Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 3-4 hours
The Components
Rise of Empires is one of the heftier games that I've picked up lately (thanks to its two boards, the heavy cardboard of the rest of the bits, and the fact that it all fills the box almost completely). Here's what it comes with:
Game Boards: There are two boards: a six-panel linen-textured map of the world and a two-panel untextured tile display.
Besides the map, the main board also contains a number of other status displays, including a score track, a food track, a turn order track, and the all-important action display.
The tile board mainly contains spaces to place various tiles. It helpfully includes the relevant action icon right next to the display of each sort of tile, so that it's always easy to see exactly what you're doing. At the top right of the board is a list of trade opportunities; though it's not a tile, it's the last sort of major action and helpfully keeps everything together. Though the rules tell you to stack all of your tiles for the whole game on this tile board, don't. They'll probably end up all over. In our game, we set up tiles one era at a time.
As already noted, some good effort has been made to make both of these boards quite usable. Some of our players, however, were offput by the very limited color palette of the boards, which show everything in grays and browns. I didn't particularly care, but having both heard the comment in my house and read it elsewhere, I know it's an issue for some people (and probably does reduce the beauty of the overall result).
Tiles & Other Cardboard Bits: There are a huge array of linen-textured tiles, all printed on extremely thick cardboard. They appear in a couple of different sizes to help differentiate between the different tile sorts. According to the rulebook, there are: 8 empire tiles, 40 territory tiles, 48 progress tiles, and 36 city tiles.
There is a lot of information on these tiles, including immediate costs, ongoing costs, and ongoing gains. Icons for all of this information is quite attractively shown (and in fact the tiles overall are quite nice), and the use of icons is consistent. Unfortunately, some of our players still had problems getting the hang of them.
One of the issues is that many of the cost and gain icons are pretty low contrast, and thus it's hard to see them from across the table, against the bright tiles. The other problem is that one-time costs and ongoing costs are shown right next to each other. Though they're used consistently, this proved a barrier for first time players who hadn't read the rules themselves. I think that figuring out what the tiles mean would be easier for second-time players, but the contrast issue would remain for whomever is sitting furthest from the tiles, even when they'd played multiple games.
There are also attractive coins printed on the same thick cardboard in two denominations (and colors).
Wooden Bits: Each player gets a set of wodden pieces in his player color (blue, red, yellow, green, or white) including 30 player cubes, 9 action discs, and 1 alliance piece. There are further 40 black resource discs (which isn't quite enough for a 5-player game in later rounds and treating them as a limited resource like is done in many Eurogames doesn't work, because they're mostly given out as one big set).
Rulebooks: The game comes with a beautiful 16-page rulebook, printed full color and containing lots of illustrations and some examples. It's a fair rulebook. I had issues with a couple of different points in the rules, particularly including the rules for playing cubes to the New World and the Far East and and the rules for when you get your various resource gains (though the latter was cleared up by the time I'd finished my read of the rule book). A little more polish could have made this complex ruleset easier to grasp.
The game also comes with very attractive full-color player-aid cards, printed on cardstock. They're most helpful because of the progress tile list that they contain--as the progress tiles are the hardest to read from across the table. They also have a short sequence of play which is pretty good (though it was missing one vital rule: that you can pay for "B" turn actions with any some of resource, not just gold).
Overall Rise of Empires contains great quality components whose total sum suggest the price of the game should be higher than the $55 that Mayfair is currently charging. There's been good attention to both usability and beauty in some places, but at other times there are issues (most specifically, the beauty of the board as a whole and the usability of the tiles, especially from across the table). These latter issues added up enough to keep Rise of Empires from quite earning a perfect Style score; it nonetheless gets a very high "4" out of "5" for Styling: it's very nice.
The Gameplay
The object of Rise of Empires is to collect the most victory points through the construction of towns and cities, the collection of certain progress tiles, and the control of regions on the board.
This will be done over the course of three eras, each of which is split into two turns, called (evocatively) the "A" turn and the "B" turn.
Setup: The main setup of the game involves the stacking of many tiles. There are progress tiles for each of the three eras, which are shuffled and separated into a total of six sets, one per turn. There are likewise city tiles for each of the three eras, but these are already separated into a set of tiles for each turn; they're placed out. The territory tiles are shuffled and arranged into four sets, which will be revealed over the first four turns. There are just eight empire tiles. They're all placed out.
