Imperium: Legends | Qin vs. Mauryan | Solo Playthrough | With Colin

hello everyone and welcome to the one-stop co-op shop this is colin and today we are going to do a playthrough of imperium legends now this game actually comes in two boxes one is imperium legends the other one is imperium classic i highly recommend if you're thinking of getting into this game get check out classic first i unfortunately got legends legends has the harder civilizations so that's what we're gonna play i have civilization coming actually this weekend but i was super excited about the game so i thought i'd show you how to play lose horribly but at least that way you guys can pick up the game and play it yourself i will say paul grogan did a great absolutely great live play of this game i'll put a link in the description below if you want to see that the designers nigel buckle and david tertzy are also in the chat so anytime he makes a mistake they let him know uh it does make the video a little longer because it is live but he does a great job i highly recommend checking that out for our play through we are going to be the qin dynasty which is a level two difficulty out of five and then we're going to be playing against the mauryans as the bot player let's set up and jump in i will say that although the rule book is solid it's it's pretty good uh it is i feel like it hasn't much to be desired when i when i was first reading it i didn't really understand how the game played so watching this play through hopefully will help you just jump right in because right after i watch paul grogan's play through i was able to play this no problem the first part of setup is setting up your own player area so we're going to play the qin dynasty i've chosen that because it is one of the easier ones in this box and the first thing you'll want to do is grab all of your specific cards you can tell by the color you can see that they have pink all on the left hand side that shows us that these are our cards for the qin dynasty we start by placing out our power card now there is an a side and a b side the b side is easier we're going to play on the a side because it gives us one additional ability that we could potentially use you'll see how that works in the play through if your dynasty has any other cards with this symbol you'll also put the mount into play but for the qin dynasty we don't have to worry about that next you'll want to grab your accession card here you can tell it's your accession card by the circle here in the left hand corner you're going to place that out on the board and then shuffle all of the moon cards you can see the moon symbol here and place them on top upside down as you're playing through the game you'll gain these cards when you gain the accession card you're going to move from a barbaric dynasty over to an empire which is really cool next you'll want to grab all of your development cards these can be in any order that you would like because as you earn them you can choose which ones you want to pick so i usually just have them in any sort of order next you'll want to grab your state card and you'll place it on the barbarian side some of the dynasties will actually start on the empire side some may never actually move to the empire side yeah it's so cool each one is completely unique i've only played three different types and so far every single one is played so differently the qin dynasty will start as a barbarian and then finally we'll grab all the cards that have this arrow here and normally we would actually slot these into the specific spot so these are unrest cards here's the thing they're both at player counts of three or four we're only playing with two players so we're actually just going to remove these from the game the final remaining cards are just pink on the left hand side with no symbols that's going to be our starting deck our starting deck will be nine cards big and this game is a deck builder so you're going to be building and placing cards into your deck you're also going to be calling cards out of your deck either through garrisons or through putting them into our history lots of cool different things so with our deck we'll shuffle this up and draw five cards but we'll do that in just a bit this is how i like my player area set up i'll be placing all of my cards down over here then what we need to grab are five exhaust tokens we're only going to be able to activate five exhaust abilities each turn we have three action tokens we'll have three materials that we can use to build different cards we have two population and one progress and progress is worth one victory point at the end of the game for each progress token our next part of setup is to set up the market place now there's different types of cards that we're going to be gaining throughout the game over here on the far right hand corner we have our unrest cards based on the amount of players we have a total of eight of these in this deck if ever in the solo game there are no cards left in this deck you automatically lose so you want to make sure that doesn't happen over here we have our region cards they're yellow when you gain those and you put them on the board think of it as like you're controlling those specific regions over here we have what are called our uncivilized cards they're green we're also supposed to in this stack have any that are both uncivilized and the next symbol which is considered civilized you'll put all of those in this pile so they've got the green title head over here next we have our civilized cards and then finally we have our tributaries so with all these different sets of cards what we're going to do is we're going to shuffle up the region cards draw six of them randomly place them up here and reveal one down here then we're going to take the remainders of them and put them over here do the same thing for the uncivilized and civilized cards putting the remainder over here and taking all of the of these tributary cards and shuffling them in with all the remaining cards over here this will be considered the main deck and it's one of the ways the game will end when there's no more cards in the main deck that means that we will only