Caesar and Cleopatra is a two player card laying game where players assume the roles of these two great leaders. Caesar wants Rome to invade Egypt while Cleopatra wants it to remain independent and both try to influence Roman officials to support their cause.
Players take turns and send their agents, i.e. play numbered cards from 1 to 5 to influence one group of Roman officials, Aedils, Quaestors, Senators, Pretorians and Censors. They can send fewer agents face-down or more agents face-up. Additionally they can play action cards like Assassins that take out opposing agents or scouts that reveal face-down agents. Players can decide if they want to refill their hand from the agent deck or the action card deck but once one of the decks is empty they don't have access to any more of these cards.
After each players turn, a card from the voting stack is revealed and the group of officials that is indicated on the card casts their vote. The player who has the most influence points next to that group wins one official from that group to his cause and then removes his strongest agent from that stack.
The game ends when all the officials have picked a side and the player who has influenced most of them wins the game, with bonus points for the majority in each group and some simple hidden objectives.
- Engaging bluffing and bidding mechanic
- Elegant two-player design with clear scoring
- Fast-paced via hand management and card play
- Mission cards provide extra objectives
- Limited to two players (may deter group play)
- Rules can be fiddly with card ordering and face-up/down interactions
- Bidding, influence, and faction control through petitions and patricians
- Ancient Rome, political intrigue around Roman patricians and petitions
- bluffing and hidden information with public scoring
- Cortisans
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Action and veto cards — Action cards modify play; veto cards can cancel actions but grant extra draws.
- Assassination and card removal — Players remove or discard influence cards as strategic disruption.
- Bag bust reveal and reset — Drawing busts from a bag to determine winners/losers; gray busts do nothing, black bust recycles busts.
- Bidding with influence cards — Players place influence cards (face up and face down) to influence which petitions win.
- Endgame when petitions exhausted — Game ends when all petitions are resolved or hands are empty.
- Valuation and scoring by petition groups — Players score points for having majority in petition groups, collecting petitions, and completing mission cards.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Caesar and Cleopatra. You have hidden bluffing and public bidding.
- it's a simple bidding game where you are placing out cards below the petitions and you're trying to get basically the majority of the petitions in order to score.
- I like this mechanic