Western Empires Review - An Ancient, Tactical Mosh Pit

hobbyist board gamers as a rule tend to believe that bigger is better so to quote the wire are you happy now my friend who I respect a great deal this is Western empires a literal Royal Rumble with classical kings and queens sawing their civilizations against each other making a mosh pit of their populations this is a game for between five and nine players that might take you as long as 12 hours to finish making this the first game that we've reviewed with a very real chance of being reported missing by your family and here's the crazy part it's about to get twice as big together with Eastern Empire's Western empires can be combined to create mega empires a colossal gaming experience for up to 18 players that can still be played within a single day now some of you might be thinking that it is perhaps a bit irresponsible for shot of a sit down to be reviewing a game that squeezes this many players around the table while the world is still battling covet 19 so let me tease my conclusion early this is not a game that I'm going to be telling you to buy I think it is a flawed and fascinating curio that will make for a very interesting review also before we start you may notice we have a new table it was given to us by the fine folks at geek and Sun it's got one of those sunken velvety chambers as if a dining table had sex with a coffin and I'm gonna be talking about it and also my thoughts on gaming tables in general at the end of this video and with that I can begin this triple review of Western empires / Eastern empires / the combined game of mega empires because as you'll soon see no matter how many people you're playing with you will have quite a similar experience your day will begin at about 8,000 BC which is approximately when I last had a haircut you're gonna have a civilisation and some components and your first challenge will be figuring out how and where to sit without being accosted by our opponents elbows and armpits I'm serious if your table is any smaller than this one trying to lay out this game is like doing Satan's own version of Feng Shui the good news is that once you're seated you'll be able to start managing your embryonic armies quite quickly because the rules explanation in this game is mostly unbelievably simple mostly at the start of each round everyone's population doubles like so many asexual cells and everyone can move every square exactly one space you can even bundle your little folks into enemy territory and they can get along until there's no dirt every space can support this many people at the end of the round if you're there alone your population is culled down to that number and only if you're there with somebody else do you fight taking turns to remove people until the total is below that number I just taught you how army management movement and combat works in less time than it takes to pee and even weirder than that comparison this mouthful of rules does all of a heavy lifting required to evoke the ancient world with unstoppable invasions flowing out from some forgotten corner of the map Kings being crushed into a historical footnote and unassailable empires rising only for one goofy leader to render them vulnerable and all the peoples around them circling and then picking apart their territory like vultures but if you're not good at wargames don't worry what if I were to tell you that you could win Western empires by being the best salesperson but first I need to introduce you to your horrible boss this is the archaeological succession track and every round everyone can advance one run on this unrepentantly mean monkey bar if they meet the requirements at the top and at the end of the day when one or some of you slide over the line with the determination of a baseball list sliding into home base the game is finally over and everyone gets points representing what future generations think of you for example I bet you what during this have heard of ancient Egypt but have you heard of ancient hatty with their worship of the mother goddess Qatar ha no you haven't and it's not because you're uneducated it's because they would lose us unfortunately even on the basic side this track is gonna make losers of a lot of players so if there's one thing you should bring to Western empires besides a packed lunch it's a good attitude or our willingness to use the rule in the manual for players who just want to leave this game their entire civilization nope being out of the continent and shuttering like a failed sandwich shop to start with the ast just needs you to own a certain number of cities and that's not too bad you can move six troops into one space and then they can be optionally collapsed into a city which is bad only because it doesn't produce new population units but it's good because it requires an opponent to send at least seven soldiers just to crack them back open like a grizzly pinata full of angry candy so there is wisdom in building cities on your borders to create a wall between you and our opponent but there's also wisdom in keeping your cities as far away from your barbarous opponents as possible that's because after it demands cities the stern doorman of the ast will not let your people pass unless you can flash a certain number of advance cards from your personal advance deck and this is where Western empires becomes like no game you've ever played advanced cards which in and of themselves do very little or sometimes even nothing are bought using sets of resource cards now every round for every city you have you're gonna get a random resource card and then everybody gets to trade with everybody else to try and get sets in a little more detail one player who will very quickly regret signing up for this job is gonna give every other player one card from each deck which sitting there half so if you have three cities you get one card from decks one two and three then you're gonna play something a lot like classic card game Pitt except with a higher possibility of being traded a card that means thousands of people are dead within these decks are better and better resources but worse and worse