Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Are you a fan of the tabletop classic Pandemic?
The cooperative “firefighting” classic designed by Matt Leacock was first released in 2008, before a number of Pandemic spinoffs and legacy games began to hit the market. I think Pandemic: Legacy Season 1 is the best legacy game I’ve ever played, and after I worked through two different campaigns, I retired. I knew, right after finishing my second campaign, that I loved Pandemic so much that I would never want to play it any other way ever again.
I haven’t played many co-op games that do the Pandemic formula well; even this year, I signed up to try Healthy Heart Hospital because I heard it was a fun take on that format. (Sadly, it was not.) Our partners at Ion Game Design offered a review copy of their Pandemic-style co-op game Sammu-ramat, and I happily raised my hand to cover the game because I am exploring the majority of Ion’s catalog.
Sammu-ramat, designed by Besime Uyanik, takes the event-driven Pandemic format to a new setting and uses a number of different mechanics to concoct its own formula. If you want to put out a variety of different fires in a unique thematic setting that plays in about an hour, I can happily recommend Sammu-ramat as a game you should get to the table.
The Unrest is Real
Sammu-ramat is a 1-5 player cooperative experience.It’s 811 BC, and the Assyrian Court is composed of a number of regional advisors who must support the leadership of Sammu-ramat, one of the first female leaders of the time. Players take on the roles of advisors who must collectively solve a variety of different issues to satisfy the conditions of a challenge card by the end of a player-scaled number of rounds.
Using one of about 20 different challenge cards, players set up a scenario, then must find a way to use a small pool of action points and various advisors to solve that card’s puzzle. Sometimes, that might include vanquishing a number of enemy units in Assyria or neighboring regions. In other cases, getting medicine or supplies to specific locations on the map becomes the goal. No matter what, rounds play out the same way: after a series of administrative steps to kick off a round (new event card, new playable cards, goods production in the form of taxes, etc.), each player can activate one of the current advisors to take 2-3 actions using that advisor.
Each advisor is used as either a personal advisor—assigned to a player—or a public advisor, which can be triggered by anyone at the table once per round. Sammu-ramat is also available as an advisor in multiplayer games, with game-breaking powers that essentially force players to use her in every round. (I did four plays of Sammu-ramat—one at three players, then three solo plays—and I am struggling to think of even a single round where we didn’t use one of Sammu-ramat’s powers, which include playing powerful hand cards at no cost or moving armies around the map.)
When a round ends, the game ends if players have achieved the goal on the challenge card. The game also comes with a campaign mode that is played out across five challenges, complete with a save sheet so that players can slowly complete an epic series of challenges with a game state that is continuous (i.e. a challenge ends but the next challenge starts using the previous game’s end state).
The Best Part? The Weight
Sammu-ramat was interesting at three players, but we ran into the “quarterbacking” problem that plagues many cooperative game players. In our final two rounds, it was amusing watching as the three of us tried to work out specific problems, going back and forth on the solution. We ended up winning, but some of our turns took a while to resolve.
That’s a player problem, not a design problem, but that immediately made me reconsider a second multiplayer play. Because Sammu-ramat accommodates solo play, I moved the rest of my plays to be a solo operation and that led to each successive game taking about an hour each, between setup, the gameplay, and teardown.
That’s not bad. Solo plays of Sammu-ramat simulate a three-player game, where the player can use Sammu-ramat as their personal advisor then trigger two other public advisors each round. Once I had the game’s systems down pat, it was easy to run through the admin steps then spend time trying to maximize the use of my six actions across three characters.
The special powers of the advisors, mixed with the Ashur cards that offer one-time-use bonuses, offered a nice pool of ways to solve each round’s specific issues. It was also fun to try and build “Vassal Gates” in different regions, because that unlocked the use of additional advisors offering unique powers to attack a challenge.
I don’t love games with event cards—and with Sammu-ramat, I was surprised how often an event card randomly made a game unbeatable in a late round because of the changes made to a location involved in the win conditions. Your mileage may vary here, but one of the core elements of a Pandemic-style game are event cards, and there’s no running from that here.
The game features 11 different technologies that can be earned by simply visiting a location that has that technology, or by playing an Ashur card. I really didn’t lean into techs until my third and fourth plays, but once I did, I found them to be exceptional ways to make the back half of games easier. One of the powers lets a player draw an Ashur card each time that advisor gets activated, so the card drip can really spike when doing the right things with that technology.
While I enjoyed my plays of Sammu-ramat, I didn’t have many “wow” moments. Some of that is tied to games of this nature, such as co-op event management-style games like Pandemic. I like games like this, but I don’t seek many of them out. For example, I skipped Daybreak earlier this year despite the fact that Leacock was involved as a co-designer.
Sammu-ramat offered many interesting ways to attack its systems, but I don’t gravitate towards these puzzles. But if you are a fan of games like Pandemic, Spirit Island, and the Forbidden Island series (Island, Desert, Jungle, etc.), please give Sammu-ramat a look. The slick pacing might be its best asset because games play fast, and the excellent “Plutorial” (playable tutorial) included in the box is a nice warm-up and the rules overhead is very reasonable.
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