I was recently contacted by designer Zach Silverzweig in regards to his game Empires at Sea. He and his wife Amy recently funded and completed their Kickstarter of the game and got it out into the hands of nearly 450 backers. They were able to raise a respectable $37,199 during the campaign and hit multiple stretch goals to the betterment of the game. They funded the game successfully and now that they have their copies Zach wanted to get the word out about the game by getting it into the hands of reviewers and the like.
He ran across one of my posts and decided to
send me word about the game. To be
honest I had never actually heard of this game during its run on
Kickstarter. I took a look at the
website (www.empiresatsea.com) to get
a good idea of the rulebook before I agreed to take the demo copy. My wife Em and I looked at the rulebook and
it was interesting enough to her (my main gaming partner!) to try therefore we
went for it. I gave Zach the go-ahead
and a couple of days later we had a copy of Empires at Sea all laid out on the
table for photos and ready to play.
Unboxing Empires at Sea:
The Box
We received the package in the mail and I proceeded to
grab my Winchester blade and cut into the packaging tape. The first thing I noticed was the size of the
box. This is a very large box (for those
worries about shelf space) that reminds me of the Z-Man Games box for games
like Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island and Pandemic Legacy:
Season 1 but just slightly deeper. Along
with the size (which I will note is probably a larger size than it needed to
be) it is a very sturdy and well made box.
It has a great cover of a ship captain on the front and a naval battle
in the background. Also, just as a side
note, bravo on the choice of putting a female captain on the cover! It is perhaps a small thing in the minds of
many but I think it goes a long way into the inclusion of women in our
wonderful hobby! You’ll notice on the
box front that this is “An epic boardgame of war, treasure, exploration,
industry and piracy” for 2-5 players aged 14+ and that it plays in a 1-3 hour
timeframe.
Flipping the box over I was able to see more about the
game. There is a nice little blurb on
the game that really does capture what is encapsulated in the box. Along with the write up there are some sample
pictures of the cards and a picture of some of the components that are included
in the game. These are all graphically
placed over a picture of the game board and a piece of the art in the lower
left corner. Again, to note the art,
this is a great picture and the graphics are well done with no clutter or odd
symbols/fonts.
Opening The Box
In typical fashion, lying on top of the opened box was
the game rulebook, entitled Captain’s Guide.
Underneath this short, 8-page booklet was the large, trifold game
board. When pulling out the game board
we found the components and cards placed in a 3-well game insert that was made
to look like the boards of a ship or treasure chest. I did like the look of this insert and it
held the components in place very well.
The insert was easy to remove if you had an inclination to do so.
The Rulebook
The rulebook (also known as the Captain’s Guide) started
off with a nicely illustrated cover of the female captain who is also found on
the cover of the game box. As a cool
aside, I found out from Zach that the captain is a painting done of his wife
and co-designer, Amy. I thought that was
a fun little tidbit! Now back to the
book.
The first thing I noticed about
the rulebook was how few pages there were to it. It starts with the front cover, then has one
page of component pieces and game objectives, one page of game setup, five
pages of how to play the game, and a back cover that has scoring
information. That is all! While the manual is small I will say that we
really didn’t have any trouble in deciphering the rules. I would have liked a few more examples and
pictures of said examples for those who aren’t used to reading rulebooks, but
for my wife and I this was no problem.
The rulebook is quite well done. I always worry about a game that is this
large and either has a manual that is either too large or too small. This could have fallen into the second
category but they did a great job in getting everything into the small
area. While being a fairly large and
possibly epic game it really has a very simple, streamlined rule set, about which I am
a big fan! While I enjoy a good,
heavy-weight game I found I didn’t want that with this game and it delivered on
that hope. If you want an
easy-to-pick-up ship-to-ship combat, civilization-light game then this may be
the rule set for you!
The Board
Right below the Captain’s Guide was the massive tri-fold,
double-sided game board. As I opened up
the board I noticed how it is double-sided.