Each player also gets five of his cubes for his "pool" (with the rest staying in his "general stock"), 5 gold, and 2 resource disks. Each player puts a marker on the "16" of the food track.
Finally, turn order is determined randomly for the first turn.
Order of Play: As with many Martin Wallace games, a game turn is split into several phases, with the majority of the game play occurring in the "player actions" game phase. The phases are:
- New Tiles
- Player Actions
- Food
- Income
- Victory Points
- Turn Order Determination
New Tiles: Each turn starts out with any older tiles being set to the side and new tiles being put out. That means that you get a new set of city tiles, you get a new set of progress tiles, and all of the empire tiles become available again. In addition, there are new territory tiles for each of the first four turns.
Here's what all those tiles do:
Territory Tiles. These are the foundation upon which your empire runs. Their most important aspect is that they provide player cubes, which are the troops you need to control regions on the board. The ones that provide fewer cubes also give you food and the ones that provide more cubes cost you food.
Progress Tiles. This is technology. There's a variety of different technology available including tiles that: give you bonuses for certain territories, allow you to kill opposing cubes, give you food, let you move troops, and (in the last era) grant victory points.
City Tiles. This is the main way to get victory points other than board control. Most city tiles cost gold to purchase and some cost food and/or resource discs on later turns. They all grant victory points each turn.
There are also some "wonders of the world" which have a single one-time cost (of gold, resource cubes, and/or food) and which grant you one-time victory points.
Empire Tiles. These allow you to place cubes on the board and are discussed more, below.
Player Actions: As note, this is the heart of the game. Each player gets to take six actions over the course of a turn, with each player taking one at a time.
On the "A" turn of an era, a player takes an action, then puts a marker down on the action track to mark the action he took.
On the "B" turn, things reverse, and now players remove markers from the action track, taking the same type of action (and possibly paying gold or other resources for the privilege of taking the action, depending on which other players have taken their actions of the same sort).
This largely means that players take the same actions in a "B" turn as in an "A" turn, but in the reverse order. It creates a very interesting dynamic that I'll talk about more, in the "Game Design" section.
The possible actions are:
- Take Progress Tile
- Take Territory Tile
- Take City Tile
- Take Empire Tile
- Trade
Taking Progress, Territory & City Tiles. These are all simple actions. You take progress and territory tiles for free or pay gold for a city tile. They give you advantages as discussed above.
Taking an Empire Tile. As noted already, an empire tile gives you the ability to place cubes on the board. Each tile lists three things: a number, whether you can place in water, and a combat tradeoff.
The number is how many different regions on the board you can place in during this action. There are some other restrictions on your placement: you must expand adjacent to your own regions and some regions aren't available until the second or third era.
The water on a tile says whether you can play to the Mediterranean Sea in the first era, and whether you can expand to the New World and the Far East in later eras.
The combat line offers you a simple tradeoff: in one region you may remove a specified number of your own cubes, then eliminate a specified number of one of your opponents' cubes. They're usually to your benefit, e.g. eliminate one of your cubes to remove two of an opponent's.
Each of these empire tiles is double-sided, with the front side being used in the first era and the more powerful back side being used in the later eras.
Trading. Finally, you can trade. This is controlled by a set of spaces on the tile board which vary slightly from one era to another. Each one allows you to spend one or more resource discs and in return get either gold or victory points. Only one player can take each specific trade, often forcing late-comers to take slightly less advantageous exchanges.
(And that's the end of the possible actions; when they're done you move on to the next phase of the game ...)
Food, Income, Victory Points: Though the rules list these as a few different phases, practically they ended up somewhat intertwined because they revolve around the same concepts.
First, each region on the board grants victory points for the players who have the most and the second most cubes. Most regions also grant an additional reward (cubes, food, or resource discs) to whomever was in first.
Second, many of the tiles cost food or resource discs, while others grant food, resource discs, cubes, and gold. Some tiles also grant victory points. You take all your gains but victory points and pay for everything you can, then you get the victory points for any tiles you didn't have to throw away due to unpaid costs.
