GMT Games | Space Empires 4X | Board Game | Ages 12+ | 1 to 4 Players | 180 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

During your Movement phase, you may move some, all, or none of your units that are capable of movement. Exploration is easy (well, easy for you, it is actually dangerous for your ships) and fun and reveals different terrain (such as asteroids and nebulas) which affect your movement and your combat. Once all ships in a System have been destroyed or Retreated, you may attack an enemy Colony or Homeworld. You will also have a negative number, which is the cost to keep your fleet Maintained and is equal to your collective Hull Sizes (see below). In this Action Point, I would like to take a look at some of the options that players have in exploring the systems that are adjacent to their Homeworld and how various actions work, such as Exploration, Colonization and Mining.

As of 2023, since 2012, the game has also been consistently ranked in around top 50 war games at BoardGameGeek. Additional Ship Yards (needed to increase Hull Size production) may be built in future Economic Phases. A few of the guys at my gaming group, myself included, are quite partial to space-themed board games. The current strategic situation, as well as your own personal style of play, would have to guide you in making the decision to fight or flee. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The rules are only 8 pages long for the basic game and increase to 11 pages in length when the advanced rules are included. The only tricky part (which tripped ALL of us up, at least once or twice) was keeping track of which ship groups belonged to which technology level. I found the record keeping in SE to be so simple that it could have been done on a track on the mapboard, if secrecy was not required.

Fleet Size Bonus: At the start of a combat round, if a player has at least twice as many combat capable ships as their opponent, that player receives a +1 Attack bonus. Mining Ships always represent a single ship, always stay face-up, and always move just 1 hex per turn. Many aspects of the game can be completed simultaneously by the players so that there is very little downtime.Whenever you build something, you place a two sided ship group token (and you can make multiple groups of the same type of ships, too, since each type of ship has numerous markers for you to utilize) on the board (along with a hidden numerical marked designated 1-6) on the board. Purchase Limits: You may not build ships if all group counters of that ship type are already in play (unless you Scuttle ships to reuse the counter).

This allows you to skip the drudgery of the early game, without having much affect on the game’s outcome. All “A” Class ships fire first, regardless of which player they belong to, followed by “B”, “C”, “D” and “E” Class ships.

There were a couple of misses in the rules, in the sense that they were not as clear as I would have liked them to be and had to ask for some designer support. Yellow’s Tactics level of 1 exceeds Blue’s level of zero (if nothing is circled, assume the “At Start Value”), so Yellow’s Base and Battleship units (Class A) get to fire first. If you include all the Optional Rules (discussed later), this fiddly problem is eliminated via the Instant Technology Upgrade optional rule.

It feels as if the game needs an outsider, an arbiter, not because somebody is going to malevolently cheat against his opponents, but because it is not that hard to make a mistake and screw the game over. Almost 20 years in the making, many elegant solutions have been developed to remove complexity and make the game intuitive. The more experienced and methodical players will build Scouts, map out their home systems, colonize planets, and bring home the Minerals (i.

Now those of you expecting a full Space Opera with various player races and powers, again, prepare to be disappointed. You can upgrade movement speeds, defense, attack power, first strike capability, terraforming ability and more, sometimes multiple times to give yourself a strategic edge. But in a world that is so seemingly saturated with space themed 4x games, what does Space Empires offer that is different from all of the rest? and could be eligible for the Fleet Size Bonus, which grants each firing unit a +1 bonus to its Attack Strength.