Wouter & Ymke 
Building an empire usually sounds like a fairly serious undertaking. You need resources, buildings, scientific progress and enough soldiers to convince the neighbours that your side of the border is definitely your side of the border. Micro Empires takes those familiar civilisation-building ideas and puts them into a much smaller game, built around cards, coloured resource discs and a shared map.
Despite the name, there are several things competing for your attention. You’re developing buildings, deciding what to do with resources, improving technologies and trying to maintain some presence on the map. None of these parts is especially complicated on its own, which made Micro Empires quite easy for us to get started with. The question was whether we’d still be thinking about those choices once we knew what everything did.
Micro Empires is currently being crowdfunded on Gamefound, with the campaign running until 7 October.
👥 1-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 60 minutes
📝 Designers: Kamil Langie
🎨 Artwork: Jarosław Wajs
🏢 Publisher: Thistroy Games (prototype copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
The centre of the table contains five empire cards, with two rows of resources around them. The resources below the cards form the development, while those above make up the supply. On your turn, you choose one empire card together with the two development resources underneath it. You can pay the card’s coin cost to place it in your projects area, or discard it to receive a coin instead. You can have up to three unfinished projects at the same time.
You can then take one or both resources underneath your chosen card. Resources usually need to be placed immediately, although your leader can store up to two for later. Resources placed on projects have to be added in the order shown on the card, so you can’t skip an earlier requirement just because you’ve already found something you need further along. Any development resources you don’t want can instead be discarded for one coin each.
Once all of a project’s requirements have been filled, it becomes a completed building. Buildings can provide immediate effects, ongoing abilities or spaces where you can place resources later to activate their effects. Your leader also has abilities of their own, while some cards provide additional ways of using or manipulating resources. Your personal area gradually changes from a few unfinished projects into a collection of buildings with more places to use the resources you take.
Science is handled on a separate board containing three development rows. You’re free to invest in any of them, although progress within each row has to be made from left to right, and later technologies require more science investment. These technologies affect different parts of your empire, including your buildings, resources and military.
Military units are placed on a separate conflict map. Different effects allow you to deploy units or move them into neighbouring areas, and opposing units that meet will fight at the end of the active player’s turn. Units are removed from both sides until only one side remains, and defeating enemy or barbarian units earns victory points. Some areas also have resource symbols. If you control one of these, you can take a matching resource from the supply when one is available. Your initial military limit is three pieces, including your stronghold, and this can be increased during the game.
Conflicts are separate from these individual battles. When two military resources appear in the supply, a conflict takes place and everyone scores according to how many areas they control. The conflict track then advances, and at certain points players also have to remove military units from the map. The game ends when someone completes their tenth building or when the final conflict is resolved. Everyone gets the same number of turns, after which completed buildings, points collected during the game, other scoring effects and leftover coins determine the winner. Every five coins are worth one additional victory point.
Artwork & Components
Our copy of Micro Empires is a prototype, so the components in the photos aren’t necessarily what will appear in the finished game. With that in mind, the first thing we noticed was just how colourful everything was once we’d set it up. There are cards showing farms, markets, settlements and monuments, several colours of wooden resources and military pieces, and small boards for the shared tracks and conflict map.
The empire cards have enough room for the artwork, icons and resource spaces without feeling crowded. Since you’re physically placing wooden discs onto cards as you develop them, that extra space is useful. Leaders use the same general format but feature larger character illustrations, which helps them stand apart from the buildings scattered around the table.
There’s quite a bit of wood on the table as well. The resources are thick coloured discs, while the military units use different shapes rather than everyone moving identical cubes around. Some of the prototype pieces are fairly plain up close. Thistroy Games has already shown changes to the production version, including printed details for the military meeples, so I don’t think there’s much point judging the final component quality from this copy.
What I can judge is the amount of table space it uses. The word “Micro” becomes slightly questionable once four empires start spreading out. The shared boards themselves are small, but the cards soon take over the areas in front of each player. It wasn’t a problem on our table. I’d still give everyone a bit more room than the size of the box might suggest.
Our Experience
It didn’t take us long to get comfortable with Micro Empires. There are several things going on, but we didn’t feel that we needed an introductory game just to work out what we were supposed to be doing. Our first mistakes came from judging things badly rather than misunderstanding the rules, which is usually a much nicer way to lose. I initially looked at the empire cards first and treated the resources underneath them as a useful extra. That didn’t last long. We soon had turns where nobody particularly cared about the card they were taking because the two discs underneath it were exactly what they needed. At one point I paid for a building I wasn’t particularly interested in simply because I wanted what came with it. A few turns later, somebody else discarded a card I wanted because they needed the money. Apparently great empires are sometimes founded on fairly disappointing shopping trips.
