Monday night found us each struggling to become the Galactic Emperor. Galactic Emperor resembles Twilight Imperium III in many ways. You’re building a galactic empire. Each round you chose roles which cause certain events to occur. You use star ships and wield political influence to expand your empire and the planets in your empire produce resources. It plays much differently though. For one thing, there is a greater emphasis on combat. I like this. Conquering plants with your fleet is fun–as is taking planets from other players. And as an added bonus, you get victory points for taking planets away from other players. Mike and I had actually played this game before at Gencon a couple of years ago. Neither of us remembered any details, so for all practical purposes it made little difference during the game.
Our game started well. All of us were expanding our empires. It seemed by the look of it that Mike and I were doing the best based up goods and technologies. That all changed once our empires grew within striking distance of each other. Evil Mike broke our truce and attacked me (and won) with his fleet. I retaliated AND I attacked Owen to the other side of me. Now I was stupidly fighting a two front war. Ben’s empire had dwindled some, so he took advantage of me attacking Mike, to attack Mike on the other side of his empire. Owen kicked my butt in the coming space battles and I eventually lost all of my ships. (Rolling four 1’s on four attack dice didn’t help either.) Mike actually told Ben what to do at one point during Ben’s turn. Amazingly Ben listened and had his best turn ever.
We were running out of time, so we ended about a round short of finishing the game. We thought Mike was going to easily have the most victory points. It turned out that he and Owen tied for first with 24 VPs. Ben came in last with 18 VPs. I floundered in the middle with 20.
I think we all liked this game. The one thing I learned was that if you buy a technology, have the presence of mind to use it! I forgot every single time and finally on the last round the guys let me use it just so I wouldn’t appear to be a complete idiot…even though it was too late for that.
Chaos Steve
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[…] to play Galactic Emperor with us. We’ve played this before and you can read all about that game here. Five players made for an interesting dynamic to the game as everyone’s home planet was pretty […]