Britannia

*** UPDATE *** I'm sorry to say while all of the original review below holds true, I can't recommend it anymore. As single player practice platform it's still fine. The AI is still woefully poor at the game, but for trying out strategies before a 'real' game it's fine. Unfortunately the multiplayer feature is entirely broken and unplayable. I don't mean "glitchy", I could forgive "glitchy". The bugs I'm talking about are victorious units literally disappearing from an area after a battle and the save function for multiplayer games not working. You cannot rejoin a game if you stop mid-way through, it just doesn't work. The connecting player gets to the lobby and no further after you launch the game. I've contacted support to see if they're actively working on fixing this, but if they aren't I'm afraid I will be seeking a refund. *** END UPDATE *** I suppose I should start by laying my cards on the table: Britannia is probably my favourite board game of all time so I'm going to be exceptionally biased. If this version was even half-decent the likelihood is I would recommend it. I did have some concerns but it's actually been done pretty well. The new artwork and extra history that the game provides along the way are welcome additions and overall the experience is very positive. Sure the AI is prone to random bouts of insanity and often plays [b] very [/b] aggressively. Also the UI can be quite clunky at times - I'd highly advise going to the 'Options' menu and tweaking settings until you're happy as the defaults have the screen jumping around [i] a lot [/i]. I've seen one or two glitches where the Irish are randomly permitted to leave Invaders in the sea through to Round 9 and once my Roman Legion Withdrawal triggered at the end of Round 1 instead of Round 2 but these are rare and usually fixed by re-loading the AutoSave (which is triggered at the beginning of every Move + Battle phase). The above are just quibbles though really. Regular players will know this board game can take a very long time to finish. If you want a digitised platform for trying out strategies outside of a formal game this absolutely hits the mark, even if it is slightly overpriced at £20.99

disappointed that I waited 2 years for multiplayer to be added, scheduled a game with my 3 friends for my birthday, and then gamebreaking multiplayer bugs ruined the experience. for one of my favorite games, I wish multiplayer got better treatment. multiplayer also doesnt have asynchronous play- but dont bother, since current bugs are broken. will update if this ever gets fixed.

except for few minor bugs and extremly dumb AI, its great, you can invite your friends over and instead playing board game, you can all sit in front of one PC and play together. Didnt work for me btw, mostly laughing at AI making the lamest choices ever

Really good game, good representation of the board game, I used to really like it and played it a lot. Sadly now unplayable due to being full of bugs, everything keeps disappearing, re-installing hasn't solved it. So I cannot recommend.

Map cannot be seen. As you hover over it...it does not appear. All you see is the name of the area. Unplayable.

The units disappear after the Romans' first turn.

Unplayable. Tons of UI bugs and soft crashes. Regions and units unmovable with no feedback explanation, making it very difficult to tell the difference between "you can't move there" and "a bug has crashed the game" Autosave happens AFTER progressing to a new phase, so the lack of Undo action means one stray click can ruin an entire game. No quickload or load game from the quickmenu means you must return to the main menu every time you want to reload, which will be often because the UI makes very little sense. Information is spread over all 4 corners of the screen instead of being concisely arrayed in one area, making for a cluttered map that always feels like something is in your way. Text is entirely too large, and cannot be scaled in game settings. Pop up windows are too frequent and too large. Some can be clicked on to remove, others you must click a red X with no consistency or logic as to which ones are removed in which way. Overall a very unpleasant experience filled with micro frustrations that leads to a negative play experience.

UPDATE: The game is working fine again. I've played several campaigns as each of the four teams and there are no issues. If you're a fan of the board game, you should really pick up this game. It took a good long time, but the game is back to being my regular time sink . AI is still a little frustrating, but the game is back to the same level of functionality as in Early Access, but now with multiplayer. ORIGINAL REVIEW (Not recommended): My favorite board game come to life for the PC. Why don't I like it, especially after playing over 600 hours? Easy. The game worked okay in Early Access but is completely broken in Full Release. Units share the same territories, combat skips, the AI moves are impossibly slow, and worst of all, the game just shuts down where no units will be visible on the map. Not to mention that in the Full Release version the AI moves about half speed, making a one to one and a half hour campaign an unknowably longer game (unknown because I can't get the game to go more than a single nation turn or two without it becoming completely unplayable due to the units disappearing). Early Access worked, but had a stupid AI. It seems to want the Blue player to win every game. Nations play stupidly, especially the Romans, Welsh, Scots, Norsemen, Dubliners, Danes, and Saxons. Playing any nation other than Blue can be a challenge, but playing Blue is like playing in Super Easy Mode. Now in Full Release, the game has the long awaited Multiplayer mode, but the game bugs out so frequently and catastrophically shuts down that you won't be able to complete more than a turn or two. The devs have been super slow in releasing the Multiplayer mode. It took more than a year in Early Access to get the Full Release. Despite multiple players reporting bugs since the Full Release dropped two weeks ago, there has been no fixes for the problems with the game and no acknowledgement of the issues and no ommunication about the scheduled palns to fix the bugs. If it took them a year to go from Early Access to Full Release, why expect that the game will be fixed in less than a year? Or at all. Sadly, fans of the board game version are better off dusting off their old physical copies of the game. The game's a mess and the devs just don't seem to care.

Great idea, prob outstanding from 1994-2004

One of my favorite games and very addictive to play on Steam now. Very good implementation. No bugs or rules issued I can find. If you try to undo, sometimes it won't work, like undoing a retreat sometimes will not let you retreat again. Works well solo against 3 bots, pass and play with 0-2 bots, and multiplayer solo. The AI does not offer any real challenge, makes some bad choices and definitely can't work together with other player to try to bash the leader - but it's fun to see how well you can do again 3 bots. Only "error" I saw is how it displays VPs for each region - in some cases it displays the occupy points for r16 at all times rather than showing the correct values for the most recent upcoming scoring round.