Galactic Emperor

So, one of my favourite themes in the Ameritrash realm are the “4X” games – eXplore, eXploit, eXpand, and eXterminate. These are multiplayer wargames with a resource-management angle, as well as some sort of manipulation of the board in a non-military manner as well. Sounds great, right?

The problem is that they take ages to play, are complicated, and generally leave you feeling just a little wrung out.

The latest answer to this problem is “Galactic Emperor”, which attempts to take the 4X sci-fi game concept and distill it down to its essence, shave the playtime down as much as possible, and still leave you feeling as if you’ve had a satisfying game of universal domination.

But does it satisfy?

Is Galactic Emperor right for your gaming table?

Crosscut Games – the New Kid on the Block

First off, let me say I am very impressed with the company’s attempt at this little endeavour, and I wish them the very best of success. They are a small company, still learning the ropes when in comes to producing boardgames, and finding their way in the industry. They have been responsive and open on the boards and via e-mail, and while I haven’t actually seen any net results from our correspondences, their customer service has been very good. I actually consider this to be a minor positive factor in the game, because any flaws which might crop up have a higher chance of being dealt with by a responsive company than by one who is defensive and churlish.

Opening the Box – the Bits and Pieces of your Empire

In the beginning, there was a Big Bang, and the universe began … and amazingly, a pretty cool Universe develops out of some pretty dreadful building blocks.

Some decisions by a new gaming company seem a little off-center in hindsight, and a lot of those decisions come to light when we look at the components.

Simply put – the components in Galactic Emperor aren’t good. Certain aspects are outstanding, and it is absolutely obvious that they tried very, very hard to hit the mark, but everything misses just ever-so slightly. Every … single … thing.

The components are printed on paper-thin cardstock, and straightaway the sheets warp and strain under their own weight, causing you to cringe as you take them out of the box. You immediately want to start punching the hexes and chits, just to stop them from warping any more than they have to. Now, I must grant that they are covered in a wonderful finish, such that once they are punched out, the surface has a great texture and sheen to it. However, the hexes that make up the board, and the chits and cards that make up the components, are of such lightweight stock that you’ll notice corner-wear almost immediately.

The choice in colour-scheme and font for the player-aids, technology cards, and role-cards is hardly ideal, and it is difficult to read these items from across even a small table. You’ll begin to wonder why you have these cards, then, if you can’t read them.

Worse than this, however, is the fact that the role card reminders are incomplete, requiring you to memorize certain facets of the game (and constantly remind newbie players that food production happens in the Merchant Role). Frankly, at the cost of making the cards a smidge bigger, they could’ve included two or three more words (like “produce food”) and saved everybody a lot of headaches.

The science/tech cards are abysmal, since they are dinky little cards with just a couple of words to attempt to summarize a few sentences of rule-bending exceptions. Inevitably somebody forgets the exceptions, and the power is misused, confused, or forgotten, and problems ensue. Again, this shows a poor decision at the design stage – larger tech cards (or cards that simply had small-print full-disclosure explanations of the entire rules) would save everybody a lot of pain. An oversight obvious in hindsight, and an industry standard, but such full-disclosure cards are bafflingly absent.

The player aid seems like it should be an elegant summary of the mechanics of combat and movement, but in practice many people need to be walked through how to read it during their first time through (it can be interpreted one of two ways at first glance, and inevitably somebody keeps interpreting it the wrong way for half the game, messing up die rolls). And as we all know, once something gets misinterpreted once, it gets stuck in somebody’s head, and it takes forever to get out.

So the hexes show corner wear, the money will blow off the table if somebody breathes too heavily, the tech-cards are unreadable from across the table and useless at summarizing their roles anyway, and the player aids are confusing if you don’t clarify them. And since it is unfathomable that in all of the games played they didn’t run into the problem of new players constantly hounding them with the question “and *when* do I get food?”, I have to wonder why the words “produce food” are missing from the Merchant role – and consequently just how much attention designers paid to what was going on with playtesters at the table.

The other paper component in the box – the rulebook – is going to give you some headaches as well. Learning the game from these rules is reasonable, but the rules could easily do with another pass or two, and some points could be clarified. That being said, there are some brilliant little snippets (like adding the phrase “yarr” at the end of the “Space Pirates” description) that made us all smile, so I’m willing to bet that a re-write of the rules with fresh eyes (and some BGG feedback) would tighten it up immensely.

But what about the ships?

