From the moment the first faction eliminates a seal’s elemental guardians and starts accumulating points, the race is on. This can be a slow and arduous process given the necessity to defeat both the opposing leader and take their throne city within a few turns. In the base game it is quite possible to cautiously build up your own empire while slowly exterminating your neighbors. It is however a game changer that dramatically changes the feel and flow of the game. To be clear, this new victory condition isn’t a revolutionary idea. At the end of each turn, you will receive 1 point for each seal you have an army on. Once enabled, you can also set the number of these locations that will appear on the map as well as the number of points you need to achieve in order to claim victory. When starting a new game, you have the option to enable the Seals. At its core, this new victory condition is essentially just king of the hill, or perhaps more often, king of the hills. Given my issues with the solitary victory condition in the base game, it may come as no surprise that I find the most notable addition brought by Golden Realms to be the optional victory condition known as the Seals of Power. I have made my best effort to separate out the Golden Realms specific content from content that was patched for free into the base game. This review is going to attempt to cover only the expansion so you can evaluate whether it is worth adding to the Age of Wonders 3 experience.

Golden Realms has left me optimistic and excited about where Age of Wonders 3 is headed. For now though, I’m going to provide my thoughts on their first expansion release, Golden Realms. Due to the continued development, a re-evaluation of the entire game will almost certainly be in order next year.

Another expansion is also in the pipeline and will increase class and race selection even further. On top of that, they have also released their first expansion. Since then they have patched the game numerous times, and in the process have addressed not only bugs, but also several of the issues pointed out in my original review. The 2014 release of Triumph Studios’ fantasy strategy game Age of Wonders 3 was only the beginning.

Age of wonders 3 race class guide