After the Empire

After the Empire was the first winner of the “what shall we play from the pile of new games you’ve accumulated?” contest, mostly because I did not have the strength to reach the end of Factory 42’s rulebook. It is a nice object, even if the plastic pieces could have used a little more care, and its playtime is manageable. Its central idea—mixing worker placement with tower defence—is interesting enough to make me want to give it time. Shame that so much of that time went into untangling what, exactly, we were playing.

At its core, the game has you use your workers and economy to develop your castle while also preparing for enemy invasions. The tension is supposed to live right there: it is not enough to build and gather things peacefully, because enemies are coming to test your defences. In our first game, however, a reading mistake had us dealing with four face-down enemy cards every round, and we ended up on ultra-high difficulty. Not a single stick was left standing, naturally, but it was a genuinely enjoyable challenge, even when it began to feel futile after a certain point.

When we played again using what we believed was the normal invader flow, things swung to the opposite extreme. Very few castles fell, the whole thing felt rather relaxed, and defending no longer seemed especially urgent. Then came another read of the rules—somewhere around the sixth or seventh—and a good amount of time on BGG, only for us to discover further mistakes affecting the economy. Those may fix some of the second game’s issues, but they also seem to open the door to the strategy discussed on the forums: winning while essentially ignoring the entire castle part of the game. For a game selling castle defence as its central promise, that is a fairly loud “nice walls, folks, but who needs them?”.

I do not feel able to give a final verdict, because in our two plays we literally played a different game™. Still, I can see it being enjoyable for one or two sessions, especially with newer people who have not played many board games. It is not quite a gateway game, but it sits one click above that. If you are looking for a lakerda-like experience, look elsewhere.