Dune Imperium | Shelfside Review

hey do you want to play dude oh yeah dude yeah love the book love the movie didn't like the new game though oh what you don't like this one no i like that one i just don't like this one we could play that but i was thinking about the other dune not 2021 dude not 2019 dude not 1979 dune dune imperial oh yeah dune imperium heard of that one isn't that one a euro deck building work replacement how much dune could this really be [Music] dune the classic sci-fi p with its first new board game release in nearly 40 years well kind of there's this new dune board game because we're late to this 2020 release but oh my gosh has dune imperium shot so high in the bgg ratings dune imperium is a work replacement but combined with deck building for one to four players in one to two hours the game says that the fate of the empire lies in your hands but how true is that in a euro with a work replacement does that even feel correct anyways let's get into it here's a quick how to play we're each playing as one of these characters in the dune universe so you can play as paul himself right here or this quadruple chin guy throughout the game you're doing all sorts of stuff on the planet like going to the great flat right there or doing stuff off planet and you're placing these workers in a work replacement and then to win the game you want to be the first to hit 10 victory points a great way to get points is to befriend the four in-game factions like the spacing guild literally by just going on these spots you're moving your friendliness with them up you get one point for reaching this spot and then when you reach the end you get another point through this point token but then someone can take that token from you and with it the points if they pass you the other primary way to get points is through these conflicts that are flipped every round where if you win the conflict you'll typically get some type of point reward to compete in these you'll have to send troops to the planet itself in this x area each cube gives you two strength and whoever has the most strength at the end of the round gets first place rewards and you know the drill for the second and third okay but getting these troops to fight and sending them in isn't cheap in this multi-layer game so let's back up a bit there's gonna be deck building with your work replacement oh man there's a deck everyone has a deck of cards and then you draw five cards from it at the beginning of a round every turn you're playing one card from your hand down and then that lets you send the worker we talked about you send the worker to any icon that matches the left side of the card make sure no one else is on the place then you put your worker down pay the cost if there's one and then you get what the space says then you get the top payout from the card you just played nice so then you just got two things from one action oh and then if you place your worker on a diplomatic space with these four in-game factions remember to move your allegiance with them one step higher everyone is taking turns doing this until you run out of workers to place and then you can do something called revealing where you reveal and discard cards from your hand to activate the bottom parts of the cards these can let you use this blue persuasion to buy even more cards to permanently add to your deck or as discarding this dagger does adding extra strength for combat to help you win those crucial conflicts once every player has done their final turn by revealing to discard their cards in their hand then you checked who won this conflict here i have the most strength i win i get a point and then there's just bookkeeping you put spice on places with that icon that no one went on this round and then you take back your workers next round draw five cards then reveal the next conflict for the next phase whoever hits 10 vp first wins the game or if this conflict deck runs out whoever had the most vp when it ran out wins the game that's it for now so now let's hop into the review starting with the pros first and foremost this board looks pretty cool and it's also very functional it has all these different segmented spaces off planet and then on planet to place your workers and there's even this big fat funnel right over there to shoot your workers from space into the planet the cool art continues with characters cards and cards and car and cards yeah there's a lot of cards they all have this muted look heavily inspired by the 2021 dude movie these wooden components are the awesome touchables here where there's the bright water that looks actually like teardrops and the different spice and salary tokens that feel so so chunky in fact even the cardboard chits are great quality and maybe the leftovers from this sheet you punch stuff out of is a bit overkill there is included plastic bags in a cardboard insert and for some reason they give you plenty of this spice melange too never seen that in a game before dune imperium is easy to get started with the rulebook which is mostly awesome and there's this side sheet that explains all the spaces on the board but more on this later player aids are also fantastic even explaining when you can play miscellaneous cards and they're double sided meaning that whoa on the back are these asymmetric characters this is all digestible asymmetry that leads to pretty different playstyles each character has one ability that triggers off of the one signet ring card that everyone starts with and then they have a second ability that triggers whenever it says it does so you could have the brutal beast rabban rear groot dude just get a bunch