Europa Universalis: The Price of Power

BaBalleflassstar10.0

Initial impressions so far after playing multi-handed solo for a few days. Going to test the game with 4-6 players next week. UPDATE 21.02.23 We ended up doing a 5-player Scenario S1-01. It was fantastic. Everyone ended up loving it. The initial teach took some time as I wasnt prepared for how I should use the HRE and Papal Curia, but everyone had a blast nontheless. Sleeve Kings

the-fire-archmage-ninjastar10.0

This is it. This is the definitive 4x with diplomacy, commerce, war and exploration of the century. And it has solo mode that works excellently. Superb immersion. You truly feel the little despot in renacentist Europe. Diplomacy, vasallage, feuds, exploration and exploitation. A super long duration is offset by a great modularization of the game. You can reduce the size of the map, the number of turns (by splitting the game into eras), the number of opponents, all in the service of reducing playtime, and at all sizes it remains enjoyable. The longer the scope of the game, the more epic the experience becomes. If you remove missions, and that's a possibility in the rules, the game is more sandboxy, which is great some times. Wanna make Castille a European power house? you can! Wanna go the traditional path and kill and exploit people all over the sea? you can too! But don't ever think you're an island, or you will get stomped by France or a Great Britain, not to speak of daring to enter the Holy Roman Empire uninvited. Some affordances have been made to reduce playtime compared to the videogame, but it never feels too simplified. And what is been simplified is obviously a good move for a Boardgame. Bots are great at giving a simulacrum of a player while keeping historical. Watching England and France going at each other in useless wars of attrition instead of, say, sabotaging me, while trying to build my empire in the corner of Europe has been fun. I don't think I'll ever play this game multiplayer, it requires too much time. But for solo it's great! You still need a massive amount of time, much less so if you master the rules and how the bots behave.