Kris Hall: Rise of Empires Impressions

While most folks who get a new game read the rules and get it to the table pronto, I’m not always so diligent.  I’ve owned Confucius for months, but I still haven’t mastered the rules and played it.  But I wasted no time in getting Martin Wallace’s Rise of Empires to the table when I received it for my birthday (Thanks, Ted!).

Rise of Empires is a civilization-building game that belongs in the same genre as Age of Empires III and Wallace’s own Struggle of Empires.  Players place armies in regions on the map with the player with the most armies in the region gaining victory points and resources.  Players also collect city or territory tiles that may generate resources or victory points, or progress tiles that give players special abilities.

The heart of the game is an action selection mechanism.  Each turn, players will take turns selecting actions and placing one of their markers on the appropriate tracks of the action grid.  For example, a player who decides to select a technological progress tile as his action would place one of his markers on the rightmost vacant space on the progress track.  The tracks will fill up from right to left during the A turn.  Then, on the B turn, players take actions by removing their markers from the action grid.  Players must pay a fee if they choose one of their markers that still has other markers to its left on the action grid.  This means that the game encourages players make their B turn a mirror image of their A turn.

Rise of Empires is not the most innovative of Mr. Wallace’s games; the area majority mechanism will be familiar to players of Age of Empires III, Struggle of Empires, or even El Grande.  And the progress tiles in the game resemble the building tiles in Age of Empires III and the tiles in Struggle of Empires.  The A-turn/B-turn action selection mechanism is the most unique aspect of the game, and although it is fun and can make for difficult decisions, it doesn’t seem to be a mechanism that is especially designed for a civ-building game.  It would be easy to imagine Rise of Empires without this mechanism, and easy to imagine this mechanism in another kind of game.

The rules have a number of ambiguities that need to be addressed with an FAQ.  For example, players who wish to sail their armies to North or South America or to the Far East need to pick an empire tile with a water symbol on it.  But can players use a water tile to sail their armies to Northern Europe (which is also adjacent to an ocean)?  Can players sail their armies to the same number of regions on the tile or does a water tile only also one fleet action?  There are some answers to these questions on Boardgamegeek, but an official FAQ would be welcome.  The answers to these questions are not always what I was expecting, and players need to be able to find the answers to their questions in one convenient location.

While Rise of Empires probably does not take as long to play as Through the Ages (another fine civ-building game), it is by no means a short game.  While I hope that playing with experienced players will bring the playing time down, you should expect your first game to run three hours or more.

But these reservations do not mean that Rise of Empires is a bad game.  Far from it.  The Appalachian Gamers found the game to be intriguing, and many of us thought that the interaction of the various game mechanisms created interesting opportunities for strategy. 

I like the fact that Mr. Wallace has built a game-balancing mechanism into the system.  The player who has the fewest victory points gets to select his spot in the turn order at the beginning of the turn.  This means that he can choose first place for himself and get the first shot at the high-scoring Wonder of the World tiles (a subset of the city tiles) or grab an especially useful progress tile like Printing.

I also appreciate that the stakes increase as the game situation evolves.  At the beginning of the game only the regions around the Mediterranean Sea are available to be colonized.  But in later turns, the Americas and the Far East become available.  City and Wonder of the World tiles tend to cost more as the game goes on, but they also generate more victory points.  These developments allow players to see their empires to spread over the board over the course of the game, and give the game a feeling of building to a climax. 

I suspect that most fans of civ-building strategy games will find Rise of Empires a fine addition to the genre.  I am looking forward to getting it to the table again soon.

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