The “Postumus Opening” in Time of Crisis

boardgamequest.com:

Thanks to the wonderful “Rally the Troops” gaming website, I’ve played many, many games of GMT’s Time of Crisis (designed by Wray Farrell and Brad Johnson, art by Rodger MacGowan). It’s rare I get to play a game enough to really explore its full variety of possibilities, but with over sixty games played, I think I can safely say I understand how the game’s mechanics interact with each other and what makes for a set of solid opening moves, designed to allow for a reasonable shot at winning more than the expected 25% of the time.

To this end, I have designed my standard three-turn set of opening tactics, which I use as my starting point for each game. Of course, in a 4p game with random events at the start of each turn, that means there could be up to 12 random occurrences before my third turn is over, which means there are many chances for things to go astray, but this set of moves accomplishes two things: (1) if things go optimally, it is the best springboard for a win and (2) it is the most flexible set of moves for when things go less than optimally, allowing for enough flexibility to survive a lot of unpleasant random events. Of course, it’s not perfect. I’ve had games where the gods of randomness just punish me mercilessly and no amount of clever card play can solve that level of bad luck. But if things are just a little bad, or not bad at all, I am usually quite pleased with what I’ve dubbed “The Postumus Opening.”

To step back for a moment, if you do not know the game Time of Crisis, it is a fairly simple, strategic-level wargame where four players vie to reunite a Roman Empire that had shattered in the middle of the 3rd century C.E. (or what we used to call A.D. back when I was a kid, which I think stood for the Age of Donuts), a period of time historians often call “The Third Century Crisis” — hence the game’s title. Each player starts with a hand of 9 lousy cards (all with power 1 and zero bonus abilities), control of one province of the Roman Empire with a