Because it was my cakeday today I not only got cake, I also got to choose a game to play and so I got my first non solo of Imperium Classics. I played as the Scythians and my partner as the Persians. I had a good feeling for most of the game, I managed to keep my deck small and go through my developments reasonably fast while keeping Unrest at bay…. While my partner was struggling to understand how the rules worked. Then came the final scoring and well it went 82 for him to my 65. Oops.
So, I am not sure how many of you have played the game or seen playthroughs of it. Let me give a short overview.
At its heart the game is a deckbuilder, where everyone chooses one tribe and tries to guide them from Barbarism to a Nation. So a deck building civilization game. The game has several possible endings but the most common is probably when one player has completed all their nation specific developments.
Lol short…
Everyone starts as a small tribe with a specific starting deck. Each starting deck has a few nation specific cards but most of them also have Conquer, Advance and Prosperity cards. So there are some similarities. The game is played in rounds. Each turn the player can choose between a standard “Activate” turn that gives him 3 actions or alternatively choose to Innovate—to obtain a card without cost—or Revolt—to get rid of a number of Unrest cards. Both of these latter ones are a bit of Verlegenheitsaktion… but sometimes you cannot avoid them. In a standard turn you get 3 action tokens that would usually be used to play cards.
Some of these cards allow you to obtain cards from the market. The market offers Regions to conquer, Tributaries to rule and civilised and uncivilised developments for your deck. Some cards will be played (semi-)permanently into your tableau, others will go into your discard after playing and some will directly go into your history.
Once per round when you have to reshuffle your deck, you get to add another of your nation specific cards until you reach the turning point card f.e. Julius Caesar for the Romans. Then you turn from a tribe of Barbarians into an Empire. This means you can no longer play certain cards but instead you can play others and from then on you get to develop powerful cards for each reshuffle and edge ever closer to victory.
So for many decks the game goes like this: cycle through your deck over and over to gain all of your nation cards. To do this every nation has their own strategy and special actions and VP conditions.
What fascinates me, is how the game allows you several options to keep your deck small and give you powerful combos. Some cards are added to your history where they are (usually) out of the game but still count for VP. When you play region cards, you can choose to garrison a card with them, which remains out of your deck for as long as the region remains in play. And there are quite a few cards that allow for card drawing/discarding thus helping with the cycling. And Unrest cards can be removed from the deck via an action and returned to the Unrest stack.
And then there is the Glory card. Every nation I have played has this. To gain the precious and powerful fame cards you play Glory. But you need to return three played regions to your discard and allong with all the cards garrisoned in these regions so suddenly your deck has grown by up to 7 cards in one single action. Oops. Brilliant and dangerous but so rewarding.
So much for the good stuff. Sadly, not all is good but the issues are minor: as previously mentioned the insert is meh and the setup of the main deck requires a lot of card shuffling.
The tokens for the three resources could be better. There are 1x/5x/10x tokens for each but they are too similar in size and especially the 5 and 10 tokens are easily mixed up.
The handling of actions and exhausting of cards is awfully fiddly with tokens because apparently people cannot keep track of their actions without tokens (which is probably a correct assumption given how many freeplay and exhaust actions accumulate in a given deck and tableau)
Understanding when and how often you get new cards from your nation deck was a bit of a challenge which brings me to the rulebook. This has a very good glossary, and a nice list of of the Nations and card and setup explanations but it lacks a few examples of play and in general reads a bit disjointed leaving you without a clear impression of what the game plays like or what certain mechanisms are supposed to do.
Finally the solo mode. The solo mode is good but again the rules are too sparse and lack a few examples to give it a soul. There are tables for all the Nations as solo opponents and you basically give the bot a number of actions and then reveal cards check on them in the table what they do… sounds easy? There are just a few too many ambiguities that the table doesn’t resolve at a glance and then you spend a lot of time looking at the table and figuring out what is happening. As just one example I played against the Romans and the game ended when the Romans had gobbled up all the Unrest cards in the game leading to a special end condition called Collapse which they could only loose because in Collapse those with the fewest Unrest cards win. I am reasonably sure I made a mistake somewhere in there playing the bot… but I still cannot see what it was. (See my post below, there are errata that fix this, apparently a section about how the bot handles unrest was missing from the rulebook)
Overall though this has tons of replayabilitiy because I want to explore all those 16 nations (8 per box) and all the different cards from the common decks. The deck building is quite unique and lovely in the options for deconstruction it offers. As previously mentioned one of my favorite parts of deckbuilding is making a small combo-tastic deck and even when it doesn’t work out that way it is so much fun to try.
It does run a bit long and my partner who ended the game on some wild on-going mega-combo said he had smoke coming out of his ears (I didn’t see it but he insists his brain ran hot).
If you like the tropes of Civ games and deck building and don’t shy a way from a two hour card game that needs four cards in the rulebook to explain card anatomy… I recommend this game.
Oh and turns out this wasn’t short. Sorry about that. Or not.