Trains: a staple of popular board games like Ticket to Ride, Age of Steam, Railroad Ink, and Russian Railroads. I’ve largely stayed away from the theme since I find the games to be so thematically dry. Then along game Level 99‘s Empyreal: Spells & Steam who for some reason felt that what route-building train games were missing was anime characters and magic. Whenever I see anime artwork or trains in a board game, I’m immediately turned off. However, Level 99 Games has officially converted me. 

Empyreal: Spells & Steam is a game for two to six players designed by Trey Chambers, the man behind Argent: The Consortium. Each player takes on the role of different railways looking to gather color-coded resources from the board and return them to the matching colored cities. The more goods players pick up at once, the more points are awarded to them by the city in the form of Demand tiles. The heart of Empyreal‘s challenge is that goods are never plentiful and players are competing over the same resources, creating a tight action economy.

Despite the box size and number of components, Empyreal: Spells & Steam is a much easier game to learn than it first appears. Players take actions by moving their worker across the spaces on the board. Each player board is divided into multiple sections. The uppermost banner is a handy player reference and the player’s available Mana. Below that are individual tiles for the player’s Conductor and other staff members who provide special abilities. The white starred boxes to the right of the hired staff are slots for the Demand tiles awarded by cities when goods are delivered. 

The track and grid below influence what players can do on their turn. The circular spaces above the grid is are the worker placement spaces for the player’s singular worker, representative of their train conductor. The first space a player moves is free, while every subsequent one costs mana. The train cars in each column indicate the actions the player can take when their worker is in the space above the column. Not unlike worker movement, the first (top most) action is free. If players want to use additional train car actions in that column, they’ll have to pay additional mana. The most common ability is to add a train to a space on the board, matching the color of the train car action. 

On their turn, players take a single action that can either be the worker movement/train action described above that’s referred to as Moving. Alternatively they can also choose between two other actions: Administrative and Transfer. The Administrative action allows players to restore their mana, ready a staff member’s ability (if it had previously been used), and add a new train car to their board. Lastly, the Transfer ability lets players jump over another player, city, or Wasteland space, depending on the amount of Mana the player spends.

The sixth and final space on the worker track is called the End of the Line. When the worker piece reached that space, they execute the pick-up-and-deliver action. To do this, the player selects one of the colored resources they have train figures on and deliver them to the matching city, if and only if they also have a train adjacent to the city. Each city has a set of Demand tiles that will be given to the first players who can collect them based on the number of resources delivered at a time. These are given to players who deliver two, three, or four matching resources back to the city and give the player additional points in final scoring at the end of the game. However, each city only has so many Demand tiles available so it’s first come, first serve. Once the Demands of a city have been met, they’re gone.  

As players are competing for the same spaces and resources, the key to victory is choosing which resources you want and moving as fast as possible to expand and get to the End of the Line so you can deliver your goods. Reaching the End of the Line before anyone else also means spending Mana more aggressively than other players, which is an easy way to find yourself out of your most valuable resource at an inopportune moment. Obtaining more Mana early on is a great way to get ahead of the otherwise limiting factor.

Empyreal: Spells & Steam ends when a player has collected the required number of Demand tiles; six tiles for two to three players, five tiles for four players, and four for five or more players. Whichever player has the most points combined between Demand tiles and the number of resources collected over the course of the game, wins.