There is a board game that asks for a full day, a very large table and up to 18 people, and it just got two new chapters. Mega Empires, billed by Ares Games as the biggest board game in the world, is adding Mega Empires: The Far East, a pair of standalone civilisation-building games that move the action to East Asia.
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Find events near youThe Far East comes as two boxes, North and South, each playing 3 to 5 players on its own. The clever part is that they are not just expansions. You can play either box as a self-contained game, combine the two, or bolt them onto the existing Mega Empires sets to build something genuinely enormous. The series already covers The West and The East, so a group with the shelf space can stitch together a map spanning Eurasia.
If the scale sounds intimidating, the pitch is that it should not be. Ares Games describes Mega Empires as easy to learn despite its size, with the real game living in the player interaction: growing populations, founding cities, squabbling over borders, weathering calamities and, above all, trading and negotiating with everyone else at the table. It is less a brain-burner and more a day-long diplomatic event with friends.
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Set up your group for freeThe Far East has just come through a successful Kickstarter campaign, which launched on 21 April and closed on 14 May after racing past its funding goal in its first few days. The campaign itself is now done, but the upshot is that both new games are confirmed and in production, with Ares Games expecting to ship to backers in January 2027.
This is not a casual game night purchase, it is a project, and one you have plenty of time to plan for. If your group has ever fancied clearing a weekend for one massive shared experience, rounding up a big enough group is half the fun.
Sources: Mega Empires | Ares Games | Kickstarter
