The empire closes its grip around the planets. Sentinels appear across the galaxy, preparing for the inevitable open rebellion. In back alleys, factions bicker and scheme to both end the Empire and take control for themselves.

At least I think so. There’s a paragraph in the rulebook that explains the theme but that’s about the last place you’ll truly interact with it. Fortunately, this game’s highlights don’t depend on the theme. They’re good independently. Unfortunately, the lows are tied to it.

Empires: Galactic Rebellion is big, literally and figuratively. Eagle-Gryphon typically spoils you on components and this game is no different. Each faction has 80 individual miniatures in addition to the Sentinels, the cardboard tokens are among the thickest you’ll ever play with, and everything from the box to the resource tokens are infused with a 80’s sci-fi tech aesthetic. The game itself matches that heft. There are five unique specialist units in addition to your generic workers that all have to be recruited individually. There are covert missions to go on, technologies to research, the senate to influence, and money to raise. Oh, you can’t forget to actually send people to the planets you’re trying to control.

This is truly my kind of worker placement game. Your actions are varied and there are multiple opportunities to do everything. This isn’t the kind of worker placement game where you will need 4 sequenced actions to succeed and get frustrated when everything goes to hell after your opponent takes the fish before you do. There are benefits to being first to almost every action but you can’t be first to everything every turn. While your opponent is focusing on science, take the time to get ahead of them on economy. When they’re forced to play catch up on your income, you can take the opportunity to grab some science if you still need it or use the Senate to make some powerful moves.

Options galore.

The worker placement pressure comes from never having enough tools to do everything, not from being locked out of anything. That’s something I really enjoy about Galactic Rebellion. The system rewards flexibility and an ability to navigate the shifting priorities of you and your opponents. Recognizing that an opportunity to remove Sentinels from a planet you control through Political Action can be as valuable as boosting your combat abilities feels pretty good and it’s an effective way to ensure that no one is ever left completely behind. The inclusion of Epoch 3 Technologies that boost or provide VP gains across all aspects of the game help here as well.

Unfortunately, their inclusion at the end of the game is but a single example of the biggest issue I have with Galactic Rebellion. The effects of a lot of really important decisions and actions are heavily backloaded. The enemy Sentinels represent an existential threat but are a big communal action problem. They must be dealt with early, but it’s extremely difficult to recognize the warping effect they have on the end game until you’ve played once - especially considering that you’ll score for planetary control twice in the game before you have to fight them. They’re seemingly content to monitor your rebellion while you score points for control, only to get super angry and start shooting at the end of the game before you score...the exact same amount of points.

Suddenly and abruptly the smooth engine of rebellious plotting grinds to a halt while you pull cubes in an out of a bag to determine who gets to score only ⅓ of the total available area control points. To be clear, I like the combat. I even like the idea of the Galactic War, I just don’t particularly care for the execution of it. For two thirds of the game you’re hardly aware there’s a rebellion at all as there is little interaction with that aspect of the setting. Sentinels waste their potential by standing around like the Queen’s Grenadier Guards, and this lack of interaction with the empire makes the game suffer in another big way.

At the end of the game the Galactic War happens. On each planet, the Sentinels will turn their attention to the person with the most units and attack them until either that player is destroyed or the Sentinels are. This leads to the frequent situation where the player in first place loses just enough units to lose control, while still eliminating all of the Sentinels. In this case, the player with the 2nd most units will end up earning the most points for the planet without ever having lifted a finger to help with the Sentinels. In fact, they’re incentivized to avoid helping in any way leaving the player with the most units to spend actions on Sentinel mitigation in the hopes that the player who must expend resources does all the fighting for them. It works from a balance perspective, but it doesn’t feel good for either player.

Getting a little crowded

These major issues do eventually fade away after repeated plays, but you’ve got to get there. More importantly: your group has to be willing to get there. I quite like Galactic Rebellion but unfortunately I can’t play it by myself and this isn’t the kind of game that is going to grab a group and blow them away on the first play. Even if you can manage to convince them of the importance of the Galactic War and lay out all the late game VP Technologies, it still feels a bit more like managing the bureaucracy of a Rebellion not fighting it. The worker placement area control game that you play isn’t quite the one promised by the setting.

But that’s ok. For 8 rounds this game provides a compelling experience that combines a few classic mechanics. Getting new workers requires constant investment and so you have to balance snatching up future specialists for next turn without sacrificing too much on this one. All the specialists are great at a few things (except Troopers, the Sierra Mist to the Hero’s Sprite ), and they even provide an element of bluffing. Diplomats, for example, may signal that you’re making a play into the Senate only to surprise your opponents when they’re used to accelerate your control of Orange Planet 2.

Galactic Rebellion is a good game. There are groups out there that will really enjoy this Euro-centric game of rebellion. In some ways, the game reminds me of Eclipse for people who prefer Worker Placement to 4x. Those people will find a game with rich layers of decisions and flexible strategy, where long term considerations must wrestle with immediate decisions about where to focus. Hopefully I can find them one day and get more plays in.

Raf Reviews - Empires: Galactic Rebellion

Rafael Cordero

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