Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor Review

Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor from Nemesis Games is a massive (seriously massive) 4X cooperative game where players are attempting to defeat the forces of the emperor and chaos. The players will work together, each controlling a separate legion and their armies. Each round, a new chapter will be flipped over and more enemies will be added to the map. Maybe you'll get lucky and it'll help you out as well. Probably not, but maybe. You'll then spend resources to add more forces to the map or reinforce havens with walls and towers. Then you'll all take turns spending your 8 actions to move your hero or units, complete quests, buy new cards, explore the map, and add new havens to the map. You can also pass, but where's the fun in that? After your turn, the enemies will have a go. They'll move towards you and attack if they can. Finally, enemies will score and then you'll score. You just simply need to have more points than the enemies at the end of the game. Simple enough? We'll go with that.

So how do points get scored? For the players, it's by controlling the map, completing quests, and you can spend resources for points. The enemies however will score from combat and defeating your units as well as controlling the map. Combat works very simply, don't let the giant flow chart scare you. You'll roll the dice for you and the enemy in combat and compare results. There's essentially 2 phases to it. The archery phase where your ranged units will attack and the clash unit is where your melee units will go. Combat continues until one side is completely eradicated from the hex. Luckily, players have cards that can allow them to re-roll in order to manipulate the results of combat. It's all very fast paced. If you're fighting one of the big baddies then you'll lower their threat by one for every hit until they've hit zero. Then they're eliminated from the game.

Because Uprising is such a huge game, I'm going to try something different with this review and go over setup and components and all that fun stuff as well.

Components:

This is the immediate draw to the game. Right out of the box, you're greeted with really nice trays to keep everything organized. You'll also get the massive spiral bound rulebook which all things considered may be too big but it's fairly well organized and filled with incredible art. Spiral bound rulebooks should be more commonplace in board games. You're almost always reading it and you're most likely bending it at the seams. No problems with this layout though.

Now the fun part, the standees. Good lord the standees are nice. They're unlike anything I've seen in the hundreds of games I've played at this point. I love that they're a nice printed plastic that corresponds to each factions colors. The artwork is phenomenal. Each faction has it's own style to it and the corresponding dice that need to be rolled for combat.

Just to add even more layers of epicness, the designers added in 3 tiered garrisons for the enemies which are fricken awesome. They're functional as well in combat, each level equals 1 health for the unit and how many dice will be rolled for it. It's fantastic. Feeling envious as the heroes? Don't worry, they've got you covered too. You can add walls and towers to your havens which give you an opportunity to have more dice in combat. It's beautiful.

The other things that I'll highlight in this review is the boards. They're massive but for a game that advertises as epic, it's only fair. However, this means you'll need some real estate for the table because even at my fairly large kitchen table I was running out of space. The tokens and hex punches are really nice thick cardboard. It's premium all over.

My only real complaint with the components is the cards material. It's a somewhat coarse cardstock that doesn't shuffle very well. Obviously there's ways to help with that via sleeving but there is a lot of cards of various sizes and that may not be viable for some.

Setup:

To be honest, setup time is surprisingly not too bad for a game of this size. The board has space for everything that's spelled out for you and for the most part, you'll only be putting out a handful of components at a time. 4 chapters, 3 quests, 3 items, however many enemies based on the chapter. You'll put out a handful of random hexes and garrisons based on how many players there are. Next, the chaos units are placed based on player count. Finally, you'll place your hero and a haven on your home hex. That's the main board.

Then you'll get your player boards setup. Put together your standees, draw some cards, and get your 8 action markers and some resources. Now you're ready to play.

Expansion:

If you're still craving more Uprising, you can add in the Arch-Nemesis Expansion. This gives you 4 more factions to play with and even more enemies. The big selling point here is that you'll also get an epic boss fight at the end of the game. It's randomly selected from the omen phase, a new phase added to the base game flow. For the 4th chapter, you're final boss is revealed and they're tough, really tough. You may end up with a massive undead dragon or a Kraken that's comprised of all of the Curses on the board from the Chaos legion. Again, it's all about adding in more epicness.

Now I can get back to my regularly scheduled programming.

The Good: Uprising just screams of epicness (I'm going to keep using that word. I don't know if it's a word but it is now). I've already gushed about the overall quality of the game so I'm going to refrain from that. The gameplay itself though is so smooth when you start playing. You absolutely need to read the manual a few times to understand the overarching ideas and concepts but once you're comfortable, there's really no turning back. It's really refreshing to see a game of this scale be cooperative. The interesting part is that you're also playing your own game. You're in your own war on your side of the map but you need to work together to figure out how best to deal with the enemies. The game does a really nice job of funneling you to the middle of the map. The chaos hordes come from the outskirts and the empire comes from the capital in the middle. It's up to you to figure out how to break through. Quests are something that I've never seen done the way it's handled in Uprising. You will roll your hero dice and compare against the quest card. If you pass, you may get some points or a continuous effect throughout the game. It's really well done.

The Okay: This game can be punishingly brutal at times. If you lose a battle, you could be coughing up tons of points to the other sides and they get points at a premium compared to you. 2 points per unit in their graveyards. My advice, don't lose battles. With anything dice based however, this is much easier said than done. You're at the mercy of the dice and what units you have in the battle. Sure, you can play cards and purchase cards to adjust this but it's still random. You can also adjust the chapters so that more difficult ones don't always come out. There's a whole table in the rulebook for setups to make the game easier or harder.

The Not So Good: This is more of a minor complaint than a full blown not good feature but I would like to have seen a competitive mode. All of the pieces are there to do it with so many different factions. You could even do empire and chaos vs hero factions if they got their own player boards. Like I said, not a huge deal and frankly the game plays really well without it. With any 4x type game, you'll need to have the right group of players as well. The game plays solo really well with no changes other than you control multiple factions so if you can play solo you'll be able to dive right in. This is the best way to learn/teach the game I think as well.

Final Thoughts: Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor blew me away. It really did. If you've been following along with my reviews in the past, I really dislike cooperative games. I just love to strategize against other people to have that battle of wits and to try and figure out other players. Uprising does a fantastic job of simulating this with the enemy factions. You'll feel like you're playing against another player that's much better than you and stronger but you never feel like you're totally screwed. After 1 play, I knew I liked the game. After 2, I loved the game. The pledge manager is currently open so if you want to purchase this for yourself, you can find it on Gamefound. Obviously, I highly recommend it. They've really got something special with Uprising. I can't wait to see what epicness they continue to bring to the series.

Thanks to Nemesis Games for providing me with a review copy.