• Designers:  Robert Dougherty, Darwin Kastle
• Publisher:  Wise Wizard Games
• Developer:  Derek Funkhouser
• Players:  2
• Age:  12+
• Duration:  30 minutes
• Times Played:  14

Star Realms is a popular deckbuilding game that was first released in 2014.  Designed by a couple of Magic: the Gathering veterans, it was, and continues to be, very popular, with a bunch of expansions and spinoff games.  The original title was ranked as high as 52nd on the Geek.  So when, in July of 2022, the game’s publisher, Wise Wizard Games, announced a Kickstarter for a legacy version of Star Realms, it got a lot of attention.  There was a delay of about two years and many disgruntled backers, which almost seems to be the norm these days, but Star Realms: Rise of Empire, was finally released in late October of last year.

My friend Alton introduced me to Star Realms a couple of years ago.  Much to my surprise, it was the first deckbuilding game to actually click with me and I’ve very much enjoyed our games of it.  When I saw Rise of Empire advertised, it seemed like an excellent Christmas present for him, so I picked up a copy.  We just finished playing all the games in the legacy campaign, so I thought I’d give you my impressions of the new game.  However, to understand the legacy aspects of the game, I’ll have to quickly describe how the original Star Realms works.

In the Beginning…

Star Realms is a 2-player game with a generic sci-fi setting.  The players build and employ their personal decks to try to reduce their opponent’s hit points (called Authority) from their starting total of 50 down to 0.  Both players start with identical 10 card decks.  There is also a Trade Deck and the top 5 cards of it are revealed in a Trade Row between the players.  On each player’s turn, they take their 5 card hand, play and activate as many of the cards as they want, discard the rest, and then deal themselves 5 more cards from their deck in preparation of their next turn.  So that part of it is quite similar to Dominion.

Cards can do a variety of things, but the two main functions are to buy other cards and to do damage.  Many cards have a number of coins listed and each Trade card has a cost.  Each turn, you total up all the coins on the cards you play and use them to buy as many cards from the Trade row as you wish to and can afford.  Newly purchased cards go in your discard pile.  Many of the cards also have a attack value.  Add up all the attack values and your opponent has to reduce their Authority total by the amount of your attack.  The goal, once again, is to reduce your opponent’s Authority to 0 before they can do the same to you.

There are two types of cards.  Ships carry out their effects and are then discarded.  Bases, though, stick around.  All bases have a Shield value, and they can only be attacked if your opponent’s total attack value is at least that high.  Some bases are called Outposts, and they have to be attacked before anything else (including the player’s central Authority pool).  So playing an Outpost with a healthy shield total can completely protect you; at least, until your opponent gets enough firepower to knock it out of orbit.  When bases are shot down, they’re placed in the player’s discard pile, to be recycled like all the other cards.

Each of the Trade cards belongs to one of four factions.  Each faction has certain effects they specialize in.  But many of them also have Ally Abilities, in addition to their main ones.  These additional abilities only come into play if the player plays another card of that faction on their turn.  So the players have a strong incentive to build up their decks using cards of only one or two factions.

Without a Legacy to Stand On?

So having laid that foundation down, let me talk about the new game.  Rise of Empire (RoE) is a legacy version of Star Realms that consists of a campaign of 12 scenarios.  I’ll try to make my description as spoiler free as I can, but to be honest, there isn’t all that much to be spoiled.  RoE isn’t similar to games like Pandemic Legacy, that have a strong story line with dramatic twists and turns and lots of surprising mechanical changes from game to game.  Instead, it’s largely based on the original game, with a few altered rules in each scenario, and the legacy aspect (that is, the thing that makes future games dependent on the actions the players take in the current game) comes from one main mechanic.

Unlike Star Realms, each player plays as a faction in RoE (they’re the Trade Federation and The Star Empire, which are actually two of the neutral factions from the original game).  You’ll play as your chosen faction throughout all the scenarios.  The 60 card Trade Deck consists of three new factions, each with their own specialty.  The starter decks are now 11 cards, but only two of them are aligned with their home faction.

The gameplay is very similar to the original game.  However, when you buy a card from the Trade Row, you now have the option of upgrading it.  At the start of each of the first four scenarios, each player is given a sheet of stickers.  There are five rows of stickers in each sheet and each row consists of a sticker for ships and a sticker for bases.  Each row has a value associated with it; for example, in Scenario 1, the values are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.  To upgrade a purchased card, you look at the cost of the card and see if you have a sticker with that value that hasn’t been used on your sheet.  You must pay the upgrade cost, which is 2 coins for a ship and 3 coins for a base.  You then remove the sticker and apply it to the card you just bought.  This gives the card some additional effects but, just as important, you get to change the faction icon so that, in addition to its original faction, it’s also part of your faction.  Thus, all the upgraded cards in your deck can work together to trigger their Ally abilities.

