When will I ever learn not to buy games because I like the pictures on the box? If I don't learn a lesson from my blind purchase of Emira from the overpriced shelves of my FLGS, I guess I never will ...

Yes, I bought Emira because I liked the box. But, in my own defense, it is a beautiful box. The artwork on the box, as well as on the board, cards, and other components within hit, is beautifully rendered. The components are very high-quality without, as in the case of the cards, being SO "high-quality" that they are impossible to manipulate (i.e., super-thick, glossy cardboard cards that only crease & fold when shuffled, etc.). And the concept was and immediate grabber, too ... Assemble a harem? Something I've felt to be a hopeless impossibility ever since Uma Thurman's unmistakably purposeful failure to respond to my daily shipments of frankincense, myrrh, and homemade waffles? Count me in!

Mistake. Not a big mistake, but, given that I paid $50 retail for Emira, definitely a mistake.

The game itself is not so bad ... Just bad enough. As stated, its components are beautiful and very well made. I purchased this game along with Colosseum, and neither game disappointed in the components department.

I played my one game of Emira (so far) with four-players (including myself), all a little too tired after 2.5 days of solid dawn-to-dawn gaming and drinking in a cabin on the shore of Lake Huron for a game with Emira's particular deficiencies (more on these below). At first, we all enjoyed the layout and set-up of the game. Reading through the rules together (we were all first-time players) was a very involved process, however, and, although I'm loathe to admit how long it took us to actually figure out how to play the game, we were all a little beat by the time we even began the first turn. Emira is not a quick game to pick-up, and the rules are rather voluminous. Nothing wrong with that, generally speaking, but it should be noted beforehand by any players under the impression that it might be a quick game to fit in between other games. It isn't.

Players in Emira take on the role of Sultans attempting to assemble harems. Each turn, a card representing a princess with various attributes (both positive and negative) is revealed, and the players compete to add her to their harem. Players are not bidding on the princess directly, however, with the highest bidding Sultan simply purchasing her. No, the bidding mechanism in Emira arises from the players' attempts to make themselves more attractive so that the princess will choose to join one harem or another. (Much hay has been made regarding the political correctness or incorrectness of this theme & mechanism in other posts, so I won't deal with it here except to state that it doesn't bother me, whatever that's worth.)

To accomplish this, players actually bid directly for the opportunity to choose 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., from the various actions available to assist themselves in becoming more "attractive" to the princess-of-the-turn: buy a camel (ah, if only love were that easy in real life!), add on to your palace, buy a +1 attractiveness token, buy small or large caravans (to increase your income), and improve your status (i.e., reputation or social standing). (Again, I make no comment regarding the notion that these are the sorts of things that women are interested in other than to state that, within the context of this game, it didn't bother me and was, in fact, an entertaining pursuit.) In any case, each princess is more or less interested in one or more of these various qualities.

After winning one of these bids, a player selects just one of those actions and sits out the rest of the bidding phase while the other players select. At the end of it all, one of the players will be more attractive to the princess-of-the-turn, and they add her to their harem, increasing their upkeep in gold the according 50 gold that each princess charges (a few have the detrimental effect of also being "high maintenance" and costing more upkeep per turn to offset some other advantages).

Eventually, one of the players accumulates the princesses necessary to fulfill the requirements of their individual goal-card and that player then wins the game. However, as I discovered, that can take a very, very, very long time ...

Conceptually, I still like Emira for its originality and artistry. Mechanically, I like it for its complexity and balance between resource management and auction mechanics. Dynamically, I like it for the interplay it requires between competing, counter-bidding players. However, the game falls short--perhaps very short--in its efficiency.

My game of Emira took nearly 4 hours to complete from the first point of play after rules-reading ended. Granted, it was our first try and a certain amount of further rules deciphering (and arguing) took place during play, but we were all very experienced gamers and I don't believe that further play will scrape much more than an hour (maybe less) from that clocking. Emira seems to slow down greatly during the bidding phases of the game.

Or somewhere. Honestly, in retrospect, I can't tell exactly where the game failed to move along at a responsible clip--but it did. As much as I enjoyed all of the things I've said that I enjoyed, there simply isn't enough fun here to make a game this lengthy worthwhile ultimately. The tension and suspense in the game arises not so much from the bidding, which is the source of suspense in great auction games like Ra, but, instead, I think, from the possibility that you may have screwed your planning up and chosen the wrong route to victory/attractiveness. It's very difficult to have your cake and eat it, too, with regard to the accumulation of actions in this game (as it should be), but it's very easy to pursue the wrong actions for a few turns and end up hopelessly out-of-the-running for victory.

The trick, it turns out, is that not all actions (the qualities of attractiveness) are created equal in Emira. After our game, in which I pursued, at the cost of pursuing other actions, many camels (or caravans--I forget which), I rifled through the deck of princess cards on a hunch without. Sure enough, very few princesses in the deck were even "interested" in camels or caravans (whichever one I had spent most of the game pursuing ... Maybe it was just gold???). Instead, the majority of them were primarily interested in attractiveness or status (I forget which). I had begun to suspect this during the game, but, once I had wasted a few turns barking up the wrong tree, I was done for. It's definitely worth your while to take a close look at the princess cards prior to your first play, in other words.

That's a mistake that wouldn't be repeated on my part, of course, but it doesn't account for the game's plodding pace. If you screw yourself, it takes forever to make it up, but, at the same time, it's taking the "winning" player a very long time to edge toward victory at a tortoise pace as well. Inch by inch, hour by hour, the game progresses, but that's as good a description of Emira's pace as I can offer.

And that's the downfall of the game, unfortunately. This is the longest review I've written for BGG so far, so, clearly, there's a lot to be said about this game, but, when it all comes down to it, not so much that it's worth the time and money I've already put into it to investigate further.