March 28, 2024

#UnboxingDay ~ Empire of the Sun from GMT Games

Billy Riley, 15 September 2022 ~ #UnboxingDay

I have a copy of Empire of the Sun. It’s a first edition, used from BGG. I don’t know if I am ever going to get round to playing it – but I want to which is the important thing…so I couldn’t resist picking up a brand new copy of it – complete with mounted map.  (This is the 2nd edition, 3rd printing)

Box Art

Same as the original. A rising sun and a list of theatres hard fought over by both the enemy and the Allies

Unbox-EotS-1

click images to enlarge

The back has lots of info on what’s in the box. From what I understand, giving this a high in Solitaire seems like wishful thinking – but the box does contain the famed ERASMUS bot and the original (which dd not include such a thing) had a solitaire suitability of 4!

nb – ERASMUS is so called after the evil sentient robot from the Dune series of novels apparently

Unbox-EotS-2

 

Manuals

There are two manuals with the game – one is the instructions for the Card Driven Solitaire System and the other is the Rule book. They are on good quality heavy paper and are written in two column format. The writing is a little on the small side if I’m honest and the manual is text heavy…though there are images where required – just not an abundance.

The rule book is 56 pages in total. 

Actual rules are from pages 6 (Sequence of Play) to 31 (Winning the Campaign Scenarios). It also includes 4 pages of a “comprehensive” example of play and 2 pages of designer notes.

The Card Driven Solitaire System is 12 pages. It has instructions on how to use the system and a detailed extension of the rule book’s example of play.

Unbox-EotS-5

 

ERASMUS Bot

These are pretty extensive. They are on good stock card and folded into 3 sections – and there are two – one for the Allies and one for the Japanese

 

Player Aid Cards

There’s a few – they’re detailed and on good card stock.

Some are double sided, some are single sided and there’s one double folded one.

as a reminder, you can click images to enlarge

 

Additions

2 10 sided die and some baggies

Unbox-EotS-31

 

Counter Sheets

For a grand strategy game, the counter count is actually very small (as are the counters at ½ “). Literally 1 and ½ counter sheets totalling 368

 

Cards

It’s a card driven system after all – and there are a lot of cards (170). These are standard poker size and quality from what I can tell. They’re detailed with lots of info on them and just reading some of them get the old strategic juices flowing

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Maps

As mentioned earlier – the map is mounted and it’s an excellent map. There is an additional, smaller theatre map which isn’t mounted. I’m not sure of the purpose of it – but I’m sure I’ll find out one day.

The smaller, non-mounted map

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And the main one

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Thanks for joining this month’s #UnboxingDay with the Armchair Dragoons and we hope you enjoyed our look inside our latest acquisitions.  You can always leave us your feedback in our #UnboxingDay thread, or in the comment area below.
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