of troops with his signet ring these troops make this guy really strong early where you can constantly inject troops into early conflicts then something like lado atreides starts getting stronger mid to late game at that point he could really start catching up on faction alliances by just paying spice that's a lot of point potential our main man timothy chamele chamele chamele has an ability that is just always good prescience to constantly look at the top card of the deck oh and then his very own signet ring lets him draw so prescience could be a good way to test whether or not you're going to be drawing something good oh hey look it's dogar yes of course let's get him in our hand oh but you don't actually start with stillgar in your deck and this is where the massive deck building options and strategy comes in you have to remember that each card is three parts first the active benefit then if you decide not to play it and reveal it or discard it and then where you actually get to place your workers if you play that card that really starts to warp your head with the options from these three piles here and these six cards from this row that constantly get replaced with new cards there's all sorts of variety with these 67 buyable cards filled with well doing things there's ambassadors to the shipping guild to give influence with them or there's those sneaky banner jesuit sisters or how about the characters of the dune universe where if you already played a bennett desert sister you can play reverend mother to discard two cards from other people's hands that's kind of like militia in that dominion deck builder of ye old but trickier to use the list is just crazy you can breed some jeans get thopter guns to shoot down your opponent's helpless troops or have a firm grip with emperor's clench or be rich with opulence okay we can't go through all these here but but but if you want to make a diplomacy comeback you can power play for a two-space jump how about getting freaking points through buying the most expensive card in the game last one for real there's a bunch of fremen that can bond together to get bonuses and that encourages you to buy tons of fremen and discard them together wow easy two spice there and when you combine this card buying with your character's ability that's when it gets even cooler say you're playing countess ariana who has to trade in a spice for one card draw when harvesting spice card draw cool losing spice not so much so to compensate for that spice loss maybe you want to look to get a carryall to increase your spice income now you have great spice income and a card draw every time you use that card with ariana and hey since you have so much spice at this point why not spend it at a friend camp to get three troops or maybe you want to double down on drawing with the count with cheese who lets you draw so play lady jessica with him to draw two more cards now you've drawn three in total well maybe you like drawing so much you want to get her back with this other memory then play lady jessica again or you could combine this with this crazy witch lady to move up in any diplomacy track but for how cool all these cards are you shouldn't tunnel in too hard on just grabbing cards left and right because well this game is also a worker placement too but hey if you want to place workers in a very specific destination going to make sure you have those colors in your deck right make sure you have them just like variety with the deck building there is good variety to plop down your workers from trading in resources spending water to draw a bunch of cards or hiring an extra swordmaster worker by paying tons of cash if you're super dedicated on buying cards all the time you could do it then you could be part of the high council giving you two buying power guaranteed every turn and remember how you're fighting over this central conflict every round and you want to send troops in well that makes these spaces with the sword icon that lets you send in the troops way more important in the beginning rounds of the game you only have two workers so that's two actions so that means at least one of your actions needs to be dedicated to moving troops in that is if you even want to contest this round troops are not just free at least most of the time so to buy those troops you need to carefully harvest spice get some water or just accumulate pure cash and collecting those things can be the other half of your round's actions then remember there's those side races those tracks for vp so maybe you want to get those instead of troops this round it's best when you can just get both here but back to troops it's not that you're just spending effort to send them in it's you have to really think about how many you want to dedicate because at the end of the round after the fighting's done every single troop that was in the middle just dies thanks dude weather but that means that every troop that you commit now is something you won't have for a later round you're frequently just questioning if it's even worth it to go hard on conflict now if your opponents look especially battle hungry or if you suspect they have a bunch of daggers in their hand to add to the strength you really have to pay attention to turn order here sometimes there's fun value to even just try to get third place on a card by sending one cube in getting a couple spies or just some coin for minimal effort is always awesome let the other people duke it out for now you may just want to save a huge stockpile for later fights and sometimes that huge stockpile is just stockpiling spice because you can later pull the trigger and go on my