Empyreal: Spells & Steam (2020)
Let me start by saying that yes, I Kickstarted this game. My group played this once, last night. The general feeling of the game was favorable, and they looked forward to playing it again. There were additional questions about acquiring the game for people they know, especially since they found out I have an extra copy due to a mistake dealing with my old and new address which lil sis knew about.
Summary:
There is a lot of back story to the world the characters and the various actions you take during that game that make it sound heavily fantasy themed, and we’ll cover that a bit later but what the basic idea is you have a company the works with trains, builds tracks and delivers goods.
Set-up
It’s actually not that bad but like most Kickstarter Games (KS) I find them lacking. It’s problem for other games too but it seems especially prone to these first run games there. Punching and counting out the components isn’t too bad. If you have the Deluxe version of the game, there is a little more work to it but really it s a pretty nice set-up with instructions on how to get things into the box once you are done:
The trains are kind of the highlight it in this and they represent tracks and your company’s network.
As you can see you can identify them both by color and each is a different shape. I am not especially fond of these trains. They feel… kind of cheap to me, especially the catepillar one (green), and I don’t know, maybe upping the quality and just sticking to color to differentiate them would’ve worked better. It wouldn’t work with their theme though which indicates each company uses a different type of train and some stories about that… the ghost/undead one is interesting to read but… well more on that later.
There is a nice area for the goods you’re trying to deliver:
Seen above is the deluxe version of the goods. There are serviceable cut-outs for the standard version.
The folios for the standard version are flat and work fine, the deluxe version has thicker and really nice ones instead (deluxe below).
It’s on these folio’s that you keep all your peeps, your spellcars (things you can do), and track your ability to deliver with your little pawns.
So these are not generic copy boards either. They’re unique, with base spellcars (actions), printed on them that different from the others. The Captains are typically assigned to these companies, except two wild ones, so there is order in which you assign them.
One of these characters doesn’t have a proper shirt on so I picked him because that seemed as good as reason as other to make a choice. Seriously though, he was a wild captain so at least we cemented that idea a bit for our first play though.
Okay… the map.
Double sided, pretty good quality, and it varies in size dependent on the number of plays. This is a 2-6 player game. That was a big draw for the game… 6 players! You have the big thick borders which makes for easy track placement (trains).
The maps have the city locations printed on them, and you put the cities on those spots. The cities hold the demand cards which makes it easy, with a quick look, to know how many goods a city needs and how many victory points you get for delivering them.
The goods match the the board:
(remember I am showing the deluxe version of the goods)
And in play, it looks like this.
Okay, that was probably way too much info that most would just get from a video but hey, I had the pics and this game excited my group.
Overall Thoughts
So the theme is really nice, the artwork is anime like which some will hate, others love. I like it just fine. My biggest complaint is the theme is it really does’t matter. I mean they sent a nice little art-book with the deluxe with stories. One of my friends read the artbook because she really liked the story but it really didn’t come up in the game. I think this world they chose is tied to some other game I have not heard of nor played, so maybe it means more to people who have.
The board is super busy with all that plastic. Maybe mini people don’t mind that but we did talk about using the standard cardboard cut-out goods next time just to make it easier on the eyes.
The spellcards, captains, other specalists… all this stuff is unique. You can memorize the icons… eventually, but this resulted in a lot of people having to reference the book, a lot, and some of the cards are simply not in there. The specialist choices are really, really important decisions to make, (I chose very badly for one of mine), so they have in the rules a chance to let you end your turn and basically use ever else’s turn to keep making that choice in order not to bring the game to a halt which sounds great on paper but in theory… didn’t work at all. The reason this didn’t work is at any given time we had 2 or so people trying to pick a specialist and needing to review the same stack someone else is AND needing the darn book. BGG is bound to have some pretty reference sheets to print-out eventually, and in the meantime just make copies of several pages to hand out… colored copies.
My game group really, really liked this game though. It kept everyone’s attention for the entirety of the game and stimulated strategy discussions since we know playing a different company with different spellcars and different specialists would cause shifting of your strategy which will keep things from being stale. In terms of balance, no idea… yet.
But hey, for now my groups loves it and we’re finally playing a game in the year it was released.