Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
Gray Eminence is a 3-5 player game lasting 60-90 minutes, in which players take the roles of powerful puppet masters in the modern world, each working towards common goals as well as their own secret agenda.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Auction/Bidding
Bid against other players to determine who receives an item, action, or priority.
Action Queue
Place actions into an ordered queue that resolves now or on later turns.
Hand Management
Time and sequence a limited hand of cards to preserve future options.
Open Drafting
Select cards or items from a shared face-up display.
Scenario Campaign
Play linked or standalone scenarios with their own setup, objectives, and consequences.
Read the full game description
Gray Eminence is a 3-5 player game lasting 60-90 minutes, in which players take the roles of powerful puppet masters in the modern world, each working towards common goals as well as their own secret agenda. Each shadowy figure uses money, power and influence to steer the course of multiple factions toward their own inscrutable ends. Gray Eminence does not pretend to observe political correctness or historical accuracy but rather aims to induce discussion about the world we live in. We also claim that all events in the game are plausible and event resolution options are within the range of real-world possibilities. We do not, however, pretend that our event resolution options cover all possible eventualities - If you find that you end up discussing event resolution options we didn’t list, that would count as a success in terms of our game design. The person with most progress toward their winning conditions at the end of the game wins. An éminence grise (French pronunciation: ?[emin??s ??iz]) or grey eminence is a powerful decision-maker or adviser who operates "behind the scenes" in a non-public and unofficial capacity. In this game the players adopt roles of the gray eminences working toward their own victory conditions. It's a game about intrigue, politics, bluffing and (questionable) morality. —description from the publisher