favorite space in the game high liner you make this massive contract with the spacing guild to pay a ton of spies to get 5 troops and deploy them right away that's 10 strength not including you can add two more if you had them in reserve that's 14 strength from one worker one action that pretty much guarantees you to fight pretty much there's one really great spicy thing in this game and that is the entry cards now these are like power cards that you can acquire through rewards or even just going to like the jenna bezret space right here these are filled with variety for that tension there's cards that can help people with combat or just suddenly let you move up a political track or just let you spend resources for points that can be super clutch or speaking of clutch there's cards to activate at the end of the game as players stack more and more entry cards motivations and opponent action possibilities start to get murkier and murkier it's like what diplomatic track can they suddenly go up on to snag the points from me are they really at more victory points than they seem to promise how much more strength can they add to this current conflict maybe i should just let them win this one these are just plans within plans going on and oh hey that's a natural card for points and thank goodness you're discouraged from just stockpiling onto these and never spending them into late game because there's this nice fix with the jenna desert space that lets you steal an entry card from someone's hand if they have four or more of them it's never the case where you can just ignore the central conflict though especially at lower player counts because the point payouts from it are just too good this really prevents anyone from just hermiting off into their own euro solitaire because consider that by getting the vp here you're taking it away from someone else getting it that round okay this might sound a little zero-sum because only one person's getting that victory point but then you have to consider these diplomacy tracks where everyone is guaranteed to get vp as long as they participate in that so points really end up being pretty close because of this race and so tensions are high later in the game say if you focus really hard on conflicts early well someone else is getting alliances and you're about the same points neither of these initial points are enough to get you close to winning mid game and then the person doing conflicts might want to shift to doing more diplomacy after expanding their troops and now they want to grab your alliance that other guy is anxious to defend his alliance title because losing points just sucks if you got multiple alliances you got a lot of points but man that's a lot of things you have to worry about after snagging all that early vp as late game rolls around you'll see players creak up those faction tracks to get that one vp but if the incumbent maxes out on the track before you well all your extra work on those tracks was not as fruitful as you'd hoped this whole dynamic here feels very smooth in the context of the game because you have to consider by putting down your workers whether it be for a conflict or for diplomacy reasons you're getting a benefit from getting to either put in troops or move up this track or in this case you get to do both highlighter is awesome it never feels like you're trapped or you're purely dedicating yourself to one area of the game as the game keeps progressing and as the game keeps progressing and we get to these two and then the tier three conflicts these give two victory points instead of one that's an insane jump in payouts so if you win one of these conflicts late game you're in the running to win even if you were previously pretty behind on points don't forget too you're building your deck this entire time so your hand will end up looking different as the game goes on with simple dune the desert planet eventually trashed because now you have the smarter car infantry and you can hear their fast food chanting and this game runs true to time it really is at about that two hour mark at four players and most of the time it'll end at about that seventh or eighth round meaning that you won't even see this entire deck the replay value is also straight fantastic too there's of course the seven different characters you got a bunch of entry cards conflicts will be slightly different every game in maybe a different order and then there's all these cards right here all these buyable cards with a lot of one-off copies and that's when we get into the deck building replayability the deck building strategy will really be shifting from game to game your deck's identity is based off of what cards you're able to buy first combined with your character ability then combined with what entry cards you're drawing in the game but it doesn't even come close to ending there you have to factor in your opponent's willingness to go in hard for conflicts or you want to see how hard they're competing for diplomacy when you're buying cards maybe him buying two guild administrators means you can't ever win on a space and guild race and and you have to look at the pacing of the game because some games could end early like in round seven or eight so in that case you want to not really focus on building an engine and just rush for points in other games it's probably a little more slower and you can be more methodical in building out your engine maybe getting things like guild bankers to buy a bunch of the spice must flow for a ton of points to get away from cards from a bit we've seen games won without ever grabbing your third action your third worker in this