Empires Review

Critical Hits: Succeeds wonderfully at providing negotiation/economic depth with very little time commitment

Critical Misses: Abstract with no frills

Diplomacy is its own sort of warfare. Sharp pointed slashes of the tongue and flying spittle are as evocative and traumatizing as blade and blood. While one takes brute strength, the other takes an unfettered demeanor. One's also much easier and cleaner to emulate from a group of middle-aged men and women huddled around a table.

The plainly titled Empires knows it forte. This is an economic game of rearranging inputs and outputs underpinning a vibrant political conference of wheeling and dealing. It comes from the reinvigorated Wizkids games, the group that sold us on the fantastic Sidereal Confluence. Empires, at first blush, sounds a great deal like its cousin whose name you can't pronounce. When you dig into the nitty-gritty and past the top layer of negotiation, they're quite different.

Wait, where’s the board?

Empires is a very abstract game. Players portray European empires (you didn't see that coming) with asymmetrical abilities. The goal is to amass the most supporters, basically victory points, by the end of the fifth round. It's a very quick 45 minute wallop of moving around simple parts to elicit the strongest production.

Simple is a key concept of the design. There are very few actual rules and everything can feel as though it's kind of on rails. Each round you pair workers with goods for them to swallow whole like fat citizens making hay. This earns you that precious support as the people are jovial when consuming large quantities of alcohol and the finest steak. Leftover citizens can be paired with land you own to produce more goods, which means more ale and cheese for their brothers and sisters to shove down their throats next round.

Swallowing them goods and working the Prussian block.

Immediately after producing everyone simultaneously ships goods to market. This is done blind so you don't quite know how many Ben will toss to sea when we reveal. The trick here is the more goods collectively sold at port, the less each is worth. This mechanism is very similar to the fantastic Black Market phase in the underrated Sons of Anarchy board game. It's a brilliant system in both designs because it naturally engenders above the table discussion and negotiation-which always leads to people screwing each other over and me on the sidelines nursing my sore sides as I can't stop laughing.

Sending off those goods brings in the money. You'll use this gold to finance wars, the final phase of each round. Following suit in the designs overall commitment to abstraction, these are conflicts in name only. They're really a bid that allows you to choose one of several tiles and receive rewards. This is the primary way new lands and workers enter the economy.

So all of this sounds somewhat bland, admittedly. Wars fought through bidding coin, meeples eating cardboard tokens, and shipping goods at a cardboard strip we agree to call "port".

Waaaarrrrrrrrr!

The magic of Empires is in its wobbly distribution and how it patronizes the players. You see, you never quite have the right mix of workers to goods to land that you want. It's a struggle to produce coin when you need it or to pivot back and turn the profits of your war into victory points. The engine is sort of a scale but the weights you’re given never quite balance out resulting in a game of shifting tides and alternating priorities.

This is all a precarious dance as gaining too many citizens results in unrest. People don't like to loaf around unless they're given those cans of Pringles or handles of vodka. So dance we must. And in order to flail our bodies about the court we need a partner.

Negotiation is what this game's all about. The player who is able to leverage their assets and continually form pacts will burst ahead. Win the right wars and forge the right trade agreements and you will propel yourself to the head of the economic class. Everything in this game is fair trade, even your nation powers. If you ignore that social element it will feel as though you are making far too few decisions, but you'll also be missing the entire point of the game.

Empires lives in that comfortable nook of verbal tangling. The layers of discussion and their impact are barer and more easily realized than the subtle Sidereal Confluence. This results in a more direct and accessible game that ends at a very reasonable time commitment. If this design was a bloated 90-120 minute affair, it would fail miserably. There simply isn't enough mechanical meat to warrant that table time. However, it forges its identity on getting right to the point and putting players in a round-table situation of almost entirely simultaneous play without hogging the spotlight for the majority of the evening.

This is a game that's comfortable with its goals and does a fantastic job of achieving them. It's not bloated or overgrown, and it's not ashamed to offer an abbreviated experience as its niche. If you're a fan of economic Euro-style games and want to inject some more lively debate into the proceedings, Empires will bring you to the table and have you arguing like a bunch of pompous dictators in no time.