Empyreal: Spells & Steam Review – A Masterful Fusion of Magic and Mechanism

Empyreal: Spells & Steam takes train games to a new otherworldly dimension. It’s bright and bombastic colours, has crazy and chaotic player abilities, and can be set up and played in 90 minutes.

For a board game about trains, this is as exciting as it gets.

It all begins with players taking their first turn, where they start with the first action in a sequence of five. Each turn, they take the next action in this sequence, and then the next action the turn after. Players can skip actions in this sequence but at the cost of mana.

While you’re crawling through this sequence, you’ll be placing trains on the map, gaining more mana to spend or making your actions more powerful through additional spell cars.

Eventually, you’ll hit the end of your sequence. When you do, you get a massive upgrade to your portfolio. But even more important, you get to deliver. Then, you return to the start of your sequence and do it all again.

Going back to the start of the game, each hex on the map – outside of cities and wastelands – has a good token placed on it. When delivering, you take all of the goods that share a hex with your train tokens and match the city you’re delivering to.

These delivered goods will count as one point each at the end of the game.

Otherwise, the only other way to get points is by fulfilling city orders by delivering different amounts of goods to each city.

Once someone has completed enough orders or run out of train tokens, the game ends. The player who’s delivered the most goods combined with the most orders wins.

Breaking the train game formula

Empyreal: Spells & Steam is a World of Indines take on the cube rails genre. Although, like Trey Chambers’ other design Argent the Consortium, Empyreal redefines every mechanism within, infusing it with magic.

A good example of this is placing trains, while a lot of the time you’ll be placing them in a contiguous line. You’ll also be able to break this line by jumping over wastelands, cities, and other players’ trains by using magical portals. Meaning there’s a lot more freedom when you place your trains.

This allows you to get out of a lot of bad decisions but also lets you rapidly spread across the map. This is awesome, but not the key reason making Empyreal: Spells & Steam so thrilling to play. That honour goes to its well-defined moments of strategic, and tactical decisions.

Every 2-5 turns you’re going to be delivering goods. Then to maximise your point gains, you want to combine this with a city’s fulfilment order. So you really, need to plan out each block of turns and figure out what you’re going to deliver.

While that’s going on, in the back of your mind, you need to be thinking about your next delivery. Because while you’re unlikely to get enough goods to pull off a big order fulfilment in 2-5 turns. You can still use these turns to set up your next delivery to be the big one.

Additionally, while all this is going on, you also need to figure out the best way to upgrade your portfolio. Whether you need more mana, spell cars, or specialists, there are a lot of options to choose from. There are no bad options here, only options that better fit your strategy.

Enter the World of Indines

Empyreal: Spells & Steam is the newest game that takes place in the World of Indines. You’ll find the same characters and art style throughout Argent The Consortium, the BattleCON series, and more from Level99 Games. As a fan of these other games, it’s always a delight to see these characters make recurring appearances.

Especially in Empyreal, where you can play as some of the characters, who come with their own unique captain ability, and action. These drastically influence how you play the game. For example blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, the other places you see these characters are specialists.

There are three types of specialists, engineers who refresh on occasion, station masters who provide a passive ongoing benefit, and surveyors who give you a powerful one-time action.

No matter the type. these specialists are incredibly powerful and break the game in unique and satisfying ways. But powerful as they are, they never seem unbalanced. Of the many games, I’ve played it always comes down to a handful of points separating first and second place.

Yet figuring out the combination of which specialists best suit your strategy is incredibly fun. With so many specialists included within the game, a lot of my plays of Empyreal: Spells & Steam felt experimental. As though I was wearing a lab coat and safety goggles mixing different elements together and seeing how they react.

All gas, no brakes!

In Empyreal: Spells & Steam, the actions you’re normally performing are simple – place a train here or there. As such the game moves fast, and it’s not each individual turn that’s fun but the accumulation of them. Not much beats watching your network of trains grow all over the map, setting up a big delivery.

Except when you also see your opponent’s network of trains grow.

Because your opponents are attempting to deliver the same goods you are. Above everything we’ve covered so far, Empyreal is a racing game. Almost every aspect of the game rewards the player who’s the fastest. From the first person to deliver goods to the first person collecting specialists and action improvements.

This constant racing from one objective to the other, makes every decision feel impactful. Because as the great Ricky Bobby once said, ‘If you ain’t first, you’re last.’

This focus on tempo provides a whole new line of thinking to the game. Although you can always skip actions by paying mana, that means you’re missing out on using that mana for transfers or activating more powerful actions. So it becomes a question of what you’re willing to sacrifice to come first.

Near-perfect presentation

Empyreal has a wonderful table presence. The bright colours generate excitement to look at, and the way the city orders rise above the table gives the game an extra dimension.

With that said, it can get overwhelming at times. Especially toward the end of the game, when there are trains everywhere. It becomes a cacophony of tokens and colours. So much so that it’s hard to take it all in.

This is also a problem when it comes to the iconography of the game. Sometimes it’s easier to read ancient Egyptian than it is to understand what each action does within Empyreal: Spells & Steam. Unfortunately, new players will get lost in the deluge of icons to start with but by the time you’ve finished your first game, it’s only the specialists requiring the rulebook for reference.

Otherwise, I had a blast with Empyreal in 2020. It was my most played game by a long margin. And it wasn’t until a late entry in December that it was pipped by Dune: Imperium for my best game of 2020.