Cleopatra Express

Cleopatra Express is a dice game based on the board game Cleopatra and the Society of Architects created by Tangent during their secondary school years. The game was created using paper and printer and was played with pencils in addition to the equipment. The game, along with a paper, pen, and lego version of Puerto Rico (see: Puerto Rico strategy), were conceived to convince Tangent's parents to buy the actual board games, first giving them a taster of how the game plays like.

A tool for playing a revised version of Cleopatra Express was made during the post-Vista era, which was ultimately superseded by Tangent's Roll20 adaptation of Cleopatra.

Equipment

 * Item checklist
 * 5 ankh dice
 * 1 corruption and palm tree die
 * 3 resource and character dice
 * 1 numeric die
 * 1 reference sheet ("blueprint")

In the Cleopatra Express Tool program, one wood in the second die was replaced by the artisan, as Tangent found out that despite them seldom getting enough artisans while playing the actual board game, artisans were actually the most abundant resource in the deck.

The layout of the dice was to mostly evenly distribute the 5 resources: artisan, wood, stone, marble, and lapis, while having tainted faces show infrequently (there is only 1 of each), and that it is impossible to have all 3 dice show the same resource for balance. However, in retrospect, the character cards are actually very rare in the deck in the source game and in the Cleopatra Express Tool program, Tangent decided to mitigate the chances of characters activating by requiring the numeric die be rolled and having the characters only activating their abilities if a 5 or 6 is rolled.

Players would roll 3 (in the Tool, 6 after a certain point, but beginning at 3) resource dice and marked off the resources they earned on their resource sheet, which was for most of the game kept private. In the non-online Tool, there was not an option other than to make things public, and therefore a player's silver talents and corruption were the only items that were always kept hidden (aside from offerings). To help with managing character abilities though, if a player has no corruption, they would be notified if they tried to remove any.

Due to the lack of playing boards, the conditions for bonus silver talents for building palace parts were changed. Character abilities were also slightly changed for a similar reason.

The Tool features better redrawn graphics than the original pencil and paper game. The Roll20 adaptation's graphics were again, completely redrawn (though keeping very closely in style to the Tool adaptation) due to the original files having been lost.