10 Things I've Learned From Dune Imperium

hey this is jamie from stillmeyer games and today i'm going to talk about the top 10 things that i've learned from many many plays of one of my favorite games dude imperium um i have also now finally played the expansion rise of vix i've only played this once but i can already appreciate what it adds to the game i look forward to playing it many more times um but i've played dude imperium many many times it's been on the top of many of my top 10 lists i really really love this game and i want to share what i've learned from it mostly as a designer but a little bit as a publisher today at number 10 i have intellectual property art and components so there are a few things that i really took note of here one is dune imperium is based on the intellectual property of dune and it was scheduled to come out at the same time as the dune movie the movie got delayed a year because of the pandemic and the game came out anyway and i think that actually worked out really well i know not most games can't plan timing uh to that level but i think that worked out really well um for inviting people who already knew dune into the board game they were probably already excited about the game but people like me i hadn't read any of the dude books i knew nothing about it i was kind of excited about the movie but uh by playing the game i think the game the theme of the game really shines through the game itself um both in terms of the characters i'll talk about the art in a second but also mostly through the influence tracks which i'll talk about a little bit later and even just a layout of the board like there there's a whole world here there's all this stuff going on that you kind of start to understand by playing the game but you don't really know and i just love how the the uh the game didn't spoil anything about the books or about the uh the the plot in particular the characters but it still introduced me to these characters it introduced me to the desert planet introduced me to these different uh kind of factions who are fighting over control of this planet or whatever their objectives are um in enough of a way that it really made me want to read the book and so i played the game a few times and then i read the book i thought was a great thematic implementation um and one of the things they did in regards to the art is they even though they had the movie to go by they did not use screenshots instead they used uh kind of painted portraits of the different characters that show up in the movies and some that don't show up in the movies many of them do but not all of them do and i thought that was a great approach of using uh some familiar characters from the movies using their images but going all out and and creating art specifically for these characters well that was a great call um that goes for the cards too these these character maps were easy to pick up but it goes for the cards as well um and the components in general i think this is a really interesting thing about dude imperium dude imperium includes a bunch of cubes cubes and basic worker meeples um because at its heart it is well it's a it's a both a euro game and an amer thrashing but i could see both i won't go into that but uh i was going to say at its heart it's a euro game and euro games work with cubes but um originally when i saw the components of the game i was like really cubes that doesn't feel particularly thematic for this world however i found through many repeated plays of the game and even the very first play of the game the theme comes out in so many other ways through the design of the game the design of these influence tracks the different types of action spaces on the board each of which seems very thematically designed the character design the card design and i didn't mind the cubes at all i i haven't missed the the little miniatures that you can buy for this game at all and so i thought that was it was a really important lesson for me to learn that theme theme doesn't come down to to pretty miniatures nice components can help a theme but i think the true heart of a theme is how it's integrated into the mechanisms of the game itself not the components i am fine with the cubes they don't bother me i never even really think about it while i'm playing the game i just wanted to mention it here and number nine i have the expansion and the shipping track so i recently did a video on the expansion where i talk about a lot of different things um and so i won't go deep into everything the expansion adds here but i do want to highlight my favorite part of it and a couple different things here one the expansion does like everything as an expansion can possibly do in my opinion it it adds new stuff to the game that you can think about and play around with and also adds more stuff so it adds more of each card types to increase increased replayability and in the new stuff that it adds the new stuff replaces some of the lesser used elements of the original game so it's one of those expansions that um it expands but it doesn't increase the uh it doesn't overwhelm you with more decisions and it doesn't take away the tension from the limited action spaces in the game which i thought was really really clever um and also while i don't think there was much to fix at all about the original game it does a few little things to fix elements of the original game like the uh the dreadnoughts the dreadnoughts add an element of a unit that doesn't die in combat and there's also a track that was used a little bit less um in in the original game that you the the expansion now gives you more of a reason to go after it it's this track right here the spacing guild spacing go track uh wasn't was one of the least pursued tracks in the game but now there's an action space in the expansion that says