Dune Imperium board game strategy guide

[Music] welcome back to the channel today we're going to do a tips and tricks video for the dune imperium board game i'm going to walk you through a pretty cool game mechanic that's present dude imperium and this kind of revolves around having either two or three of these agent meeples in the game you start the game with two and eventually you can earn a third one by purchasing the swordmaster space so what's kind of cool about this game is that you can either focus on having a lot of persuasion points and the persuasion points are going to allow you to buy larger larger and more powerful cards or what you can do is you can move to more spaces with the agent markers now alternatively you could do both but it's very very expensive to do both so kind of at the beginning of the game i tell players and newer players to this game maybe just focus on one and figure that out get it going in the game and maybe not focus on both i think you can win the game with either having a really high persuasion value or having the third asian people so to kind of illustrate this when you start the game you're only going to start with two of these agent sort of meeples and when i play a card it's going to then allow me to go to that space and then the meeple goes onto the board and then consequently i play a second meeple with that card but this only then allows me these three cards during the reveal phase so in this case i'm only going to have three of those persuasion points and those points are what i'm going to use to buy new cards now alternatively if i return all the cards sort of back onto the table and we take a look at this now let's say i have three of these um agent meeples to play and maybe i play this one this one and this one and these all get eliminated and removed because i'm playing them now during my reveal phase i can only have one persuasion so kind of what's cool about this game is that you can kind of balance between having meeples that go out onto the board and i get additional resources i can play troops things of that nature or i can spend my persuasion points to gain really hefty cards that really hit hard and they're very impactful so these are two strategies that i want to kind of talk about it's really the sort of swordmaster icon space and the high council space and i'll walk into how those work in just a second one quick note i want to make about this game before i move on to the high council in the swordmaster space is that at any point in time whether i have two or three of the agent meeples in the game i have the ability to do my reveal phase so let's say there's a really excellent card out on the table i can completely omit placing my workers my asian meeples onto the board for that turn to just simply reveal my hand so in this case i would have one two three four five persuasion points to spend on a pretty nice and expensive card any card that's kind of like five or higher that's a really good card and it's going to give you a lot of good uh sort of special effects when you do that so just always keep that in mind no matter how many meeples you have you can always just stop at any point in time and say hey i'm going to reveal and that's a great strategy as well one of the reasons i tell new players to just focus on either the high council or the swordmaster is the pretty high cost of purchasing these spaces please note that these are only uh active once per game so once you purchase this tile you can only purchase it once per game same thing with the swordmaster as well now five and eight solari that's going to take you a while to build that up so that's that's kind of a high achievement to get that amount of money and to play that down so for the high council i'm going to always have two additional persuasion points per turn when i'm purchasing cards and that's absolutely fantastic or alternatively once i purchase the sword master space this meeple comes off and i can start using it to place it down onto the board now the total cost of those combined if you want to do both is 13 solari and that's something you can't really do near the early point of the game you could definitely do it toward the mid to late game which is fine but i always kind of tell players just focus on one or the other if you want really high powerful impactful cards go ahead and go for the high council if you want to place down meeples onto the table if you really enjoy that i would recommend then going with the swordmaster here's a quick summary of how these strategies work in the game so i went ahead and just pasted the board spaces into this slide so we can take a look at it and this will give you a basic road map on what to look for when the game first starts so first and foremost you have the wealth and the secure contract spaces these are great and pretty easy ways to gain solari pretty quick in the game and you can do a quick combo even on your first turn i've been able to get this to work several times you play um one of the emperor faction point cards down you take the wealth space and then you can play a secure contract card as well and that'll net you five solari in the first turn then on the next turn if you hit the secure contract space again that gives you your eight solari that you need for the swordmaster so very quickly you can do a wealth and secure contract to get you enough solari for the high council and you can buy that on the second turn alternatively you can do these three steps in a row it's a little bit harder because these are highly contested spaces but then you can purchase that swordmaster pretty quickly in the game now a little bit more subtle strategy and