stone Age. Players are not just running a race on a scoring track, they are vying for the control of factions, and when one takes control of a faction, one usually takes it from another player. Since it抯 impossible to strengthen a faction once you control it, the political gameplay tends to be very aggressive.
Tribun is not an original game, but it抯 an outstanding game. It recycles ideas, which are quite popular at the moment with game designers, but it uses them to build a very rich and consistent system. The components are of the highest quality, and the dark graphics fir the game very well. He only problems I have with it are the square box, which is slightly bigger than the standard Settlers size and therefore doesn抰 fit well in my collection, and the pretentious historical comments in the rules, which would have been great in a simulation game but are out of place in a German style game, even a really well themed one. These are really very minor concerns, and don抰 affect the quality of the game, one of the very best game of these last months.
要点翻译：
Caylus推出后，沿道路建筑逐步发生作用的机制被多个游戏所利用，如大地之柱、帝国时代、古巴、石器时代和护民官。护民官使用手牌进行政治斗争、争夺区域控制来获得分数。通过这点发展了caylus的机制，并使游戏变得进攻性很强。