When you're all done you typically have new supplies of cubes and resource discs for the next turn, more victory points on the track, and may have earned or lost food.
Turn Order Determination: Finally, the players determine the new turn order. From the player with the least victory points on up, each player decides where he'd like to go, from first to last.
Ending an Era: After each set of two turns is done, the current era ends. Players must now decide whether to pay two costs: to keep progress tiles, a player must pay 1 gold each, and to keep city tiles, a player must pay 1 cube each. Further, each player removes half of his cubes from each space on the board, returning those cubes to his general supply.
Ending the Game: At the end of the game there are a few additional victory points for gold and resource discs in hand. Then the player with the most victory points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Rise of Empires almost immediately picked up the mantle of being a Civ Light game. As I say in the article I linked to, that means that people were expecting a game that had civilization advancement, resource management, trade, and warfare--and played in a substantially shorter time period than the 8-12 hours of Francis Tresham's Civilization.
Increasingly, I think that when a game is called a "Civ Light", it's just getting set up for failure. As with many games in the genre, Rise of Empires certainly has the veneer of Civilization, since you watch three eras of history sweep across the board, with cities and technology upgrading as you go.
However, in the case of Rise of Empires, it really is a veneer. At heart the game is a slightly abstract Eurogame, and in fact it's more European (by which I mean less random and more lightly themed) than most other games put out by Martin Wallace. The "civilization advancement" and the "warfare" aspects of the game are some of the most abstract, while you won't find trade at all. So, Civ Light? Probably not, though that doesn't mean Rise of Empires isn't a fine game.
I think Rise of Empires is closest in feel to 2007's Through the Ages. Through the Ages felt a bit more thematic (though there was still lots of abstract resource manipulation), while Rise of Empires has some nice board positioning and majority control--and thus direct interaction that you (largely) wouldn't find in Through the Ages. Both games have similar playing times too, though Rise of Empires is probably shorter on average.
The Game Design
The big "innovation" of Rise of Empires that every one was talking about prior to its release is the mirrored turn structure. Frankly it sounded like a gimmick to me before I played the game. However, when I heard the reasoning was that "civilizations get stuck into certain ways of doing things", I started to buy into the idea more, then when I actually played the mechanism, I found it really tactically interesting. At first I just worried about doing actions in turn "A" because I knew I'd want to do them in turn "B", but as the game went on I learned that the ordering of those actions became very important (because it can be prohibitively expensive to take actions from early in turn "A" early in turn "B"). So, I consider Rise of Empires's big innovation to be a very successful one.
The rest of the game centers around majority control and resource management, and I think they're both well done. There are considerable restrictions on where you can place your majority control cubes, which makes for a nice, tight game. Similarly, you'll always be short on either food, population, money, resources, or all four, and that made the resource management tight and interesting too.
Especially when adding that on to the near mirrored turn system, I generally consider Rise of Empires to be a successful and interesting game.
Having said that, I did have issues with it.
The first was time. I think our four-hour rules play time was long, even for a five-player game, but I'd be surprised if that number can be regularly gotten under three hours. Similarly, I suspect that three player games are unlikely to get below a two-hour game. The game doesn't exactly outlive its welcome. I had fun throughout the entirety of my four-hour play (though I was certainly punch-drunk tired by the end of it). However, as with many Civilization-style games, I feel like the first hour or so is such rudimentary setup that it could be avoided without decreasing the interest in the game. Parthenon was another "Civ Light" game from a few years ago that solved this problem by offering an alternative setup for beginning in its second era; I wish more games in this genre did that.
Beyond that, I think Rise of Empires suffers from incomplete development. I already mentioned in the components section that the rules for colonizing the Far East and the New World were shaky and that there weren't quite enough resource markers. I had a few other minor issues, including the fact the conditions under which you could (or had to) take an action in either turn "A" or "B" were vague, that too often you came to a situation where every action seemed non-helpful, and that some of the differences in tiles seemed relatively meaningless. I think a more thorough development polish could have really raised the game up to the next level.
As is, Rise of Empires is a fun and interesting game, but one that is brought down a bit by niggling issues. I still let it eke in a low "4" out of "5" for Substance.
