Core Worlds: Empires

At our latest gathering, the main course was a choice between this and Seeders of Sereis, but Core Worlds: Empires won out — mostly because I was curious to see another interesting side of Parks, when he is not trying to paste rules onto some random commercial IP. He does not necessarily always make masterpieces, but he makes games that give you things to discuss, as with Ideology: The War of Ideas. Here we have a fairly heavy worker-placement game with honest 3X elements, just without exploration.

Each player begins with a core world, four additional planets, a leader, and two ambassadors. Once you know the game, the planets can come through a draft; we played with the default balanced setup. Each round, we place workers on planets to activate abilities: usually taking things, or paying X to get Y. At the same time, we improve technologies, gather troops and cards, gradually building the means with which we will contest the map.

The main point of friction is the neutral planets that appear each round and that players mostly fight over. I especially liked that the strength of the pieces being placed is not fully known at the moment of placement and is calculated later — an idea that reminds me of the dearly departed Mechanisburgo. Moving troops and cards between characters works equally well, while event seeding and its eventual resolution add further pace to the structure of the nine rounds. At the end comes a modest VP salad, with an honest cap on how many points one can collect.

It takes a while and, yes, becomes a little tiring toward the end, but it has almost no downtime and that pleasant burn I want from a heavier game. If your group can handle a full three-hour session, Core Worlds: Empires is well worth a look: it is not heavy merely for the sake of being heavy, but has enough clever connections among its systems to justify its running time.