work replacement so it's never a dull action to just go ahead and grab that there to reiterate you could easily get dozens of plays in of dude imperium without games feeling too similar since you're mixing and matching characters intrigues and conflicts with that deck building novelty of making new card combos with multi-layered cards in wrapping it up this game has a theme meet gameplay surprisingly well even though it is fundamentally just a it is a euro so this is an area control where you're actively fighting over regions for control of spies but you actually can get control of territories in this game and you can get spice by winning conflicts if you own the imperial basin if anyone goes there you get a kickback of spice and you could even argue that it feels thematic for your workers as you send your ambassadors to walk around the sand to garner favor with a fremen and then you can unlock the revered siege tabor and we got to give a shout out to the resources in this game they feel really appropriate like the solari money it's nice but really the spice the spice is where it's at to do the big place in this game and you know how to get that spice well you gotta go on planet and once you're on planet well then you can send troops in to go fight also water water is so so scarce and the way to get it is by going to the front end and you know what if your homies with stilgar he can give you water every turn you use it freaking awesome okay now it's time for the cons of dune imperium and the first one is this one to two player rule book or should i say rule sheet that is a square aside from being a square this is really confusing because it mentions specific rules for two players and then one player but due to this difficulty chart and additional rule section on the one player it's initially confusing to tell where the cutoff for two player rules is it was meant to be a really hard cutoff after two player but just doesn't flow that way or is even worded in that way this leads to confusion in hopping from one gameboat to the next for example in one player it says that under conflict that your rivals gain first and second place rewards from conflicts but then in two player it says that house hagal which is literally your rival why did they not just say the word rival this can never collect rewards from conflict yet that is under during the game section and why is the combat above for the two player here where it is below for one player what the heck why are there no gameplay examples written here why is there no fact here and why is it a square actually why are all of these just these huge squares ever tried reading a book or pamphlet or even piece of paper that was this giant square this is times three so hard to flip through let's get to gameplay cons drop shipping off with this entry card right here plans within plans this is a super awesome dune sounding thing ooh my plans within plans to get more points as i get alliances but its design in the context of this game is actually kind of wacky see it's letting you get additional points for influence on faction tracks as opposed to other intrigues where you have to spend something to get points this makes it probably the most consistent top deck late game where in many cases especially with certain characters players will have the top category fulfilled and bam that's a victory point you can't even stop it by grabbing away their alliance token because this card is based off how many steps you have taken it's not outright autowin though because there is a chance you happen to not get that much diplomacy progress this game and then you top deck plans within plans late game also you only trigger this card at the very end of the game so it's clogging up your entry can and experienced players may see it coming it's just that its design does feel too easy sometimes for a game that otherwise has very tight resource management remember you do get a point for moving to tier 2 of each track anyways if you're playing character that does well with diplomacy like baron harkonnen here that moves up these tracks for free already and has a way to draw entry cards on his own yeah plans within plans is a little too good on him if baron harkonnen quadruple chin guys in your game we especially recommend either taking out plans within plans or just house drilling it so that the bottom only gives them one point and the top is just non-existent nitpick time now first off for these square rules let's go to this primary rulebook where it's streamlining a lot of the learning process to ease you into the game which is generally good but it does a little too much streamlining here it takes a lot of crucial information needed to play through at least the mid game and puts it on the very back like very important symbols like drawing a card or trashing a card which are one of the most crucial mechanics we know you're meant to reference the destination sheet as well if you're confused but come on at least mention crucial symbols once in the meat of the rulebook there is an included strategy tips section this is okay more so the advice on conflicts and buying cards but we would have wanted half the space to be a fact instead of them just chickening out and putting it all online and we have to address the look on some of the conflict cards where you're competing for spaces yeah did you realize that we're having a battle for the siege of karthag to control it when this card looks so similar to the card right before it the siege and secure location cards should really be at least highlighted then oh there's a defensive bonus where you get one additional troop to a later