Well, first off, the ships are made of a fantastically solid plastic, and will definitely stand up to your gameplay. These are not cheap, or soft, or bendy. These are quality plastic spaceships. They are brightly coloured, and easy to recognize between player factions.

And from that point on, there will be two camps amongst the fans.

One camp will look at the ships and say “Gee, those are great! They look just like the ships I would’ve chosen!”

Another camp will look at the ships and say “Gee, those suck! They look just like the ships I could’ve chosen!”
What is my point?

The design if the ships is very retro and cutesy, based on the grade-school model that seems to believe that multiple tiers and lots of fins makes a ship cooler and more powerful. It hearkens back to a simpler time and a lighter design theme. Some people will find this endearing and heartwarming. However, some people would prefer their sci-fi to be a little edgier, and would prefer their ships to show some design that is innovative, or darker themed, or simply more sophisticated. There is a reason that the Art Department gets paid serious coin on movies – there is a knack to making those little ships look edgy and powerful!

These look “okay”, and they do the job, but in the hands of even a talented rookie comic artist or graphic designer the ships could have been amazing, with the same amount of plastic used. Again, a missed opportunity.

However, the main problem with the ships is the size.

They are too darned big. Way, way too big! Somebody, somewhere, is compensating!

There are 3 types of ships – fighters, cruisers, and dreadnaughts. The fighters are a serviceable size. Cruisers take up a third of your hex. Dreadnaughts take up almost all of your hex, leaving only the outskirts free (enough to squeeze fighters in the edges).

The problem is that a standard fleet production often consists of one of each type of ship – one fighter, one cruiser, one dreadnaught. You’ll often have a food cube or two sitting on the hex, as well as a token indicating who controls that sector. 3 ships, 2 food, and a too-flat cardboard token – and you’re already spilling out of your hex!

Not even this minimalist freshly-produced fleet will fit in a hex, let alone an actual battle-ready fleet stockpiled over a few rounds. When multiple fleets are crowding around each other in multiple hexes, angling for position, attempting to retreat to friendly spaces from forfeited battles, and so forth, it is a nightmare of book-keeping.

There was just no good reason for making the ships that large. The two larger ship sizes could have been scaled back such that the dreadnaught was the size of the cruiser, and things would have made much more sense. If they were worried about people confusing the ship types, then make the ships more distinguishable by design style (again, designers get paid for a good reason – the good ones earn their pay!) It isn’t like I ever confuse tanks for trucks in miniatures wargames, and they’re the exact same size!

No – the components cause a lot of problems, and a lot of headaches in Galactic Emperor.

The whole thing almost doesn’t work because of it, frankly.

But then you play the game…

The Gameplay- 7 steps to Taking the Emperor’s Throne

The rules for Galactic Emperor will sound familiar to anybody who has played games like Twilight Imperium, or even to those who have played role-selection games like Puerto Rico or Citadels.

One player has the Throne, and sets the direction of the turn marker. Each player, starting with the player sitting on the Throne, takes a Role, and in so doing sets the action for that turn. The person who chose the role gets a special benefit for choosing the role, but everybody else in the turn order gets to do the basic function of that role.

The game ends when either (a) the victory point pool is depleted due to the Action taken during a turn or (b) one player runs out of Empire tokens at the end of the Regent phase, meaning that they’ve taken over as much territory as they could politically. In either case, a victory-point count determines the winner, (bonus VP’s for high cash, tie is a broken by a massive all-out fleet fight to the death!)

So what are the roles?

Explorer – Place a new hex on the board (special bonus: when you place your first hex, you claim it – and, when all others have placed, you place the remainder)

Merchant – (special bonus: take 3 money, set market prices) generate food on planets that produce food, buy/sell any resources you wish, put food on planets you wish to produce metal/energy in the future (leftover food goes away)

Steward – (special bonus: generate one free metal/energy) Generate resource on planets that have food on them (remove one food to do so)

Engineer – (special bonus: produce one fighter for free) build ships at starbases

Warlord – (Special Bonus: one ships has +1 die when initiating combat) Move Ships; if ship movement ends in conflicted territory, combat ensues

Regent – (Special Bonus: Place last, purchase extra token at lowest cost) Play political influence

Scientist – (special Bonus: purchase one tech at -1 Energy cost) Buy one Tech

These 7 roles define the possible actions. However, the roles change as the game continues.

Once the entire universe is explored, the explorer role is useless, and is flipped over to become a second Warlord role card (which is good, because generally at this point people are brushing up against each other and want to move a lot of ships around).

