Yesterday a package was delivered by UPS, and that package was Galactic Emperor! The timing was very fortunate, as I was having a gaming get-together, and were able to play a 6 player game of it. I decided I'd give my initial impressions on the game.

Rules:

The rulebook is very clear and well-written. The rules are short but clear, and are well-organized. My only, very small, gripe is that there is important information in the margins, where usually the margins are reserved for small clarifications or game examples. But overall, a good rulebook. It's available online to look at, so that's all I'll say about that.

Also, since you can look up the rules, I'm not going to give much of a synopsis on how to play the game. Essentially it takes Puerto Rico-like roles and combines them with a hex-board, where new hexes with resource- and point-producing planets are revealed and then fought after with the end goal of getting the most points.

Components:

Since I think the overall quality of the components is great, I'll start with the gripes and then move onto the good stuff. The insert in this game is completely useless, and is already in the trash after one playing. The two compartments it provides are big enough for the items that originally come with the game, but no real room for all the pieces you have to punch out. The cardboard pieces are a bit on the thin side - they're quite functional though, just a tad thinner than I expected. When I first opened the box, you could really smell the paint from the cardboard pieces, and with the hot and humid evening we had, if someone was fiddling with the cardboard pieces, they'd find that they would start rubbing off the paint by accident. I'm happy to blame this on the humidity, but this isn't something I've found with all games. I should also mention the text on a lot of playing pieces leaves much to be desired, at least for a first time playing. The text on the role cards and technology cards do not give enough information on them to fully know what their powers are. With 7 roles and 8 technologies, it meant for a lot for people to keep track of in their first game.

Now to the good stuff. The ships! The ships are wonderful - in my opinion the photos here on the geek don't do them justice. They're quite sturdy and just look freakin' cool. Just about everybody found themselves playing with them in-between turns. The artwork, all around is great. I love the look of the board, and planet artwork is great. I don't think I could have asked for anything more in this regard. The linen finish on the cardboard pieces in particular is great. There's more texture to these cardboard pieces then you'll find in most games, and basically what this added up to was very little glare. We have a big window right beside our kitchen table, and usually people will complain of not being able to read pieces because of glare. Not so in this game. It was always easy to see and read what was on the table. The board is quite sturdy, and the hexes stayed on the board pretty firmly - I was expecting them to slide around more than they did. Oh, and there is a -lot- of stuff in this game. Once you've set the game up for a 6 player game, you start wondering how everything even fits in the box. Overall, I'd say the components were quite good.

Gameplay:

Since it was a large part of the advertising for this game, I really need to talk about the playing time. The playing time is advertised as 90 minutes to 2 hours. As Dan had posted here on the forums, that is assuming that everyone's played before and there are no Analysis Paralysis players. This is a big assumption. If neither of these are true, the game can take quite awhile. We had 6 players, none had played the game before, and one definitely was an analysis paralysis player. Our game clocked in at over 4 hours. My wife can't really take a game over 2 hours, so she was not too impressed. The rest of us still had a lot of fun though, and enjoyed the game. But beware, that the first time you play the game, it will take a long time. As I said before, with 7 roles, 3 of which are fairly complex, and 8 technologies, there's a lot for people to remember and get their head around.

Time aside, which I can forgive with such a large number of new players, the game played FANTASTIC. Once everybody caught onto the rules, we all enjoyed it a lot. The game definitely does exactly what it sets out to do, and that is be a streamlined 4x game. All of the X's are present - eXploration, eXpansion, eXploitation, eXtermination. More than one of us commented that they did an incredibly good job of getting the feel of all 4 of the X's while still keeping the game as streamlined and as simple as possible.

The game also "ramped up", so to speak, at a nice, steady pace. The beginning of the game is more of a cold war, where you're scrambling to get the best resources to acquire the best technologies and build the best and biggest fleet. There will be an occasional skirmish here or there - a lone cruiser taking over an abandoned world here or there, people's empires begin to get a little to close to each others' for comfort. And then someone will build a dreadnought. These things are the equivalent of nukes in this game. If you're the first to build one, you will be immediately feared. The tensions will rise, battles will get more and more common, and then the black hole will appear, changing the face of the game. The unpurchased technologies disappear, and now anyone can get anywhere on the board in a matter of a couple turns. The battles get bigger and more common, and later in the game when there are 2 warlord roles, becomes by far the biggest focus of the game. This whole transition, while certainly pushed along a bit by the black hole and the extra warlord phase, felt very smooth and natural and climatic. A big part of what made the fun of the game last for 4 hours was that the last half of the game played very different from the first half.

We found the economy very tight and very interesting in the game. With limited storage, there were lots of interesting decisions to make. Do I buy a technology or wait and build up my fleet? Do I liquidate my resources into cash to leave more room for more resources, or do I keep them in case someone picks engineer and I need to buy ships? Do I set the price of energy high and sell, or set it low and buy? The economic system is relatively straight forward, but provides lots of choices.

Combat is simple, yet effective. It's very simple dice-rolling combat, but it works well, and all 3 of the different ship types had their place in the game. Fighters were great for escorts (i.e. cannon fodder), and were good to have cheap ships that could skip around picking up empty sectors. Cruisers stand even odds against an empire, and with a little luck (or a technology or two) can start taking on empires and starbases on their own. Dreadnoughts are slow but deadly - they will often win battles before the other side even gets a chance to fire.

One thing about gameplay, that will either attract players or deter them, is the need to metagame. If you get ganged up on, you will have a -very- tough time in the game. Making a truce with another player at the right time can be a huge boon. Getting the other players to do what you want to do through persuasion is going to be just as important as any other factor in this game. I accept it and work within it, but I can see people not enjoying this aspect of the game. (I can, of course, see others, that would love this.)

Overall, this is a fantastic game, and I look forward to getting it on the table again. If you're looking for a Euro-meets-Ameritrash streamlined 4x space game, you need not look any further.