conflict over your area if you control it yeah that's easy to forget and this really should have been noted on the tier 3 conflict cards where the extra troop really matters now let's get into the gameplay nitpicks starting with these leaders these a leaders now it can be a little tricky to talk about balance here in a game that has so many different card draws and then there's a lot of different ways to expand your deck and we already talked about baron harkonnen being too strong because plans within plans exist so really only this guy this earl menon thorvald caught our eye on iffy design this is a guy that gives you a bonus if you take the high council c but you can only take the high cancel seat once so this is a one and done ability that can be a bit stale his signet ring is nothing special either just one spice which isn't terrible but not amazing you're not gonna guarantee lose playing this guy but he's just not as interesting as the rest by a big margin now for the big nitpick and this is where the deck building elements start to come in see dune imperium doesn't have traditional deck building pacing and you'll probably only cycle through your deck completely six to seven times a game this is not dune minion where you're constantly drawing cards chaining columns together drawing shuffling trashing no no no no in doing imperium you draw five cards around and then you play one card a turn and then you keep that hand for the next turn play another card this lower speed of deck cycling means you want to be extra careful on buying especially since there's no big way to trash cards this carefulness ends up discouraging players from buying the weaker cards in the game granted the weaker cards even the cost ones are almost always better than your starting hand but they still clog up your deck from the stronger cards you really want to play as your action that leads us to the actual nitpick it is possible to have situations where the buying just stagnates so the deck progression grinds down players sometimes don't buy the weaker cards sitting there as they don't want to take the risk of putting subpar cards into their deck then flipping over a great card they can't immediately afford to buy and then their opponent after can buy instead of all being cheap in mediocre this row could also be all expensive cards early and the nolan deck builds for a while so this is a topic of some debate online because well you could say that this stagnation is what the game wanted some matches to be like because the deck building here is far from your only concern with this game's multiple layers so if this deck building stagnates well it's okay just adapt you're still playing a work replacement and then you got to change up your strategy just a bit we will settle that we would have wanted an included optional variant to have these cards move down at the end of every round to keep things fresh if you want to play that way this would introduce a little more randomness onto the game but keep things more fresh maybe even the winner of the conflicts could choose whether or not these cards move down at the end of the round now for that flip side of the deck building meeting the theme that is when this deck building can make this dune theme just uh fly out the window remember how we said in the pros that it's pretty cool how you're sending agents to go do diplomacy or how look you can even send duncan idaho to lead troops into battle these cool elements can actually be more often than not the exception to the theme being presented here see there are so many very types of cards from an arrakis liaison to guild bankers and these all flavor the agents you put down but then you get into some abstraction with the fremen camp okay this is more like a destination but then how about the vagueness of dune the desert planet another destination which feels especially weird when i use it to not go on the planet this theme disconnect is just gonna happen in some turns with so many interactions in deck building which is already a pretty abstract mechanic jam-packed with all sorts of dune elements with the one-to-one tie to putting down workers don't get us wrong it is really cool to use a carryall for more spice but those are more often the highlights of theming don't expect them every turn okay now it's on to player count nitpicks so every single player account does work fine for this game mechanically the mechanics are just flowing smoothly just like that spice but in one to two players there are robots playing the game and that makes that mode lose out on a couple of the key tensions of dude imperium you'd see in three to four players this ai deck flipping is smooth and fast with you literally just flipping over a card for the opponent's turn this is neat and totally works you don't have the deck bill for the robots and they're still actively competing with you the weirdness begins with the central conflict where since the robots are committing troops to the conflict based off of card flips you really lose out on the tension of competing against humans they're constantly threatening to put troops in sure the robots can add additional combat bonuses just like humans but since it's pretty random well okay you can't plan around it that well whereas with the human opponent you could keep track of their deck building for remaining cards at hand and those entry cards this is more severe in one player where there's two robots both doing this which makes conflict outcomes even more random and two players it's not as bad but also the robot never scores vp so it's just like this collar that is just randomly clogging up the board