Harrowed Halls

For our holiday edition of gaming, our friend Andy dropped by 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 close to someone else’s home planet, while still being a galaxy away from someone else. Ben claimed first lost because he was seated between Mike and me. No one wants to get between Mike and me when galactic conquest is on the line. Ben, oddly enough, was also the first player to go offensive by trying to use his influence to rid Mike of one of his empires. Mike whined about it the rest of the game. Ben was aggressive throughout the entire game. He even bought the first Dreadnought. Also throughout the game, Ben was my main…uh, target.

One thing I enjoy about this game is that combat is inevitable. The galaxy is small, there are a limited number of point scoring planets, and everyone needs the resources those planets provide to build their space fleets. It wasn’t long before Owen was using his fleet to take planets from Mike. Owen also eyed Andy’s planets–Andy was situated on his other side from Mike—but Andy made some great defensive choices that caused his planets to be less desirable to taken by force. I should also mention that Owen’s dice rolling sucked the entire evening. Battles he should have easily won, met with disaster.

Mike played a steady game of non-aggression; mainly because Ben and Owen seemed to be gunning for him and he spent most of his resources defending his empire. As I mentioned before, Ben was my target of choice during the game. Fortunately for Ben, my dice rolling was worse than Owens. On two attempts with four dice, where I only needed a 3 or greater, I rolled 1’s and 2’s on three of the dice. My second attempt got me three 1’s! Oh the injustice of it all!

It was the unassuming Andy who really shown at the end of the game. His two neighbors (Owen and I) had left him alone the entire game and during our last round, he made us all pay for that mistake. He scarfed up a bunch of Planets (i.e. victory points) that basically got doubled because it was the end of the game. Andy ended the game with 20 points. His last point was because he has a single “space buck”. The rest of us had no money at all. Mike came in a close second with 19 points. Owen had a respectable 17 points, while I came in NOT LAST with 14 points. Last place was Ben, Just as he called it. He had some small number of points that I can’t find the number for on my keyboard.

Chaos Steve

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