Jana & Javier: Jana's Second Game

Our impressions from the first session were lukewarm. Jon says:

The rules have the same vague and uncertain quality you find in Warhammer. And I've always hated the Warhammer game because it doesn't specify...

We tried to avoid the comparisons to Warhammer, but it was unavoidable. The game looks and feels similar, and the choice of Orcs vs. Empire for the boxed set is too much of a coincidence.

I thought the rules were complicated, and it was hard to reference things in different parts of the book. Maybe because it was late at night. The banking was a pain in the ass. We really wanted calculators when figuring armies and doing the maintenance and income phases. Finally, you do have to plan for upkeep, and that doesn't make for a very quick game. Empires looks like a boardgame, and we really did expect it to move faster, even allowing for unfamiliarity with the rules set.

The second time around, my husband and I teamed up against Jon, and switched armies. He played the Orcs and we played the Humans.

The game went pretty much the same...

...with both of us quickly moving units out onto the board and advancing toward our enemy cities.

We were headed for an orgy of destruction and it was looking good.

An hour later, after multiple rounds of combat and more manoeuvering, the battle was still not decisive - and we were all beginning to notice it was awfully slow going to get to the orgy...

Another problem my husband had was with the lettering on the card tokens that represented his army pieces. He's a typical middle-aged-gamer-with-glasses, and he said he could 'just barely' make out the lettering. As a result, he repeatedly had to lift the tokens off the board to look at them, or ask what the piece was, or ask me to read the unit card. Not a big deal, but annoying. (In defense of the tokens, it was nice to have them as alternatives to buying miniatures. That makes the game playable 'out of the box,' and makes it a suitable pick-up game or gift item.)

We were more familiar with the rules during the second game, but questions kept coming up. We weren't sure if we should pay upkeep on the capital in the first round or not. Or if it was ever due. I think we might have resolved that later in the game, but it was pretty unclear for a while. Another question had to do with movement in swamp hexes. After looking at the mapboard, we were uncertain which hexes were the swamp hexes, or if there even were any on the board.

After almost three hours of play the game was still unresolved, and with one amazingly bad attack roll...

...which came up with 6 shields (good for defense, but not 'to hit') - Jon simply asked "Can I surrender now?"

And he wasn't kidding.

On To Jana's Conclusions