A couple of years ago, I bought a record by a band called Interpol. Interpol is an outfit from New York City with fashionable clothes, fashionable haircuts, a rumored track on ROCK BAND 2, and a sound (at least on that first record) very close to Joy Division. In fact, one of the tracks on their first record sounds an awful lot like that immortally great band’s “Shadowplay”. The singer sounds an awful like Ian Curtis and even though members of the band claimed to have never really listened to much Joy Division, they sure as hell came up with a pretty reasonable imitation of them. I think they lied.

Regardless of the assumed pilferage, I think Interpol is OK. They’re good musicians; good songwriters and they’ve got a few corkers in their setlist. But when I listen to their records I’m constantly aware that what I’m hearing is an imitation of something much, much greater.

GALACTIC EMPEROR, the first release from CrossCut Games, is an Interpol game—if at any point it feels great, it’s only because it plays it so safe banking on what has worked in other hobby games that it misses the opportunity to do something singular or progressive by transcending its influences or through reframing its common elements in a new context. Any seasoned gamer will be able to read through the rulebook and spot mechanical resemblances, borrowings, and appropriations from several other hobby games and the result is a decent game that feels like it probably stands a little too much on the shoulders of giants to find its own identity beyond its status as a very studied- rather than inspired- example of synthetic board game design.

There’s no escaping the fact that designer Adam West has his sights set on designing a “90 minute TWILIGHT IMPERIUM 3rd EDITION”—from the PUERTO RICO-derived role selection mechanic, the overall sci-fi civilization/conquest theme of the game, on through the production, only someone with no familiarity at all with the prior game would mistake GALACTIC EMPEROR for an original concept.

Virtually everything about the game feels like a stripped-down TWILIGHT IMPERIUM and on paper that likely sounds very, very good to a lot of gamers who do not have the time, table space, or a willing group of friends to dedicate to that longer, much grander game. The game really does play in 90-120 minutes as the box advertises and it does manage to at least give the players a relative sense of a much abbreviated kind of 4x-style gameplay…at least in a Cliff Notes fashion.

Essentially, GALACTIC EMPEROR is another example of the hybridization we’ve seen in board game design over the past several years wherein we have seen the sometimes very different idioms of Eurogame efficiency and streamlining crossing streams with Ameritrash-style theme and direct conflict. TWILIGHT IMPERIUM itself is one of the chief examples of a successful hybrid, borrowing as it does from a number of European sources, but ultimately it remains a very baroque, very “American” game with an epic-scale playtime, relatively complex rules, and a lot of interlocking mechanics. GALACTIC EMPEROR redresses the balance and frames the 4x space conquest game as something closer to a Eurogame- complete with wooden-cube resources representing food, metal, and energy. However, the streamlining and shorter playtime costs the design the scale, atmosphere, and narrative with which TI3 is packed to the gills. This abandonment of theme in favor of gameplay and mechanics- despite any window-dressing- is par for course by Eurogame standards.

The game is easy enough to learn and teach, making it likely suitable for more Eurogame-inclined audiences; the lack of the complex technology trees, diplomatic concerns, and racial differences that characterizes TI3 makes for a pretty easy-to-apprehend set of rules with refreshingly little overhead. Each player represents a different unnamed, faceless, and indistinct race, affiliation, or aggregate of people or things that are charged with expanding out into the immediate galaxy and procuring new worlds to produce resources. Control of planets also yields victory points and the game ends when a player has placed their full set of control markers, which varies based on the number of players. It’s the only victory path, barring some bonus points for having the most money or a full cargo hold.

Along the way, fledging empires can expect to gain a couple of simple technologies, build fleets to wage war, and engage in a little political manipulation to try to wrest control of planets away from other players. And there’s combat—close quarters between empires ensure that the game erupts in quite a few bloody scuffles over territory, at least toward the game’s end. The game supports three to six players but four seems to be the ideal number; the right balance between real estate, proximity, player density, and time.

Following the role selection model made popular by PUERTO RICO, each turn the leading player (who sits on the “Galactic Throne”) gets to select a role and enact its ability with a special bonus not afforded to the other players, who follow suit and engage in whatever exploration, production, movement, or combat the particular role allows. Then it’s around the table as each player gets to choose from the remainder of the roles. It’s a great mechanic that offers a way to give the players a lot of choices and a lot of control without front-loading them with a huge decision tree.