Empire (strategy game)
Encyclopedia
Empire is a turn-based strategy game of industrial development and military conquest. Empire is played on large maps with off-set squares (equivalent to hexagons) that display one or more continents and feature various resource squares. The game has undergone several incarnations and ongoing development. The first version was invented by University of California at Berkeley graduates living in the Bay Area in 1938, notably Mark W. Eudey and Stillman Drake
Stillman Drake
Stillman Drake was a Canadian historian of science best known for his work on Galileo Galilei . Drake published over 131 books, articles, and book chapters on Galileo. Drake received his first academic appointment in 1967 as full professor at the University of Toronto after a career as a...

. In 1960, Stillman Drake's son Dan went to Reed College
Reed College
Reed College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in southeast Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus located in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, featuring architecture based on the Tudor-Gothic style, and a forested canyon wilderness...

 in Portland, Oregon, and developed a descendant of the original game with his friends, particularly J.D. Eveland. The Reed College version of Empire evolved over the course of the decade with several generations of students. It was a largely oral tradition, with just a few charts and key written rules, until the rules were compiled by Andrew Nisbet (ca. 1969-76).

The economic elements of the game are complex, and involve exploiting resource spaces on the map board, and processing those resources, and continued processing and combining of goods through multiple levels. Roads, factories and cities must all be built, population fed, etcetera. The military component of the game was originally based on Tactics II
Tactics (game)
Tactics is generally credited as being the first board wargame. It was designed by Charles S. Roberts in 1952, and self-published in 1954 under the company name of The Avalon Game Company...

, particularly the combat results table
Combat results table
A Combat results table or a CRT is used in wargaming to determine the outcome of a clash between individual units within a larger battle....

, but with the added elements that the military units had to be constructed.

The original 1960 board was a square grid with a map of the world. This was soon replaced by a hex-gridded map, and then by a board featuring 1" offset squares that were equivalent to hexagons, but much easier to draw. The later maps typically featured several artificial continents, and were 42 inches by 72 inches. The board could be populated at the height of a game by nearly a thousand individual game pieces of various descriptions. After the first year and a half, games were played asynchronously, with each game lasting an entire four-month semester. Typically each of the six to nine players needed up to several hours per move, and each player would be given twenty-four hours after the previous player's move to complete their turn.

For many years the board was located on a large table in the popular campus social room of the Winch dormitory; it is a commentary on the school and/or the times that almost never in the entire history of the game as a public campus institution was it maliciously disturbed or its participants harassed. — although in later years, the game was moved to the furnace room of another dorm. Because of its public nature, the game became also a spectator sport for some, and a well-known campus phenomenon. Nicolaus Tideman
Nicolaus Tideman
T. Nicolaus Tideman is a Professor of Economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He received his Bachelor of Arts in economics and mathematics from Reed College in 1965 and his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1969...

, later a notable economist, was among the early avid viewers. Second-hand descriptions of the game inspired Peter Langston’s mainframe computer game of the same name
Empire Classic (computer game)
Empire is a 4X wargame created in 1971 by Peter Langston, taking its name from the Reed College board game of the same name. In 1973, Empire resurfaced under the name Civilization on an HP2000 minicomputer at Evergreen State College. The game was written in interpreted BASIC and utilized extensions...

.

External links

Main Empire web site

As discussed in the overview for the Empire computer game
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