I picked up Tiny Epic Galaxies the other day as a solo game, and played several games of that today. I don’t have any other “Tiny Epic” games, but I’ve enjoyed some of Scott Almes’ work with Button Shy, and this particular entry in the “Tiny Epic” series seemed to be well-regarded for the most part.
I was initially underwhelmed. I started on “medium” difficulty (skipping “beginner” and “easy”), and played a couple of games and won them both very easily; so I tried “hard”… and I won that very easily… which was a bit of a worry. That left only “epic” difficulty, which I feared was not exactly going to live up to its name on first impressions. I was soundly beaten in my first game of that, but I won the next two games (albeit not by large margins).
So on first impressions, this is not a difficult game to win. Although the manual does have an additional suggestion for increasing difficulty (giving the enemy a single re-roll of each unusable die) which I think would be brutal in an “epic” game, but I should try that on “hard” difficulty and see if I like it better that way.
The strategy is very light, and the difficulty levels are largely just reducing some thresholds in order to increase the effects of the dice on the enemy’s turn, which means that a simple run of bad luck with the dice can be absolutely calamitous to your prospects.
The game grew on me a bit more over those three “epic” games, though. The more significant luck factor did force me to think more about how I might counteract those effects, and the specific state of the enemy’s empire did play a greater part in my decision making. The outcome still feels more arbitrary than I was hoping for – I’d like a bit more strategy and a bit less luck – but not as much as it had felt to start with.
Things very much in its favour are that it’s extremely quick to set up / reset / pack away, and the games themselves weigh in at ~30 minutes (I think my longest game was 45 mins) which isn’t outstaying its welcome. I also like that the special effects available to you vary from game to game with the shuffle of the deck of planets, and these have a genuine impact on the game and consequently kept them from feeling too same-y. Current thoughts are that the positives outweigh the negatives, and as a pretty engaging experience in a short time-frame one could do a lot worse. All this being the case, I expect I’ll get lots of games in over the next little while, so here’s hoping I keep seeing the good side.