The main side of the board is the Americas, Europe, and Africa. This is the side that is played with 3-5
players. The off side of the board
(which was unlocked as a stretch goal during the Kickstarter campaign) is just
the Americas and is used for a 2-player game which does a good job of
tightening up the game.
I quite like the
graphic design of the board. As you
first look at the board (either side) you will see that it is gridded with boxes
and has occasional orange, green, and silver boxes that are specific ports with
their subsequent resource. It is a
simple art style that isn’t cluttered which I very much appreciate. I also wondered why their weren’t boxes on
the whole board (it is broken up, see attached pictures) but when we started
playing the game we realized that when you move you can use an action to move
as many spots in one direction as you would like. The broken paths make it impossible for you
to traverse the entire board in one move and I very much enjoy that
design/graphic decision. This also helps
with keeping the board uncluttered.
The only thing I think I would change on the board is the
color/size of the port name font. It was
a bit difficult to read unless you get fairly close but this is a minor quibble
at best. The board is good quality and
thickness and we didn’t have any trouble with warping during our plays.
The Components
After pulling out the game board we finally made it to
the part that everyone seems most curious about, the components. There were four different baggies included
with the different components of the game and four sealed packs of cards. In one bag were the acrylic gems (which are a
proxy for gold/treasure), in another were the wooden cubes (which are a proxy
for ports, wood, and steel), in another was the dice, and in the last was the
ship models. I always appreciate when
the publisher includes enough baggies in the game to actually store the
components if you choose not to store them in a container or created
insert.
The gems are classic acrylic gems that you can find in
any craft store. I will say that I find
the gems an odd addition and would have rather had either gold metal cubes or
just some other painted wooden cube to proxy for the treasure/gold. This is a personal thing however, so if you
like the gems they are good quality. The
wooden cubes are just that, wooden cubes.
I like that they included the smaller and larger cube size of the steel
and wood resources to count as either one or five resources. This is a simple thing but I feel like
publishers sometime forget about these things.
I like cubes so these are always good components for me.
The dice are pretty good quality and have a
decent heft to them. I do like how they
put the skulls on to give them a more personalized feeling for the game. Also, the dice are etched and I always
appreciate the feeling they give. The
only thing I think I would have asked is for at least a few more so we didn’t
have to keep passing them around, but we have plenty of dice on hand so this
wasn’t really a problem.
Lastly, we take a look at the “star” of the show, the
ship models. Zack has stated that they
did research to get the models as close to their real-world counterparts as
they were able to. What they got are
some pretty nice little models that do a pretty good job as the main component
focus of the board. You start with a
transport (which has no masts) and then later on will be able to build frigates
(two masts) or even ships of the line (three masts) if you collect enough
resources and the cards needed. These
models are very small (as they need to fit on the small grids on the game
board) but still have enough detail to look pretty cool.
The ships come in the five colors that are included in
the game box, orange, white, red, blue, and yellow. You will need to be careful with these
miniatures as their masts are somewhat flimsy.
Even though they aren’t super sturdy, we only had one ship mast that was
broken. It was fixed with a small dab of
super glue with no other problems. The only
ship we had a problem with standing up was the pirate ship of the line. The base was just slightly slanted which
caused it to list to the right but as long as we didn’t hit the table it would
stand. I think just a small amount of
filing would have fixed this. All in
all, these ships aren’t the quality you are going to see from Fantasy Flight
Games, but they are solid and an obvious labor of love!
The Cards
The last thing included in the box was the cards. There are four different types of cards
separated into a couple of different sections within those four types. The first type of card is the history
card. These are separated into three
different eras (I, II, and III) and are used as a general setting for each
round. The second type of card is the
weather card. These cards are flipped
and show a general rule of ship movement for a round. The third type of card is the port card. There is a card included for each of the
different ports on the board and show an icon for the resource that port gives. The last type of card (and most prevalent) is
the captain card. These are the cards
that are given to players and they use to do actions and such in the game. The captain cards are separated into event
cards (give a onetime effect), advancement cards (give a permanent effect),
captain’s orders (can be played at any time and provide an immediate effect),
and the industry cards (grant their resources permanently).
