A fast paced area control

🎎 First Empires is a small, fast-paced area control dice game. You play one of five civilizations with a unique board that shows 5 tracks, that are your 5 attributes. These are: the amount of dice you may roll 🎲, amount of rerolls ♻️, movement points 🧭, cards you can draw 🃏 and meeples ♟️ you can have on the map. During the game you try to go up all of these tracks as best as you can and tactically move around on the map in a bit of Yahtzee-fashion.

A turn is really fast 🧐 - you roll dice and can reroll them according to your attribute. Then it’s on to the movement phase where you can move your meeples on the map. To conquer a territory you just need to send 1 more meeple than already there - black sword die faces add a virtual meeple to your conquests though! Conquered meeples just retreat so you never remove any. Then it’s onto the progress phase, where you can move up tracks if you have matching colored pairs of controlled territories and die faces.

As you progress on tracks you become more powerful, and at certain thresholds you unlock your cities and place them on the map. 🏙️ This is a double-edged sword, as though they give you points if you still control them at the end, your opponents can take them any time with a conquest. ⚔️ Cards in the game act as objectives you can complete for additional victory points, or you can discard them to change the face of a die. Dice mitigation is powerful, but you only draw a very limited amount of cards throughout the game.

💬 You cannot strategize a lot in this game. It’s all about tactics and the present - what tracks can you advance with your dice, and what do you need to complete objectives right now? It’s also very confrontational. ☝️ There are many incentives to do battle, either because you need a specific color region to progress on a track, or to complete an objective, or to just take a city tokens. There is a fair bit of randomness though: not just the dice rolls, but the face down city tokens with values from 1-3. First Empires is really fast and enjoyable though, if you love rolling dice🙃 Also I recommend it at a higher player count.