YORKTON - Regular readers will know this member of The Meeple Guild loves abstract strategy games.
So I was rather interested to see how Centurion, a 2023 release from designer Bryn K. Bills and Catalyst Game Labs would play.
Now Centurion is not a perfect information game. When you go to add a piece to the board it is randomly drawn from a bag – but the game is certainly abstract strategy game adjacent.
The game here is not exactly new even though it came out only in 2023.
It uses the same general mechanics and core concepts as The Duke from designers Jeremy Holcomb and Stephen McLaughlin released from Catalyst in 2013, and Jarl: The Vikings Tile-Laying Game from designers Randall N. Bills and Loren Coleman from Catalyst in 2015. The latter game was a tie-in to the TV series Vikings – and is one I wish I had acquired.
Centurion takes you back farther in history to the times of the Romans.
Players – it is a two-player offering -- start the game by placing their Centurion in one of the two middle squares on their side of the game-board. The Centurion is central to the game. You win by capturing the opponent’s Centurion.
Two Legionnaires are then placed next to the Centurion. Each turn a player may choose to randomly draw a new tile from the bag or move a tile already in play. Newly added pieces must start adjacent to the Centurion too.
The pieces – nice plastic in Centurion although I prefer the wooden ones in The Duke – are two-sided. When a piece moves it is flipped. What each piece can do in terms of movement or special attributes are is right on the piece using a variety of icons.
There are quite a few ‘powers’ and different moves so you will have to keep the rule book handy for a while as you learn what each icon means.
You will also find yourself picking up your pieces often in early games as you try to gain some level of familiarity with what a piece will morph into after a move.
There are 13 different pieces and with two sides each, there's a lot to grasp here, and the better you know the pieces the better strategies you will be able to muster.
The game plays on a 6x6 board so you can get into confrontations quickly.
Now there is a luck factor. Digging into that bag for a new piece does not ensure you will get the one best-suited to your immediate needs.
And, with each player having 19 pieces, you are unlikely to see all in any one game.
Like any abstract strategy-style game, the more you play, the better you can be, and here that is true simply based on more naturally knowing piece powers without having to look in a book allowing more concentration on strategy.
The question one has to answer is if the destination of being good at Centurion is worth the journey of learning the pieces and their dual sides? We’ll leave that one to readers to answer for themselves.
