David and I continued our foray into 2 player games with some heft this weekend with Julius Caesar. As with any historical game, we started with David giving me a mini history lesson, but unlike most of our little lessons, I knew quite a bit about the escapades of Caesar and Pompey. Shout out to HBOs Rome. The game starts just after Pompey leaves Rome and just before Caesar crosses the Rubicon with the 13th Legion and follows the Roman Civil War (49-45 BC). 

Julius Caesar is a block game. I had never heard of a block game before, but it’s where your troops are on blocks that you keep hidden from your opponent until you are in battle. So, when you attack, you know you are fighting three troops, but you have no idea what level they are or when they attack. It was a lot of fun being able to hide where Caesar and Mark Antony were until they struck.

The rules were very easy, you have 5 cards to play each year. The cards either have numbers and circles on them, the number determines turn order and movements, the circles represented adding or upgrading troops, or gods that have special powers. You play cards, move troops, upgrade or add troops and then fight if you are in the same location as an enemy.

Very simple. It really is a perfect introduction into wargames. When I decided that I liked the experience enough to write about it, I looked up the product page to make sure all of the info was input and HOLY SHIT THIS GUY IS $63.95?!

It was a great game and I would definitely recommend it, but it was just cards, wooden blocks, stickers and a paper map. How in the world does this thing cost $63.95? And that’s our price, MSRP is $75.00.

After getting a crash course on wargaming from David and then doing my own research, I found out why they are so expensive.

First of all, Columbia Games is a small company. They concentrate on mostly wargames and do small print runs, but continue to print for a very long time (some of the games over 30 years!). The board is paper, and for a hobby board gamer, this made zero sense to me. But David explained that a lot of wargamers use plexiglass over their “boards”. I’m pretty sure this was out of necessity in the early days of gaming. You really need the heft to hold the paper down. But when companies began to print boards on … well … boards, the plexiglass that the wargamers had come to know and love, wouldn’t sit flat on them. So, they actually prefer the paper boards. The blocks are actually wood, so that adds a bit of cost, but what adds the real cost to the components is that they are all made in the United States.

Almost all board games are made in China these days and that cuts the cost to what you pay today. So, it becomes quite a bit more expensive to produce a game 100% in the US of A. So, taking all of that into consideration, the price does end up making sense, and it was a great game that I will most definitely play again. So, I do recommend this game and supporting a company that produces good games and keeps the production here in the US. And if $63.95 is too steep, you can always play them at the Geekhouse.