Star Realms: Rise of Empire review — The sticker effect

Star Realms is one of the all time classic deck builders. I admire Wise Wizards commitment to the brand and ability to continue to create new content and innovate on the design for long time fans and newcomers alike. They’ve been at it since 2014 and we’ve seen commanders, huge ships, events, gambits, cooperative play, and more added to the game. Now with Rise of Empire we get 2019’s favorite board game buzzwords… Legacy Game. After playing through eleven of the twelve missions (more on that later), I have to wonder… is it time to let Star Realms be?

At its core, Star Realms is a very simple deck builder. Both players start with the same starter deck of mostly money cards and a few attack cards. A shared market lets you buy bigger and better cards and the first player to beat down the other wins. Rise of Empire doesn’t change anything about this core loop but introduces a trickle of dopamine hits via the mysterious and unexplored mission envelopes. What could be in there? The next mission could be so cool, we should play one more and find out. There’s a reason Legacy Games are so popular.

The Legacy part of Rise of Empire consists of two main elements. Missions typically add a passive or round start effect that is determined by which side won the previous game and upgrade stickers. The missions are honestly pretty disappointing and do little to differentiate one game from another. Star Realms is a pretty swingy game and luck of the market has a huge effect, so I can understand why the missions are pretty tame in an attempt to maintain some level of balance. The consequence is that they are uninteresting and have little impact on the experience. The stickers on the other hand… oh boy, do I love upgrading cards. 

Each of the first four mission envelopes will give you a new sheet of upgrade stickers. The upgrades come in two columns, ship or base, and are tied to specific card costs. For example, the first row has a ship upgrade and base upgrade that can only go on cards that cost one. The kicker is you can only use one upgrade from each row. This tiny bit of limitation introduces some much needed tension that can be lacking from most games of Star Realms where just buying the most expensive card you can is typically the best action. The problem though is that decision space has a timer. After mission four, there are no more new sticker sheets. It’ll take a few more games to get your max of twenty upgrades out but they didn’t last the entire campaign for me. Once they run out, Rise of Empires begins to crumble. 

The cracks begin to show after just the first game. When you buy a card from the market you can pay an extra cost to upgrade it before it goes into your discard pile like a normal market purchase. The two “empires” pool of available upgrades are unique. One is focused on extra card draw and forcing discards, while the other is focused on gaining authority (health). Customizing cards gives each empire an identity and distinct feel as you continue to gain upgrades. That is, until the end of the first game when all of the market cards get shuffled back into the deck and you start the next game with your same starter deck. Now getting your cool upgrades again is dependent on the random market draw and your opponent can buy the cards you upgraded if they want to. Like a normal game of Star Realms, it makes sense to stick with just one or two factions on your cards as much as possible to trigger those extra faction abilities. There is nothing stopping both players from pursuing the same ones though.

Winning a game scores you a point and at the end of the campaign whichever player won the most is the ultimate winner. Sort of. There are bonus points for being the first to get all of your upgrades out and a potential to lose points during the final 12th mission. The 12th mission says not to open it until told to do so. I’m sure I missed it somewhere, but I have yet to discover anything instructing me to open it. Fortunately I don’t let envelopes tell me what to do, so I opened it after we completed the 11th mission. In a completely unexpected and totally random development, the 12th mission forces you into a cooperative scenario against the invading Blob empire. While that may make sense thematically within the lore of Star Realms, it feels completely out of place as the conclusion to a head to head campaign. Both players are now expected to work together to defeat the Blob threat, but there are campaign victory points available as well as negative points for attacking each other if you choose to do so. I read the rules for the mission and put it back in the box, content to pretend I never saw it and end the campaign after mission 11. To be fair, I don’t like cooperative games.

Once you are done with the campaign, you are left with a semi-custom trade deck that you can continue to play regular Star Realms with. The card storage in the box is significantly larger than required so you have a big box storage solution if you own a couple of other Star Realms expansions and want to consolidate some boxes. If you're going to replay the campaign with someone new or simply pass the game on for someone else to experience, there is a refresh pack that will allow you to reset the game and even play through the legacy elements without having to use stickers. 

With each round resetting your deck and the upgraded cards going into the shared market, Star Realms: Rise of Empire feels less like a legacy game that is building up to something epic and more like a drawn out exercise in getting all of the components ready to play a regular game of Star Realms. Even though I’m disappointed by what I feel Rise of Empire could have been, I still had fun. Giving the players some control of what the cards end up looking like is a fun idea but I have to ask myself: did I have any more fun than a normal game of Star Realms would provide at a fraction of the cost and shelf space? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s time to let Star Realms rest, it doesn’t need to be more than it is.