Romance of the Nine Empires - Tips & Strategies

The “championship decks” included with the R9E box set represent five of the nine factions, and each has been tuned to play well against each other. They also highlight the mechanics of the game.

• Malchior is about as straightforward a military smash deck as you can get: cheap Heroes and Cohorts, the Brutal keyword (similar to Trample from Magic), and efficient gold production. Malchior uses food at a breakneck pace and is vulnerable to raiding/starvation.

• Ord is a slower military deck, building giant Voltron units with large items, and using its spells (particularly Divination) to get the cards it wants when it wants them. Resistant to raiding, does not use as much food, vulnerable to defensive military/questing.

• The Displaced are a defensive military deck, inviting others to attack into them, using attrition to whittle away their best units, then raiding in the Autumn phase to rebuild their food stores. Displaced is food-heavy but attempts to make up for it with raiding. Vulnerable to fast military/starvation.

• Holden is a questing deck, very combination-driven (therefore including more hand manipulation). It uses seized opportunity to lay down and complete appropriate quests, giving them more options on future turns. Vulnerable to heavy military (slow or fast).

• Ixhasa is a starvation deck, attempting to run their opponents out of food before they can complete their victory conditions. It tends only to attack opportunistically, but remove a castle full of food during an attack is a perfectly valid complement to passive starvation actions. Vulnerable to slow military/questing.

Once you’ve played a few games with the base decks, break into the extra cards, swap cards between decks, and construct your own builds. If you want to go back to the championship decks, the lists are found in the rulebook.

Every Castle starts with between 3-6 Food capacity. While there are plenty of food tokens available in the punchout sheet included in the box, they are unwieldy, fiddly, and easy to lose.

Instead, use dice of your preferred size to track food totals. If you are raiding, you’ll want a few more dice than your total number of Castles. Also you may choose to keep a larger die than a d6 on hand if you’re planning on overloading a Sanctuary (which can hold any number of food tokens).