So those of you expecting plastic TI4-styled armadas at your beck and call, prepare yourself for the biggest disappointment if you have already pre-conditioned yourself to believe that 4x games cannot be played without minis.Īnd this aspect of game component sparsity was perhaps the biggest hurdle for me to overcome in deciding to purchase Space Empires. This is just a small 8.5 x 11 x 2 box filled to the brim with cardboard chits and tokens, paper sheets and a medium sized game board. The first and most obvious of such distinctions is the absence of miniatures and tiles. But in a world that is so seemingly saturated with space themed 4x games, what does Space Empires offer that is different from all of the rest? Having initially been released in 2011, it is now entering its 5th production run, which says a lot about its staying power if there is still enough demand to fuel additional printings. Space Empires 4x, the brain child Rodger MacGowan, is not a new game by any means. While I wasn’t quite moved to purchase it, I was nevertheless intrigued enough to set its name aside in my head until a time came along where I could afford to try it.

Being that 4X games are one of my two favorite genres of board games (the other being dungeon crawls), I inadvertently stumbled across Space Empires 4X when researching Eclipse.

Space empires 2 online version