Zhanguo: The First Empire Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Zhanguo: The First Empire, a euro game published by Sorry We Are French. This new edition helps improve upon the original Zhanguo: The First Empire in a number of ways.

Reinventing and reimagining a game that others deem as a classic must be one of the hardest tasks a developer/designer could undertake. And yet, even so, this monstrous feat has been successfully achieved many times recently. In my opinion, the most notable return of a game was tweaking Brass and turning it into Brass: Birmingham. Somehow, Gavan Brown and his team at Roxley took what was an already iterated-upon title and twisted it into the #1 game on BoardGameGeek. So, how successful were Marco Canetta and Stefania Niccolini at remaking Zhanguo into Zhanguo: The First Empire?

In Zhanguo: The First Empire, players will be competing in various tasks for victory points. What players will be doing for said points is Building Walls (paying certain resources to unlock multiplicative scoring opportunities), Constructing the Mausoleum (racing one another to meet certain conditions first for higher victory points), and Appointing Governors (most in each region at the end of the game gets a nice chunk of points).

What makes all of these monumental tasks doable in so few turns is through tableau building. At the start of each round, players will be getting six cards dealt to them from three different decks. With those cards, players can either take an action or lay a card down into their tableau. When a card is laid down, the actions shown at the top of the card indicate which action will be amplified. If I were to take a Build Walls action in the future and there’s a card with that symbol in my tableau, then I get to do what the other half of that