Each player gets 5 wooden warrior cubes, and you roll to determine starting player. The Legion pawn is placed on the SPQR spot off to the side.
(That's the aspect of the game that reminds me a little of Ilium, which also had this sort of correspondence between number of paths and value of a location.) Below the IV, V, and VI forts, you place the II, III, and IV victory points tokens, respectively.
The number of the fort also corresponds to the number of roads leading to that location - so a II fort has two roads leading to it, and a VI fort has 6 roads leading to it. To set up the game, all of the wooden fort tokens are placed on the matching Roman numerals on the map. The reason this matters is that in some areas the forts are so close together that it's hard to squeeze a wooden cube in between them (let alone the Legion pawn), making it hard sometimes to see where the roads actually are. In practice, you don't really need all that space and the player aid probably could have been just printed on a little card, allowing more room for the map itself. Well, not exactly: there's a section of the board that's devoted to the sea, which displays the name of the region, the Legion space and five ships, and a player's aid. My only complaint after playing several times is that maybe the board is a little too small. The wooden cubes and dice are pretty standard Eurogame style. All of the components are pretty nice, with wooden chips for forts and victory points. The two sides of the board have a different configuration of the forts and roads, which just allows for a change of scenery, with subtle shifts in strategy. The box is about the size of a thick paperback book, and you could easily stash it in a backpack to take your gaming on the go. It's a very compact game, and I applaud Closet Nerd Games and Sandstorm LLC for not going for the big box route.
The first thing you'll notice about the game is that the tri-fold board is quite small.
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