you can only go here if you're at level two on the space and guild track so it gives you a reason another reason to go after that track however my favorite element of the the expansion is uh yeah here we go the interstellar shipping track i think this track is just brilliant uh it is essentially a cyclical track so whenever you see this icon you can take one of your tokens on this track and you only have one token on this track and you can either move it up one space or you can move it down all the way down to the bottom and gain all of the benefits along the way down so if i have a token right here i would uh gain all these benefits and all the one of these benefits on the way down to the bottom um so i i really really like this i mean it it means that you can have a really interesting track without it having to be a really long track can be a short track that you that you go up as you wish and at the right moment you can decide to jump down to the bottom and gain all those benefits and then you can start over again so you can it's the cyclical track only takes three spaces here to fill up to make a really compelling track with interesting decisions of when to move up and when to to gather those benefits love the shipping track and number eight um and i guess i'm just talking about things i love in this game that's gonna be a lot of this video me talking about things i love but this was just a big uh a big lesson to me as a designer that to have a compelling track it doesn't need to be long like getting to the end of a track doesn't have to be the goal rather it can be about um it can be something designed exactly like this where the tension and the choice the decision space is when to move up and when to drop down and gain those benefits and number eight i have the victory condition and point scarcity this is a huge element of the game so in june imperium you are playing to get to 10 victory points um that is the goal of the game to get to 10. the game doesn't end instantly at 10 but uh at the end of i believe a at the end of a combat phase if a player is above 10 that uh that triggers the end of the game you get more points too there are some cards that can give you more end game points um but i love how limited the points are in this game you are really fighting over a huge scarcity of points and so every point that you get feels really really good um i don't mind games in fact i design plenty of games that where you can score 200 300 points that can feel good too especially if there's a ramping up feel to it i can tap stream you're starting out by gaining just a few points before your first income turn and then you're getting more and more and by the in the final round you might gain 100 maybe even 200 points that feels really good that's a different type of game this game and dune imperium every point matters so much like it it's essentially when you get your first point that's one tenth of the points that you'll get in the game if you if you even get reached 10. um i i really really like this element in the game that that uh points aren't something it doesn't feel like point salad i guess not the points out is necessarily bad points out is when they're like every little thing you do in the game gives you points instead there are very few things in this game that give you points and every one of them feels like it really really matters as a result i love that win condition and it does feel like a bit of a race to get there but because there's a limited number of ways to get points um you you can't totally just rush it although i did play a game i played a game of dune pyramid a couple weeks ago where it was a one hour game because i really was able to capture all the points that i needed to race up to the top of the track and uh i think that happens fairly rarely in doing imperium at least in my experience that some player kind of runs away with it but i was able to put together all the right things to make that happen before other players could really get their engine started but i think that's pretty rare and even then it was very it was satisfied i think the other players still had fun in that game at number seven we have asymmetry and the signet rings so i flashed earlier the the different characters in this game so you have all these different characters some of these are expansion characters and each character has two different abilities so there's asymmetry in the game but not too much i talked about that recently in terms of clank i think it's important in a uh in a deck building game that there isn't too much asymmetry that most of the asymmetry out of the game happens during the game itself not before the game even begins so each character has a starting ability over here and they also have and these are cool the starting ability or not starting abilities these are these are different ongoing abilities the different complexities you can see the complexity up there i like that they show the complexity on these characters um the starting abilities are definitely interesting and compelling to make these characters feel unique what i think is the real brilliance of this design here somebody upside down is the signet ring benefit uh so here's timothy chalamet over here with a benefit of drawing a card so whenever he plays his signet ring card he gets to draw a card so what's really cool about this is that these mats are asymmetric these are unique but every player's starting deck is identical because they've tied an asymmetric ability a when played ability to a generic card in the game to the ring each player has this ring in their deck and when they if whenever they choose to play it when it's in their hand and they choose to play it they gain this ability too i think this is just a brilliant way to add a symmetry to a deck building game rather than