The Barracks Emperors, Orbit, Tales of the Arthurian Knights, and more

Week of June 30th, 2025

I picked up The Barracks Emperor when I was at GMT this spring; it’s a little bit far afield from what I would normally buy, but I talked to a couple friends who were enjoying a game of it and GMT had a decent discount as they were trying to raise cash with all the tariff uncertainty.

It’s a hard game to categorize. The copy text says that it is, at heart, a trick-taking game. Maybe? I’ve also heard it described as a historical gamer’s version of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai, which also makes me think sure, maybe that’s true, but it strikes me as unhelpful? Anyway, the core idea is that the players are all competing to win sets of Roman Emperors, of which there were a kind of shocking number in the 3rd century CE. The square Emperor cards are laid out corner-to-corner on a square grid. You play cards adjacent to them, but the cards you play aren’t “yours”. Instead, the cards that give you influence are the ones “in front” of the Emperor from your perspective. So when you play a card, it’ll count for you against the Emperor “behind” it, for your left-hand neighbor against the Emperor on its right, for the person across from you for the Emperor “in front” of it. This sounds very confusing and initially it absolutely is, but as you start to learn to see the patterns it slowly becomes more comprehensible. While the core engine isn’t complicated, you wouldn’t mistake this for a euro, or even a historical euro like Molly House or Watergate. This is a full-on messy GMT game, and I say that with some affection for the genre.

It does have some structural similarity to Samurai, in that it’s usually best if you can play the last card adjacent to an Emperor card to trigger its scoring. But where Samurai is a game of indirection and hedging, The Barracks Emperors definitely is not. The cards here vary in strength a lot (0 to 8), come out of a shared deck via a simple and clever drafting system, and all have special powers, some of which are very strong. To me, The Barracks Emperor is much more tactical — it’s about using the special powers and timing your plays more than it is about resource management. In Samurai, you have a certain number of influence points that you need to use as efficiently as possible. In The Barracks Emperors, it’s much more a game of tactically outmaneuvering your opponents. Which actually has a nice feel! You’re planning out political power-plays, not just building up influence. Given the chaotic nature of the period, and the proliferation of political figures, it actually feels apt despite being quite abstract.

I’ve played this a couple times now and given I was not a huge fan of either Sword of Rome or Time of Crisis by the same design team, it surprised me and how much I enjoyed it. It’s surprisingly evocative, a little brain-burner-y but interestingly tactical. I would put it as another in the long line of games going back to Naval War and Atlantic Storm: kind of the Ticket to Rides of historical gaming, trying to put a nice historical veneer on a traditional game structure. More effective than most, though — it’s a quick teach, but it’s got more going on than you might think on first inspection, both tactically and historically. Is it strong enough to get the kind of replay that justifies a game’s existence? I don’t know. I wouldn’t pay retail, I don’t think. But at 50% off I’m happy with it.

Bitewing delivered their latest Kickstarter of a 3-pack of Knizia games: ORBIT, SILOS, and EGO. ORBIT is the all-new game of the set (SILOS is a light tweaking of Municipium, while EGO is a major revamping of Beowulf: The Legend), and also the only one I’ve had a chance to try so far. It’s what we pretty much expect from Knizia these days: tight, quick, easy to explain. It’s a route-finding race game where you need to touch 8 planets before returning home, but the planets move as they orbit the center of the board. There are also stations scattered about that allow you to gather resources (mostly energy, which gives you extra moves) and upgrade your ship. It’s all pretty interesting. Because the cards that you play to move your ship also move the planets along their different trajectories, this adds a nice interactive component often absent in race games — you may need to prioritize moving a planet away from an opponent over making the best move for yourself.

As is sometimes the case with new Knizia games, I find myself slightly uncertain. For a game of this type I generally want it to get at least 10-15 plays in the first 4-6 months after release to consider it a success; anything less than that is modestly disappointing. Whale Riders was the last new Knizia that felt solidly in this weight class and while I think it’s really good, it didn’t quite make it into the regular rotation and it fell off at about 10 plays. I’m not totally sure why it didn’t stick the way I expected, but there it is — there are just so many great games available in the back catalog these days. Orbit feels a bit more unique than that game did, though. Its closest analogs are Quest for El Dorado and Fast Sloths, but neither are really that close. I’m optimistic that it has enough depth and range to get over the threshold, but it’s clearly not El Dorado good and I feel like I won’t know the final verdict on it for a little while.

Tales of the Arthurian Knights is the recent adaptation of the old classic Tales of the Arabian Nights. I really enjoy the older game, but it doesn’t get a ton of play anymore; it’s a specific flavor that isn’t that popular, I think it really wants 3 players, and it definitely has a bit of an “old school” vibe as you can wander the desert Accursed or Diseased for more time than really seems reasonable in 2025. Still, it’s just a wonderful evocation of the stories, and impressively faithful.