calamity cards there are minor calamities major ones tradable ones non-tradable ones and whichever players get stuck with those calamities get walloped by them at the end of the trading phase but what really powers this trading game is you're not swapping individual cards instead a set has to be a minimum of three cards and it gets better when you're talking about what you exchange you only have to tell the truth about the first two cards that can be dodging if you're trading three now what if I told you this is a clay and iron of fruit another rhine and Anoka how much of that am I telling the truth about probably very little let's imagine that your rum sat unenviable in the middle of this grand mal a you got dealt some fish and you don't need anyone else asking for fish so you think maybe I could be the fish set person so you'll talk to Iberia say got any fish and they'd say yeah I've got a fish a fruit and an ochre so you trade some cards and oh no it's a fish a fruit and a slave revolt they were lying but don't let it show on your face don't swear at them keep your cool and maybe just maybe you'll be able to trade that slaver vault with some other junk to Carthage your mortal enemies across the Mediterranean and if they suffer the calamity that might just set you up for an invasion this literal trading card game does such a nice job of breaking up the day everybody gets to lurk up away from the merciless explosion of tiny squares and brutal wars on the board that you're all worrying about and you get to make each other feel better by helping one another complete sets and you can laugh at the ridiculousness of lying about what you're trading over time the first time I played this we were all cracking up because the Assyrians in that game got access to a bunch of cities and therefore higher numbered decks so they started saying things to the Mediterranean like does anybody have any wine and we were dying laughing because we'd never seen any wine we didn't know what it was wine we were saying to her is that a kind of bone so there's your primer on what this game is populations double you move you fight you build cities you get trade goods from the cities you trade some players get devastated by calamities you drop populations out of the level reach can support and then all or some of you advance along the ast or actually I guess none of you might advance along the ast if you all screwed up which would mean you just played a 40-minute round and the game is no closer to being over I really cannot overstate how long this game is trying to guide a table full of new players through this it reminds me of some of the stress for holidays we've all had you know someone's getting cranky someone's getting hungry and none of us can get off the tour bus because we don't want to admit that we failed at leisure but like a holiday Western empires is at least going to be memorable and if you're lucky and stay positive and you are very organized it might even be magical and for certain millennia of certain games it has been magical for me when we reviewed routes I talked about the pleasure that game gives you by giving you your little role to play in an ecosystem and enroute that was all this crazy asymmetry with all the factions climbing on top of each other in western empires you're playing your role in a bigger thing but the bigger thing is the world it doesn't matter how many people you play with whether it's 5 or 9 or 18 your civilization is going to be spending all day warring with the 2 3 4 maybe 5 players around you everyone else at the table you're not going to interact with them imagine imagine playing a game with some people all day and you do not talk to them and yeah this is backwards but this is where Western empires gets its magic from it's this idea that you're playing a war game not just against some players but in a world that is bigger than your comprehension I swear on those few times that you'll have some trade goods you really need to shift and no one's interested and you stand up to walk away from the table all the way round it to trade with the celts sat 6 feet away from you only then might you look at their corner of globine go hey do you have any ochre what is happening here and then you'll have your mind blown by the war that's happening that you completely forgot about and then you'll walk back sit down and completely forget about it again that's the sense of scale we're dealing with here and it's so exciting benefits oh so easy to stake out the reasons to play Western empires it is sadly even easier to point out the reasons not to play it first off let's talk about movement you know the manual encourages you to move things simultaneously where possible it's easy going like that but as soon as you have borders which all players will very quickly have all the time you're going to want to know which of you has to move first and the manual says it's easy as well just whoever has the biggest population and you say but how do we know who has the biggest population and the game says it's easy you do an actual census of Europe every round you count literally every token on the board to update all the other tokens so you know when it's your turn to move tokens admittedly I did quite enjoy the census phase but that's only because I liked to yell hey everybody census and see all of my friends sag ever Society and how they've chosen to spend their Sunday but that's because I'm a bad man and your mileage may vary but the census is just a little bit of friction compared to what I'm really afraid of seeing happen to someone around the table which is them just losing because of the cruelly mathematical combat if another empire is bigger than you they can come every thousand years on eat more and more of your lunch and worse the less territory you have the less you have to do which means the slower the game is gonna feel and that's one thing if you miss played the strategic game and so you're losing cuz of that but frankly you might be losing because you just got whomped by a calamity now the calamities are supposed to be a catch-up mechanism because they get worse the later debt you draw