oh and then remember how we talked about card buying can get stifled this is worse in these robot modes because the robots they don't deck build they never buy cards and the robots get their third worker later on and that's asked to be slotted in the conflict deck and man that's a really gimmicky thing because ever try balancing a bunch of cards on a tiny wooden piece that doesn't work well you're still getting your deck building meets work replacement just fine with the robots we just have to stress that three to four players is where the game starts opening up for more of that conflict tension for the tightest clog of board spaces bloodier combat and the most anxiety from competition for alliances play with four so now it's time for scoring for our recommender score for dune imperium where we try to critically evaluate the pros and cons this is going to get a 9 out of 10. it is excellent admittedly we're pretty late to do an imperium because at a glance we're just like okay it's designed by someone called paul that's that's funny but this game's about securing the imperium with workers okay there is no mechanic mentioned that is really revolutionary or that exciting when mentioned in a vacuum like okay you're racing up these tracks with workers cool is that even thematic just look at the box it says dune with some moons on it okay so what right i'm just gonna go fire some laz guns in uh these other dune games that sounds more exciting this game box is like the mechanics in this game at a glance pretty subtle and not flashy so paul's creation here doesn't have last guns or diplomacy like maybe those other dune games it's a euro you'll hear those familiar work replacement turrets where from the card lady jessica is the worker to plop down and consult on selective breeding doing selective breeding on your turn yeah selective breeding in this blend of work replacement deck builder we kept finding novelty around all the cards and dune imperium is especially impressive when it comes to deck building decisions there's a slow approach to deck building in the game's fewer hands and even deciding when not to buy can be a real mind warp in fact one of the most impressive draws to return to this game again and again is the skill curve it takes in buying you adapt with the random card flips and opponent's direction of decks as you're also deciding if you even want to buy this route because maybe you want to play your best card for its top not the bottom benefit oh and then how about passing early in a work replacement you may want to just pass early to secure that super good card right now man passing up turns in a work replacement is not normal at all for those maybe tired of work replacement or deck builders feeling maybe too linear this blend really spices it all up you can't just place wherever you want and you can't just blindly trash weaker cards because you may need their target location no autopiling to trash all your starting cards here it's not an old school euro filled with point salad either and here we have to discuss the luck for a euro wonky hands can happen to the best of deck building players so remember to shuffle well cause you're not getting that many ghosts at your deck here and wow did someone say top deck from intrigues that give you points late game oh and then maybe after you buy well still guard gets flipped and i really wanted him and now my opponent grabs on his turn freaking unlucky again i needed that water so bad however a lot of this randomness ties into the murkiness of late game tension and really encourages healthy randomness adaptation like you don't really know what intrigues your opponents are going to play but over time you'll know that oh these are the cards that copies of each other and oh there's only five entries in the deck that directly give you points plus there's that nice probability calculation with your deck you don't have perfect pressures to get perfect hands but you can really start to cater your outcomes and predict your relative strength if you do decide to draw three cards right now probably just probably you'll get those needed daggers to boost your combat to get that final 2 vp to clinch the game and that's the thrill of dune imperium there's so many varied cards that can be bought and then combined fun momentous spaces on the board and all sorts of injuries to change the outcomes of battles and alliance races the very race of grabbing those alliances makes victory point leads frequently in question or in some games some guy is trying to stall the game out by trying to tie conflicts so that no one gets vp while he builds a point engine so the spice must flow for his deck when the theme does hit gameplay dune imperium is able to have dune flavored turns with workers that other dune board games can't really provide and when the theme doesn't quite line up with your actions you probably won't care too much because you're so engrossed in the flexibility of each multi-layered card for 50 bucks msrp this game is a steal there's eight playable characters in one box there's all these chunky wooden components and all these buyable cards to give you reason to return to this again and again for that one to two hour slot in your game night and there's even app integrated free additional game modes if you download direwolf's app on your phone or through your computer via steam it automates your one to two player mode cool but then there's two actual game modes here we're talking about which we haven't played an actual game with but look awesome if you think the same deck building hands are a little stale well then you can play blitz that gives you new