Dune: Imperium Review - A SU&SD Dust-Up

june it's my favorite month of the year and it's also a made-up word that means sand and now it's also another board game based on the famous book june by herbert herbert and so this is june imperium kindly provided to us by direwolf games each round you're going to be trying to win a fight on this important dusty planet you're going to be building up relations with key interstellar factions and to win the game you're hopefully going to become the most galactically influential player and seize control of june broadly speaking june is about factions competing for control of the spice a magical substance that is excreted from incredibly dangerous worms but this isn't even the only dune game we've seen in the last few years in 2019 quinn's donned a wetsuit and allowed me to pull water inside of it as part of his review of june a remake of the beloved 40 year old game of intrigue strategies and a horrible giant worm but is this dune imperium as good as the other june game well the answer to that depends very much on who you ask at the start of the game each player is going to choose a faction that gives them a subtle unique advantage during the game and everyone starts with the same deck of 10 cards that they can then tweak around with as they play through the game there's a shop of new staff that immediately refills after you buy a card from it and various ways of removing cards that you no longer want in your deck now if you've played a game like this before you'll probably know it as a deck builder game but there's a second mechanic within this that's very popular and well known worker placement the gently mean system of having a selection of different unique options of things you can do on the board but the only one player each turn can do i'm doing this which means nobody else can so all players draw up a hand of cards and take it in turn to place one of these workers for as long as they have more of these agents available to place on the board but where you can place these agents on the board isn't only dictated by what's currently unoccupied each location requires that you play a card that matches its symbol in order to go there and get the cool stuff now this deck of 10 cards is gonna let you go anywhere you want on the board but i think this is quite cool only two of these 10 cards will allow you to go and visit the four factions on this side of the board and one of those two cards when you use it for that will be removed from the game now you combine that to the fact that you might also be removing cards quite liberally from your deck to thin it out and get it running a little bit tighter and it's very possible that you might end up simply not being able to for example go and visit the emperor on the board we have the green spaces that represent the council areas where you can go and come back with all manner of useful services providing you have the cash money to buy it yellow spaces represent the very wormiest spots of the dessert planet june and also let you visit the spice market trading orange goodness for coin goodness these blue areas won't let you harvest spice on the planet but will give you access you need to muster troops for battles and finally we have the four symbols here that represent the factions that you're going to be hoping to court and woo throughout the game now these eight spaces you're going to be keeping a much closer eye on during the game than everything else partly because the powers that they offer are pretty beasty but also because every time anyone sends an agent to visit one of these spaces they're going to improve their relationships with this faction go to visit people improve your relationship it's like when you pop over to see your grandma except rather than being given 50p and a biscuit you're going to move up this track and substantially increase your galactic standing and potentially uh get given this tiny bad biscuit and who are these factions that you can make friends with we've got the emperor the spacing guild and fremen with beni [Music] jesuits [Applause] so listen all of the iconography on this board is really sharp and clear and universal because you'll also find these icons on the bottom of your cart because excitingly when you play a card in order to send an agent to one of these locations you're also going to activate any of the bonuses in the white strip at the bottom of that card now we're playing with cards and it's this intersection of which symbols can you use in terms of sending an agent onto the board and what bonuses could you potentially get if you tried something a little bit different i could go there it's not very good but with that card gets me more troops for the upcoming battle but maybe i should just go to a space that lets me draw up more cards so i can have a better choice of things when i place my next agent and at the end of placing all of your agents anything you have left in your hand well while this white bar gives you bonuses if you play that card during the round the blue glittery spacey bit at the bottom is what you're gonna get if those cards are in hand at the end of a round you're gonna get influence for spending on buying new things from the shop but also you're going to get swords and all manner of little bonuses which might sway the battle in your favor so that's quite a few different things potentially being done with each card and each round tends to start off with players just putting a card down moving an asian quite slow strategic before eventually a player runs out of things to do and people start whapping down loads of cards all at once maybe then revealing a flourish of swords that changes the fate of the battle in the middle and sees them snatching away at the prizes and broadly speaking i really like it but to quote juglito jugglyto atreides there's trouble don't spice mel son [Applause] literally no one else on team shadow and sit down light june imperium and while it would be great to have them all here airing their grievances live i frankly resent giving the screen time to people who were wrong about board games and so because of that we will be channeling their opinions through the hard cold pipes of the patented shutter can sit down disagrometer so [Applause] all right if i'm playing a deck builder i need more options of how to build my deck on my turn all too often it felt like there was an obvious choice or i was only choosing between two things i'd just rather be playing dominion trains or the quest for el dorado presents as exciting but juggling lots of mechanics means none grab or hold my attention also it was way too long both times i played it the same market just left me without enough control over my deck to feel like i was making strategic decisions and left a lot of interesting combos off the table until too late in the game but i still suspect i might actually like it if i played it in person and it was quick so here's an annoying thing over the last year we've had to play an awful lot of board games over the internet because of a global situation with pandas or something the thing is when you're playing games on digital platforms some of them fare better than others and we found that the ones that get the worst deal are card games that was an unintentional pun you can't keep a drum kit in here move along and so yes dune imperium took forever to play when we played it online in person though it's pretty nippy uh