<PERSON> Quo Vadis is an elegant negotiation game that gets to the heart of the mechanic that it seeks to explore with a minimum of added elements. Although the game has an ancient Roman political theme, the board and pieces are quite abstract. The goal of the game is to maneuver one's pawns (politicians) through a series of political committees (groups of 1, 3 or 5 squares) en route to the senate (a five member committee space that marks the end of the board). Players will gather laurel tokens of various values which represent victory points as they pass between the paths of certain committees. When the five spaces of the senate have been filled, each player who has managed to advance a pawn into the senate compares the number of laurels he has acquired and the winner is the person with the most laurels. Of course, if one never manages to place a pawn in the senate, it is impossible to win regardless of the number of laurels that one might have.
Unlike other negotiation games such as "I'm the Boss," there is no real hidden information or vindictive card play in Quo Vadis (even victory points, which remain hidden after they have been collected, are theoretically trackable). Quo Vadis is all about the art of making deals that are advantageous to oneself without giving other players too much of a benefit in return. The game encourages deal making by forcing the players to have the support of a majority of the spaces in a committee in order to leave it to progress forward on the board. 937
While this can be achieved by controlling the necessary spaces with one's own pieces, it is often necessary to gain the support of your opponents. Allowing a player to move forward immediately gains the supporting player a single laurel token but the most interesting deals will require the moving player to concede more than that. The official rule regarding deals is that anything may be negotiated but the only binding agreements are those that can be fulfilled by the time of the player's next turn. So if one agrees to move a pawn to a certain square on the next turn, one is legally obliged to fulfill that condition unless circumstances have altered to prevent that move from being made at the time. Although the only real elements at stake are the acquisition of laurels and advancement towards the limited number of seats in the senate, the relative value of those two goals fluctuates greatly during the game, and deals are further complicated by the need to account for how your agreement will benefit the other players and how many laurels they have at the time.
Quo Vadis is one of many games where the range of players recommended on the box is overly optimistic. Having played this game with three and with five, I would say that there is little point in playing with less than a full compliment of players. The race to the senate is simply stripped of all tension in a three player game and the game really suffers without that element.
Quo Vadis' elegance and abstract minimalism has the potential to be the game's greatest strength or its greatest flaw depending on what a player is seeking from the game. If one is looking for a pure negotiation game, it is an ideal choice as it effectively boils down the mechanics to allow for a tense 30 minute contest of thought provoking negotiations and tough decisions without needing to resort to the possibility of threats and bluff which come from hidden information. The lack of chaos, however, can lead to the game feeling somewhat dry despite the fact that it has a high degree of player interaction. 237