We also made the mistake of starting too many things. Three unfinished projects sounded generous until all three needed resources that weren’t appearing. I ended up staring at several half-built cards while somebody else kept completing buildings, and there wasn’t much sympathy around the table. In later games we became much more willing to discard something for a coin instead of trying to make everything useful. A card that looked mediocre could suddenly be worth taking because of the resources underneath it. Meanwhile, a building we really wanted sometimes had to stay in the market because everything attached to it was useless to us. Our empires also started heading in different directions. One player spent more heavily on science, another built around effects they could activate repeatedly, while someone else was much happier putting soldiers on the map.
That last approach caused the most disagreement. In one game, a player didn’t increase their military capacity much and gradually lost influence on the map. We initially thought the starting limit would be enough to remain involved. It wasn’t. In another game we went further in the opposite direction and spent more on military development, only to realise we’d neglected buildings elsewhere. We never really agreed on how much military development was enough. Someone was usually convinced we’d invested too much, while the person collecting points from several areas tended to have a different opinion.
We gradually started paying more attention to each other as well. Most of the time we still chose cards because they helped our own empire rather than because they hurt somebody else’s. Occasionally those two things lined up rather conveniently. There was one game where I mentioned that I needed a particular resource, only to watch it disappear before my next turn. I’m sure that was an unfortunate coincidence. In another game we were so busy watching the conflict track that we failed to notice someone reaching nine completed buildings. The tenth appeared and suddenly the rest of us became very interested in what that player had apparently been doing for the previous half hour.
Our Thoughts
The most useful way I can describe Micro Empires is as a resource-management and tableau-building game that borrows some of the development choices of a civilisation game. You’re not negotiating treaties, managing individual cities or taking a historical nation through several ages. Instead, you’re deciding where limited resources should go and watching those investments change what your empire needs next. A building that gives you another use for a resource can make future copies of that resource more attractive. Increasing your military capacity makes deployment effects more useful because you actually have room for another unit. Science can make cards you previously wouldn’t have considered worth taking. As your empire grows, what you’re looking for in the market changes with it.
The individual actions are easy enough to understand. Judging what they’re worth to your particular empire takes longer. An ordinary building you can complete now may do more for you than a better one that will sit unfinished for several turns. Money can seem unimportant until expensive cards arrive one after another. Something that helps science might suddenly solve a problem somewhere else. Most of the time you can see exactly what you’re choosing between. The annoying part is deciding which thing you’re willing to leave behind.
By the end of the game, your empire can do considerably more than it could at the beginning. Initially you can only keep a few unfinished projects, your leader stores very little, your military presence is restricted and you don’t have many additional abilities to work with. Later, you may have somewhere useful to send an awkward resource, an ability that changes what you can take, or enough military capacity to contest another part of the map. You’re not moving through historical eras. Still, the position in front of you feels noticeably different from the one you started with. For me, that does more to create the civilisation feeling than simply putting historical names and pictures on the cards.
Our main concern is the military capacity. Controlling areas can score several times, defeating units also gives you points, and certain territories provide access to resources. So far, increasing your military limit has been difficult to ignore. The question is whether it will remain something we genuinely weigh against other improvements, or eventually become something experienced players more or less have to do. We haven’t played enough to answer that. We’ve seen different levels of military investment work, but another ten games would probably tell us more about this than anything else. Players who aren’t interested in area control at all should also know that this isn’t a system sitting harmlessly at the edge of the game.
The changing market will suit some groups more than others. You can have a direction in mind without knowing whether the exact card and resources you want will appear when you need them. For us, there’s enough control to pursue something while still having to deal with what’s actually available. We don’t mind changing direction because two useful resources have appeared underneath a card we hadn’t considered five minutes earlier.
Micro Empires has worked well for us as a shorter take on civilisation building without pretending to replace the larger games that spend several hours on the subject. It’s easy enough to teach, and our games haven’t felt automatic once everyone knew the rules. There’s usually been something we wanted that we couldn’t quite have, somebody occupying an area we’d rather they didn’t, or a project sitting unfinished for longer than we’d care to admit. After several games, though, we’re still arguing about how much to invest in the map, still changing our minds about cards once we see the resources underneath them, and still happy to set it up again.
📝 We received a prototype copy of Micro Empires from Thistroy Games. Components, artwork and rules shown or discussed in this review may differ from the final production version.
