Roman Roads



Cost:2/1/1/1

Gain an extra yellow token and an extra blue token.

This effect varies by age:

At Age Ⅰ: produce 1 resource.

At Age Ⅱ: produce 1 science.

At Age Ⅲ: produce 2 culture.

Roman Roads in History
We often forget just how difficult travel used to be before the existence of superhighways, airplanes, or the railroad. Back in Ancient Rome, logistics was all the rage, as your army is only effective if you can get it to the field of battle on time. Wanna bring your goods from far away lands all the way to the capital? Good news, we have the shiny new Via Romana that you can take and be there by supper!

Silently, the ancient roads have provided their services to inhabitants of Europe for millenia. Countless stories walk alongside the traveler, of Hannibal marching his immense armies through all of Hispania, with Heracles going the opposite direction on his epic quest to steal cattle from the end of the world. Spectres of battles lost, and of thousands of crucified slaves follow the pilgrim all over old Rome.

The Roman engineers build a lot of different kinds of stone paved roads all over the empire, stretching from Londinium to Thebae. Even today, thousands of years later, the infrastructure laid down by the Greatest Empire that ever was, is used and improved upon heavily. Why make a new road, when someone has already done all the engineering for you?

Designer's Note
Having a good network of roads is very convenient. And that was the idea behind the effect of this card – making everything a bit more convenient for you. The extra yellow and blue token sure make your game easier (and represent how roads allow your territory to be larger and the goods better distributed). And the variable bonus represents how the trade adjusts to what you need most in the given time, giving you resources for building your infrastructure in Age I, science to faster develop your civilization in Age II, and finally culture you usually concentrate on in Age III.

This card was originally created for the Czech bonus pack (you may read more about the bonus packs in the blog) and was named “Network of Trade Routes”. There was not that much interesting stuff on the Czech territory in the ancient times, but its position in the heart of Europe predestined it to be a crossroads of trade routes that connected east to the west, and especially north to the south – the important Amber Road was named after the commodity that was transferred from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean nations long before Christ.

Playing with that card was, as I have already said, convenient, so we included it also in the official expansion and just scaled up the theme to Roman Roads that interweaved a big part of the European territory in the ancient times. The card has not changed much during the development, it just lost a bit of its symmetry– originally, it was giving only 1 culture in Age III. It was needed for the balance, and personally, I liked the change - I am rather an economy-concentrated player, and losing one cool science in favor of one stupid culture felt usually as a loss, even at the very beginning of Age III. Two culture points? Yeah, that’s better :).