Empire review — Profit above all

Empire is the third game in AVStudiogames’ Nano9games series, which consists of small box games that use exactly nine cards, nine dice, and nine cubes as their components. These games have so far been released in 2 “waves” of three games each, with the first wave capable of being combined to form one larger 2-player game that I’ll be reviewing later. This particular game is solo only. Unlike the previous games in the series, Railways and City Planner, this one was not designed by Alban Viard and wasn’t based on an existing game. Instead, this was an original design by Todd Sanders and is probably my favorite of the three.

Rules & Components

The rules for Empire aren’t terribly complex, and there are plenty of examples in the text to help clarify any of the trickier portions. The back of the rulebook also has a reference for the actions and associated costs, which is always a big plus to me. The only thing I would change is that the rulebook could be a tad clearer regarding how, after a particular event has triggered once, subsequent triggers of that event are simply ignored. 

The components are fine, with the oversized cards sturdy enough that they won’t wear out. The dice and cubes for this Nano9games entry are unpainted wood, which is a bit disappointing. I would have rather seen just a light splash of color to go on the table, but I suppose they fit the “dry euro” theme of the game well enough.

Gameplay

In Empire, your goal is to create a tableau of factory buildings to produce resources, which you can sell for Profit. After 15 turns, the game ends, and you compare your final Profit to a scoring range to see how well you did. I generally don’t care for score-chaser solo games, but I can’t hold that against the game since that’s the goal of nearly all tableau builders anyway.

You’ll start the game with a single Central Factory and a Worker Die of value 6 operating it. Below, you’ll shuffle, flip, and deal out a row of cards to create your options for expanding operations. Each turn, you can take up to four actions, but each action after the first costs you more Capital (1 for the 2nd action, 2 for the 3rd action, and 4 for the 4th action). The actions also need to be taken in a specific order, though you can skip actions if you don’t want to pay for them; the cost is based on the number of actions you take, not which specific actions, so if you only perform the final action, it’s still free. At the end of a turn, you may need to pay upkeep as indicated on the year track, either a tax on your buildings or labor costs for surplus Workers.

The first action is simply selling resources to gain Profit or Capital (or selling Capital, if you’re playing the advanced mode), which is the only way you’ll actually score any Profit. The value of each resource is determined by a die roll at the start of each turn, which correlates to a small chart. The second action is hiring/moving workers in your factory buildings. Each factory you build gets a worker die, but that die needs to show a specific value or higher, shown on the factory, to begin operating. Although the action is called “hire” a worker, it doesn’t cost anything to do, aside from the action cost itself. Because the Central Factory you start with only needs a value 4 Worker to be fully-staffed and operational (or 5 for the advanced mode), you have a slight surplus of workers and can move them from building to building to work where needed. The third action is to build a new building. Each building has a cost in resources and Capital that must be paid to construct it, as well as arrows pointing to/from the factory on the card. After paying the cost, you must be able to place it such that an arrow on an existing card lines up with the new card (pointing in the same direction, not at each other). Each new building gets a value 1 Worker and a cube on its resource track. Cubes are limited, however, and if you run out of the free cubes, you’ll need to take them from your Central Factory (which will no longer produce resources of that type). Building may also trigger an event, which is checked by comparing the “Year” range on the card to the right of the now-empty space to the current year/round. These are generally bad, so you’ll typically want to time your buildings around avoiding these triggers. The final action is the most important one, producing resources. Each fully staffed building produces a number of resources based on how many operational buildings you have in total that produce the same type, including itself. Even when the Central Factory starts losing cubes, it continues to contribute towards your other buildings’ productions, giving increasing returns on your investments.

Empire does give the player one tool that can help manage the occasional struggle to stay Profitable: the Managers die. The Managers die can be spent up to once each turn to do one of three things: Gain a resource, gain a Worker, or place a building in a way that no arrows are touching adjacent cards at all. This is quite strong and great for getting you out of a pickle. Leftover Managers aren’t worth anything at the end of the game, so you may as well use them all up.

The gameplay itself flows pretty smoothly once you get into the swing of things. It’s an interesting puzzle of what you want to build and when, since focusing on only a couple of resource types lets you produce more of them at a time vs diversification, but you also have to worry about both events and upkeep hindering you. The Managers are great for quickly getting a factory operational by adding an extra worker to it each turn, though I did need to use them as just a resource once or twice. The game does hit a lull, however, once you’ve built most or all of the factories that you want, since the game then just becomes a mildly monotonous cycle of Selling and Producing without any thought—occasionally broken up by needing to pay building upkeep. This endgame autopilot is the biggest detractor for the game to me. The game isn’t unfun or broken in any way, and I enjoyed how tight the early game was, but the final quarter of the game was just dull.

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