A couple of months ago, I sat down to a web call with Space Empires designer Jim Krohn to talk about his game series and the final expansion for it that is currently on the P500, All Good Things. Despite a name that might indicate a touch of bittersweet, Jim is not sorry to bring this game arc to a close; he’s more excited about “completing the system” and finishing up a project that started in the ‘90s. He acknowledges that some fans may be a little more sorry to see the content well dry up, but says “this will have all of the rest of my best material. I have more material that I could use, but honestly, it’s just not as good.” Before getting to the specifics of that “best material”, here’s a quick recap of the Space Empires: 4X system. It is a hex ‘n counter space wargame, featuring space exploration, empire expansion, resource exploitation, and, of course, extermination of your opponent. These are the four “X’s” from the title. The base game comes with the map, tons of ship counters, a massive tech tree, and lots of fun things to discover. The Close Ecounters expansion packs in more counters and variable player powers, among other things, while Replicators added a new type of playable empire that can also be used as a foe in solo and cooperative games.

Jim says the origins of the system are from a 50-hour-long epic game that he played with a friend shortly after college days. He clearly recalls that time with fondness, saying “it was the type of thing I had and I did in the early ‘90s when I didn’t have kids yet.” Then as life went on and there was no longer time for games on such a huge and intricate scale, Jim says “I decided to come up with what I liked best about the game in a version that could be played in a night.” So he got to work, and eventually “Space Empires was born, somewhat in its present form, in the late ‘90s”. Fast-forward to the present day, where the final expansion is up for preorder more than a decade after the base game was first printed. As with other expansions, this one will be modular, with different new rules and pieces that you can swap in and out as you see fit. The game’s page on the GMT website and on Boardgamegeek.com promises a lot of content, and I started out by asking Jim for some of the things that he’s most excited about.

The first piece that Jim mentions is changes to deep space planets to make them more interesting. He provided more detail later, revealing that there will be more types of non-player alien ships guarding these planets, “and some of them take more damage” to destroy than the original three types. There also exists a mechanism whereby some planets “will be guarded by heavy infantry as well”, which is an exciting possibility for those who, like Jim, “love gobbling up planets in the center with . . . marines.” As for the planets themselves, “there will be a counter that you’ll draw for every planet that’s discovered”, which will give “a benefit or some advantage, or sometimes a disadvantage to that planet”. For example, some planets are  “abundant planets that, say, can go up to 10 CP instead of 5, and then there are some that are poor planets that go down as low as 1 CP.” Jim also mentions struggles balancing a “Jedun Temple” planet, where a group of ships can spend some time training in order to become more powerful—an obvious homage to a certain popular sci-fi franchise.

Another element Jim loves is the new Scenario cards, which should help players try out new strategies. “[Y]ou flip over a couple scenario cards, and it just changes the game slightly”—likely similar to some supplemental rules material from the original game and first expansion, though I did not clarify this during our conversation. In any event, using these cards makes it necessary for a player to “adapt to the situation . . . that the game presents.” Jim also brings up the new Crew cards, which bring “a little more bling” to the game. We didn’t get into specifics about how they will work (the page on the GMT website indicates that having them will bring bonuses to individual ships, groups, or even fleets), but it was the one aspect of the expansion that Jim and his team found to be broken during playtesting, resulting in rework and streamlining. In fact, at the time of our conversation, it sounded as if it was one of the last things Jim was needing to personally test more, “just to . . . really make sure that that’s right.”

A large part of this expansion for many will be two sets of a new type of empire that is different from the base empires. Jim indicated that one of the main reasons for including these was so that you could play with up to six players, but as to why they are different he says “I didn’t want to add something in that would be useless for those people that only play two players.” He disclosed that almost all of the stats on the new counters will be different, and there will be some differences in the available ship classes. He explained that the new empires don’t have Boarding Ships, Titans, or Battle Carriers, and revealed one new ship class unique to these empires: Missile Boats. These will “fire early, but the missiles don’t hit until the end of the combat round, and . . . they do two damage each, so Missile Boats are advantageous against larger ships.” He later indicated that opposing ships will have a chance to shoot down the missiles before they hit.

Jim also talks about some fun changes to terrain, both in the home systems of each player and in deep space. There will now be an option to have variable home systems, with a balanced but slightly fiddly method of selecting and mixing pieces prior to setup. Jim is trying to work out a more truly random method with a re-balancing aspect that occurs after several economic phases, but he is doubtful if he is going to be able to get it to work and does not intend on holding up the production of the game over it, saying “if I get it in, I get it in.” As far as deep space terrain goes, there will be more base game terrain to help cover larger maps, as well as some new types. One new type of terrain may not yet have an official name, as Jim has to think for a moment before he says “we’ll essentially call them space stations . . . they’re something you can destroy, and then get rewarded with a tech card.” And with a wry smile, he brings up the topic of plasma and ion storms, which he regards as “one of the stupidest, nonsensical thing[s] in Sci-Fi”, but “because I love Sci-Fi, it doesn’t need to make sense. We’ve got ion and plasma storms, and they move in deep space, so the terrain will shift and change.”

New to this expansion are two more types of facilities: Logistics and Temporal facilities. The former add a supply element to the game, and the latter were originally going to be Intelligence facilities, but Jim didn’t like them during playtesting so they changed and became Temporal facilities, “because then you could do fun things”. Jim didn’t elaborate too far on what exactly those “fun things” will be, but he did mention an “endgame option, essentially, where . . .as long as you have ships in the enemy space, if you have enough Temporal points you can end the game.”

Our conversation covered various other topics, ranging from component counts (Jim had originally asked for up to 190 cards but hopes to exchange some of those for some additional counters) to tweaks to the solo and cooperative modes of the game and a unified rulebook. Through it all you can see his continuing enthusiasm for the system, evident in the smile he gets when talking about specific elements of the game, recalling favorite strategies, or talking about the games he plays with his son. His completionist mindset surfaces again near the end of our conversation, when he talks about how all the Space Empires games and expansions are currently on the P500 preorder system: “this is a spoiler, and GMT doesn’t have to listen to me, but I am going to ask GMT if they could all go to the printer at once, so that if somebody wants to get the whole system, it all comes together.” He has a laugh as he imagines the company bellowing curses at him through the void for even suggesting such “blasphemy” and is quick to caution that it might not happen for various reasons including financial risks, but concludes “it doesn’t hurt to ask”.

As we wrap up the interview, I ask what’s next for him after the Space Empires series. He mentions other game designs that he is working on, including some WWII projects he has with other publishers, but he’s also not done with Sci-Fi. In relation to Talon, his other Sci-Fi game that GMT has published, he name-drops what he is calling Talon: Galaxy at War, which he describes as a “standalone boxed game for Talon, with two different empires”. So it sounds like fans of Jim’s style of game design have plenty more to discover after they get their hands on Space Empires: All Good Things—whenever that may be.

---