I've only manage to play Galactic Emperor once this far and it was a 4 player game. Game time was around 2 hours or so. I can see that once everyone knows the game that this can be played in 90 minutes easily.

First impressions upon opening the box weren't great. The chits are made of some really cheap card board, the ends frayed just from punching the pieces. We'll see how long they hold up, the game board and the ship miniatures were fine however. I also was not crazy about the printing on the chits either, some of the color choices are very hard to read. In fact I could find the purple home sector, I thought I was missing a piece. Luckily the manual shows the names for all the home sectors, only by seeing the name and then closely examining the tile did I see the icon to indicate the purple home world.

The rules are simple enough that you should be playing in 20 minutes, some of them are open to interpretation (I made an FAQ on the Geek) and other important rules are found in the sidebar of pages. However once you know how to play none of that really matters.

So all minor quibbles aside what do i think of GE?

It's one fun game

I was actually surprised to find that I enjoyed GE much more the WOW:TAG. The game definitely has strategy involved and knowing what the roles do and when to play them is the key to success. Through proper use of roles i was able to win the game easily and I fought only 3 battles.

Early game is a bit on the slow side as empires expand and start planning for conquest, by mid game skirmish start and by end game is usually a dash for Victory points in any way possible. The role mechanic is straight out of Puerto Rico , the combat Nexus Ops or Starcraft but it all works very nicely.

The main complaint I have seen is the lack of theme and here I would concur, the different empires are nothing more then a color choice. Much more could have been done by giving them unique abilities, bonuses or even weakness.

As it stands after one playing I really enjoyed this game, sure it's not original in any way but it sure is fun, in the end isn't that what gaming is about?