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Hold the Pass

Mighty Empires Review

by Avian

Having run four different map campaigns so far, I was looking forward to the new Mighty Empires set. I was a bit disappointed to hear that the rules you actually got with them, but I have enough experience with these things to compensate for that. Other players might not, though, and this will be a critical view at what you get in the box. It has been said that campaigns should be mostly about having fun and that they aren't really meant for competitive play and that one should therefore not be too critical towards the rules. I disagree; casual gamers will rarely complain about balanced rules and having rules that cannot be easily exploited is more of an advantage for the casual gamer since he is less likely to be victimised by competitive players that way.
Anyways, the rules are mostly okay and much better than I feared when I heard that they were five pages long.

 

Contents

The tiles and features

The rules

 

The tiles and features

I haven't actually gotten my talons on the tile set yet, so my comments are limited to what I can tell from the contents list and the two extra tiles you get with WD.

 

What you get in the box

 

Good things

 

Bad things

 

The rules

The rules as a whole take up four pages, where the first page is mostly dedicated to setting up the map (which is a bit long for something that is essentially: "randomly draw tiles and connect them"). The actual rules take up three pages, which is (perhaps surprisingly) enough for an okay set. They do in fact resemble the Warmaster Mighty Empires rules that were released a couple of years ago and which I belive you can download from the Specialist Games website.
People have complained a lot about the length of the rules, but most things I object to are not related to the length, but the lack of clarity. For example: The rules do not really say one way or another whether it is possible to claim a territory and then claim another tile that is adjacent to that, but not adjacent to any tile you had at the start of the phase. If this is allowed it is possible to block in other players that have no victories against you by claiming a chain of neutral tiles in his path which he cannot take from you until he gets any victories in a later turn.

 

The rules at a glance

Briefly speaking, the rules work as follows:

 

Good things

 

Bad things

Sadly, there are enough bad things in the rules that I would not want to field them unmodified.

 

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