Hadrian’s Wall Solo Review: A Rewarding First Move-and-Write Experience

This is adapted from the script of Episode 90: Hadrian’s Wall Has a Spankin’ New Pict-Fil-A, which you can listen to here.

The year is Rome.

The challenge: Build a thriving slice of Roman colonial society with one hand and the infrastructure that defends it with the other.

The setting: Wherever you have time to spread out Hadrian’s Wall, stop being a jerk, and play a game.

The genre? It’s a move and write, part of a surge of designs where your decisions and their results get tracked by marking up sprawling game sheets to show your progress. You also have flip-and-writes, roll-and-writes, etc…

Hadrian’s Wall Solo Review: My first score of 51, playing on the easiest setting. Throughout the following weeks, that number — and the challenge level — goes way up.

Being a late adopter who likes to watch and measure a gaming concept before I make a purchase, I finally land on Hadrian’s Wall as I see this design — which is generally favorable to solo players, but can include others — take off and catch fire.

Hadrian’s Wall surfaced on my consciousness over and over again, a combination of praise from reviewers and social media accounts I respect…and also a blink response that stuck it in the front of my brain. Beyond the mechanics, I looked at the pictures and wanted in; I saw what looked like a beautifully illustrated, well-regimented historical sim game at the lovely pace of markers and pens.

Both casual players and non-hobbyists usually balk at first glance and would be forgiven for saying “Oh, hooray! It’s Rome: The Spreadsheet,” but I did break it out multiplayer once for two noobs and within minutes they more or less had the self-directed game turns down as they assigned builders to extend forts, got their profile up among other Roman generals, and built the odd civic structure or two.

The two biggest obstacles in front of you are the icon systems and the (at first) overwhelming variety of things to do: On the left sheet, you’re faced with row after row of fortifications, basic infrastructure, and foundational builds that bring in new wooden meeple peoples to fuel the effort — citizens, soldiers, builders, and *cough* servants. We’re gonna about those later. You’ll also see the dashboard that shows you how your ambitious general is doing in the four attributes — Renown, Piety, Valor and Discipline — that will determine your final score.

Over on the right sheet? The citizen tracks that let you specialize in developing trade, the arts (including death sports), religious life, bureaucracy (including bribes), and the time-honored game of kissing the asses of the rich, which helps you out with diplomacy and resources.

Each of these sections contains specialized minigames with their own logic and opportunity costs: You can build out markets, temples, gladiatorial arenas and bathhouses, which is where your civil servants prefer to receive their bribes. I don’t know why you can’t just slide them an envelope while they’re having their morning coffee at Pantera Bread, but that’s just the way stuff works. If you send muscle to the Patricians, they can unleash scouting raids and attach diplomats to your armies that blunt the Pict attacks that happen at the end of each of the game’s six years.

Yes, the Picts. These are the armed locals who, for perfectly good reasons, don’t want the Romans there and don’t care about the fussy little projects on your Asana task list. You draw cards to see how many of them slam into your military cohorts beyond the wall, arriving in bigger numbers with each attempt. If bands of them get through, you start to accrue Disdain, another drag on your ambition and your score. This is what I referred to earlier when I talked about how the game creates sweaty-palm moments by forcing you to choose, always choose, between allocating resources and people to the military or civic and infrastructure projects. Building one is gambling with the other.

Early Games: A Puppy Romping Through an Ancient Construction Site

A few impressions from my early games, which I played solo at the easy difficulty level: You can expect to invest some time in experimenting as you start to see how making moves ripples combos of actions back and forth across your two game sheets.

In your favor: This rulebook is excellent. One walkthrough gave me a solid foothold on not only the interlocking logic of the resource systems, but all the flavorful subsystems that are both mechanically impressive and evocative.

So I start flinging wooden people into the furnace of Brittania. For my first game, I simply decided that whatever happened, I was going to have a strong army and not lose points to incursions. 

I wasn’t efficient, but I was stimulated: Filling in sections you’re working on with magic marker produces a chain of endorphin strikes that keeps you in it even when you’re not sure if your strategy is sound. And then you start to see the rhythm of actions and resources feeding other actions; as you get more stuff at the beginning of each game year, the drug gets potent. The first few hits in years one and two peak and fade, but what happens from year 3-6 is a binge. What happened to the afternoon? According to the final grading, I got a 51, earning me the rank of Primus Pilus on my first go.

I’d focused on Traders and Theater Kids as the primary pistons of civic life behind the wall, maxing out both of those tracks and building a bustling theater that put on five flagship performances and a market that did a decent trade, even if it was somewhat underutilized.

Time Out For a Sidebar Here on Potentially Troublesome Aspects of the Setting

Early on in the rulebook, it is explained to you that about 30% of the Roman empire were slaves, so slaves are one of the four meeple flavors you generate to get stuff done.

If you decide to proceed after that knowledge, they are referred to as Servants for the rest of the book, which feels like a dodge after the frankness of the explanation on the intro page. If you accept the proposition, knowing that playing around with surface evil significance doesn’t make you an advocate for imperial slavery any more than playing Monopoly makes you a BlackRock shareholder, do you need it masked from you as you cross the threshold into the Magic Circle and its absolution from ethics? 

Hadrian’s Bribes: Yeah, we can finagle you some more forced labor at the Courthouse, but it’s not going to be pretty.

For example, look at the Courthouse over on the right sheet: If you lavish your Apparitores with enough budget, you can build it and use its actions to generate Rulings that kick out more slaves. Immiserating the populace by servitude with decrees. That’s life in Rome. Or in the Jim Crow south. Or the optimized modern versions: Making prisoners go fight wildfires or break sanitation strikes. It’s a supercharged bolus of history, morality, semiotics and symbols that I can sense, but only partially unpack. 

In a future installment, I’m going to try to explore this in the context of the few pure wargames I own, but if your primary reaction to all this is revulsion? Don’t blame you a bit. If your heart is tenderized by the implications, this might be your cue to back out. Or instead consider the newest Garphill Games’ spin on the concept: The Anarchy, which uses the same system, except this time it’s about a succession crisis in England in the 12th Century. Maybe you’ll find simple internecine English slaughter more relaxing.

Takeaway: Yes

As a testament to quality of pure play, the growing stack of marked-up game sheets are QED: I’m thinking of using them for a decoupage project on an ugly door in my living room. I’ve completely killed the tips of two Sharpie markers. (Pro Tip: Put something under those game sheets if you use a marker, it will bleed through to your table.)

As of this writing I have played my way up to the top difficulty level and achieved a 70+ score at that tier, refining my play with each turn and finding satisfaction in even the late incremental improvements. Strategically, it feels somewhat solved, but I took it out again last week and played it twice in one night because the action is good and it’s gratifying to have that hard-won early knowledge from stop-and-go learning sessions turn into pleasant riff-variations of a song I can play well.

But that and wall art isn’t the end of the value chain: I haven’t even touched the game’s solo campaign mode, which lets you play solo sessions as an interconnecting epic, each chapter with its own wrinkles and strictures that challenge you to adjust the reflexes you honed while playing in standard solo mode.

Hadrian’s Wall is a rock-solid and beautifully realized system, a rich and rewarding entry point to the roll-and-write genre that sings in its visual presentation, beguiles with its flow, and stimulates where the gears of its system mesh with its setting.