from so people with more cities are slightly more likely to draw worse calamities but they might not draw them this whole system it's like trying to redistribute wealth by laying a minefield in Bank let's say Egypt's doing really well and draws an epidemic Egypt trace that epidemic to you know the enemies at Carthage are as a lovely moment but Carthage then trades it to the Celts who were already in last place and now they're in last place and have an epidemic to deal with oh that is awful is so unlucky everyone around the table is going to be saying platitudes of that player now there is no way in heck they can win and they have to stay here and keep playing for eight hours listen in this situation I would instruct that Celt player to leave putting all the little out of play tokens but let me stop and repeat that this is a board game where things happen what I would encourage a player to walk out of my door while the rest of us kept playing no I'm not gonna do that I mean I would but I would don't want to but whether a player ends up with a bad board state because they were unlucky or not very strategic or emotionally checked out or all three that'll be fun that player let's say it's Rome is then left like the turd on our doorstep for all the other players around them who have a decision that I hate making in games and that the decision is either do we leave Rome alone that player is having a horrible time I don't want to make it worse for the good of the day we're all having or do you say well this is the game I'm gonna take as much of their territory as I can because you can't spell fire sale without fire also one of the late-game calamities is just to move your ast marker backwards you thought missing a turn was a bad mechanic that has all the appeal of your computer crashing and you losing your work you know what it's worse because if that happens to the person in first place that elongates the game by 40 minutes the computer just crashed and lost everyone's work I think I would be a lot more forgiving of a lot of this if Western empires was just shorter and this is not gonna gel with the community have players who have been enjoying this game since the first edition was hewn out of rock all the way back in the year 1980 but listen I understand what this game gets from it's improbable scale it's like nothing else in the marketplace I do not understand what this game gets from forcing you to enjoy it from 10:00 a.m. until 11 p.m. guys here's a sign right if you find yourself writing a section in the manual on what happens if players leave maybe instead change the design so players don't want to leave just practically speaking with a game like this where it is easier to get 9 world leaders around my table than nine people who are definitely going to enjoy this what I want after that point is flexibility I want to fall to my knees at the altar of this game and say oh I did as you asked my laws I gathered eight other people who could understand the difference between unit movement and ship movement and then I wanted to say will done my profit how much time do you have to play instead it says cool you can play literally all day or slightly longer than that oh thank you wait are there really no other options there's also the short game that takes just six to eight hours oh but that's perfect it is perfect and only recommended for experienced players yeah I might just go see if Marv Duke is accepting new followers in science okay you know what else if your map squeezes 50% of the players into just 10% of your board use a different map projection so that is Western empires a game that brings history to life while feeling like a bit of a historical throwback itself a time machine the disrespects the very time you have to play it this then is a design I would only recommend you investigate if like me you will put in a preposterous amount of time and money and energy just for a few crumbs of table gaming magic and you know what I don't regret any of the games of this I have played and if when Eastern empires finally comes out you were to invite me to a full a scene play a game I like to think I might just say maybe maybe it depends on which civilization I get if I get to be on the edge where there's loads of space awesome if I'm the Celts great if you want to squeeze me in the middle with all the other players vast I'm gonna I'm gonna spend too much of the game reaching over the table ass gonna suck it's not gonna be worth it so that is the review over which means it's time for me to talk about this new table that we got sent by geek and son this is their Megan model it's the bigger version it's in dark wood and currently there is a Kickstarter running for these exact tables offering them at a price that is good so here's the deal they said they would give us this table in return for us talking about it but they said very strictly a geek and son that we could say whatever we want so I'm gonna start by saying whatever I want I'm gonna say I did not get the appeal of these gaming tables so if you've not seen one before and we pressed the James Bond button what we have here oh god moving these lands is quite a lot of work is a sunken recess chamber in which you can put your board games on I sort of felt interior I'm probably gonna fade things I've done this because no one wants to listen to me grunt tada so as I said I didn't get the point of this I was like why would you spend all this money on this dramatically expensive luxury product to have a playing area which is of course smaller than the size of the table itself if you put a game on this it's very difficult to use this kind of tight rope around the edge worse you can't even really put drinks on it because that's obviously a disaster waiting to happen it either gets not one way or it's not the other way and then water goes on that felt ah goodness gracious also this might be a time to mention that some of these gaming tables don't even function as dining tables if you put the slats on then you spill a drink that liquid might fall through the slats onto the felt ruining it so who first things first if you're getting one of these I would say