i don't see as many people doing this so in your first opening turn if you have a fremen fashion card go ahead and purchase the still suits that's going to give you one water resource now you're going to start the game with a water resource anyway then on your second meeple placement go ahead and hit the great flats that's going to net you three spice you're going to have to burn both of your waters but then you have three spice then on your next turn you can sell either two or three of those spice for six or eight solari and that gives you the opportunity to purchase either the high council or the swordmaster so this is a very quick and efficient way to get one of your really important aspects of the game going either the high council for influence or the swordmaster for that extra agent meeple another really fun game mechanic are the entry cards that are present in dune imperium there are several spaces on the board and there are several ways that you can gain intrigue cards now when you look at the overall stacks of entry cards the vast majority of these cards are going to be the plot cards these are played in general when you place one of your agents onto the board you can also play a plot as well there are a fair number of the combat cards and these are a great way to surprise your opponent in a battle let's say you both have you know pretty much equal forces in the combat phase you can throw you know one or two of these out to overcome your opponent and sort of beat them at the last minute and then there's only really only a few of the end game cards which some of these are fairly situational one of them you have to have two spice must flow cards in order to cash these in um things like that so really what you're looking for in intrigue is to enhance first and foremost when you're placing your agents on the board you get all sorts of different special abilities you can get extra resources you can get victory points by spending solari uh you can get faction points by spending solari things of that nature and then secondarily you're going to surprise your enemy in combat by putting out you know a host of these combat abilities as well so you can kind of tip the scale in your favor so one of the strategies look for the open entry card slots on the table when you're placing your agents it seems to work a little bit better if you have the swordmaster extra agent earlier on in the game it seems like you can spend that extra agent every turn gaining one of those entry card spaces and you don't have to worry about it hurting your engine all together so think of it that way is that you can enhance your agents by getting these entry cars if you have more agents that you can spend on the table it gives you more flexibility and versatility so i'll show you kind of what those look like and sort of the investment schemes and what you get out of those let's go ahead and walk through the intrigue spaces on the board the first one is conspire this one's a little bit more difficult to get you have to basically spend four spice and you have to have one of the imperial faction cards to actually even get to the space it's a great space this is more combat oriented i mean it's something you should do probably more in tune with a combat strategy next is carfag this one is extremely easy to get all you have to do is spend one of the uh purple circle cards to get onto this space it gives you a troop it gives you an entry card and the ability to add troop streamer garrison into the combat and then probably my favorite one is secrets it's in the bennet jesuit sort of faction tree on the side of the board this one you can spend uh just that ben and jesuit faction card to land on it and when you do you get an entry card but the great thing is you get a steal entry cards from all the other players that have more than three entry cards so if they have four more you can steal an entry card from them and you can steal from every single player on the board so be really uh be really mindful of that especially toward later in the game if you take an entry card from somebody plus you get one that means you're basically netting two entry cards and you're kind of hurting your opponent at the same time so this is definitely a great option for you to look out for car drawing in dude imperium can also be another fantastic strategy so there's several spaces on the board i want to show you really quick one of them is selective breeding next we have the mentat space followed by arakeen and then finally the research station the research station is surprisingly powerful it is a little bit hefty to purchase that space it will cost you two water but you do get to draw three cards so any of the spaces on the board or any of the cards in your hand that allow you to draw extra cards allows you to have more versatility on your agent placement in addition when you have a reveal action it's going to increase the amount of persuasion points you can spend to purchase cards as an example let's say we're toward the end of our turn i have two convincing arguments on the table i go ahead and let's say purchase the research station that's going to net me three cards so if i do my reveal after that point in time i can jump from a mere four persuasion points all the way up to 10 persuasion points and that's a fantastic way i know this this is a little bit of a simplified sort of scenario here but it increases your buying power for persuasion so now you can move into purchasing some of those larger cards you know some of the eight point cards you can buy a spice must flow card which will net you one victory point so that's a fantastic option as well so always think about