The third in the tiny epic series of games (kingdoms and defenders were the first 2), Tiny Epic Galaxies takes players into space to see them conquer the galaxy. It does this by, once again, using a totally new system than the previous two games. This time, dice are involved.
In Tiny Epic Galaxies, each player gets to roll a certain amount of dice and get actions based on these dice. These include flying ships, earning resources or trying to colonise a planet. Once a player has earned enough victory points, the game ends. Any goal cards completed are then scored and the final victory points are scored to see who the winner is.
At it's core, this game has a push your luck mechanism with rolling dice. Do you spend resources to re-roll or try to make do with what you have. Even though there are no real bad options, there are definitely better options depending on which planets you are exploiting. The other consideration is that opposing players can follow dice that you have used on your turn. This introduces a bit of gamesmanship (sometimes) and maybe makes you second guess using a valuable action (especially in a 2-player game).
Although it is a tiny game, there is allot of thought needed for each move in this game. Player interaction isn't very high in the base game (as it effectively is each player racing individually) so opposing players turns can be slow. This is a problem when the game goes to 4 or 5 players (but even 3 players if the players take turns slowly). This means that the game often overstays its welcome as a short game (probably by 5-15 minutes), but there is a nice sense of escalation as your empire becomes more powerful.
There is also no real way to attack other players (past some planet abilities and following) in the base game. Fortunately, the Satellite and Superweapon expansion adds in Superweapons that you can use to give more direct confrontation between players. If direct confrontation isn't your thing, than you can just leave them out as well.
The components for this game are excellent. However, the player mat should definitely be larger (or I might scan and print a larger one out on some good card stock). Larger boards can fit in the base game and the player board is so cluttered that I would have preferred it to be larger and clearer, with maybe bigger resource trackers as well. But you get cool sheep meeples and custom dice so all good.
This is a solid game. However, the small player mats and the slowdown of the gameplay on other players turns means that it is not quite an excellent game, but it is solid.
3 out of 5 tiny epic waffles.
No comments:
Post a Comment