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| Empires | |
| Product # | 1601 |
| Manufacturer | |
| Suggested Retail Price | €35.28 EUR |
Back to EMPIRES: JANA WANG & JAVIER B AKA DOKTORZINIEZTRO
Back to Workbench
| Revision Log | |
| 25 August 2004 | page first published |
Master figure painted in America, then the unit is sent to Ukraine for completion.
2,665 hits since 25 Aug 2004
©1994-2024 Bill Armintrout
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For starters, the sturdy box arrived a bit later than expected, so delays were to be suffered by all. Who would have thought the U.S.P.S. was destined to be the great equalizer in a review contest?
Anyway, the box arrived. I opened it. Jana made a great job of painting the Capitals - top marks for her, yes. I plunged into the rules book.
The game was afoot, so to speak.
The contents are of a very good quality, with nice printing and materials for both the counters and cards representing units or characters (collectively and quite conveniently known as "elements"), itsy-bitsy chips to mark the hits taken by the elements mentioned before, cardboard treasury cards and six money tokens, ten d6s with 3 sides marking a "hit" and the other 3 a "block," a foldable gameboard that depicts four rectangular sectors with a few terrain variations...and the rules book I plunged into, of course.
The writing style is simple, direct, and may seem only a little funky in very few places, but it is nothing that can't be figured out/comprehended after reading the paragraph a second or third time, tops.
The game idea is based on the movement of elements, the building of villages and their upgrading to towns and, of course, their defence against the relentless advance of an equally expansionist enemy on the other side of the board.
Apparently it's not too much of a challenge, right?
Well, I was surprised how much forethought can be put into the game.
The mechanics are pretty straightforward and without unnecessary encumbrance designed as "detail." It all begins with both players setting the size of their resource pool, which translates into the total amount of points you have to spend in your army. Once this is set, each player places his/her capital on one of the corners of the board — opposite to each other in a basic game — and mark their initial monetary resources on their Treasury card — 500 gold pieces.
Then, the game starts proper and the fate of your chosen race begins to unfold.
A Game Turn is made up of five phases:
After all the phases have been played out, the turn is over and a new turn begins.
And that pretty much is it.
