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Empires
30m - 60m
2 - 5 Players
Ages 14+
This mechanic requires you to place a bid, usually monetary, on items in an auction of goods in order to enhance your position in the game. These goods allow players future actions or improve a position. The auction consists of taking turns placing bids on a given item until one winner is established, allowing the winner to take control of the item being bid on. Usually there is a game rule that helps drop the price of the items being bid on if no players are interested in the item at its current price.
Auction/Bidding
The simultaneous action selection mechanic lets players secretly choose their actions. After they are revealed, the actions resolve following the rule-set of the game.
Simultaneous Action Selection
In games with a trading mechanic, the players can exchange game items between each other.
Trading
Variable Player Powers is a mechanic that grants different abilities and/or paths to victory to the players.
Variable Player Powers
54.00
€
30 day low:
Out of stock
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Kickstarter – Gamefound
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Ελληνικα Παιχνιδια
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Apple Paul
This game is a very worthy effort at trying to create a streamlined euro whose core mechanic is trading and negotiating with the elements of a euro engine. In addition, it has a nice market and auction mechanic, and seems to play up to 8. So, Empires has merit for sure. I greatly prefer it to Sidereal Confluence. On the other hand, perhaps like all such trading games, the winner of the game tends to be the most forceful and insistent player in the group, the one who is most able to convince someone less so, to give the forceful and insistent player a sweetheart deal. As for the remaining players who had not thought of being THAT insistent or THAT misleading, they get to watch the game, and slowly lose the game by a handful of points at the end, because they aren't trying to be forceful or misleading enough. All in the group can then say: yep, he, the winner, was the most insistent and misleading of all of us, and some, or perhaps only one of the losers (the sap?) was to blame for his victory. Assuredly, the solution to this would be to make sure all players in the game, share the same level of energy and dedication to always making sure that "the leader" does not run away with the game. Simply put: just say "no" to the leader!
jsnell
Basically ten repeated everyone-pays blind auctions. That's about my least favourite game mechanic. Having free-form negotiation and trading on top of that can't save that. Especially since this game doesn't do anything clever to actually make trades happen; compare with Sidereal Confluence or John Company. In fact it seems to actively discourage trading, by making all the resources to "chunky". It was hard to find trades that felt fair to both people. But the really puzzling part: this is a $55 game in a full-sized box with a ton of components. Not really getting why a game like this was published in a format like that, rather than as a pure card game in a Amigo-sized box.
mynameisthis
I bought this on the promise of a fast, medium weight game similar to Sidereal Confluence. However, it really doesn't compare well. Everyone ultimately wants the same stuff and does similar things. As a result, the trades are just generally less interesting than in Sidereal. Not a bad game, just doesn't compare well to Sidereal Confluence.