making a player figure out what their unique configuration of cards is in their starting deck just give each player the same exact configuration of cards but give one of those cards a unique meaning thanks to this map i think that is really really brilliant at number six i have worker placement and action gating i put this a little lower on the list i really enjoy the work replacement on the lid on in the game um yeah you know i love working placement in general and i think the game does really well i think it does some other things even even better but uh every worker placement spot i love how it's designed i mentioned earlier that it's designed i believe that each worker placement spot is designed really thematically like you have the places on the planet itself where you are uh you're gathering a little bit of water there isn't much water there but you gather some water uh there there are places to add troops to the the battle and because they're on the planet it makes sense that you can do that um you can also also gather spice while you're out in the desert um uh the the troop gathering is kind of like you're you're recruiting troops to your cause uh and then there are the different tracks each which as i mentioned earlier feels thematic based on what they're doing there's down here you have the uh the fremen who are gathering water for you there they're you can get more troops from the framing if you're recruiting the freeman the ben and jesuit they are the sneaky ones i get the sneakiness later but i love how they feel kind of sneaky and mysterious and magical uh the spacing guild to me that like they can dump a bunch of troops in battle and they have one of the most powerful cards in the game but you have to trash it every time you use it's kind of a one-time use that's really expensive to travel in space and then you have the emperor um who is very very rich lots of lots of money with amber that's where you can get more money up there the worker placement is tied to the cards in the game so each card that you play in june imperium has a few different actions on it let's see if we can pull out one of these cards uh one of the things that you can see on a card is uh so yeah here's an example this card shows you that when you play this card um you can place an agent on one of the spaces that shows this icon i think this is a really really clever method of kind of limiting your choice a little bit so you can't just choose every space every turn um but you still have you have multiple cards in hand so if i have i have this hand of cards i have all those choices as to where where i can place workers it's just a matter of timing is now the time that i want to place a worker there and the action spaces are limited so if i don't choose one of those worker placement spaces now someone else might choose it before it gets back to my turn there's also the element of action gating in the game so i alluded to this a little bit earlier so there are a few actions on the board and even more with the expansion where let's see if i can find one yeah so right here down here this action right here you can only go here if you have two influence so it's kind of like a special place that you can go if you've already achieved some amount of influence over a certain uh a certain faction um this is probably i think this is a really clever design mechanism it's the thing that i probably forget the most when i'm playing like i'm scanning the board looking at what i can do it's easy to maybe overlook this a little bit even though it is very clear on the board but thematically i really like it that you've gained influence with a certain faction not only are you moving up on their track not only are you getting these one-time benefits again i'll talk about that in a second but you're also accessing new types of actions and in doing this like with the expansion you're encouraging players to uh go after to try different factions basically if there's an action space you really need you can look and be like i really need to go there the way that i go there is to go to the to first go and gain influence with this faction so i do like that action gating in this game with some action i don't think i would like it if it was all over the board but there are only a few actions with that action gating number five i have rounds so i talk about games with or without rounds uh quite a bit in this channel and one of the wonderful things about deck building games is that they don't need rounds they flow really well you just take a bunch of turns till the game ends not so with doing imperium though june imperium institutes rounds and i think it works really really well you play you don't play through a set number of rounds like i mentioned earlier with the victory condition but you are playing round by round you get a hand of cards um you're typically going to play two of those cards one card per turn certainly unlike most deckbuilding games not playing a bunch of cards you're playing exactly one card and uh you're doing that usually twice uh you play those are those are agent placing turns and then you take a reveal turn where you reveal the remaining cards in your hand and you gain some benefits i'll talk about that more in a second but uh adding that structure to the game of of saying okay the this is this is what you can do this game this round i think makes each round feel really tight and meaningful like there aren't because there aren't many things you can do each round and because it's not flowing from round around from turn to turn rather the choices you make every turn really seem to matter part of this is that you don't gain a lot of cards in dune imperium you only typically buy cards at the end of the round during your reveal turn where maybe you'll get one card maybe two sometimes zero you might