The game cards have open source art on them that are
often of historical battles and/or scenery and I honestly find them to be
beautiful! I love the use of the open
source art to give a good thematic boost to the look of the game. The graphic design of the cards is pretty
good. The only real problem I have with
the cards is on the cards where you need to pay resources. These have very small (and not dark enough)
icons up in the upper right hand corner that are very difficult to read. We needed to get very close just to see what
we needed to pay to build whatever we were trying to build. Other than this, the cards are one of my
favorite parts of the game!
Gameplay
I’m not going to go into a super detailed rundown of the
gameplay as you can download the Captain’s Guide on www.empiresatsea.com and get a better
feeling of the game. While I’m not going
into great detail I will give a short idea of how the game is played.
You will start by selecting your nation (they suggest a
certain color for a certain nation but we just chose the colors we wanted to
chose!) and then shuffle the weather cards, the history (first separate by each
of the three eras) cards, and the captain cards.
You will deal (face down) five third era
cards into a stack, then five middle era cards on top of the third era cards,
and then finish off with five first era cards on top. Then take the weather deck and deal out
(again, face down) fifteen weather cards onto a different stack. These two stacks of cards are the game timer
and make up the fifteen rounds of the game.
Each player will choose a port card at random (more on this later), get
one of their transport ships, six captain cards, and two of each resource (gold, wood,
steel). Then, the pirate ship of the
line (only black ship of the line) goes on the red “x”, the starting player is
chosen, and the game begins.
Each round starts with a weather and history card flipped
over. The weather card shows how the
ships can (or can’t) move during the round while the history card gives a
general setting for the turn which can either help or hinder each nation. The players take the resources that are on
their port cards at a rate of one per icon.
After these “phases” the players each take turns making their moves for
the round.
The first player will play a
captain card (this is a requirement) and complete that card. Some of these are gaining resources,
captain’s orders, and building cards. On
the building cards the player spends the resources and gets what they paid
for. Some of these are the transports,
frigates, ships of the line, forts, and naval bases. If it doesn’t cost any resources they will
just do the action or gain the resources on the card. If the player doesn’t want to use a card for
its action they can discard it for three gold.
During their turn, each player gets five actions. These include sailing (moving ship in one
direction as many spaces as they want), trading (if adjacent to a port they can
pay one of any resource for one of the resource they are adjacent to), buying a
port (adjacent to an unclaimed port and pay one gold, one steel, and one wood),
and attacking another player/pirate’s ship or port/fort/naval base.
One direction of movement counts as one
action, each single resource traded costs one action, buying a port costs one
action (can only be done once and ends the player’s turn immediately), and
attacking costs one action (can only be done once and ends the player’s turn
immediately). After the player completes
their actions, the next player plays a captain card and takes their
actions. Turns continue in this manner
until each player has finished the round.
After each player is finished with their actions, there
is a pirate phase. Each player will do a
blind bidding where they take an amount of gold into their hand (they can do
zero if they’d like) and each player shows their hands at the same time. The player who bribed the most gets to use
the pirate ship to do five actions which are basically used for movement and
attacking other player’s ports/ships. If
players are tied then the pirate ship does nothing. After this phase the starting player moves
clockwise and they will flip the next weather and history card and the game
moves on for fifteen rounds.
At the end of the game each player scores points for how
many ships/ports they have, how many resources they have in their collection,
and how many ships they destroyed. The
player with the most points at the end wins.
The Review
Okay, now for the hard part. I will state up front that I’m not a reviewer
by nature. I am quite discerning about
what games I buy as my wife and I have a very limited budget for extras. As a matter of fact, I’ve never spent a dime
of our “regular” income; only what I make on the side from music gigs and
selling items I no longer want/need.
Because of this it is hard for me to do reviews. I research things very closely and watch
everything I can on a game before I purchase it. Due to me taking so much time researching I
really don’t have any games I don’t like.
