Empires of the North: Deck Synergy
A Tableau Builder within a confined space
Box Art
Published by: Portal Games Designed by: Joanna Kijanka & Ignacy Trzewiczek
Modern humans like predictability. We like assurances any choice we make won’t lead to a world of discomfort. Living in the first-world provides such high assurances—the rigidity of rules and regulations. For instance, there’s a likelihood eating a blueberry muffin wont throw you into turmoil (three or four in one sitting, however?).
Unlike real life, when it comes to board games we feast on the unpredictable. We like the challenge of processing our way out of predicaments not from our own creation. The satisfaction of unwinding a puzzle full of traps and pitfalls, pushing your brain into hard corners as you look for a way out is its own form of reward. Resourcefulness is the spice of board game life!
Those bits of playful predicaments are the mechanics that call to us. It could be the roll of dice, pulling a token out of a bag, or in the draw of a card. How does Empires of the North feed our curiosity for a challenge? Does it fulfill the need for adversity?
It’ all in the decks
The Six Clans
Empires of the North is a relative to another Portal Games tableau builder, Imperial Settlers, and although set in the same universe, it has a different approach to building and unrolling its decks. For starters, Empires of the North comes with pre-built, self contained decks of different clans in the box, six in all. These decks vary in intricacy and each clan employs different methods to making victory points, resources and money. It’s your job to decipher the web of actions that will allow you to use each card of the deck to its best of its abilities. This means compared to Imperial Settlers, your resourcefulness will have to come from the confines of said deck and not from a shared communal one to amplify it.
Tommaple?
Each deck has 33 cards to use, with three of those cards used as basic fields, mostly available to you in order to create resources. These resources come in food types like fish or apples (or is it a tomato? Tomapple?), or building materials like stone or wood. Some specific clans will grant you access to harvest coins or raze tokens, even. Not all clans have access to these resources as some specialize in a specific set of items. At some point, you will need to make different combinations and transactions to gather resources to pay the price an action requires.
The great thing about these restrictions that each clan has is it forces a deeper understanding of what clan deck you use. One size does not fit all. How clan Panuk plays and goes about its business is wildly different than clan Ulaf, for example. Each clan has its own synergy hidden within its deck. While one produces copious amounts of fish and stones, another floods their wares with gold coins and wood. The mechanics to do so might be the same, their outcomes, however, are ever different.
Whatever the actions yield, however, only serves to push more and more actions later on. You don’t get one tomapple to sit on it. You need it to push it forward to this action to start another chain reaction to feed the machine that will ultimately get you that victory point.
And those victory points are essential. In the early stages of any game, you feel as if you’ll never get anything going that will produce those points. However, the tepid start is misleading, and you’ll soon find out how fast it will start moving after a few rounds.
farm to table
What I like about Empires of the North is its urgency to create a working tableau as soon as possible. You can’t dawdle waiting for the water to boil—you must make it boil, now, somehow. The trick is, how to muster an engine from the unpredictable cards drawn? As tableau builders go, Empires’ cards aren’t self sufficient. They don’t single handedly win you a game. In fact, robust engines can come late, only bearing fruit once half the deck materializes in front of you. Add that resources are scarce at the beginning, and harvesting more resources eats up your actions to do other things. The balance of creating and resource gathering are always at war with each other. At least in the early going.
Aiding you by expanding your actions is the game’s reconfigurable rondel. You will need this rondel, almost exclusively in the early stages of Empires, and in concert with your developed tableau later in the game. This rondel has five actions that you can take using your two clan action tokens. With these actions you can:
HARVEST: take resources from one type of field on your tableau
EXPLORE: draw one card from your deck
CONSTRUCT: construct 1 card in your hand instead of using resources
POPULATE: add more workers into your reserves
SAIL: place your ship onto the expedition board to pillage or conquer islands
The Rondel
If having only two actions isn’t enough, you can extend the usefulness of your action tokens by using an apple/tomato resource to move your token to an adjacent spot on the rondel. In total, in a given round, you can have up to four actions exclusively from the rondel alone. Once the round ends you take your tokens back and can freshly use the rondel once again in the next round.
The rondel is a neat idea. Its set up is totally random since the five pieces are separated and can be placed however you like. This adds a different path to every game, as clans have a different use case depending on how the five actions are set up.
What you can build with limited resources and options is what makes this game appetizing. Tripping the switch on an imperfect engine with tiny morsels taken from opportune actions is an amazing feeling. And when the perfect synergy of cards finally do come out, it feels like a bounty of opportunities was just plated for you.
The game does ramp up, almost forcefully, after some very scarce rounds. Where most players won't see much going on in the first couple of rounds, a game can see a flurry of points being created turn after turn. Actions add upon actions to get you victory points, sometimes in bunches if triggered at the right time with the correct combination of cards in your tableau. This sense of urgency is augmented as players are racing towards the 25 point threshold to trigger the game’s last round. If you can’t create a working tableau soon enough, you’ll find yourself ill equipped to keep up with the rest of the players once the final rounds come about.
Once all players have concluded their last sailing phase and taken their last cards or pillage actions, the game points are tallied up and the one with the most points wins.
alone i wander
Solo Play Tableau
The mass appeal of board games is their social aspect, but once in a while you might like to keep to yourself and play a game or two alone. Empires of the North, in my opinion, is one of the best games to play solo. The entire mechanics of the game can be described as multiplayer solitaire since there really isn’t a lot of player interaction aside from raze tokens that can deactivate a building on someone else’s tableau. However, this minimal interaction works in the game’s favor as you can practically keep the same mechanics and go solitaire.
Empires has a very robust solo mode that can yield repeated plays. I’d argue that it fares better as a single player board game than a multiplayer one. With the six clans provided playing differently, under the scenarios given, one clan may have a decided advantage over another in one scenario, but in turn, that same clan might have a massive disadvantage on another as the caveats change.
These restrictions or alterations to the normal rule set squeeze your chosen clan one way or another, and it’s where understanding the clan’s deck comes into play in a big way. This tightness is compounded by the fact that those scenarios have a four round restriction. For example, the first solo option, Winter is Coming, you must surpass 30 points in order to win. Talk about a fast turnaround.
With more clan expansions coming out over time, and even more scenarios available, replayability is extremely high. You’ll sure to be busy figuring out the best way to unlock a clan’s potential as you play the solo mode.
everything in its right place
A Finished Tableau
Empires of the North is a great experience if this is you first foray into a tableau builder of this ilk. The art work by Roman Kucharski is whimsical, slapstick, and bright. It’s nature never serious or overburdening. Each clan has a certain defined style, its trait, that must be thought out to beat your opponent or pass the minimum score threshold for the solo mode. With six of them, it will take a while to find their quirks to maximize.
Overall, Empires is a great game. It makes you think and consider the best path to building out your Empire while also keeping you on your toes as each new card drawn can be the linchpin of your grand design, or a dud that could not come at the worst time. With three expansions (two of them already available for purchase) bringing in six new clans into the fold with new solo scenarios to boot, the case for an ever present table presence of Empires of the North is guaranteed.
I highly recommend Empires of the North.
To Consider
+ Highly replayable; six different clans keep the game fresh
+ Has a great insert to keep everything neat and organized
+ Expansions add to the longevity of the game
+ Solo mode is one of the best around; can easily be the entire game
+/- Difficulty ranges from fairly easy to complex and demanding
+/- Set up can be a bit finicky, but not too bothersome
- Some rules can be a bit difficult to understand. Will need the rulebook handy