not get any cards and so every card you gain feels really really important rather than just loading up your deck with cards over and over again like in many deck building games not that i mind that but in dunedin period i like that it's so tight same with the points i like that they're so tight there aren't many of them so everyone feels really important you're not getting many cards due to this round system in doing imperium um there's also an interesting passing strategy in the game i mentioned that typical a typical turn is that you place an agent then you on your next round you place an agent and then you do a reveal turn but you don't have to do that if you have if you have a hand that um where you've played one agent and there's maybe a card that you want to acquire at the end of the round and you currently have the skill to do that the skill is noted on the bottom half of these cards so this this half is what you're revealing and gaining at the end of the round you might pass early you might not even place that second agent so you can grab that card that you really really want it's fairly rare but i think it can happen um and it can also play into combat too like depending on the exact timing of when you want to uh enter combat um and not enter comment necessarily but contribute things like this power to combat uh you might you might pass a little earlier early too so there's a little bit of strategy to to when you take your reveal turn and last by adding rounds to the game i don't think this is a significant element of the game but by adding rounds you give uh you add an element of resource accumulation to the game so you have action spaces that look like this and at the end of each round if no one has chosen that action you add a spice token to it making that action better this is like what we see in lords of waterdeep uh this type of action accumulation doesn't work or resource accumulation doesn't work if you don't have rounds in the game so yeah i really like the dune imperium ads round i think it works really really well in this game it also means i think it's sometimes nice when games have around because if you're learning the game or teaching the game um for some reason it's a little bit easier to learn a single round of the game just say okay let's play one round we'll see how that goes and you can essentially do that with a deck building game where you don't have rounds but because there's you're kind of learning every step of the game through this round system you're learning how to do the play turns the reveal turns you're learning how to do combat and then that that's then you you've learned the entire game at that point pretty much speaking of combat combat's at number four in this game and on my list i really really love how combat works in in dune imperium uh it's confrontational but you're not directly impacting any player you're not choosing a player to attack rather in dune imperium if you've contributed units from your garrison or from an action into the combat arena here the the area where you're fighting you are going to fight all the other players who are there you're going to compare your military strength to theirs at the end of the round and there are a few different ways that strength is accounted for part of it is at the bottom of these cards so if you have this icon and you've revealed them um you are going to move up this military strength track i think it's called power maybe military each of those is worth one also for every unit that you have in combat the cubes they're worth two in combat and the expansion adds dreadnoughts which are worth three and so all you do is you look at the the sum total of all that and that's the winner however there is a little catch and that's what the influence cards influence cards are little sneaky cards that i'll talk about more in detail in a minute but they can add an extra element of combat uh of uncertainty to combat so you can you have a lot of known information but you also don't know if other players have uh have uh have influence cards that they can play to impact combat so i like that you're just fighting everyone all units that go in combat die so every unit you choose to put in there really really matters i think this is crucially important to the game itself while i like that dreadnoughts don't die dreadnoughts just go back to your garrison um if you lose i really like that all units incumbent die because it means that you're not just throwing units in there and then they get to walk back out if they if they lose every unit you put in there really really matters in this game uh last related to this is what you're fighting over and those are the combat cards in the game you can find them while i'm talking yeah here are the combat cards so are the conflict cards the conflict cards so each uh you'll randomize these at the beginning of the game they're three different stages of conflict some kind of ramp ramps up uh one two and three what this shows here here's a card from the expansion is if you finish in first place in in a combat at the end of the round you get this reward then if you finish in second place you get this reward and depending on player account you keep going down in a four player game there's a third place who wins this reward as well and this changes every round so you're fighting over different things every round adds a little bit of theme to the game maybe not a lot of them but a little bit but i really like the variety that you aren't fighting over the same thing every round it's changing up and so you're kind of deciding is this the moment that i really focus on combat or do i hold back a little while and it also enables players to not have a combat strategy but sometimes go into combat um i think it's pretty difficult to play whole game game of june imperium