Roman Wars: Deck Building Game

Introduction

Deckbuilding games on Steam tend to split into two families: the campaign kind, where a single deck grows and mutates across dozens of runs (Slay the Spire's roguelite descendants), and the tabletop kind, where the point is solving a fresh scenario with cards you buy from a shared, un-evolving market — Dominion is the reference case everyone in that second camp gets compared to, favourably or not. Roman Wars, a solo project from developer Aleksandr Zhukov released in December 2021, sits firmly in the second camp and doesn't pretend otherwise: ten missions, each one a fresh deck built from the same pool of Roman-themed cards, each one asking a different question about how to spend your first ten turns.

The community's own vote-weighted Steam tags back that framing up cleanly — Deckbuilding, Card Battler and Turn-Based Tactics sit ahead of Board Game and Card Game, well ahead of the broader Strategy tag the storefront leads with. This is a card game that borrows tower-defence framing (you're building and upgrading a base while fending off attackers) more than it borrows the run-based structure most PC deckbuilders default to.

The core loop

Every mission opens with the same starting deck and the same market of buyable cards — gold production, military units, base structures, support effects — and closes the moment you either meet that scenario's win condition or run out of turns trying. The strategic question isn't "what goes in my deck by the end of the run," because there is no end-of-run deck to carry forward; it's "in what order do I spend my limited early gold, this specific mission, against this specific threat." One Steam reviewer who came in expecting an evolving deck (comparing it to System Crash or Cardpocalypse) described being surprised to find something closer to "a single-player Dominion" instead — not a complaint exactly, more a recalibration of what kind of deckbuilder this actually is.

That structure rewards a specific kind of player: the type who enjoys treating each scenario as its own economics puzzle rather than wanting momentum to carry between them. A structure that gets destroyed mid-mission doesn't just vanish from your options — it returns to your deck in its upgraded form once it cycles back around, which the same reviewer flagged as a genuinely useful tip worth knowing rather than something you'd naturally discover. Small mechanical details like that are where the design shows its board-game roots most clearly: it expects you to read the card text, not just react to what's in your hand.

Missions and difficulty

Ten missions and ten enemy types is the entire scope of the base game — suppressing a riot, running a sortie, fending off a gold-thief and seven others, according to the storefront's own feature list. Reviewers who worked through several of them describe real variety in what each one asks for: whether to prioritise gold production or immediate military strength changes mission to mission, and one reviewer explicitly recommends reading each mission's briefing carefully before committing to an opening strategy, because the "right" first few purchases genuinely differ from scenario to scenario.

The difficulty curve is steep by the reviewers' own account. One describes the final mission's gold requirement as "absolute brutality," still unclear on exactly how they cleared it even with bonus cards unlocked from earlier wins. Steam's global achievement data is consistent with that: 71.1% of trackers have won at least one mission, but that falls to 37.5% for winning every mission, and to single digits — 8.6% — for the very last unlock. The sample here is small enough that the curve isn't perfectly smooth (the tenth-level milestone sits slightly above several earlier ones), which is normal noise on a tracked population this size rather than a meaningful signal, but the overall shape — a steep drop after the first handful of wins — lines up with what the reviews describe.

Luck and design tension

The one consistent critique, even from reviewers who otherwise enjoyed the game, is variance. "Very luck based in some missions" is how one puts it, alongside genuine enthusiasm for the rest of the package. That's the natural friction point of this kind of design: a shared, shuffled card market means a mission can occasionally hinge on whether the card you need shows up in time, rather than purely on the order you chose to buy things. It doesn't come up as a dominant complaint in the small sample available, but it's the recurring caveat attached to otherwise positive reviews, which is usually the more trustworthy kind of criticism to weight.

Presentation

Visually this is a modest, functional card game — 2D art, a Roman aesthetic on the base game, and an alternate Cats theme that reskins the entire ten-mission set rather than just swapping a few icons. That alternate theme is worth calling out specifically: it's a genuine second pass at the same content, not a token cosmetic toggle, and it gives players who've cleared the base campaign an actual reason to run it again with a different coat of paint. Beyond that, don't expect animation or spectacle to carry the slower turns — the game's identity is entirely in its card math, not its visual presentation.

Reception

Roman Wars' Steam review count is thin enough to read in full: three reviews total, and all three are positive. That's not enough of a sample to treat as statistically meaningful, but it's worth reading closely rather than dismissing, and the pattern across all three is consistent rather than contradictory — "fun for an evening," "well worth the low price," and a recommendation to read each mission's briefing carefully before committing to a strategy. One reviewer also notes the game runs fine on Linux via Proton despite the storefront only listing Windows support, which is a useful data point for anyone on that platform weighing the purchase.

Value

At NZ$4.49 with a free demo covering the first two missions, the asking price is low enough that the financial risk of bouncing off the game's puzzle-not-campaign structure is close to zero. Content is genuinely light in absolute terms — ten missions, ten enemies, one bonus-card unlock track — and once you've solved each scenario there's no further layer pulling you back in beyond the Cats reskin. For what it costs, that's a fair trade rather than a shortfall; it just means the ceiling on how much play this offers is honestly low.

6.8 out of 10. Roman Wars is a small, honestly scoped solitaire deckbuilder that does what it sets out to do — hand you ten distinct card-buying puzzles wrapped in a Roman theme, at a price that makes trying it close to risk-free. It won't satisfy anyone hoping for a deck that grows across a longer campaign, and its own fans flag real luck swings in some missions, but for the narrower audience it's actually built for, it delivers a few honest evenings of play for less than the price of a coffee.