Daimyo Rebirth of the Empire

Back in July of 2020 I was looking at this project when it was on Kickstarter thinking I was going to back it. I ended up not doing so and I kind of regretted it. I happened to luck into somebody that was selling a new unopened copy of this locally and picked it up.

First Impressions

When I opened this up, I thought to myself this is a colorful and busy looking game. Started reading the rules and there are some bits of it that remind me a lot of Scythe. looking at some of the reviews I'm surprised that other reviewers haven't really picked up on this. The clan boards seem very similar and how they work with the allocation of resources and also the upgrade functions. The big difference that I've seen with it is that you can only use actions on your clan board that you have dice for. Another interesting difference is that when you build a building you have varied different things that you get his bonuses to add to other actions. And with the construction many boards you have different things that you can do depending on how it's set up. This is one of the small items that contributes to replayability. Another interesting difference is with your recruitment action the more you recruit the more expensive it gets however with this you have the option of resetting the cost of the recruitment by paying for it.

The Game

At its core the game is pretty simple. The turn sequence is that you roll the action dice, every player Glen clockwise takes a turn and takes one of the dice and places it on their action board or the appropriate color takes all the actions associated with that action, and this is done three times total by each player, at the end of that each player scores for the round based on their influence over each region.

So, let's talk about the different actions at this point.

Your blue dice goes on the blue action which gives you help from villagers. What you get to do on this is you get to increase your storage capacity (This is something you'll need to do in order to have multiple pieces of relics that you're collecting). Then you draw a hero card from hero deck and add it to your hand (I'll talk about the heroes a little later on). You get to activate a villager tile (These tiles have various different things that they do depending on which one you choose). And if you were the first person to take the blue action that turn you get to take the mighty helmet token. This will allow you to be first player in the next round.

The green dice gives you the option of taking one of two actions: production and relic scavenging

For production it's as simple as it sounds you obtain a resource for each production site where you have a governor miniature, and you obtain a resource for each production site where you have a techno farm.

For relic scavenging there's a little bit more to it. You take your scavenger miniature, and you move it to a no-man’s-land of another island. Once on that other island you take one of the three relic tiles available there and place it in your personal supply (that is what that storage area location that was talking about in the blue section was all about). Once you've pulled that tile and put it in your storage area you go and grab another one out of the bag and put it in the area that you just emptied. You do this one more time going to another island taking another relic replacing that relic. Additionally, there's one other thing you can do after moving but before or after collecting the relic tile you can perform either or both the following actions once per no-man’s-land search no man's land or shop in the black market. When you search the no-man’s-land, you can spend either at crystal or at or to discard 2 relic tiles from the no-man’s-land where you're at and place discarded tiles in the black market and then you draw two more to replace it. Also, you can go to the black market and spend gold you can buy one relic from the black market and place in your storage.

The red actions will allow you to two different things: one of those being recruiting governors or shadows the other is building either techno farms or radio towers.

The recruitment action is pretty simple from the standpoint that all you really need to get is the rice tokens to do so and the amount of rice you need is dependent on how far you're up on the recruitment track. Once you hit the highest level of the recruitment track you can pay 2 gold to reset the recruitment track back to the beginning otherwise, you're paying 3 rice per character that you recruit. When you recruit a governor, you place that governor on any open space, and you gain two influences on that island. When you recruit a shadow, you gain gold coins equal the value indicated on the chosen space you gain influence, and you eliminate an enemy governor of your choice on that island. One thing to note about shadows is that you can only recruit 3 shadows per game you cannot either move nor retrieve them.

The building action is justice simple on the top of the board there will be an indicator of how much resources you have to spend in order to construct that building and depending on how many buildings you've built before there might be additional costs associated with building that building. Once you've purchased the building you can place it on any available space and then he placed the bonus action tile so once you pulled that building off of your construction tableau, you'll see that there is a bonus tile underneath you pull that bonus tile and place it in a slot of your choice on your tableau. One thing I should note about this is that there are a couple of yellow bonus tokens that go into the yellow bonus area. when you place a radio tower you immediately gain to influence on the island that you place it on. When you construct a techno farm you immediately gain one resource produced at the production site where you placed it from the general supply.

Last and probably least as a catch all action you can take a dice of any color and place it on the tax area of your tableau all this gets you is 2 rice from the general supply. The number of actions are so limited in this game that there is most of the time something else that you're going to want to do but I can see one or two instances where you would have to play a dice here.

Bonus actions

before or after you play your main action, you can play certain bonus actions depending on the value of the dice that you have.

With the hero ability you can play one card from your hand if you have the right strength available. For example, if you had a strength 10 card and you had a dice with a four and six you can play that card at this point. If you have a strength four card and you have a dice with the number 4 on it you can play that card. Keep in mind that your dice amounts have to exactly match the strength on the hero to use that hero ability. If you need to modify your dice numbers in order to get to that number, you can discard additional hero card(s) from your hand to do that.

