Inca Empire: The Card Game

Good things do come in small packages, and Inca Empire: The Card Game makes the case rather neatly. It takes the road and temple building of the Z-Man game with the same name and puts it into a shorter, lighter evening, while keeping that small pleasure of watching your own corner of an empire spread across the table.

The game runs for five rounds. Each round gives players a set of cards through a semi-draft process, which they use to build roads and cities. The rhythm is easy to grasp, but it is not entirely weightless: there is more planning here than a box this small initially lets on.

At the end, the hidden goals are scored, so building is not merely there to make a pleasant display; every placement ought to serve a plan the others cannot quite see. The semi-draft is where players brush against one another’s plans, if quietly, and the rulebook does not make the first steps as smooth as it might. It is no real problem, only something worth settling before the building begins.

By the end, though, the table has the familiar look of a desk after a difficult Tuesday: more than 200 tokens scattered over cards, followed by scoring that needs a steady eye — do not play it somewhere windy. Even so, it is an honest semi-filler with plenty of replayability, welcoming enough for a holiday group that is not made entirely of gamers, and quietly excellent at exactly what it sets out to do.