Also, there is a “black hole” hex tile in the mix, to be placed on the board during the explorer phase sometime during the game. When it is placed, it goes in the center of the board, turning the sun into a black hole. Since the scientists failed to warn the people of this impending disaster, people’s faith in science is shattered, and the Scientist role card goes away. Thus, the Black Hole serves as a game clock of sorts – halfway down the tile stack, when the universe is half explored, is around the time when the Scientist role card will disappear forever, and technology rule-benders will become unavailable. So get them while you can!

(side note: the designers decided to designate the main burning-out sun “Omega”, but then decided to include a random galaxy tile with a normal sun called “Alpha” in the tile mix. This led to some confusion in our group, especially when trying to interpret the black hole rule, the placement thereof, and the obvious tie-in between the names Alpha and Omega and a Black-Hole and the dying sun artwork on the tiles. There are no special rules for the Alpha sun, and you can’t do anything with it. It doesn’t even impede movement. It adds nothing to the gameplay over a blank tile, leads to reasonable mistakes via its name/artwork, adds to confusion, and frankly is yet another example of bad decision-making on behalf of the designers, and/or poor attention to feedback and playtesting, because I refuse to believe that any blind playtesting didn’t have somebody wondering how to turn the alpha sun into the omega sun, and then wondering how this whole thing fit together … just like we did!)

Fitting the Roles Together

Like most role-selection games, it is difficult to describe the play of Galactic Emperor, because it really must be seen as the interaction between the various roles.

Exploring worlds with better resource production is better than finding hexes that have poorer resources, or no resources at all. Placing the good worlds close to you, and gaining control of a world for free as part of the special role, can be a great advantage. Which worlds are where, and the distribution of their food/metal/energy production, becomes very important.

The production of Food during the Merchant role, and then placing the food cubes on resource-producing planets (2 food cubes max) is what funds the production of metal/energy resources during future Steward roles. If you haven’t funded a resource planet with food, then it can’t make resources during the Steward role.

The money produced during the Merchant role by selling food/metal/energy is necessary to make ships during the Engineer role, as are the precious metal/energy resources (which you could produce yourself during the Steward role, or buy outright during the Merchant role). Finding yourself without money is a sad state indeed!

The Regent phase allows you to place Empire tokens on the board, but also gives you the option of buying up to one extra empire token (each player’s bonus token costs one more than the previous player’s, and thus the last player in the turn order is paying a high premium for his bonus token if he takes it!) You can place these empire tokens anywhere you wish on the board, meaning you can place them on “your” hexes or “other peoples” hexes, or even the throne itself (in an attempt to steal it). At the end of the round, tokens cancel each other out, and thus you can have a very changed map at the end of the Regent action! Two tokens on the board of the same colour upgrade an Empire to a Starbase (a more powerful defense bonus), and this is the only way to get this military upgrade – and again we see the interrelationship between the roles, in that a political action and a military action are directly linked.

Science/Tech plays an important part, in that each technology chosen provides a small rule-breaker in the game – but only to that player! One tech provides faster ships, one tech provides virtual food for two hexes, and another tech lets you steal one metal/food during the merchant phase, and so forth. Getting a good tech combo, and getting them before the scientists are kicked out of their Universities, is important.

NB: At the end of the regent phase, all players count up the number of planets for the hexes they control (some hexes have two planets) and gain that number of victory points

Also, if you ever run out of Empire tokens at the end of the regent action (all of them are still on the board) this triggers the game end.

Combat is streamlined and simple. Dreadnaughts fire first and remove any casualties before they may fire back. Second, empires/starbases and cruisers may fire, and remove their casualties. Finally, fighters may fire. Thus, it is often advantageous to have a number of small fighters along as cannon-fodder, simply to soak up damaging hits, and to stop you from losing your precious dreadnaught. Dreadnaughts are the only ship that can take multiple hits (they can take two) and they auto-repair at the end of a combat. All other ships are destroyed with a single hit. On the defensive side, one destroys ships before destroying the Empire/Starbase fortifying the planet. Starbases are downgraded to Empires with a single hit. Empires when destroyed when hit. Very simple, very fast, very quick..

NB: If you destroy an Empire, you gain 1 Victory Point

Finally, if the black hole has come into play (and replaced the central Omega Sun), then ships can move into the Black Hole during one warlord action, and then “warp” during a future warlord action. Since they obviously can’t retreat like they could in a normal combat, they are given the advantage of one free round of attacks if they use this mode of transportation to warp into an enemy territory. They are committed to the battle completely – victory or death!