what you can do with card drawing now if you are going to draw cards and you have your three agents i would suggest getting the cards earlier on in the turn it's going to allow you more flexibility on the locations that you can go to and then toward the end of the turn if you're trying to let's say net a spice must flow card you know you can make that push you can get those extra cards in addition to this don't also rule out that combat icons can be present as well and obviously you're going to have you know some better combat cards toward the later part of the game but you can also add these points to your conflict totals and if you have several of these cards they can pile up and add up really quick here's another example during your reveal action you can get a persuasion and a combat icon so think about all of these things think about making your reveal action really strong and card drawing will definitely help you with that conflict is good in dune imperium it is a great way for you to net victory points and other resources we're going to just do a quick overview this is the active conflict card this is telling you what you're fighting for during that combat round so in this case you're gonna be fighting for victory points and you can potentially gain some spice the next term we're gonna look at is garrison so the circles that are surrounding the center of the conflict this is the garrison these are troops that are not actively engaged in the conflict in the center of the board where you see these cross swords these are all of the troops that have been dedicated to the combat these are the ones that are going to be actively fighting for this card at the end of the turn now notice everything in the middle will get removed from the board after the combat is completed your garrison troops will remain through the next turn and you can spend them on the next turn or subsequent turns we have a combat tracker at the bottom and this is a really quick and easy way to tabulate all of your combat bonuses at the end of the turn and notice that each troop is worth two points and each of these sword icons is worth one conflicts in dune are extremely important for progressing your victory point totals i kind of just threw a bunch of cards onto the table these are conflict cards and you can see that in general there are a lot of victory points that are present on these cards you really have to be mindful that when these conflicts open up at the beginning of the turn if you have a decent number of troops start using them immediately to take um you know some of those spaces so place your agent meeples on spaces of the board that will allow you to place your troops into the center of the conflict you don't want to miss out especially in a lot of these double ones where you get two victory points those can make the difference between winning and losing and throughout the course of the game you can see that there's quite a few of even the single point ones and then also too a lot of the second tier rewards even if you don't win the conflict those are pretty decent as well there is a lot of spice that is present on a lot of these conflict cards spice in general in my opinion is one of the best ways that you can gain troops so i'll kind of go through these loops and these arcs on how you can spend spice to build troops and the troops move into the conflict and then you use those troops to gain more victory points and additionally more spice and it's almost this endless loop and this rhythm that you can get into and it's kind of cool so i'll walk you through what some of those strategy loops look like and once you get some of these going you can sustain them for many turns and build sort of some long-term strategies over two or three turn sort of blocks and you can execute some of these loops like two or three times during the course of the game and it really helps your your point totals it also helps you lock down and shut down a lot of the enemy troops on the table which is fantastic as well next i'm going to teach you how to build up a lot of troops and i'm going to call these battle loops and as you can see once you get these going you're going to do the same thing over and over again once you have the system primed and you can execute these moves anywhere from two to three times in a 10 round game which is a pretty typical game so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to focus on ensuring that we can generate water effectively and easily and the first thing that we can do is we can go to the fremen sort of location and get the still suits that will generate one water but what happens in this game is that still suits gets contested fairly often when you play dune imperium so you need a secondary or a backup way to gain water and since this is a battle loop another great portion of the board you can go to is siege tabor which gives you a troop and there's a conflict icon on it which allows you to move troops from your garrison into the conflict and it generates water so the first step is that we need to unlock siege tabor and in order to do that you need to fremen influence so the only ways that you can get from an influence or the the typical ways through the board are the still suits location and the hardy warriors location so if you're going to do this sort of battle loop you need two of these influence so if you want you could do still suits twice you could do still suits once and then hardy warriors or any combination of the two that's going to unlock those two water locations both still suits in siege tabor and you're going to use the water then to start harvesting spice so on the second row of this slide you have