The Romans Are Coming!

About the game

In The Romans Are Coming! you are the ruler of a small people, and the game is played on a map drawn in a few warm parchment colours: forests, hills, sand, water and rocks. Your only tool is the banner. You place it on a marked spot of the map and it scores a point and gathers a few resources, shown in the bar at the top of the screen.

A short note from your advisers opens the game and explains the rules as they come. After four banners a new day begins, and every banner has to be fed: each one eats a unit of food a day. Keep placing banners until the map is full, so where and in which order you place them matters, and a careless choice early on costs you later. Hovering over the resource bar with the mouse gives hints about what each figure means.

Then the empire shows up. The Romans take over regions of the map, demand a tribute (for example a stack of resources that you cannot possibly pay) and start sending decrees that you must follow every day, or they will send more. From that point the game is a puzzle about how to make your own plans fit around orders from the outside. Some decrees are kind, such as an extra harvest; others are a headache.

The menu has two ways to start. Start always plays the same map, with the advisers' notes as a tutorial. Freeplay deals a new random map every time.

Playing it here

The Romans Are Coming! was made for WASM-4, a fantasy console: an imaginary handheld with a 160 by 160 screen, four colours, a D-pad and two buttons, for which independent developers write new games. Sander in 't Veld made it in 2022 and updated it to version 1.1.0 in August of that year. It runs here in the official WASM-4 web runtime and is about 43 KB. It is best played with the mouse, but the keyboard works too. The game does not save anything.

Controls

On a phone or tablet, the WASM-4 runtime shows touch buttons on the screen.

Tips

Read the first note. The advisers' messages are the tutorial. They tell you what a banner needs and what happens when a day ends.

Think about the whole map. Banners go on the map until it is full, so spend the early ones in the places you will not need later, and leave room for the decrees.

Use the hints. With the mouse, hover over the resource bar; with the keyboard, hold Z and press left or right.

FAQ

Is it related to real history? The setting is a made-up tribe facing a distant empire. The game uses the idea, not real events.

Does it have an end? Yes. The game goes on until the map is full.

Credits and licence

The Romans Are Coming! was made by Sander in 't Veld. The code and graphics are released under the MIT licence, and the palette is based on Painted Parchment 9 by skeddles. The original game has a laurel wreath on its title screen drawn by "scribbles pixels", which has no licence we could verify, so the version served here leaves it out. The cartridge was compiled from the author's source code, with that one change, and it runs in the official WASM-4 runtime (ISC licence). The licence texts are linked from this page.