The review should maybe be called "first impressions" though, as I only have 3 2-player games and one 4-player game under my belt meanwhile.
Components: 5/5 Stars!
Gee, awesome! If you’re looking for a game that has over 400 plastic spaceships, nearly 100 cardboard hex tiles for creating a new board every time you play, over 600 little cards with tech and actions and resources and politics, and several hundred cardboard counters, this is the one.
They’re well-crafted, look great, and if anything should be broken anyway, Fantasy Flight Games is well-known for great customer support: If something’s missing, they’ll send it after you free of charge (this didn’t happen to me with TI3, but I did have a broken miniature in my Starcraft box and it was replaced no questions asked).
Oh, you will need more dice than they provide though. 4 just don’t cut it when you have to roll for 30 ships.
Game Box: 1/5 Star
Having so many such great components also means that it needs proper stashing, and a box that can hold it. Now, the game box isn’t quite up to that task (being just a box and all, without any sectioning whatsoever).
Eventually, I ended up sorting the game components into those plastic boxes you can buy for tools and screws and whatnot in DIY markets. This works very well and makes transporting the game easier too, and I also made custom boxes for the sorted card stacks (to avoid having just one mess), that helps a lot for stashing too.
Overall though, storage is a concern when buying this game, and the provided solutions don’t cut it to the extent that they don’t exist at all.
Rules: 4/5 Stars
For a first timer, the very volume of the rules makes them very hard to get a grasp on. There’s the turn sequence, there’s the various actions you can do in the action phase (where every player gets just short actions before the play moves on), there’s all the strategy cards that involve politics, trade, research, then there’s the tech tree and all the different unit types and system types on the board … it’s huge.
Which is exactly the good thing once the volume of the rules is understood: There are plenty of options for things you can do, and they all make sense and have rather intuitive and consistent rules gouverning them.
The rulebooks (available online) are very clearly laid out and explain things rather well and with examples, there’s a FAQ (same place) that clarifies many problems, and if anything remains there’s still the FFG forums where plenty of resourceful and knowledgable individuals gather.
Still, some things could be better. The reference for quick lookups during the game is severely lacking, I and printed out quite some player aids for the various stages, and a tech tree that my players (including me) actively used. Not all too many additional things were needed though, overall.
Another weak point is politics, and with it the worth of planets with high influene values - politics are somewhat trivialized, and although it’s possible to win a game without a single fight (our winner today did just that) it’s not really necessary to do that with many won votes and introduced laws. In fact, it’s pretty possible to ignore politics cards for the most part.
That last thing doesn’t mean that it’s even remotely possible to ignore actual politics between the people playing - trade agreements are made and bargained for (and strategically broken at times), attack routes are influenced and bought, goodwill and other goods are exchanged for strategy cards and play sequences. It’s just that the actual things called “Political Cards” are less central than they maybe could be.
Replay Value: 5/5 Stars!
I do believe I’d give the game 5 stars here already even without the community. Every time you set up a galaxy, you create different routes and strong and weak space regions in the galaxy, new hotspots and sneaky paths, and the somewhat random victory conditions together with the vastly different racial play styles (with the trade-centric Hacan, the spying Yissaril, the warrior Embers of Muaat, the ground force centric Sol empire - 14 distinct races included) and deep tech trees and politics guarantee that the game doesn’t get boring quickly.
But the community exists, and creates new rules all the time - from variant strategy cards over new races to new ship types. As a matter of fact, many of the Shattered Empire rule expansions were inspired by community authors and similar things were found on forums (mainly the BoardGameGeek one and the FFG one) first.
Fun: 5/5 Stars!
I actually asked my wife here if I should give 4 or 5 stars - it turned out to be a clear vote for 5. The four players today had great fun, she actually tried to sleep this afternoon and couldn’t because we were laughing all the time.
I guess my brother and me having our little infights with him pushing me back to a mere four three systems over time (and my revenge with fighters later), while the other two had a cold war type of thing going on between them did it’s own - but that’s just the kind of scenarios the game enables.
It’s of course important that the group fits together, that everybody has enough time and no stress, as with any complex game. We started 11am today and played until 7pm (including a brunch, that is, and closing with a dinner).
So with the right group, the game is as fun as a 4X space soap board game gets. I’m really looking forward to introducing leaders (racial heroes) and distant suns counters (random encounters on planets) the next time we play, and maybe adding the “create the board” phase before the actual game too - all of which we didn’t use this time, to keep things simple(r).
Overall: 5/5 Stars!
Yes, this is my favourite game right now. It’s certainly more fun for our group than the comparably static and more convulted Starcraft (which is from Fantasy Flight Games too), and the common tech trees and unit types for all races make getting into it for starters a bit easier too.
Definitely a must-have for any friend of non-trivial board games.
Last edited on 2008-09-15 02:07:15 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Posted Mon Sep 15, 2008 6:57 am
