I can’t tell whether Empire’s End, the latest game by John Clair, is trying to invoke the end of the Roman Empire, the Bronze Age Collapse, or a theoretical crumbling of the fleet from Space Base. Given the skinny cards, perhaps it’s the latter. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that this game’s genesis arose from the former.

Which isn’t to say they’re especially alike. Space Base was an engine-builder with dice. Empire’s End is an engine-builder that occasionally explodes in your face due to No Thanks!-style auctions.

Empire under fire. Ha ha.

When the game begins, you’re presented with a pristine pastoral landscape, the envy of antiquity. Much like Space Base — I swear this is the last time I’ll say that — everybody’s eleven tiles begin in a randomized but identical configuration. Farms and roads provide a small but reliable income of weapons, food, and tools. Cities and towns are your centers of industry, permitting you to tuck upgrade cards under your starting tiles or, in the city’s case, swap the position of two tiles. Armies do army stuff, giving you a leg up on defeating wandering Franks, Alamanni, Huns, and other riffraff.

But while Empire’s End presents you with a fully functioning engine right from the get-go, odds are that you won’t get to enjoy the scenery. Before your first income phase, disaster strikes. Soon after that, another problem arises. Then another. And another. After a while, raiders come to town. By the time the first industry phase rolls around, something will likely be broken. There’s a very good chance your empire will never be the same.

After a round or two, most disasters look like this.

But while your empire will be transformed by its age of calamity, it may emerge tougher. This is where the auctions come in, dominated by the aforementioned riffs on No Thanks! Either one or two crises are presented at a time. Fires, famines, earthquakes, the usual culprits. Everybody goes around the table and either spends a resource to bug off the problem, or else accepts the inevitable.

Both options have significant import. Much like paying a band of Ostrogoths to overlook your trade routes, these bids are often a temporary solution, and not only because certain disasters, like those targeting your city, will draw quite the hefty tribute indeed. The bigger problem is that your stockpiles won’t hold out forever, and even surviving until the next economy phase will only award a few measly resource tokens. Like a Roman emperor ascending the throne in the third century, you’re in it for the long haul. Also, your personal guard is probably already sizing up your shoulder blades for his next dagger sheath.

Disasters, however, present an economic opportunity. It’s somewhat counterintuitive that an earthquake or ransacking might be desirable, but these tend to represent the game’s greatest windfalls. There are two benefits. The first is material. Whomever accepts a disaster also grabs all the resources everyone spent to avoid it. If something particularly nasty is on the horizon, there’s a good chance that the table will go around three or four times. That’s a lot of grain and hammers. Even better if you’ve rearranged your tableau so that a disaster that would ransack everybody else’s city will only dirty up one of your roads. Big deal. Maybe you’ll get around to fixing it later.

Which brings us to the second benefit. Every disaster card also offers an upgrade of some sort. You begin the game with a few of these in hand, and can buy them during the industry phase, tucking them under your cards by spending the same hammers you use to fix broken tiles. But claiming a disaster is even better. Rather than waiting for the proper phase to roll around, you earn its upgrade immediately. Think of it as learning from your mistakes. You suffered a revolt, but learned how to better marshal your military might. A famine taught you the advantages of proper storage procedures. Last decade’s great earthquake taught you to bury gold beneath your farms so that after they’re burned by barbarians you’ll suddenly have more cash on hand. Like putting dollar notes in your coat pockets so you can find them next season.

The game track gives an idea of what’s coming.

Okay, so not every upgrade makes total sense. Nor are they equally efficacious. But this is a strength. Remember, everybody at the table starts with the same tableau. Empire’s End is a nasty affair, full of failure and frustration. But it is, above all, a fair game.

And a downright positive game, to boot. Sure, death spirals are possible. There’s nothing stopping a player from making shoddy bids and claiming all the worst disasters. As you might expect, these problems have a tendency to compound. First your farms disappear, then your towns, and now it doesn’t much matter that you’ve learned a lesson from your past mistakes. You’re the king of dungville, spending evenings telling uncomfortable guests about how you once ruled history’s most resplendent dynasty.

But in most cases, the empires in Empire’s End tend to be comparable, if not better off, at the conclusion of the game than at its beginning. Your borders might be diminished, but those accumulated upgrades offer both abilities and scoring options. Clair is threading quite the slender needle here. Rather than letting his auctions be purely subtractive, as they initially appear, Clair proposes that his engines are being renovated under pressure. Every lopped-off appendage is accompanied by an addition, perhaps even one that will prove more interesting than whatever it replaced. What might have easily been a game about decay instead becomes a game about transformation.

Not bad. An empire without roads.

There are faults in this presentation. Battles in particular are dull, little side-auctions that require blind bids and tend to function more like extra income opportunities than like the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields. What could have been climaxes to the game’s sustained action are instead blips that distract from the better stuff.

On the whole, though, Clair has crafted something rather sturdy with Empire’s End. It strikes a delicate balance. At times, it feels appropriately bad, a necessity when talking about the collapse of an empire. But these moments are offset by the game’s inherent fairness and its inclination toward metamorphosis. It’s all the joy of paying off Attila and telling your buddies you defeated him in open battle, without the threat of him coming marching back with murder on his mind.

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A complimentary copy was provided.