make sure that it does actually work as a dining table so yeah with all of that you know in my face I was like why would anybody this turns out after living with one of these for a little bit I've completely changed my tune in the merry condo-style this tape will sparks joy in my life every time I use it and I'm gonna talk a little bit about why so first things first this is the biggest thing for me as Sony loves card games there's a reason that casinos use felt and it is because felt is a fabulous surface to play card games on in addition to there being all this nice friction that lets you do card tricks and fun deals in addition to cards not being able to fly off the table which is why it's really fun to roll dice on a gaming table because they don't fall off it's like craps you can be like BAM basically I like gaming tables because they make my house feel a bit more like a casino but the real reason cards are nice on felt is because you can pick them up you ever had that experience but you just can't pick up a card because you can't get your fingers under it obviously and felt you can just pick up anything you want and it is always buh-buh-buh-buh super easy I absolutely adore that the other reason not the other reason another reason felt also has this nice feature of making games kind of pop you know you put a board on here and not only is it like on this colorful background but because it's slightly sunken it just feels a bit more like a museum exhibit or something I dunno it's hard to describe also this really blew my mind I read a lot of manuals when I'm playing board games and of course usually if you've got loads of bitty tokens you have to read the manual like that and it's sucks but of course now no no no no I can wrest the manual on something I can browse it and know that anything underneath is not getting knocked about so overall this you can sun table has kind of put a bit of egg on my face I did not think I would enjoy it half as much as I do so just a nice sturdy object I can't speak for all gaming tables but this one it's so big and heavy it doesn't go anywhere which means it feels like feels luxurious it feels nice even with the slats on it's just a lovely table to sit at however you know the real question is not do I like this table I do it's lovely but I got it for free so the question I want to try and help you answer maybe is whether you should buy it but ultimately these tables are so expensive I don't feel confident telling anyone to buy unless money is absolutely no object to you instead I would say well the only thing I can really which is I like mine I would however say that if before you buy it before you do a thing like that maybe try and go to a board game convention to sit at one of these tables you know see how much you like it the only other sort of advice I can provide is my favorite feature of this table is this one bit of wood let me show you what it does the reason I like it is because what you do is you can have a recess that is not necessarily all the whole thing right you can wall off part of it you can wall off as much as you want you can have half of it being a dining table and half for being recessed and then dice and cards aren't gonna roll under that thing and it feels like it's just nice to have this belt line playing space and then it's even more nice for it to be the perfect size of the game so that's really cool the only other commercial advice I would give you is I don't know even here's the thing you can't have drinks on this thing that's the floor and the way they fix that floor is by having a variety of cupholders this is actually also a token holder but it's the only thing I have the whole mugs and then they fit into this rail system around the edge of the table so there you go and then you've got your cup holder I dislike having to pay extra for all of these just to be able to maybe hold all of your friends drinks and I well I'll counter point as much as I dislike having to buy those I do personally use them and these little token holders I really actually do like this is this was a very disappointing discovery for me personally but you get something like this which is so dorky and it's got like two sections four components and it can hold cards there oh yeah that's a fun bonus this thing this rail around the edge of the Megan that's designed to hold the sheaves of wood actually also functions as a card holder which is cute for those few people out there who actually like card holders but yeah these token holders I also do use them you know when when I was receiving this table you know asked do you want these and I said not really but they forced them on me and I use them all the time so that's another sort of bit of high ground I'm having to abandon in the face of these tables actually being quite nice so there you have it I don't feel enormous ly confident recommending this table because it's the only one I've had I can only say I like it I don't feel comfortable recommending gaming tables in general because they're insanely expensive and candidly maybe this is the most important thing I will say even though I got this table for free and it's bringing me pleasure all the time I wouldn't pay for it I I'm I'm not like you know broke anymore like I was in my 20s but I couldn't justify dropping you know one thousand and one one and a half thousand pounds on a table and a bunch of accessories that just bring me just a little bit of joy every time I use it but for those of you who really like the idea of these tables more than me for those of you who have more money than me I would say yeah maybe maybe one of these tables would be a fun investment for you final final final thing I'll say these chairs which are also from Deccan Sun they're not cheap but they are very comfortable super comfortable honestly it kind of makes me feel sad for my ass cheeks and lower back that they had to sit on there like here folding tables you've been seeing in our reviews from for the last seven years because this is so good hmm thank you very much for watching everybody and a link to the Kickstarter for this table is in the description of this video

