Star Realms & Rise of Empire
- Board's Eye View
- 32 minutes ago
- 2 min read
You wait 10 years for a new Star Realms faction and then, like London buses, three come along at once! It's the 10th anniversary of Wise Wizard's space battling card game, which has become a deck-building standard. To mark the anniversary, Wise Wizard have published a special edition in a sleek black box and with dials to record your 'authority' (score). The cards mirror those in the original game, except that the images on the cards bleed to the edge (there's no border). That means the images are more striking tho', as always with cards that bleed to the edge or which have dark borders, we recommend sleeving (dark edges are more prone to showing the small nicks from handling and shuffling). Happily, the 10th Anniversary box is designed with enough room to accommodate all the cards when sleeved.
The 10th Anniversary edition could be just what you need to replace your much-played now-worn Star Realms cards but the content isn't new. For that, and to take your Star Realms game to the next level, you need Star Realms: Rise of Empire. It's a standalone two-player prequel to Star Realms that incorporates both a competitive and cooperative mode. And it's Rise of Empire that introduces the three new factions into the Star Realms universe: Scavengers, the Consortium and the Kingdom. Rise of Empire is designed by Rob Dougherty and Darwin Kastle to be played as a 12-game legacy campaign. That means scenarios will result in modifications to cards so that they play differently in subsequent scenarios.
Tho' the prospect of a legacy game is bound to excite Star Realms fans, some will have a tinge of trepidation at the thought of permanently altering cards during the course of the legacy campaign. Without giving away any Spoilers, the game comes with stickers to amend cards but if you dislike that prospect, Wise Wizard have you covered... You can supplement your copy of Rise of Empire with an Infinite Replay Deck. This incorporates a second copy of all the cards in Rise of Empire that you might have stickered as well as copies of all possible upgraded versions of the cards. Instead of stickering a card to mark its legacy upgrade, you can simply swap out the card for its printed upgrade version in the Infinite Replay Deck. The team at Board's Eye View get a big kick out of playing legacy games and seeing them unfold but it's especially reassuring to have the facility to re-set the game and share it with friends.