Victory is at Hand – Ending the Game

So we can see that there are two main ways to gain Victory Points – destroy an empire token during a Warlord action, and be sitting on planetary systems at the end of the Regent action.

Games with lower player numbers (3 or 4) will tend to have more room to expand, and thus may end with the Regent triggering device (control of a large expanding empire).

Games with higher player numbers (5 or 6) will tend to be crowded, and little border skirmishes coupled with the victory point counts from Regent actions will deplete the victory point pool, triggering the endgame.

Either way, it is important to keep an eye on the endgame conditions, and the victory point count, as it is easy to let things spin out of control.

As a multiplayer wargame at its heart,it is easy to let early aggression get the best of you – and like most multiplayer wargames this can tend to be a losing strategy. At the same time, however, the game doesn’t really reward turtling, and since border-skirmishes lead to destroyed Empire tokens (one of only two ways to gain victory points) very quickly you’ll find a back-and-forth, give-and-take exchange over contested hexes, with each side gaining a victory point for the Empire token it destroys on its particular turn on the contested planet.

How Sits the Crown? – Looking at the Game as a Whole

So does it work? Does it play quickly? Does it scratch your 4X itch? Does it come in under 90 minutes? Is it everything you want it to be?

Yes – eventually.

The first game is a learning-game, and as such each role requires that you walk each player through it for the first half of the game. Thus, in a 5-player game, each role takes 5 times longer than it should, as you walk each player individually through the mechanics of that role, for a good three or four rounds of the game.

Later on, once all players are experienced, this time played would diminish significantly – so long as all players are independent, can be trusted to understand the rules and their own book-keeping, and so long as each player doesn’t get trapped in Analysis Paralysis.

4 Experienced players could easily clock in a game in 90 minutes. 5 experienced players might add a few minutes more. Throw in a little analysis paralysis, though, and things can slow down significantly. Throw in the learning aspect of the game, and things can slow to a crawl, even for experienced gamers.

But it is an enjoyable crawl! It is a fun game! It is well done!

It is simple, it is streamlined, and it does everything you want it to do!

The combat is simple, but straightforward, and fast enough to be playable yet finicky enough that you feel you can adjudicate your actions ahead of time. The techs are just right, in that they bend the rules just the right amount, and never leave you feeling that any one person is so supremely overpowered that they’re unbeatable. There are decisions to be made, and they are sometimes agonizing, and thus you feel engaged throughout the game.

It is a good game. The designers should be pleased with the design, and gamers who are looking to scratch their 4X itch will definitely feel it scratched.

The Twilight Imperium Comparison:
Okay, so it has to be done – how does it compare to Twilight Imperium? It is pretty darned obvious that the game is designed with T.I. in mind, and T.I. fans want to know how it plays in comparison, right?

There are no special alien abilities, so you’re missing your special special twist. There are fewer ships. There are fewer *everything*!

But that’s the point. It is streamlined at every single turn.

My friend Sam said this … “The extra additions to Twilight Imperium make playing that a more interesting experience, but the streamlining makes Galactic Emperor a more playable experience.”

I really enjoy Twilight Imperium. However, I can’t be bothered to schedule the all-day event that it requires, and usually my energy reserves are such that I don’t actually find myself suggesting it. As such, my copy hasn’t hit the table in years, even though I actually think it is a good game.

This game, especially once everybody has played it once (thereby tightening up on that 90-minute playtime window), will scratch that same itch in such a short span of time that I won’t miss T.I.’s additional bits and doodads.

T.I. is more interesting, and more fiddly, and perhaps burns your brain by testing your limits more, but this is far more playable. And as far as I’m concerned, this is a fantastic design-choice, this is the point. It is a good trade-off.

Summary:

So if you’re willing to overlook the components, there is a great game here for 4X sci-fi fans, and once you’ve got a learning-game under your belt you can look forward to many hours of Galactic Domination in your future.

I myself am anxiously awaiting some BGG-quality PDFs of new components (player aids, tech cards) and will probably cannibalize reasonably-sized ships from other games for future games, and start using poker chips or something else for money.

If the designers read this, I urge them to take a look at some of the player aids by “Universal Head” and others here on BGG, and to take a look at the Magic Realm player-designed reprint here on the geek, just to see how the ‘geek responds to component failure, and what sort of standards the gaming market has set for itself these days.

For the rest of you, I thank you for reading, and I hope this has helped you decide whether or not Galactic Emperor is right for your gaming table.

I know that it is right for mine!