[following on from What Should I Play? (Help me decide)]
Next on the list was Empyreal: Spells & Steam w/As Above, So Below expansion. I’ve been enthusiastic to check this out, but I’ve always been put off by the thought of setup – the box is too big. I refreshed my memory of the rules and watched a solo-playthrough from One Stop Co-Op Shop.
Setup wasn’t as bad as I expected; the box is too big, but some of it is dead-air due to me not having the “deluxe upgrade”. Questionable decision by L99, certainly, to put the retail edition in a box big enough for deluxe upgrades and the expansion. But the GameTrayz-style inserts are, mostly, very functional for both storage and gameplay.
Roughly speaking, it took me a bit longer than I would like to setup the game, but future setups will be much faster. I decided that I wanted to use colored wooden cubes instead of the tiny cardboard goods chits; which meant finding my spare wooden cubes, realizing I didn’t have cubes in enough colors and then finding the necessary colors/counts of wooden discs (ostensibly for 18xx print-and-play projects or upgrades).
The game itself took about an hour, and a lot of that was me checking and rechecking the rules, and then checking and re-checking the special powers on the cars and characters. It’s probably about a 30 minute game when playing solo (the box suggests 20 min/player, so not far off).
The AI is a bit clunky, only in the way it requires the player to make judgement calls of what the AI “should do” in any given automa card drawn. A lot of the time, it’s straight-forward, but still it involves scanning a visually-busy board.
I really enjoyed the game; I felt like the decision space was interesting but not overwhelming. The action selection rondel is good and adding spell cars to the player board to enhance the rondel is a great mechanism.
My biggest complaint is about parsing the gamestate on the board. There are so many colors and by the time you get just 2 or 3 items on each hex in a crowded area, it requires a lot of attention to figure out what is what and where.
If this box were half the size, it would be a no-brainer to keep in my collection. As that is not the case, I am still mulling over whether to keep it or not. I should note, however, that I broke a cardinal boardgamer behavior and played a game while awaiting a new expansion for said game to arrive. The very smol new expansion is all but ready to ship if it weren’t stuck in a factory in a region of China that is currently shutdown due to COVID.