I played Imperium: Classics face to face back in 2021, and enjoyed it more than I expected; but then I played it again on Tabletop Simulator, and found it a slog, so didn’t persist with my plans to buy it.
Then I got Horizons as a review copy from Zatu and fell back in love, to the extent of buying he two earlier boxes. The rulebook is a lot cleaner, though it’s still quite rough. I like the trade subsystem, but most of the civs still work without.
I like the way that there generally aren’t exceptions. All right, some cards have a lot of text, but they generally come down to some form of “spend X to get a Y”. When there are exceptions, they seem to be civilisation-wide: the Atlanteans start as an Empire, while the Vikings never become one and don’t have a History.
I know people who reckon it’s best at solo, and the bot is good, but I prefer it face to face; the level of interaction is low, but it’s enough that one spends at least a bit of time head-up.
This is probably my favourite game to play right now.
I purchased Classics, I like ancient history, I like fantasy and I like deck building. After muddling through 2 games and being bored I moved it on. The tokens annoyed me, the automa seemed much more fiddly than interesting and I just didn’t want to play. Now there is a big caveat. I was trying solo games after I had moved away from my games group for a bit. I still dislike playing solo games. Even Spirit Island. So I don’t know if I dislike it or have only played in a form I’m not interested in. I still think some fo the concepts are fun.
I like Imperium:X quite a bit. I have all 3 boxes. Well no, I only have the Horizons box now… luckily everything fits in it. I also have the big solo playmat. I don’t think I want to play this competitively. Because I think it is hard to play well and I do not have the time to explore all of it even just in solomode. It is a long game that takes quite a bit of commitment to play. And I don’t have the energy to teach this beast.
I like the idea of all these civilizations and they are indeed playing quite differently. With SO MUCH game in one (a little bigger but not much) square box it is definitely a keeper even if I will only get it out for special occasions. Would I rebuy it, if my collection got lost? Maybe not. I have played it now and I wouldn’t want to have missed those plays.
The bot is fiddly in some ways especially with trade routes I keep forgetting stuff. But trade routes are fun…
I dislike the quality of the cardboard tokens. This is definitely a case for deluxification. I think I threw out the tokens from the original boxes. I don’t need that many.
I kept the original “1” tokens but threw out the multispot ones, so the only multiples I have are the numeric ones from Horizons.
I’ve seen several people complain about the tokens but for whatever reason they don’t offend me. Sure, they’re cardboard, but so are lots of tokens in lots of games, and at least they’re not plastic. I suppose one could get brick tokens and meeples, but I haven’t seen anything that would be a good obvious substitute for the progress-GREATER THAN SIGN or the amphora (ghost squid). Certainly I’m not tempted to 3d-print them like these ones on Thingiverse:
I’ve taught the game a few times now, and there’s more than in most games I teach, but it seems to work. I should probably write down my teaching script at some point…
I reckon half an hour per player is just about achievable, though one hour is more likely.
I had Classics. I think it’s a really excellent, clever game, I enjoyed my solo plays of it, and I really liked the art; I just realised I didn’t love the game, and so it ended up part of the great (endless?) purge.
I certainly enjoyed playing with you Roger and (given I came a solid 2nd out of 3 felt that you must have taught enough for me to grok it. The game was long (maybe 2.5 hours) but I don’t remember feeling that as too long!
I love this game. Ok, enthusiasm is infectious and I play it with Roger BW, but even so…
I struggled with it first time out, because I didn’t have the wit to cycle the deck fast enough and progress to more options. D’oh. Once over that small hurdle, I was hooked. While the basic mechanisms are (of course) consistent, the civilisation decks work in such different ways, and have such definite ‘flavours’ that trying to do the same thing (win) is never ‘the same thing’.
I’m not a solo player, but for Imperium… And that way, I’d be able to look a bit more closely at the artwork, which I think I should be doing.
A final warning. Triremes. Sometimes suspiciously redolent of camel.
I love card games. I don’t, as a rule, love low-interaction card games or solo games. But this thread is enough to push me into at least learning the rules and giving it a try on TTS (has anyone implemented it on a better platform?)
Well, I beat the Chieftan bot as the Egyptians (B side) with over double the bot’s score. Obviously that’s as easy as solo play gets, so not a very good test of whether or not I played well, but I felt that a) without knowing any of the cards in any of the decks, I was mostly just flailing around, but also b) I probably wouldn’t have played all that differently even if I had known all the decks in advance. So, I’m not really interested in playing the Egyptians again, but better. I suppose a real test will be to try another deck and see if it is interestingly different.
Second play, as Qin (A) vs. Imperator bot. Scraped a win with 100 points vs. 99. Felt like I had to actually engage with the systems this time, and it was a lot more interesting. This time, though, I began to feel like the decks didn’t have enough personality. Doesn’t seem to be enough there to maintain my interest. But perhaps I just got two relatively boring factions, or maybe I was never going to have much fun playing alone on TTS.
I wouldn’t turn down a friendly game with other reasonably fast human beans using physical cards.
