Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor Review
boardgamequest.comWe review Uprising Curse of the Last Emperor, a cooperative 4x game published by Nemesis Games. Uprising will pit you and your fellow players against the legions of the empire and the hordes of chaos.
Welcome to the Isles of Azuhl—a backwater of the known world and one of the last remaining pockets of civilization. You are the leader of a rebel faction leading your tribe in an uprising against the Empire. But that’s not all, beyond the frozen wastes are the hordes of Chaos, ready to destroy everything in their path—you, your allies, and the Empire itself.
Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor, designed by Cornelius Cremin, Pawel Mazur, and Dirk Sommer, bills itself as the first fully cooperative, 4x game. And that may be true, because coop and 4x (an abbreviation of Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) don’t usually go together. But here we are. Did it work? Let’s find out!
There is a lot going on in Uprising—the rulebook itself spans 60 pages–so I’m just going to give you a high-level overview of the gameplay. If you want the full ins and outs of the rules, you can download a PDF of the rulebook here.
A game of Uprising will last up to four rounds, with each divided into 7 phases:
After the 4th round is over (or fewer if you are playing a shorter game), the game ends and final scores are checked. If ALL players scored more points than both the Empire and Chaos, the players win, otherwise they lose.
When we were doing our Best Games of 2023 list this year, fellow reviewer Brian B’s pick was Uprising. Not having heard of it, I skimmed the webpage quickly while putting the article together and moved on with my day. Looks like much going on, I’ve got other games to play.
A few weeks later, Brian made me sit down and play it. “You’ll love it, he says”.
Never one to pass up a chance to prove him wrong, (plus he was whining a lot, who wants to deal with that) we took it for a spin.
Two hours later, we finished the game, discussed it a bit, and immediately set it back up
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