hands and also reduces the play time and how about this from a page of the original 1979 dune you can predict who wins the game and you get a bonus if you guessed correctly there's also arakin scouts which probably makes the game a little bit longer with more decisions it has these scouts going around the imperium which means it's essentially adding an event deck spaces will have more abilities from rounds around adding so many more options with this expansion the rise of x on the horizon for us that adds more characters cards and changes some spaces on the board we just can't wait to get our hands on that we just couldn't find it anywhere in time to make this review dune imperium is going to get a 7 out of 10 for me it's a good time so i got a disdain for euros because solitaire dull themes boring aesthetics yadda yadda you've heard all before usual complaints against euros however dune imperium does a lot better compared to most other euros for me primarily because of two reasons more interaction and a ridiculous amount of options doing imperium lets you play as solitaire or as interactive as you want through its progression systems you want to constantly race other players to see who can build the biggest army the fastest every round totally viable way to get points you want to build a deck that can bite a victory point card every turn regardless of what everyone else is doing go right ahead obviously i would prefer even more conflict than what's currently here but i super respect the design decisions this game takes because of how everyone has options for what they want their gameplay to be and all the options you can pick are great because while your turns are super simple play a card place a worker there are so many systems working in tandem with each other you want a crunchy euro dune imperium has you covered what i especially like about having all these different systems and currencies that connect with each other is that i feel so much more blocked off by opponents going to certain locations in comparison to other euros where oftentimes i find i can still make my engine work just fine with just some minor tweaks that isn't the case here you can have your whole hand ruined pretty easily by someone going to the spot you wanted even more so for the spots that get you bigger armies if you want a ton of spice you want a ton of water you want some of whatever it is that you really need you'll really got to secure it in this game as a result i'm not bored between turns because not only do i have a lot to think about because of the build paths but i also have to account for other players taking my spots to a much higher degree backup plans for your builds are so important because there's no way you're going to be able to contest everything so you really going to have to pick and choose where you want to put in effort especially because everyone plays as different characters who have slight advantages in different areas but those slight advantages will heavily incentivize certain lines of play so it can be easy to get caught up and being pulled towards two different directions and to top all of this off there's a really healthy amount of rng in my opinion your car draws will definitely matter as well as when the big point conflict rewards pop up and what entry cards everyone's gonna draw i'm always a fan of adapting to a widely dynamic game states and dune imperium has such an amazing sandbox to do so because of how much everyone has to contest the different resources so why isn't my personal score higher if all this sounds like endless praise well first of all it's still a euro with some interaction but not a super high amount meaning that i'm still far more focused on what i'm doing and can still get away with just not paying attention to others if i know i can't be affected by their decisions either because i already have what i need or the cars in my hand just happen to be extremely versatile and second like all good euros there's a certain level of pressures you can have around mid late game where once you see everyone's bills in the point track it's really clear to me who's going to win and who doesn't stand a chance like in the first game i played i was the beast's rabon dude and i happened to solidify two faction alliances super early so there was no chance in hell anyone could make me lose my signet ring power plus i had a really slim deck that frequently spawned in tons of soldiers and i became insanely hard to contest during fights on top of drawing some entry cards that just shot me up to 12 points so yeah super clear i was gonna win very disengaged around halfway through then the second one i was experimenting with some weird strats like trashing a bajillion cars and trying hard to do some bennett jesuit combos with my hand but unfortunately i just had my booster shot in that day and miscounted my resources constantly because i was just like oh a few dreams so i ended up being like a turn or two behind everyone on top of buying the third worker when i totally didn't need it because so many cards i had didn't even need to be played did i just reveal it early cash on point cards no problem that one i was very sure i was gonna lose especially when my opponents had much more efficient ways of doing what i was trying to do also there's this card reverend mother that makes others discard that one's kind of terrible if you're not going first over opponents aren't really trying to buy high cost cards so god damn i got caught by that noob trap pretty hard i was like oh it makes other people discard oh that's so good but again this is all personal tastes i would obviously still