The Roman Empire set is heavy on player interaction, with split piles containing two different cards, Gathering piles that accumulate tokens, and Landmarks that provide VP players can compete over. Debt lets you buy cards before you can pay for them. VP tokens and Events return.
Five Kingdom card piles in Empires have 5 copies each of two cards – Catapult / Rocks, Encampment / Plunder, Gladiator / Fortune, Patrician / Emporium, and Settlers / Bustling Village. The cheaper cards are always on top. Players may only buy or gain the top card of a pile; players have to work through the top 5 cards to get to the bottom 5.
Empires has Debt tokens. Buying a card or Event with debt in its cost gives you that many Debt tokens. You can remove Debt tokens in your Buy phase by paying 1 per Debt token.
One Kingdom Card pile in Empires has many different cards – the Castles. They behave similarly to the other split piles; only the top card can be bought or gained, and they are ordered by cost with Humble Castle on top.
Landmarks provide new ways for players to score. Like Events, they are not Kingdom Cards. Many Landmarks only apply when scoring at the end of the game. In addition to counting up their regular points, players add some bonus based on the Landmark. A few are penalties instead - players subtract points from their score. Some landmarks award points throughout the game, these points are unlimited.
Flavor
The world is big and your kingdom gigantic. It’s no longer a kingdom really; it’s an empire. Which makes you the emperor. This entitles you to a better chair, plus you can name a salad after yourself. It’s not easy being emperor.
The day starts early, when you light the sacred flame; then it’s hours of committee meetings, trying to establish exactly why the sacred flame keeps going out. Sometimes your armies take over a continent and you just have no idea where to put it.
And there’s the risk of assassination; you have a food taster, who tastes anything before you eat it, and a dagger tester, who gets stabbed by anything before it stabs you. You’ve taken to staying at home whenever it’s the Ides of anything. Still overall it’s a great job. You wouldn’t trade it for the world – especially given how much of the world you already have.
-- Donald X. Vaccarino
Features
- 71 Unique cards - large sized expansion
- 24 Kingdom cards
- 6 Split piles
- 9 piles using VP tokens
- 6 piles using Debt
- 7 Treasures
- 21 Landmarks
- 13 Events
- Low complexity