especially a winning strategy without doing anything with combat at all but you definitely can take a strategy where you aren't doing much with combat and are strategic strategically choosing the round where you just go all in and have a big memorable combat yeah so i really like everything about how the combat works in this game at number three i've talked about this a little bit the influence tracks i just love how they work i love how there's a default um uh victory point for everyone anyone a game it's not going away if you move up two spaces on an influence track you are gaining that victory point but in addition to that there is a limited victory point token up here so there's a token up here and if you reach this layer of the board not only do you get this little benefit but you also gain that victory token and you hold on to it until a player passes you or until you reach the top and then no one can take it away from you unless you somehow go back down which is possible but someone has to have more victory more influence than you to take away that token so i like that there's kind of not much tension down here which is good it's a it's a preset way to get a victory point that doesn't go anywhere but there's a lot of tension to get to the top of the track and grab that victory token and the way you're doing it typically there are ways on cards that you can get up but typically you're going to one of these two actions i like that each influence track has a basic action with no cost that you can go to and a very expensive action that you can go to with a huge benefit a huge thematic cool benefit and each of these are unique um i talked about it earlier so i won't go into them again but i really like how unique each influence track feels it all still it takes me back to the theme of the game and it gives me a different feel every time i play the game i don't try to do the same thing every time i play doing imperium i try to do different tracks and see what works for that particular game and what cards are available and that gives me a different feeling every time i play um yeah i love how the influence tracks work in the game at number two i have the deck building itself uh part of this i've talked about before that you aren't adding a lot of cards to your deck um what makes each card feel really unique if you get a card in your deck it feels reasonably unique especially kind of build your deck around that card um and notably i actually think the starting deck that you start out with in dude imperium is pretty good um it isn't a deck filled with with with crap that you have to get rid of right away you can while i think gaining cards is important in doing imperium i think the starting deck is viable enough to do meaningful things right from the start of the game i think that's really really important um i also like that each card has three different parts to it so let's use an example here that isn't too complex yeah so here's one here appropriate uh this card has a few different elements to it one it has a when gained benefit not a lot of cards have this but that can add a little extra attention to the game when you see one of these when gained cards come up uh you might want to race to get it before another player you might do one of those passing turn strategies where you pass a little bit early to grab it over here we talked about this earlier this is where you can place workers when you play that card so you have to think about that and then when you play the card on an agent turn you may get this benefit so this is a nice benefit that you can consider getting this can really mix up the game makes each card feel unique and last the bottom the bottom part uh is is what you get during a reveal turn so there are all these different elements that combo together to give you a ton of card variety um i i think this is hugely crucial to make each card feel unique and thematic uh and one element of this i'm gonna save this card for a little bit later that i think is pretty important is that most of these abilities are done with icons because you are looking at these cards from across the board there's a card row of five cards and uh it's a lot of information to look at from across the table there are some that do have have text on them uh this one has a fair amount of text but i would say they did whenever possible they used icons instead here's another one where they could have spelled this out but they used icons instead i think that's really really helpful to have those icons as you're looking across the board and trying to figure out what that card is uh last in terms of deck building i think uh because you each round is that you get your hand of cards and you play them out uh and and then you discard and and and refresh your hand at the end of every round so you're only doing that probably ten times over the course of the game at most uh whenever you draw a card it feels really really good uh this is very different than most technical memes where you are constantly drawing like every turn you're discarding your hand and drawing a new batch of five cards and that can feel good but i really like the importance of drawing cards in this game like this action space it would be largely irrelevant in a normal deck building game but because you aren't drawing cards until the end of your turn uh until the end of the round uh drawing a card in the middle of the round and giving yourself more choices more cards to reveal it can have a pretty big impact it's a big thing to do and so i really like how this round system and the decoding system makes drawing even a single card feel really really good in doing imperium last uh my favorite thing about doing imperium the thing that i've learned the most about it is sneakiness it is a game of being sneaky and uh this is exemplified