Tetrarchia Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Tetrarchia, a small footprint war game published by Draco Ideas. In this cooperative board game, the players are trying to defend rome from the barbairn invasions.

I’ve always been fascinated by the question of when the Roman Empire fell. The Old School tradition dates the demise of that massive empire to 476 CE (or AD if you prefer), when Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer as the last Roman emperor in the West, and sent his imperial regalia to Zeno, the remaining Roman emperor in Constantinople.

But of course, that begs the question: if the Roman Empire fell, how was there still an emperor to send the regalia to? The answer is, of course, that the Roman Empire was ruled jointly from Italy and Constantinople in 475, so the termination of the western half did not mean the empire fell, but rather just continued a process of shedding territory that had begun 70-some years earlier. The Roman Empire as ruled by a Roman emperor in Constantinople (or nearby) endured another millennium falling in 1453 (traditionally) or even as late as 1461 depending on how you measure that. But by then it was a wholly transformed polity, Greek in language, Orthodox in religion, etc., and even the historians who push back against 476 and say the empire endured longer rarely consider the end of something truly Roman to have occurred in the 15th century.

The galaxy-brain take on this question is to say the Roman Empire fell way before 476.  Some point to the so-called “third-century crisis” of Rome, which lasted for 50 years straddling 250 CE. During this time, the empire almost completely lost control of its borders, rarely had an emperor live more than a few years, and almost none of them died a peaceful death. For a good