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JAMES CASTELLI
Australia
Hornsby
N.S.W
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I had the opportunity to play GMT’s new game Space Empires 4x yesterday. It’s a space themed game where players will eXplore space, eXpand their empires, eXploit resources, and attempt to eXterminate their opponent’s empires. I have likely mentioned this somewhere along the line but space themed games are not very appealing to me, I don’t hate the theme, I just find space themed games in general very hard to get excited about. You are reading a post by someone who still hasn’t seen all of the Star Wars movies.
I sat down to play a 2 player game of Space Empires with a good friend of mine using only the basic set of rules, there are some advanced rules that can be added in, although it is not recommended that you play with them until you grasp the basic game. The basic set of rules is not terribly complex, the basic rules are around 11 pages long and the rulebook is available as a download on GMT’s website. I’ll also note there is a very nice video here that I found useful to help learn the game.
Space Empire 4x has players each start with a very small "empire", as they explore space they will find planets to colonize giving them resources to buy new fleets, upgrade technologies, and essentially just eXpand their empires. Some areas in space are safer to explore than others, players have home regions that are relatively safe to explore, however the players are separated from one another by deep space hexes. Deep space is not as safe to explore. To explore a space hex of either kind you simply move a combat ship (or ships) into a hex and reveal the counter there. If it’s a planet, you can colonize it using a colony ship, if it’s a mineral token, you can pick it up using a Miner Ship and take it back to a colonized planet to get a resource bonus. There are also nebula and asteroid tokens that may be revealed; these mainly affect battles if they occur in that hex, there are things like black holes and danger tokens too; these can destroy ships exploring in that hex. Later on in the game a player may develop new ships that make exploring a much safer. The early turns of the game will see players spend some time exploring their surroundings, revealing planets and colonizing them, mining minerals, and just basically developing their technologies and building new ships. For the most part we did this part of the game simultaneously until such time as one of us broke out into deep space, so the earlier turns all went by quite quickly.
After three rounds of "play" players must do a maintenance phase, get your pens and paper ready here folks, perhaps even bring a calculator along. No, look, it is bookkeeping but it isn’t an overwhelming exercise, it flows nicely and there are some really interesting choices to make in this phase. The first thing you will do is determine how many resources your planets are developing and how many resources your Miner Ships have collected. Then you use these resources to pay maintenance costs on the ships you have on the board. You can then develop technologies, the technologies are things like upgrading the defense capabilities of future constructed ships, upgrading their attack capabilities, their speed etc. You may also develop a technology to get access to new model ships that have better abilities, and there are other technologies as well. Player’s can then buy new ships if they wish, keeping in mind of course they will have to pay maintenance costs for them in the next maintenance phase, the larger your fleet, the higher the maintenance costs will be and it can get a bit pricey.
After the Maintenance phase play then returns to the 4 X’s, eXploring, eXpanding, eXploiting and eXterminating. Once a player breaks through into the deep space hexes, it’s likely they are not coming over to your side to borrow a cup of sugar because the way you will win the game is by destroying your enemy’s home planet. When a home planet takes damage, the amount of resources it produces is decreased too. So it can really slow you down if an opponent is attacking your planets. Ship to Ship combat in the game is done with 10 sided dice (d’10’s) and it has some similarities to the Columbia Block games’ system in terms of ships initiative ratings being letters A,B,C etc, All A’s shoot before all B’s and all B’s before all C’s and so on. Player’s will roll the dice to attack their opponents attempting to roll under a target number to get a hit their opponent’s ships. The target number may be modified by a ship’s defenses and technologies. Anyway, I’ll stop there with the overview, I could go into more detail as there is obviously a lot more to the game. But I’d probably just confuse you, head over and check out that video or the rulebook to learn more about the game. That video is a really nice production.
So what did I think of the game? Well, as I mentioned I have only played this game once so keep that in mind, but I was left wanting to play it again. I can already see that the game has a lot of re-playability. The board’s set up each time would be different because the placement of the exploration tokens is random. There are also plenty of strategic options to eXplore, especially when it comes to the technologies and what to upgrade, and that’s all just the basic game too. The advanced game I have only briefly looked at but it adds a lot more ships which look like they would add even more depth to the game.
The resource management aspect I thought was really neat, knowing when to create a particular ship and in what quantity was very tough. Knowing what technologies to upgrade and when was equally as tough. There is also a fog of war which I like quite a bit in games, this means you won’t always know what your opponent has been developing, in most cases you learn all about what they have been developing when you interact with them, at which point it may really take you by surprise to learn that they have upgraded their attack technologies to a high level.
Deep space is interesting too, once the deep space has been broken through there is a real pressure to start acting either very defensively or aggressively towards your opponent. In our game there was little to no player interaction in the first 3 or 4 turns because we were just gathering resources and staying to our own sides of the board. But once a gap was made in deep space, IT WAS ON! I did feel with the battles that perhaps a d10 was to much die for this game, sometimes because of modifiers you may have to roll a 2 or less which is pretty hard to do on a D10. I say that now, but I think when I play this game again I would focus my strategy and technology upgrades a bit more aggressively. So, I doubt I’ll feel that way after my next game. The play time for my learning game was probably a little under 3 hours, (my opponent had played the game previously). I thought a little under 3 hours was reasonable for a learning game, I expect that with more players the playtime would be increased quite a bit though. I’m curious to try the game with 3 or 4 players, but would happily play it again with just 2. Just like many games out there, after reading the rules through I’d never have guessed the game plays like it does. It wasn’t better or worse than I thought it would be, just different. So far I haven’t put it on my must buy list, which is admittedly largely because I have a friend who owns a copy of it, but after more plays I may cave. I’ll be sure to report if and when that occurs.
Regards,
James.
www.castellireviews.com
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. I'm still loving that one a lot. 
