Barnes on Games - Empires in America in Review

Victory Point Games' venerable States of Siege line has come a long way. The original games in the solitaire series – titles like Soviet Dawn and Arab-Israeli Independence were pretty simplistic, whack-a-mole affairs where you tried to beat back five counters moving along different tracks whether they represented armies, ideologies or whatever. They were card-driven, with historical events driving the action. Typically, various tracks and meters would influence die rolls and other results so you got a decent sense of a historical narrative in a compact package. But those early versions of the system were pretty simplistic and they often felt somewhat repetitive or lacking in giving players enough agency to counteract bad rolls and inopportune card draws.