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Empires - A second look

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Timethief:
After having played multiple empires games now, here are my second thoughts on the expansion.

Empires can turn really frustrating (with legionary). Once you breach a certain threshold and got your deck into position i fell like empire cards really shine. Wild hunt becomes a real beast, that, if you are set up well can control and lets you pick up VP tokens and tons of cards each turn. Overlord, as the name suggests, can, depending on the board, be the dominant card. I've played several rounds only buying overlord and winning the game. Empires often brings real power into the kingdom.
But that power comes at a cost. The cost is diversity. Were previously 2 or 3 potential successful tactics on the board the landmarks in particular, events and empire cards often reduce it to one, competing strategy.

I feel this loss of versatility is the biggest weakness, especially if we gaze into the future to potentially new expansions.
Empire is a power boost and if new expansions want to compete with it i fear there will be more dominating cards dividing the game into pre empires and post empires or empires will keep dominating unless the sting of some of its bites get softened.

In very short: Empires offers extremely strong cards. These cards are dominating enough to wipe out alternative strategies on the the board. Its very hard for inexperienced players to compete.

LibraryAdventurer:
but buying Dominate four times in a game is fun  ;D
(just did that a few hours ago.)

Chris is me:
I think the opposite, generally. The presence of multiple competing VP strategies have only increased the number of choices available in games for me, and deciding whether or not to skip a particular method of scoring is a careful challenge.

Roadrunner7671:

--- Quote from: LibraryAdventurer on August 18, 2016, 02:23:49 am ---but buying Dominate four times in a game is fun  ;D
(just did that a few hours ago.)

--- End quote ---
Somewhat related to this, I'm glad you link the card/card shaped thingy to the wiki. I still don't have all the Empires cards memorized, so that's a helper  :)

Beyond Awesome:
Powerful cards aren't actually a problem in Dominion. It's when powerful cards offer less strategies than more strategies. While super strong, KC tends to allow for more strategies and even encourages on some boards for you to buy cards you would otherwise not buy. Peasant is very similar as well. However, on the other end of the spectrum, when a card is very monolithic like Rebuild, that's a huge problem since that single card is the only strategy.

While Empires does provide some very strong cards, I do feel that as far as I can tell they fall in the category of opening up more strategies rather than closing them down like Rebuild.

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