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 510,645

Rating: 4.9386601 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Western Empires, Mega Empires, Eastern Empires, Mega Civilization, Civilization, MegaCiv

Id: 5pBXSGZtS5E

Length: 26min 4sec (1564 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Aloeb83]

This game sounds pretty cool, but that 12 hour playing time is just crazy. If it was closer to 4 hours or so, I'd be interested in getting it. But there is no way I, or the people I play with, could sit through 12 hours of this.

[u/hotk9]

Happy to see SUSD putting out videos every week, even if I'm not remotely interested in the game I still enjoy their videos immensely.

[u/DinkeandDilly]

I can't stop looking at his foot in the mirror.

[u/Notfaye]

on the table end of the review - I love my game table. You can set up a game in the vault, and then cover it up with the slats to use it as a diner table, and then put another board game on top of the one already in the vault and have your partner yell at you.

[u/milkyjoe241]

This is the type of game that's just better on computer.

You can do simultaneous turns + resolution. The Fitting around the table situation goes away. The game time can easily be cut down in half.

[u/Watericesteam]

Played the original when it was called Civilization. I wonder why they changed the name.

[u/Anon125]

It's sitting on my shelf. It's time will come. One day...

[u/SpaceDumps]

I've played the full 18-player game of this and it was completely ridiculous, AMA.

[u/Halflingspy]

I really, really want to play this. Just once. Make a damn day of it. Get some of my friends that I go to Ren Faires with together, the ones that like spectacle. Everyone brings food or drinks based on the old cultures and styles, and we just go ham. Someone writes down when things go down as if they are writing a history textbook, or fully in character as a historian.

Some games I don't really see as games, but as an experience - like going to a megagame such as Watch The Skies. Can I imagine playing this normally? No. But as an event? Yes.