by Mike Clarke This review was originally published to BoardGameGeek in June 2012.
A fellow gamer asked me to write up my thoughts on Ascending Empires as a two player spouse- friendly game after I spent a week researching a 4X (explore, exploit, expand, exterminate) game I could play with mine.
So here it is. Let’s start with: Is she clumsy? Ascending Empires has one fairly unique feature. It uses dexterity instead of dice to simulate randomness. You flick your ships over a smooth puzzle-piece board on, or within, a planet’s orbital “ring” allowing you to set up outposts and transfer troops as you expand your empire.
It’s light for a 4X game, but has a decent amount of strategy that includes a tech tree for customizing your ships.
It’s a 2-4 player game with each player represented by a coloured world. Each world has its own colour tech. You accumulate more tech by exploring worlds and unlocking the tech represented by that world’s colour.
Unlocking tech give you rule-breaking abilities in attack, movement, defence and troop recruitment. If you specialize too narrowly by just levelling up one colour, you won’t get the extra troop bonus for getting to Level 2 across all colours.
Despite that, there is some incentive to specialize. You get very powerful, game breaking abilities at Level 4. Generally, you do not want your opponent to get Level 4 tech.
Ascending Empires: All about the VPs
As you level up your tech, you get Victory Points from a limited pool equal to the tech’s level. You also get VPs for destroying enemy starships and installations on their planets. You can get VPs for building colonies and cities, and for occupying quadrants outside the half of the board closest to your home world —a reward for exploration.
Ascending Empires is on a timer. When the pool of victory points, determined by the number of players in the game runs out, it’s over. By the time all the planets have been explored, the VP pool will be nearly empty.
It’s a simple game with just enough choices to keep it interesting. The flicking mechanism gives it that bit of uncertainty and employs just enough skill to hold your attention. Gameplay is quick and engaging. You convert troops into starships, navigate them by flicking them into place and then reconvert them back to troops when you land on a planet.
Turns are quick minimizing downtime because you can only do one thing on your turn although you have a host of options: move, launch ships, navigate, land, mine, build, develop tech.
Short turns keep Ascending Empires moving and allow you to see your opponent’s plans well in advance. All that strategy can be undone by a seam in the nine-piece puzzle board that can send your starship flying right off the board. Just chalk it up to the hazards of space flight!
Despite some complaints, the board isn’t that bad and you can always hold, snap down or knife edges that are problematic.
Ascending Empires is a great gateway 4X game that doesn’t depend on destroying your opponent (although you still can) since you get VPs for just about everything you do including a mining function that lets you remove troops from a planet for VPs.
Because it’s not all-out destruction and includes a lot of building, it’s definitely spouse friendly (mine liked it).
It’s no Space Empires 4X, but that’s OK.
If you do get your wife (or anyone else for that matter) to play it with you, let them practice flicking across the board for a while. If they’ve never played a flicking game.. it takes some getting used to.