recommend doing imperium in a heartbeat if you're looking for a euro with a really unique blend of deck building and work replacement remember that for comparison a majority of euros are threes or fours for me because what ends up happening is that we all end up just jerking off in our own corners totally disengaged from each other and then whoever computed the hardest wins which is not my idea of a good time for a social in-person gathering with friends wingspan plus a lot of them just aren't complex enough to me in terms of options and build paths it's too often that you're hardline into certain dominant strategies or openings and there's just not that much room for player expression as a result all right yeah process score done check it out boom it's a good game you know it is okay now it's time for my personal score on dune imperium and this is going to get a 8 out of 10. i have a great time with it right away i just love the art style here and when this gets combined into me playing some of my favorite characters from the hand to do actions and get their card benefit man i knew i had a winner as i save up for gurney halleck on my turn this crazy crazy ability it feels like a rare card that i'm putting into my deck to permanently have kind of like a tcg a trading card game that being said i'm also a huge fan of deck builders and doing imperium having this slower deck building pace i actually ended up really liking it the stakes are higher and i'm encouraged to carefully manage my hands because getting good hands has real consequences on the board where i'm actively competing with my opponents over points that's that conflict interaction with this cube pushing i know cube pushing right but it's super tense here i'm constantly agonizing over how to min max to barely win while keeping track of other people's potential daggers and that paired with only having two actions a turn to send troops in ah there's just not enough time i've even had in late game cool negotiation happened over the voice placement so there's definitely quite a bit of interaction here for this leaning into my euro side of my collection how much money do you have [Laughter] it's never a good sign that someone looks over it today how much you got i love that updating of strategy without cards come out or with how people are racing up diplomacy the cool thing about dropping this review later is that i have gotten to play it almost a dozen times and i found some small personal gripes i've noticed that when i'm not injecting novelty through deck building due to weak hand draws unlucky again or off of just a more conservative buying strategy the game can feel a bit repetitive actually especially in mid game when mediocre conflicts come up and i'm just stuck with boring cards then the board is always exactly the same there is just conflict after conflict every round and that in a 1-3 player game makes dune imperium feel stale sometimes as for asymmetry there being just one signet ring in your deck at max feels like a miss opportunity but hey it's probably really hard to balance around that this makes many of the characters not really feel like cool characters from the lore just things with decent abilities that sometimes go off but of course it's still great and this slower roll of deck progression with consistent late game tension has me excited for more doing imperium the more i play the more i understand this intrigue deck 2 where i'm guessing what i could be drawing or what my opponents are drawing and this really reminds me of my beloved game takanoko just like takanoko i could find myself just eventually memorizing the hidden deck you draw from for that maximum counter play and i've played takanoko probably over 50 times a lot of them thanks to bga and it still hasn't gone old dune imperium is making my heavier rotation as of now and maybe in the future it will be within that top 15 games of all time for me of all time just like my beloved takanoko it is way more complex than takanoku though that video was actually suggested by our patrons over at patreon.com so if you want to go ahead and join that maybe vote in these polls for me to review these games check out the link below but now we got all those homies that are voting on that thing so we got manuel g brian c clifford hmw max b borah jeremy mc charlie p quinton sms drafts r alvin y bumps k ryan d jeff l matt g p or z spinner step one ryan j brad gtm appeared marquette james mmv trust me junior draw straight bass vibrato so we ryan's equal announcement basically omar fmy ethan p bradley j john c galvin v jorge ssko alex l robar sentenced to two dff draw sharp pat cheryl c wayne collin amir h right left spin counter s allah books we also got two bats cardboard we got zl and jeff l we got that guy right there we also got our mad lady of cardboard we got amy so that was dune imperium again we're super hyped for the expansion and remember to like comment and subscribe see you later see you on the rise of x or maybe another video bye-bye

Channel: Shelfside

Views: 25,880

Keywords: tabletop, shut up and sit down, dice tower, boardgamegeek, geek and sundry, no pun included, watch it played, prozd board game, dicebreaker, rahdo runs through, actualol, jongetsgames, 3 minute board games, tom vasel, no rolls barred, before you play, bgg, susd, quackalope, boardgameco, paula deming, shelfside, heavy cardboard, our family plays games, rolling solo, dune imperium board game, dune imperium review, dune imperium how to play, dune board game, dune board game review, rahdo

Id: NvTupalYQF4

Length: 44min 7sec (2647 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2022