Britannia

Britannia is a strategioc board game, dealing with the history of the British isles from the Roman invasion in 43 AD to the Norman invasion in 1066.

The game is a 4 player game, with each player controlling one of the 4 colours (Red, Ywllow, Green and Blue). Each colour has 4 (or 5) nations, playing a part in the game throughout the course of history. Each colour has 1-2 nations on the board to begin with, the rest come along as invaders in pre-defined turns. There are rules for 3 or 5 player variants, but I've never tried it. It's a great 4 player game, so try to playit that way.
Gameplay consists of 16 turns, each with easily overviewed rules of invasions, reinforcements etc.
Victory conditions is the simpel accumulation of Victory points. Each nation has distinct goals in pre-defined turns, about how to score and how many points. The nations are not balanced, some score a lot and some are just a minor participant. But the 4 colours are fairly balanced, depending on strategy and chance.
The rules are basically very simple. Rules for deployment, combat, movement, expansion and maintainence are easily grasped and well illustrated with examples. All exceptions and special situations are thoroughly explained in a unit by unit or round by round basis.

With the way the mechanics and gameplay work, the game moves in waves. It's difficult to see who is in the lead at a given time, bacause the nations score very uneven. Nations on the board need not give an iron clad definition on the power, with the comings and goings of invaders.

All in all, this makes for a very fine game. Once the rules and basic strategies are grasped, the game moves easily enough forward. All games I have played have seen vairation to the results. This is very much a game of choices, how one nation is used to help another of your own. Or even another player, since his succes with one nation might help you against yoyr next invader's worst enemy. And so on.
A plenthora of strategy and help atitcles can be found on the net.

This board game is one of my absolute all-time favorites, I keep coming back to play it.

One of the great things about this game