PLAYED FOR YOU

Eminent Domain

EMPIRE OF PLANETS

First and foremost, Eminent Domain is a deck building game that gives off a strong flavor of a development game - the topic of the game is advancement into space, settling or conquering planets and all this from an identical start-up situation for each player. You have one role card Politics plus nine more role cards, 1x Warfare, 2 x Survey, 2x Colonize, 2x Research and 2x Produce/Trade.

In the optional action phase you can play a card and implement its action; the card is then discarded on your own discard pile. Then you must choose one of the roles available to all as open stacks on the table - Warfare, Survey, Colonize, Research or Produce/Trade - and implement it. You can boost this card with more cards from your hand, which carry the same symbol. Cards in your personal display - face-up planets and also technology cards - can also be used for boost the one card you played, if they are carrying the necessary symbols.

Now each player has the choice to pass or to follow this role and play any number of cards to do so. Then you discard cards and draw cards up to the limit. When either role cards or influence tiles have all been used, you win with most points from influence tiles, technology cards and researched planets.

A nice and promising idea per se, to combine deck building mechanisms with a role selecting mechanism, but somehow the hybrid does not come up to expectations, offering only a rather monotonous flow of the individual game rounds - too heavy is the influence of deck building on the choices for role selections, and the game could do with a bit more interaction.

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Time: 45+

Designer: Seth Jaffe

Artist: Gavan Brown, Christine Conrad, Hans-Georg Schneider

Price: ca. 20 Euro

Publisher: Pegasus Spiele 2012

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: SciFi deck building game

Users: With friends

Version: de

Rules: de en jp

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Interesting mix of mechanisms

Game flow very even

Tactic depends on available cards and supplements

No real interaction

Compares to:

San Juan and others for using roles, Race for the Galaxy for use of planets

Other editions:

Tasty Minstrel Games, Arclight

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 1

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0