We made an extra visit to CarcaSean in the middle of the week for a session of Struggle of Empires. With six players in all, I do believe that it’s the biggest gaming group we’ve had yet. Our group was led again by Han who taught us the rules which took about half an hour out of our total playing time of four hours. This game’s basic gameplay reminds me a lot of Risk, though it’s obviously a much more subtle and complex game.

The main area of the board depicts Europe while the smaller boxes to the left side and bottom represent the areas that the European powers can colonize. The object of the game is to gain as much influence as possible and this is accomplished by conquest. You move ships and armies around the board to strike and defend as needed while spending your own population to raise new forces. You can also use your actions and money to buy special tiles which confer various advantages and abilities over the course of the game.

The premise and basic rules are really quite simple but it has a number of features that I found to be downright ingenious. First of all, there’s the alliance auction system. Each player in the game must belong in one of two alliances and determination of who goes in which alliance is done through an auction that also sets the turn order. The game is divided into three wars and the alliances are dissolved after each war, so someone who’s an ally in one war can easily become an enemy in the next.

The second clever mechanic is that combat results are determined by rolling two six-sided dice and modifying your military strength in a territory by the difference between the two values you get. This has the effect of ensuring that while a fairly wide range of random outcomes from the dice rolls is theoretically possible (from 0 to 5), the likeliest outcomes are the lowest values, hence preserving the value of even minor differences in military strength.

The last innovation that impressed me is that you don’t actually conquer whole territories per se, but the control tokens in the territory. This means that several different powers can share a territory. The player with the most tokens in a territory gets the highest listed points that it’s worth but if several different powers have the highest number of tokens there then all of them get the full points. This makes the dynamics of conquest very fluid and interesting.

Furthermore, the tokens come into play randomly over the course of the game, ensuring that each game will be slightly different. In our game, the random distribution of tokens gave me a significant lead in India so I proceeded to consolidate my position there. It wasn’t worth a lot of points but it did give me a lot of money. The downside of this however is that someone with good knowledge of which territories has how many tokens has a considerable advantage by being able to predict where new tokens will appear later in the game and what type they will be.

The net effect is that despite the relatively simple rules, it’s actually a game that requires a great deal of thought. The alliance system alone for example presents a fiendishly complex web of decisions to consider especially once you realize that getting someone that you fear on your team effectively neutralizes him as an enemy. The end result is a game that gains its richness from tons of player interaction, as far from the multiplayer solitaire of many Euro games as you’re likely to get. Of course, this does mean that there’s little point in trying to play this if you don’t have enough players. I’d imagine that you’d need at least four to have a decent game but more is always better. In all, it’s a good wargame that I’d be glad to play anytime we have the player numbers, but I do agree with Chee Wee that it needs better components. Let us push around miniature soldiers and ships instead of cardboard tokens!