Core Worlds: Empires

Parks has a useful habit of producing interesting games whenever he is not trying to paste rules onto a random commercial IP. Not always great games — Ideology: The War of Ideas already makes that case — but designs worth investigating. Core Worlds: Empires belongs in that category: weighty worker placement with meaningful 3X elements, merely without exploration.

Each player begins with a core world, four planets, a leader, and two ambassadors; the default balanced arrangement is perfectly serviceable for a first play, while later games can draft those planets. Across nine rounds, workers go onto planets to trigger abilities: mostly taking resources, or trading one thing for another. Meanwhile you develop technologies, assemble troops and cards, and contest the neutral planets that arrive each round.

The interesting decision is how troops and cards move between your characters, while the strength of a worker is not wholly known when it is committed and is instead measured at the end; Mechanisburgo's worker placement, wearing different overalls. That makes the fight over neutral planets properly live and keeps downtime close to zero, even as the game applies its slow, pleasant burn. Scoring sensibly caps the points available, and the event seeding and resolution mechanism gives the separate systems an unusually neat join.

It is long, and it does tire you a little, but it never lets the time go stagnant. If your group can take a full three-hour game, Core Worlds: Empires is absolutely worth putting on the table.