Additionally, there is a clan ability that can also be played as a bonus action. Unlike the hero ability all you have to do is have 13 or higher showing on your dice. If you've been following along you will be having to do this on your third turn around in order to make this go. One thing to point out about the clan abilities is that each different clan has a different clan ability.

Now let's talk about the end of the round.

When everybody is done three turns a place near dice then it is the end of the round, you will need to do four things in order at the end of the round:

First determine the influence on each island. The person has the most influence gets the gold standard points for that round and the person with the second most influence gets the silver standard. Ties will be pretty common so in the event of a tie it's broken by the player with the more shadows on the island and if it persists after that then the players that are tied add up the gold and silver points and divide it amongst the tied players rounding down.

Next, you're going to the revenue phase where are you gaining resources based off of your tableau and any bonus action tiles you might have inset

determine the first player: the player has a mighty helmet can give it to any other player or keep it the player who now has a mighty helmet is now the start player.

Then you're going to want to hire heroes in turn order clockwise starting from the first player (the one with the mighty helmet) Using the gold that you've acquired during that round or any that you might have had saved from previous rounds you're going to go recruit heroes from the five heroes that are in the marketplace. Once you buy a hero another one is replenished immediately. These heroes that you hire go immediately to your hand, so they are ready to use in the next round.

Once you've gone through the end of turn phase each player draws a card and then you advance around marker 1 space to begin the next round.

The end game is similar as the end of round with a few exceptions: you do not pass the mighty helmet and you do not hire heroes. Otherwise, it's the same. Once you've taken care of all that then you go to the final scoring of popularity points. You're going to score based off restored relics, buildings, heroes, Owning the mighty helmet, and bonus points for resources. The player with the most popularity points at the end of the game is declared the emperor and wins the game if there's a tie the tide player with the most resources remaining excluded gold points is declared the victor if they're still tight after that the players share the victory.

My thoughts

Production:

As I said earlier when I first opened this box, I thought that this is a very busy looking game, and it still is. There are lots of little details in the artwork on this. It's pretty cool when you sit down and look at all the little bits and pieces on there. But I don't really think it added that much to it I think that the designers could have gone with something simpler for the board at least and it would have worked out a lot better and made things a lot easier to decipher. The copy that I got had miniatures and it also had meeples both are pretty good options, and you can play with either if you so desire. Personally, I'm more of a miniatures person and I like that little bit better, but I can see if you're a person that prefers meeples you might want to go that route. The artwork on the cards looks fantastic and really helps define the theme of the game.

Another reviewer mentioned that the game gets a little confusing because of the designers decided to use multiple different fonts for numbers and I can easily see where they are coming from on that. It wasn't a deal breaker for me, but I think they could have spent a little bit more time on some of the iconography on this. you start to get it pretty quickly with the board and your tableaus, but it can start to get confusing once you start putting the bonus tiles and the hero cards in the play.

Rules:

the rules in this game are pretty straightforward and seem to be pretty easy to explain. I don't think I'm going to have too much for problem explain this game too new players or my game group. It does look a little confusing when you open it up but once you actually go and start breaking down the different things you can do and how things are scored it's pretty straightforward. As I mentioned earlier I feel like this is a Scythe light.

Gameplay:

I like how this game flows. One of the big differences I found with this game and with Scythe is that you have a determinant amount of time that this game is going to go. Really all you have is 15 moves to become the emperor. It's going to require a lot of thought I am planning to make that happen. This is a point salad type of game. But unlike other point salad type games you're really going to have a hard time if you concentrate on one item. In order to be successful with this you're going to need to go and make sure that you are paying attention all aspects of it. I found that it's very easy to lose control over an island if you're not paying attention.

The hero cards can be major game changers in here and you need to make sure that when the opportunity comes that you are prepared to purchase as many heroes as you possibly can. For one it's going to also make it so you can take other actions and extend your game and maximize what you can do and also, they have potential game end points to give you as well.

You're also going to want to get buildings out as quickly as you possibly can. You're going to want to have those bonus tiles available to you as often as possible and in order to do that as quickly as efficiently as possible you're going to need to get heroes in your hand to get you bonus builds. Additionally, there is a bonus build action tile that you can unveil by building one of the buildings. You are not going to want to leave any buildings on your tableau at the end of the game. While governors are great for getting you both influence and production on a particular island governors can be killed. As far as I've seen it there's no way to get rid of techno farms or radio towers so once you place those on islands they don't go away.

Replayablity:

As I mentioned earlier, the building tableaus are variable, so you are not getting used to that every game. Also, there are enough heroes that that you can have very different games each time you play, and you won’t get stuck on a single strategy every game.