To me, Tales of the Arthurian Knights feels like it set out to address the big complaints about the original: disadvantageous status cards now tend to be short-duration and self-removing. The slightly odd Destiny/Story duality is gone and you just need Destiny points. Encounter generation has been significantly simplified — there is no complicated reaction matrix, you just need to combine two cards to get a paragraph lookup. Most importantly though, the skills have become fewer but more fine-grained. In Tales of the Arabian Nights, you either had a skill or you didn’t; if you had a skill required by the encounter you succeeded, otherwise you failed. You could advance skills to a master level, which could give you a useful bit of narrative control, but for the most part skills were binary. In Tales of the Arthurian Knights, every challenge is a die roll and your skill level gives you a modifier. This makes the early game more satisfying as you have a reasonable chance to get stuff done even in unskilled checks, and you don’t feel quite so incompetent while you desperately hunt for an encounter that hits one of your 3 skills. There are also more skill rewards in the paragraphs now so you usually feel like you’re making some kind of progress. It’s just a bit more satisfying as a game. It’s interesting because it can, at times, feel less skillful as a game — in Tales of the Arabian Nights there was definitely an art to finding and managing encounters to feed into your skills, albeit one that worked on the margins. In Tales of the Arthurian Knights, these choices still matter but since you usually have a chance to prevail with an unmodified die roll they feel lower-stakes. I think the new way is better; it’s a game about creating narrative so it feels more in-genre to have the players’ choices affect the direction of the narrative while keeping the forward flow going. The technical RPG term is “fail forward”.

I enjoyed this, even though the Arthurian myths actually don’t speak to me nearly as much as the Arabian Nights. I think it hits a better spot overall than its predecessor, in both a game and narrative sense. It’s still the kind of game that is a unique and specific enough flavor that I think you’ll know if you want to try. We played 2 eras (8 turns) in about 2.5 hours with 4 players. This feels reasonable; one era definitely felt like it would give the game enough time to breathe, while the full 3 eras feels like it would overstay its welcome — at least with 4 (4 is the maximum number of players, thankfully). With fewer you could probably do the third era without too much worry. The sweet spot for the game is probably two players, but Tales of the Arabian Nights worked quite well with 3 so probably the same is true here. With 4 it’s going to depend on the players and their ability to just enjoy the stories and camaraderie of a highly narrative game.

Dead Reckoning has been coming out a bit more of late, which I’ve enjoyed. The new expansion, Letters of Marque, is cool. I usually think that to win Dead Reckoning you need to be good at two complimentary things from those the game offers: combat, island production, exploration, influence being the core activities. With Letters of Marque we now have another one, treasure hunting, and having that additional core specialization available feels like it multiplies the game space in satisfying ways at a very limited cost in rules complexity.

The rules for the expansion suggest playing to an additional achievement (5 instead of 4) because the treasures can accelerate the game somewhat. My experience is that at least initially, this is unnecessary. I trust that it’s true that there are new fast ways through the game, but I think unless you’re Dead Reckoning sharks you’re not going to find them for a little bit. Our games to 5 have felt like they didn’t need to be quite as long as they were. It’s not that they weren’t fun, but if I had to do it again I’d probably play our first few games to the standard 4.

Our last most recent game featured more direct assaults on other players’ installations than we’ve seen in a long time, which was interesting. Because the favor tracks (for delivering treasures) can grant you free buildings, it seems like the islands can get built up more and that can strengthen the “area control” aspect of the game which can lead to more conflict. I’ll be curious to see how this plays out. I generally don’t think of Dead Reckoning as a table-balancing game, but of course it can be. Ship combat, even between players, generally more than pays for itself for both parties if done in a limited way. But going after islands can clip the Buccaneer/Purser strategy (which I generally think is quite strong), and of course if you can sink an opponent that can be a big point swing. The motivation to do both has been increased with the expansion. I’m going to be very curious to see how a nudge in that direction affects how we evaluate positions and play the game.

Usually when I play Hegemony I aim to play with 4, since that’s the most interesting game in terms of the network of faction interactions. We had a last-minute cancellation this time though, so rather than switch games we just played with 3. It went better than I expected. It moves at a very nice clip, so that’s a plus. I do think the Government is overall marginally the least interesting faction to play, so losing them isn’t the worst thing. The game is still definitely better with the full compliment, but 3 works.

I’m actually a bit surprised that Hegemony has continued to totally engage me. At a high level, it seems clear to that really the only thing that matters in the end is the politics game, and those systems pretty coarse and simplistic. However, I think there is enough variability out of the action, company, and immigration decks, and enough indirection in the actions available, to make navigating and adapting to the changing economic environment interesting. It’s no Arcs, Weimar, or Oath, but it’s enough, and the way the economic systems try to portray the basics of real-world macroeconomics gives it an edge that more abstract economic games like 18XX or Brass lack for me. I can’t imagine it’s anything like a long-term keeper, but we’re up to about 10 plays on it and it persists in being interesting. So I’m happy to have it in the collection.

Molly House is also up to about 10 plays, and it continues to show a lot of fascinating depth as a game. Because it’s so unique it takes a while to come to grips with, but as the rules have become internalized and I can focus on strategy rather than making sure the right cards go to the right piles (and keeping everyone else on track) it just keeps on fascinating me. Arcs was flashier, and don’t get me wrong I think Arcs is a truly great game, but I wonder if Molly House is actually going to be the long-term winner here. It’s not just a really interesting game, but a very humane one — portraying a community in all its human glory and messiness. I think it’s going to be very hard to overestimate how important this game will end up being in terms of expanding the reach of board games as an expressive form.

Coda

That’s all! See you next week!