the great flat hoga basin and the imperial basin both the great flat and the hoga basin you need water to harvest spice the imperial basin you do not but it doesn't yield as much spice so next the next goal in the next stage of this progression is for you to build up four or six spice now if you've watched the earlier part of this video one of the strategies is using spice and sort of water production to prime your engine to get the extra agent you can actually use that strategy and then roll directly into combat so that's a really cool progression you get your extra agent and then you can roll directly uh into this combat loop so the whole objective of this first loop is to obtain four or six spice now i'm going to show you where you're gonna be spending those four or six spice and sort of the loops that you can go through once you have that here is the first loop that we're going to talk about and it focuses on raising your faction with the emperor so this one is only going to consume four of the spice that we talked about so first step you have your four spice plate an imperial faction card and take the conspire space it's gonna net you five solari two troops and one entry card that is a hefty amount of stuff that you're getting for that four spice next now that you have five solari you can spend solari to rally troops so you can take that space and spend four of the five solari that you just gained now you're gonna have six troops that are sitting in your garrison at least six troops you might have some more now you need to get those troops onto the table so what we're gonna do is we're gonna pick spaces that will let us do this loop again so be on the lookout for a couple different things be looking for water spaces so the still suit space and siege tabor if you place a agent meeple on either of these these are both conflict marker tiles which allows you to take troops from your garrison and put them into the conflict so that's fantastic also siege tabor will give you an additional troop so really if you go through this loop you can net seven troops really easily and you're gonna net a water and then potentially net another water with the still suits so this strategy works very well if you have three agent meeples next step is once you've built up some water you have some troops out on the table you can start harvesting spice again the great thing about this strategy is that once you start harvesting the spice all of those locations for spice harvesting are also conflict oriented which means that you can take troops from your garrison and put them directly into the conflict so by doing this we're going to be building up spice and then moving our troops out of the garrison into the conflict and we're going to be winning those conflicts and gaining those victory points once we have all of the spice built up the cycle can start again and we can do either this loop or we can do the spacing guild loop which is what i'm about to show you the next strategy that we're going to focus on is the spice battle loop for the spacing guild and this one i think is probably my favorite out of the two this one is super easy to execute and it's pretty powerful this loop is going to require that you have six spice so the first thing that you're going to do is purchase the highliner spacing guild faction location on the map and it's gonna net you five troops and what's great about this since it's a conflict space all five of those troops can either be placed into your garrison or directly into the conflict so this is a great way to dump troops immediately into the conflict the other very very cool thing about this it's gonna net you to water now as we've been talking about these spice battle loops in order to get spice harvesting i'm going to need water and this thing nets you to water so that's fantastic now i can play uh still suits or siege tabor again to increase my troop count even further and get water then i now have potentially even more water that i can use for spice harvesting what i like about this one a little bit better it gives you a jump it gives you a boost in water resources so you can go directly into spice harvesting next i'm going to focus on getting either four or six spice if i get four spice i can go back to the emperor spice loop or if i get six i can go directly back into the highliner uh spice loop as well what's great about this you can get spacing guild faction which can gain you victory points and then also you're gonna be really hitting the conflicts hard with this strategy and you're gonna be winning those conflicts and gaining additional victory points in that manner as well here is a deck building strategy for doing imperium this one is called faction loading and you can perform it using either two or three of the asian meeples i think it works relatively well with both so first and foremost what we're going to focus on is buying really cheap cards these are going to have low persuasion costs anywhere from the two to three range and you can see all these on the table and each and every one of them has at least one uh faction that you can use to get onto the board and start increasing your victory points through faction as well so the first thing that i want to note is that each and every one of these factions has a sort of cheap fashion card and you don't need to actually pay anything to land on those spaces so when you start spending them you're not going to be consuming any resources now each faction also has one in which you have to spend something so in this case you have to spend a water so be really careful and mindful that when you're playing this strategy i suggest always trying to take the