Overview & How to Play

We’re each trying to get the most points, done by successfully fending off the invading Picts via constructing good defenses, and by also developing parts of our society.

To kick it off, at the beginning of each round, we’re gonna get a bunch of pieces, and then we can just do the meat of the game: the box ticking.

This is like shopping in the game, where you can take as long as you want, with no action limit, to tick off boxes. It’s just that by ticking off a box, you spend certain pieces, and have to tick from left to right within each row. You tick off boxes because you want to achieve things in said boxes, like checking off shield icons to add to your existing troops, which is the force that actually fends off the yearly invaders. But also, you’ll realize that to get to said boxes, many of the boxes on the way are filled with other components, meaning that when you spend a piece to tick off those box, you’ll get a pieces back!

When you’re all broke outta components, the Picts attack, where you flip cards from the deck equal according to your current year. You get points if you defend successfully, but if you don’t, you will incur some negative points. Then you just jump into the next year!

At the end of the 6th year, you just count up all your points on your piece of paper, like the 4 different types of VP (called Attributes), negative points, and bonus points from achieving certain categories you select every year called “Path Cards”. Whoever has the highest points wins!

Pros

You can just jump right into a session of Hadrian’s Wall within a minute: grab the 2 sheets, dump some meeples out, attach your player board, shuffle 2 decks of cards, and go. Oh, and the meeples and grey slabs of stone pieces look and feel great.

Onto gameplay with Hadrian’s Wall’s city-buliding box ticking. The main reason why this is so continually satisfying is how when you spend a resource to fill in a box to progress your society, there’s a strong possibility that you will get also something else for free. Like, you can boost your yearly resource income by spending servants, and that boost ALSO comes with a resource right away! So then spending something didn’t leave us with any fewer components! Hadrian’s Wall is filled with these type of clever component conversion outlets, and through all of its converting, you’re checking off boxes, which is achieving progress on tracks, which feels great.

This decision space gets blown up from choosing to spend on 5 “Citizen Tracks”, to slowly unlock access to certain specialties, like:

1. Pursuing the traders route to increase resource income.

2. Calling in divine favor against the Picts from building temples.

3. Build baths, then bribe WHILE bathing with fellow Romans to reduce their disdain for you (so less negative VP!).

There’s the looming threat of the attacking Picts at Years’ end though, so the box ticking is a balancing act between doing efficient conversions to advance your society for points, and then getting actual Cohorts to defend yourself.

Also, Hadrian’s Wall handles its limited luck very well, to especially keep you on your feet with the yearly progression. Resources are slightly random every year, and the Picts have no weirdness like doing double damage or not attacking at all. This randomness is REALLY important to keep Hadrian’s Wall feeling fresh, because the sheet of paper is always the same, with no ways to influence other people’s Walls; this game could have easily gotten stale without less or 0 randomness, but too much luck would cause too much or too little box ticking for each year, especially if you couldn’t get any defenses against the Picts early game.

The replay value here comes from how DEEP you can go in each game, where you try different combinations of VP giving paths. There’s 6 of these you’ll select by game end (out of 12), and you can pursue each of these as much as you want. Hadrian’s Wall really does have a different tone depending on what you want to prioritize, too, like building a lot of Buildings needs a lot of Servants & Resources.

There is a HUGE thematic restriction on building around your wall which is really well handled, where you cannot build Cippi, which is a preliminary wall, or, your actual Wall, without first building up your Fort. So no building things without infrastructure to support it! Oh, and you’re also gonna have to build a Granary to support certain advancements too, to feed those new parts of your society.

Lastly, Hadrian’s Wall feels really well timed, where the really clean components in 6 years keeps the game at about an hour, especially with really fast setup and takedown.

Cons & Nitpicks

As straightforward as the box ticking in this game is, the game’s ridiculous amount of upfront information with the sheets can be intimidating, and the rulebook does not help this start. You currently have to read every single ability breakdown before seeing how the pict attack actually works, and sorely lacks symbols for all the pieces denoted in examples which makes examples tricky to follow. It’s not terrible, but is just slow-ish to go through, and could have used an appendix. Or how about putting a nice player aid on the back of the rulebook on how partial pict success is scored?

Then, it is rather easy to forget about building granaries, since its restriction is not nearly as clearly noted as the wall’s chains. While not super easy to forget, this is a HUGE mistake once made in game, as if you tick off boxes TOO fast, you need to completely restart. And then the 2:1 meeple exchange has a similar problem, where it can be easy to forget that you cannot trade soldiers during it.

Nitpicks include how multiplayer solitaire this game is, where you have practically no influence on other people’s sheets, and even for stuff you can counterplay on, you’re really not weighing much, because you cannot see other people’s sheets from across the table. Oh, and then you’ll probably run out of pieces with 5-6 players. We really wish that single player, or ‘limited-interaction’ was actually more prominent on the box.

And don’t forget about getting 2 plastic baggies for the decks of cards.

Final Thoughts

Hadrian’s Wall could have been great, an 8/10 from us, if it was marketed to be more solo leaning on the box. But the final nail in the coffin for the 7/10 was the $55 MSRP, which is really steep for what this game is. It really felt like they threw in a total of 400 sheets, then added a couple of extra components to say that this game plays up to 6 players, even though in reality, you likely will just play it solo, or at most, with 3-4 buddies if you really don’t feel like talking.

But that’s really the problems with how Hadrian’s Wall is presented, where we can’t blame the mechanics much. Hadrian’s Wall will probably hit a nice sweet spot for those looking for a quick solo run, with super minimal setup and takedown, and the box ticking where all those components are tied together happens right away.

Sure, the game can be pretty game-y feeling with all of its box ticking, where the resource conversion is SUPER on the nose. There’s even an included Tetris-piece-like game that makes no thematic sense. There’s no turns, or actions in Hadrian’s Wall, rather you just charge through boxes with pen in hand until you’re done for the year.

Ultimately, the two very clever sheets of paper is what you’re mostly paying $55 for, so know that price to component and multiplayer value is not here in a traditional sense. But the paper makes this super accessible, for fairly deep resource conversion within an hour… including setup and takedown!