what other complaints have we got here uh quinn's didn't like it because it wasn't dominion he makes that complaint about every single deck builder we play isn't that right quinns i'll take that as a yes and broadly apart from that the complaint seemed to be that this game just wasn't crunchy enough it wasn't interesting enough none of the choices felt spicy listen we talked about this you can stay but you can't do that when i'm filming so i do think that some of these criticisms are fair but firstly i'd like to talk about some of the things that i didn't like about this game because i'm a human and they're just bits of paper now firstly and i think this would usually be a killer blow in terms of our collective tastes it shall sit down but i think that the thematic stuff in this game falls a bit flat and sometimes just gets in the way and is very slightly annoying for example you've got one space on june that you can't go to unless you're friends with the freman which i'm sure makes sense thematically within the world but when you're trying to teach the rules to everyone around the table sticks out uncomfortably like an unwanted second belly button and while we're talking about the fremen you've also got the fremen bond a power that triggers when you've played two freeman cards in a turn and then there's also a similar power for benedescer it's using two cards getting bonuses but that one doesn't have a name this one's frem and bond this other one just there's there's nothing about this which is deeply confusing but it's just enough and there's lots of little things that are just enough to have you nudging slightly over and over into that zone of ambiguity that has you reaching for the manual and then oh no the manual isn't absolutely terrible but it's certainly not great and then at this point you're booking an appointment with your old friend dr google but once you have managed to pull your head out of the manual the pace of this game is really very pleasant trundling along very nicely you're only taking one action at a time and then almost all of the upkeep that comes after that action can be done while the next player is taking their turn now obviously this flow works way better with fewer players and i was really really pleasantly surprised by how well this plays with just two using this special deck of house hagel cards to simulate a third party that clogs up the spaces on the board and occasionally causes trouble and wins battles in exchange for an incredibly small amount of admin literally just flipping over a card each turn it keeps you on your toes while still keeping those decisions with the other player feeling quite tactical it's peachy with three but with four players the game's design does start to stretch out of shape things shift dramatically between turns as the spacers on the board quickly fill up and rather than this reduction of your options making choices slightly easier it quickly crushes down to a point where those choices can simply evaporate if you've built the wrong deck and so sure with four players a little bit too slow too many moving parts but with two or three players i think this game is very entertaining there's a really delightful chunkiness here without the components becoming over the top and bloated making money feels incredible when the coins are so thick that you could butter them like crumpets and the unique shapes of the tokens for water and spice alongside this incredible searing pop of color in contrast to the rest of the board and the cards makes them immediately different wonderful to collect and move around and hold and crucially means that at a simple glance you can look around the board and have an exact idea of exactly what everyone else is currently holding watching with horror as across the table an opponent hoards that sixth precious chunk of spice knowing full well they're about to dump a small army onto june the desert planet grabbing a car that lets you teleport an agent from one space to another i mean mechanically you're just moving a worker from one space to another space but look at the artwork on that card i'm teleporting through time and space mother building a deck that lets you draw way more cards than you need is great because then at the end of your turn you get to whap down a huge selection of things like your james bond in the royal casino and i can appreciate the fact that some people won't like the way that some battles can suddenly swing unexpectedly because of cards that somebody's keeping held in their hand but the tension and potential for mind games that comes with this and the fact that sometimes i purposefully made my turns longer than they should have been just so i could hold on to the cards in my hand making the other players sweat thinking i was about to do something horrible when i had nothing that's board games but is the addition of bluffing and necessary flex in a game that already blends deck building and worker placement to distinct separate systems almost definitely not no but i do think it's fun and while a lot of people online are always convinced that shut up sit down doesn't like this genre or this genre shut up it down doesn't like euro games absolutely nonsense please bury me with numbers and cubes but if there is one genre that collectively we do tend to bounce off as a team it's probably ameritrash games where you know you have a pretzel you have a beer you're awesome dice something happens maybe you've got a gun pow i win the game and in our defense i think a big part of why we don't tend to get on with those games most of the time is because a lot of them but i do also think that in our search for elegance and innovation sometimes games that are just cozy and maybe a little bit messy don't tend to get much love from our perhaps at this point quite sharpened critical gaze i don't think that june imperium is a classic there's a whole bunch of stuff i change and honestly purely on the basis of the copyrighting some of the cards and some other thematic stuff being just slightly fiddly i couldn't broadly recommend it to a wide audience i don't even know how long it will stay in my collection for but i had a ton of fun playing this game a ton of fun playing this game and maybe you would too you know hey maybe i'm right and maybe they're all wrong is this the hill i finally die on atop the sandy mountain of june the dessert planet all of the alien desserts are here the space flan caramel neutrons quad brick spludge profiteroles and custard it's a bit rich for that one for me a bit too rich for my taste and that's it you might like june you might like it you might not this is usually the part of the review where i'd say hey here are some other games similar to this that you could check out but frankly games are similar to this we don't tend to review because we don't like them and i'm the only person that likes this one so guess we're in a bit of a weird pickle just click on whatever's there i suppose just some links to something i guess i feel so alone [Music] at least i've got you custard i'm going some custard thanks for watching the video um have a great week [Music] it's very rich [Music] oh it's very rich very good

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 203,149

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Matt Lees, Dune, Dune Imperium, Dune Review, Reviewing Dune, Direwolf

Id: kiXL251bdmQ

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021