the most in the influence deck so you have these oh sorry entry cards with the entry card so you have this deck of intrigue cards and uh it's a random draw you don't know what you're getting you can't choose and your opponents also don't know what you're getting so you have some cards that help you in combat your opponents don't know that it might help them you they don't know that you're holding a card for combat or not they might think that you just have a plot card that you can play on on a on a turn so this card turns um a coin into a trash so you play a coin to trash a card trashy is pretty scarce in this game uh yeah there's so many different placards that can just make you feel sneaky just by having them in your hand you get to feel sneaky about these cards i love that i love having these intrigues this is my favorite thing to go after in the game because i like to feel sneaky when i play do an imperium i love to have these and feel sneaky about them especially keeping some in hand uh just so opponents wonder if i have something that can help me in conflict uh i may or may not may or may not but if i'm in con conflict in combat and i have a couple of these cards in hand opponents are gonna wonder can are these cards going to impact the combat right now uh there's even sneakiness in terms of actually no i'll finish this and come back to that but the one thing that the expansion adds and there might be a few of these in the base game that i think are clever let's see if we can find one there are a lot of them i guess but there are a few split cards here so there are a few of these that basically impact the end of the game um let's see if i can find at least one of them while i'm talking about it so they say like at the end of the game gain a victory point based on this thing here here's one that does actually this just gives you a point during the game but there are a few here's one here's a split card actually this isn't the end of the game uh it can be but as this says at the end of the game or in combat uh oh i see the top part is combat this is the end of the game so you can choose here i think this is a really interesting card design uh i'd love to see a few more of these although i don't mind the info the entry cards at all the way they are but i really like here this is giving you a choice of playing this during the game to get two power during combat or at the end of the game getting 10 spikes which is the tiebreaker so there's a nice tension here and another level of stinkiness here of how long do i hang onto this card when is the right moment to play it and if i don't play it that's okay because i can use it at the end of the game i think that's really clever card design the other two areas that sneak in just come to the game and there might be more that i'm not thinking about but uh one is on your reveal turn like i said players don't know what you're revealing this is i often play deck building games open-handed i do not play dune imperium open-handed because i need these things i need my combat to remain secret until the end of the round uh this the combat icons on your cards don't have a huge impact on combat because they're only worth one power but i still get to feel a little sneaky about what i have in my hand that other players don't know and last in the expansion they added one other element that's that makes you feel a little sneakiness or at least thematically is sneaky and that is this little icon right here which says that if you play this card and place an agent on one of these action spaces that little icon right there it's kind of half a person half an agent it says that agent can go to an action space that's already occupied so they're kind of like slipping into that action it's it's not even really that sneaky of a of a thing in terms of um how the game works but thematically i think that's really nice that you can you can sneak someone into an action thanks to these this new icon yeah so this video is mostly me just raving about doing imperium which i perfectly fine doing i love playing this game i love talking about this game and i've just learned a lot about deck building from this game um it really opened me to the idea of rounds and deck building as has lost the runes of our neck i think both of them show that rounds can work in a deck building game and the game can still flow really well uh the asymmetry in the game and both those it really the this game gets compared to a lot of the lost runes of our like i think it is a very different game um but both of them are deck building games with a worker placement element and so i've learned a lot from both of those games from playing both of the games and those those elements of work replacement and um and deck building anyway i won't rehash all that i already said but this is what i've learned from the game i've i love doing it here i love talking about it and i'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments what are your favorite elements about it what have you learned as a player or as a designer from playing it and uh i guess what do you hope to see from the future of the game if there's if you want more from it personally i i was it took me a while to get the expansion because i'm so happy playing the core game i really do enjoy it i didn't feel it needed i didn't feel it needed an expansion but but i was happy to play it and i do enjoy it now and now that i have all the cards shuffled in i'll probably continue to play with the expansion every time i play anyway let me know your thoughts in the comments below i look forward to talking to you about dune imperium bye

Channel: Stonemaier Games

Views: 21,342

Keywords: game design, board games, tabletop games

Id: WfrTDGB8R8Y

Length: 30min 32sec (1832 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 12 2022