You can only use one sticker from each row, so if you upgrade a ship of cost 2, you can’t use the Cost 2 base upgrade as well, and vice versa.  You’ve got to upgrade the card at the same time you buy it, so if you can’t afford to do that, you won’t be able to upgrade it later that scenario.  Players get an automatic win if they can use all five upgrades in the scenario that the sticker sheet was introduced in, but we never came close to doing that.  However, you keep older sticker sheets around, even as new ones come along, and you can use the older ones to upgrade your purchases.

Obviously, all this stickering has the effect of changing the makeup of the Trade Deck.  Each subsequent scenario you play will use these upgraded cards and not the original ones.  So by upgrading, each player is trying to enhance the deck to make it more favorable to them, not only in that game, but in all future ones.

That’s the main difference between the base game and the legacy version, but there are a few other changes.  A lot of the Trade cards have a small ability that you apply at the moment you buy the card; something like an attack of 2.  That only applies when you buy it and upgraded cards lose that ability.  It gives you some incentive to buy non-upgraded cards even if you don’t choose to upgrade them.  One of the card effects is to increase your Authority total and, unlike in the original game, you can actually go over your starting total.  There are some physical changes in the new game as well.  There’s now a central playing board, where you can lay out the decks and have room for the card row; it’s not strictly necessary, but it’s nice.  RoE also comes with two score dials that you track your Authority total on.  The original game tracked Authority using cards and the low tech solution worked pretty well.  But I have to admit, using the dials is a whole lot nicer and makes it less likely to make a mistake.

Finally, there’s an expansion for RoE called the Infinite Replay Deck.  This is a deck of 180 cards that contains every possible upgraded version of the cards in the Trade Deck.  If you play with the Infinite Replay Deck, you don’t bother with the stickers; you figure out what the upgraded card will look like, find it in the replay deck, and swap that card for the original one.  No delay whilst you apply small pieces of vinyl and no worries that the deck full of stickered cards will be hard to shuffle (and, like most deckbuilders, you do a lot of shuffling in Star Realms).  Perhaps best of all, the expansion, as its name implies, allows you to replay the campaign as many times as you like, because you’re not altering the cards.  When you want to start over, you just remove the upgraded cards and swap back the original ones.  The expansion even comes with the 60 original Trade Deck cards, just in case you did use stickers the first time around and now want to play the game again.

Winning a scenario earns the player a Victory Point card.  There are some other VP cards provided, for achieving certain things throughout the campaign.  At the end of all the scenarios, whichever player has earned more Victory Points wins the campaign.

As I mentioned earlier, each of the first four scenarios has its own sticker sheet.  That’s far and away the biggest legacy aspect of RoE.  The subsequent scenarios have a few different ground rules, but not too much that alters the game permanently.  There are a few things added in some scenarios, but my talking about them is mildly spoilery, so if you really want to be surprised by what comes up, you may want to stop reading now.  But none of them are particularly dramatic.  An Event deck is introduced in Scenario 5 and is used in each subsequent game.  The winner of the previous game draws two Event cards, picks one, and the card is shuffled into the deck.  Events affect both players, but the winner can choose the one they feel will best favor their position.  The event cards are never removed, so by Scenario 12, you’ll have 8 event cards in the deck, which is another mild legacy aspect.

Scenario 5 also introduces a Gambit deck.  From that point on, at the beginning of a scenario, you count up the VP’s each player has earned from previous games.  For every VP in excess of 3 that your opponent has earned, you draw a randomly chosen card from the Gambit deck.  This gives you a small perk you can use whenever you want during the game.  Most of the cards have a one-time effect and another effect you can use when you scrap the card.  The purpose is to let a player who may not have done as good a job of upgrading as their opponent still be competitive in the future scenarios.

There are some other differences in the starting situations of the later scenarios, but almost all of them are minor.  The thing that really distinguishes RoE from the base game is the upgrade system.

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder

So is Rise of Empire worth purchasing, by either fans of the original game or legacy game aficionados?  That depends on what you’re looking for.  Both Alton and I like the base game and weren’t really looking for a major remake of it, but were intrigued by how a legacy version would work.  So we were quite happy with the game.  The upgrade system may not be Legacy with a capital “L”, but your decisions do affect both the current game and all future games, pretty much as advertised.  We enjoyed playing through all 12 scenarios (actually the Kickstarter version of the game has 14 scenarios) and intend on playing it again at some future date, allowing us to play the other side.  So it was definitely a success for us.  However, if you’re looking for a classic legacy game like Pandemic Legacy, you’ll probably be disappointed.  There’s not much of a backstory and it certainly isn’t nearly as dramatic and surprising as we’ve come to expect of legacy games.  There were also people who were hoping that the expansion would introduce a lot of changes in the basic gameplay and that’s not really what Dougherty and Kastle tried to do with RoE.  So your feelings about the game will depend quite a bit on the sort of game you’re seeking.