spots and locations in which it doesn't really cost you anything and this is going to do something interesting in the game especially if you have a bunch of these cards and you're playing down roughly two of your asian meeples every turn taking these cheap faction locations you're crowding out your opponents your opponents will not be able to sit on these locations because you've already taken them essentially so you're robbing them of those influence points and you're essentially kind of forcing them to go to other locations on on the board and on the map so to speak since this is a work replacement game you're going to mix a strategy of deck building and you're going to crowd them out using sort of those work replacement strategies as well so this is a great way to blend this together so think of it as you're starving them of influence and you're gaining those influence points so if you look at this tracker you can net two victory points from each one of the factions now obviously these uh are not competitive but when you hit let's say an influence at this location you can take the alliance marker itself now if your opponent goes past you and influence they can take it from you you're going to lose a victory point they're going to gain one but by doing this strategy you're constantly going to be putting out influence points onto the table so you're going to be leading the pack and you're going to get a lot of these markers by using this strategy it's not uncommon to have two three i've even seen four alliance markers uh players that have literally every single alliance marker when they're using the strategy so that's pretty fantastic if you think you only need 10 victory points roughly to kick the game into the end game you can get eight just on this track now four of these are going to be pretty easy to get and you can easily get two of the alliance markers i feel like with the strategy so that's going to net you a total of six victory points so you're definitely going to be competitive and if you're looking out for other opportunities for victory points while you're playing this strategy that's great as well so think about trying this strategy out and like i said it works well with either two or three of your agent meeples a deck building strategy that you can employ really goes around focusing on persuasion and purchasing really expensive cars for your deck so this is a great deck building strategy so the first thing that you want to do is that i would recommend for this scenario you only need two of your agent meeples and the reasoning behind that is that when you do your average reveal phase you're gonna have you know those three cards to reveal so what you're looking for is to have more cards to do persuasion so you can purchase really expensive cards so first and foremost you're gonna need the high council space something else that can help you with buying these expensive cards is the hall of the oratory which is located right here it gives you one persuasion point for your next reveal action and then this space right here the high council we've talked about before it gives you two persuasion every time you do that reveal action so if you want to buy something expensive you can basically get those three extra points to buy some really heavy hitting stuff so kind of on this row right here i put out some of my favorite cards for this strategy now when you're playing this way don't buy cheapo cards because that's going to dilute your deck you want to only focus on really heavy hitting cards so your deck is going to be concentrated with those heavy hitting cards you're going to be getting them more often don't just buy cards for the sake of buying cards and don't ever feel like you have to spend all of your persuasion every turn so in this case we can get some really heavy hitting cards the quiz x hat rack is probably the most powerful card in the game in my opinion pretty much any time you have that it helps you literally just win the game it's really it's really overpowered but there's only one of them in the game so that's okay opulence is great you can essentially spend solari for victory points i like these warm rider cars i think there's several of them in the deck the santa car legions those are fantastic as well and you know things like bernie hallock you're gaining a lot of stuff in the deck so that when you do your agent placement you can get a lot of stuff and then alternatively when you do a reveal actually you're gonna get a lot of stuff as well so really going with high persuasion cards is fantastic and then finally i want to throw into the mix the spice must flow now these cost nine but if you are sort of loading your deck to generate tons of persuasion nine points that's still going to be pretty hefty but you can buy anywhere from one to three of these over the course of the game and that's going to net you anywhere from one to three victory points because you can get that victory point when you first purchase the card so this is a great way to sort of supplement your victory point income and then also too since all of your cards are gonna be so effective you're gonna be making some big moves every turn so i highly recommend trying this strategy it's very very effective and very very fun i want to thank you for spending your time with me today hopefully this video has shown you some cool tips and tricks that you can use the next time you play dune imperium once again thanks for watching and as always have fun gaming you

Channel: Fossil Ridge Gaming

Views: 32,324

Keywords: Dune, Dune Imperium, Game, Board Game, Gaming

Id: XQ7cqbwI0lY

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021