Mighty Empires (2)

I played 2 campaign seasons with the Mighty Empires setup I described a few posts ago, using the original 1990 rules.

So what did I learn?

• There's a lot of dice rolling. A lot! 
• There's more dice rolling!
• And even more!

To summarize, a lot of dice rolling on all sorts of tables: to determine the content of a tile when scouted; to determine whether you can move over mountains and how much troops that will cost you; to determine the strength of independent settlements; to see what happens when an army banner doesn't have enough subsistence; and so on...

So is Mighty Empires  a good game? Hmmm, no, not so good. But then, it was never meant as a standalone game. You should really see it as a campaign world generator, with a lot of unexpected events happening, and for that, it does the job.

Here are pictures after campaign season 1. You see each of three empires has spent most of the time exploring.

Here's the situation after campaign season 2.  There has been quite some fighting near the borders, and as a winter event, a Dragon Rage happened, razing some tiles in the middle of the board.

Mighty Empires

Reading up on Tony Bath's Hyboria campaign (I should start a separate page and collect all sorts of resources there), I started wondering what game might come close to recreate such a campaign.

Then I remembered Mighty Empires.

Back in the late 80s,early 90s I was a hardcore Games Workshop fanboy. To be honest, I wasn't even aware other miniature wargames did exist outside of Games Workshop, that realization only came later. So naturally I also bought Mighty Empires when it was first published. I do not recall we ever played it completely or used it as a campaign engine for our regular Warhammer Fantasy 3rd edition battles, but I do recall I owned some of the metal miniatures as well, and most likely some of the White Dwarf stuff (I was a subscriber).

Then somewhere during the early 2000s I had a major clean-out of my games collection, and Mighty Empires was sold. Last year, an old gaming buddy donated some of his old gaming stuff to me, and suddenly, I had a box of Mighty Empires again. Everything was still there, except the rulebook (but that can be found online).

So, I couldn't resist and generated 2 maps according to the rules in the rulebook, the result of which you see below.

I also browsed through the rulebook again, and there are some good ideas in there. I am almost sure the designers were heavily influenced by Bath's Hyboria, some of the similarities are too strong. But there's probably a reason we never finished a game 30 years ago. The game is not so much game, but indeed, a campaign engine. Lots of rolling on random tables etc. Fun as a way to generate an imaginary world, but perhaps not so fun to use on a game.