That’s my overall review of RoE.  What were the things that I particularly liked or disliked?  Keeping in mind that I need to be a bit constrained by the desire to not reveal spoilers, here’s the list:

• I like the upgrade system and think it provides a legacy aspect to the game without too much of a rules overhead.  Even though the effect of a single upgraded card is fairly small, I think they got the power level of the upgrades right.  Overly strong or dramatic changes would have had a real chance of unbalancing a game that needs to stay competitive for 12 scenarios.  The way they did it, the changes are subtle, but real and definitely affect the way the game plays out in future scenarios.
  
  
• The Infinite Replay Deck is, frankly, brilliant.  While I acknowledge that some legacy game fans still get a naughty thrill from defacing their game, it’s so much faster and cleaner to simply find the upgraded card and pop it into your deck.  It does mean that you need to keep track of which card values you’ve upgraded and which sheet they came from, since you won’t be using the sticker sheets as a physical reminder, but that was very easy for us to do.  And since the storytelling aspects of RoE are quite limited, there’s no reason not to do the scenarios again from the start and this expansion lets you do this as often as you want.  Alton and I absolutely intend to redo the campaign in a few months time, but this time by playing the other player’s faction.  I thought it was easily worth the extra $20 for the expansion.
  
  
• The lack of variety in the different scenarios was disappointing.  It seemed like they could have tried harder to change things up, both in terms of a storyline and with more mechanical differences.
  
  
• The Gambit deck is absolutely needed, but is a flawed effort.  It’s actually a pretty good solution to an issue just about every competitive legacy game has, which is what to do to reign in the early leader.  It certainly happened in our game.  I won the first three scenarios, but it turned out that Alton was doing a better job than I was in those games of upgrading the cards in a coherent fashion.  As a result, he proceeded to win the next six games—and that was with me getting some boosts from the Gambit deck!  (By the way, this also shows that the way you upgrade cards very much affects the future plays of the game.)  Eventually, the extra Gambit cards pushed me over the top and I won the last three games, but I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have won them without their help.  I have no problem in rewarding a player for good early play, but it’s different if you’re planning on playing 12 or 14 individual games and one player is better set up to win them than the other.  So I approve of the concept, as a way of keeping the later games of the campaign interesting and competitive.
  
  The issue is that the Gambit cards don’t seem to be well balanced.  I mean, none of them provide dramatic benefits—it’s meant to provide a subtle assistance—but some of them only help out a tiny bit, while others are really quite nice to have.  Given that they’re assigned randomly, this was annoying and I think they could have done a better job of ensuring that they were at least somewhat equally powered.
  
  
• The last scenario does change things up quite dramatically and I won’t say anything more, since I don’t want to spoil things.  However, even though the scenario was quite entertaining, it also introduced a huge luck factor which could very easily sway the result of the entire campaign.  It didn’t affect our results, but it absolutely could have and that was a very questionable design decision, in my opinion.  Kind of baffling, in fact, and it could certainly leave someone with a sour taste in their mouth right at the very end.
  
  
• The components are well done.  The board is nice and I really do like the scoring dials.  The cards are of the same good quality as those of the original game.  The iconography is good, although mixing the crests of the original and new factions on the upgraded cards into a single index may not have been the best idea.  The rules could have been a little clearer, but we didn’t have too much trouble working through them.
  

So even though it’s a bit of a mixed bag, overall my feelings about Rise of Empire are positive.  By the time we’ve finished our second campaign, I expect we’ll have gotten 25 or so hours of enjoyment out of it and that’s pretty good value for the money.  The upgrading system is a good one and it’ll be interesting to see if I can do a better job of employing it the second time than I did originally.  So I’m quite happy with the purchase.  Having said that, I can definitely see that this game isn’t for everyone, particularly if you’re looking for a classic legacy game in the Pandemic Legacy mold or are a Star Realms fan who is seeking big changes in the game play.  Go in with your eyes open and decide if an innovative, but mild variant of the standard game is enough for you.  If you were hoping for a game that boldly goes where no game has gone before, you’re liable to get sticker shock, but if not, there’s a good chance this title will get a Rise out of you.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Steph: Ultimately, the game has some really cool ideas for a legacy. It will not change your mind about Star Realms if you already don’t enjoy Star Realms. In fact, it highlights all of Star Reams’ flaws. I don’t regret playing it, but I won’t recommend it to people, either. Would rather just play Star Realms. 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

I love it:  
I like it:  Larry
Neutral: 
Not for me:  Steph