This just means I don’t really do reviews because for the most part they
would be very positive. I have only
traded off a couple of games that I’ve owned, those being Star Wars: Imperial
Assault (we liked it a lot, just felt like we wouldn’t ever get it played again
after we completed the campaign) and Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed
Island (love this game, just want the Portal Games version when it comes
out). This should show that we like
everything we own at least enough to keep it in the collection.
With these things being said, let’s move on to the review
of Empires at Sea. To begin with, I’m
going to start by saying that this is not the type of game my wife and I tend
to like. We focus more on European-style
games (i.e. Fields of Arle, Dungeon Petz, Above and Below), card/dice games
(i.e. Seasons, Wizards of the Wild, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn), multi-use
card games (i.e. Imperial Settlers, Oh My Goods!, Mottainai, 51st
State: Master Set), and deck builders (i.e. Paperback, The Big Book of Madness,
Baseball Highlights: 2045). We don’t
have a ton of the more American-style games.
We do have some that we really love (i.e. Mice & Mystics, Super
Dungeon Explore: Forgotten King, Zombicide: Prison Outbreak) but we find that
we prefer them to be co-operative instead of competitive. Because of these preferences I really wasn’t
too sure we were going to like this game.
Pleasant surprise, we did actually enjoy our plays! This game play quite a bit quicker than I
would have originally suspected, especially at the smaller numbers. While the game says 2-5 on the box I’m going
to put out the caveat that I would never play this game with five players. To make up for the extra player (the fifth
one) the designers suggest in the rulebook to take out one card from each era
in order to make a twelve round game instead of fifteen. I think the twelve rounds wouldn’t feel as
good (fifteen doesn’t outstay its welcome but still seems to be enough to do
some cool stuff) and there is no way I’d want to deal with the downtime of four
other players. The other player counts
are fun however. Just know that the
playtime can almost double going from two players to four players.
The gameplay is fun, streamlined and quite
strategic. I’ve read/seen some other
reviews that say that luck plays a heavy factor. While it does play a large factor there are
many different things you can do as a player to mitigate these. Make sure your ships are in a good place in
case the weather turns up out of your favor, get a lot of ports to get
resources, and use your captain order cards quickly to be able to draw up more
helpful cards. The die can roll in or
out of your favor but honestly I don’t think it plays that big of a role in
this game. In fact, you could play this
game pretty much live-and-let-live style where you barely attack the other
player. This isn’t as fun, but it is a
viable option.
My biggest thing is the initial draw of the beginning
port. If you are lucky you could draw a
gold port and your opponent draw a wood port.
This would put you at a significant advantage as gold is the rarest of
the resources. Again, you could mitigate
this but it still puts you a leg up on your opponent. I would suggest deciding what ports you want
to start at. Just take ports that have
the same starting resource and that helps with the luck of the initial draw.
The pirate ship is a cool idea but seems to be completely
unnecessary in the two player games. It
is fun to use, however, in the higher player counts as it can help be a bit of a
catch-up mechanism to throw a wrench in the gears of the player who is
ahead. Just know, if that player has a
lot of gold they could continue to use the pirate ship to their advantage and
just get further ahead. I preferred to
destroy the pirate ship in our games which took its power off the board and
netted me some points.
All-in-all my wife and I (and other players) enjoyed the
game. I don’t have a particular scale
that I use for reviews (again, never having done them before) but I’d probably
give it around a 7 on a 10 point scale.
I enjoyed it but in the end it’s not a game that my wife and I would
play that often, ourselves. I would not
turn down a play of this if someone brought it to the table as we had a fun
time with it. If you are a fan of
strategic/tactical skirmish style games and like some civilization building and
resource conversion then you should definitely check this game out. Congrats to the Silverweigs on a solid first
published design!
Thanks so much for reading. Please, feel free to comment as this is my
first “official” review. I’d be curious
to see what people think. I am running
some ideas in my head about a review series but we’ll see what comes of
it. Until next time, game on!
