Back to the Gen Con show floor!
Back to the GenCon show floor! At least in spirit. We really wanted to check out Empire's End too. We got a quite rushed explanation and a short demo of it, but it was enough to understand what the basic gist of the game is. 🧐 Sorry about the picture quality - I tried to snap some as the game was going full steam.
The theme is an interesting twist on civilization builders - 👆 instead of starting from nothing and building up, you start at the peak of your empire. With wars and disasters coming your way, it is your job to try to slow and stop the fall of your civilization. 🙅
You start with a full tableau of territory tiles. In each round the turn marker is moved on a simple central track. The spaces it lands on are either disaster, conflict, economy or industry.
🌪️ Disaster: you draw a disaster card, then you start bidding in turn order NOT to get the card. After a while there will be so many resources on it that someone decides it is worth to take it. They take the card and all the resources and flip down the targeted territory, potentially losing out on victory points. As an additional consolation prize you can tuck the card under one your territories giving you bonuses.
⚔️ Conflict: this is a secret bid. You get the sword icons from your military territories plus you can spend axe resources to raise your strength. The winner with the highest value gets a reward, and everyone loses all spent axes.
💰 Economy: your green production tiles are all activated.
🔨 Industry: you can spend your hammer resources to rebuild lost territories or play innovation cards.
The third resource is grain which is mostly used for bidding. The fourth and final one is gold which is a wild resource.
There are adjacency bonuses you have to look out for, you can sometimes swap your tiles with each other, and there is a lot of engine building with cards you tuck under tiles. The game should be very quick, yet with interesting decisions every turn.
The art is also quite nice and the designer of the game is John D. Clair. 👍 We are interested how this will turn out. Unfortunately it is only coming to Kickstarter in November.