have one more round and the game will be complete so i'll go ahead and do that quick here we have the marketplace all set up our next step is to place one progress token on each civilized card with no uncivilized symbol on it so that would be these mercenaries and these money lenders finally any card in the marketplace that's not a region so it could be civilized uncivilized a tributary we need to place one on risk rest card underneath them like so what happens is if you gain one of these cards you're also going to gain one of the unrest cards and those unrest cards will go into your deck if you can see in the bottom left hand corner these will gain you minus two victory points at the end of the game not to mention we now only have four in this deck and if all four are gone and we need to and they're all gone we immediately lose the game so we've got to watch that our final part of the market setup is to place the king of kings on side a fame card here we're then going to grab the deck of fame cards i'm going to discard the top two cards since we're playing a two player game and that's another way that the game can end if all of these are removed and someone gains a fame card that will end the game the final piece of setup now is the bot player so the first thing you want to do is choose a nation i've chosen the mauryans then what we need to do is create their dynasty deck we create this deck by starting with their development cards what we're going to do is put them in order of victory points now for the ai any of the asterisk symbols they're automatically worth five and any question marks are always equal to the highest value of whatever that question mark value can be so we have here uh this is a five victory pointer and another five victory pointer for the ai so those two are the highest they're going to go on top of this pile then we'd have the three victory point followed by the two followed by the other two and followed by the one so that is going to create the bottom part of our dynasty deck then we're gonna grab their ascension card place that on top of that deck and then finally grab all their moon cards shuffle these up and place them on top of this card this is their dynasty deck and is yet another way that the game can end if ever their dynasty deck is totally depleted that means we will complete the game also just like a regular player once they have earned that ascension card they're going to move from barbarian over to the empire side and what's really cool i'm going to pop it up on the screen right now there are charts for every single civilization which means that each civilization as a bot player will play differently when we reveal their cards they're going to do these certain actions and you'll see how it works in the play through but it's really cool okay back to the remaining cards now these cards just like us it's going to create their deck they have eight cards i'm going to shuffle these up this card they're not going to have any of these these abilities and also it's been confirmed that they will not gain any of these victory points the only reason we have this card out is to remind us that it's the mauryans and then also whenever they put cards into history we'll just slide them underneath here they don't start with any tokens on their board they're not going to be using action tokens or exhaust tokens what i've done now is i've taken their eight card deck shuffled it up and then placed one card underneath each card in the marketplace then during their turn they're going to roll this die and if we roll to one that means they're not going to activate this card and they're going to activate all the other cards in sequential order after doing that they're going to discard those cards and then re-draw back up if they can't redraw that's when they gain a card from their dynasty deck shuffle them back up and then continue going finally because they are considered the second player they're going to grab the solstice card and just set them beside them because we need to remember after their turn we have to activate any solstice effects they won't have any but we will so there you have it that's the setup of imperium legends the solo mode i'm excited to start playing i'm telling you do not watch this for strategy watch this to understand how the game plays and what not to do i'm likely not going to win i have not beaten the mauryans as the chin but i'm going to give it my best go let's talk about the turn setup and then we'll jump into our playthrough so during your turn you can either do one of these three things activate innovate or revolt then you have your cleanup phase you're going to do that each of us are going to do that after that we do our solstice phase and then we move to the next round activate is what you're going to see us doing most of the time that means we can take up to three actions and use up to five of our exhaust abilities if we want to innovate we can just discard our entire hand then break through for one of these types of cards and what breaking through means is we can just dig through the top the the cards at the top of the deck or potentially gain one that's in the marketplace and not gain the unrest card which is kind of cool finally we can revolt and that would mean we would just return any of those unrest cards that are in our hand and that's all that we're going to do then we move to that cleanup phase we're going to add one of progress to one of the cards on the market but since we are the chin dynasty you'll see that's a little bit different then we're going to clear all of our action exhaust tokens we can discard any number of cards and that's important because we want to run through our deck relatively quickly so that we can gain those cards that will help us turn into an empire instead of a barbarian state and then finally we'll draw up to five cards with this i think we're ready to start our playthrough now i want you to understand what our chin dynasty card allows us to do so we have a passive when you place any progress on a card in the market instead you're gonna place one of the population tokens and then we can exhaust this that's using one of our five exhaust tokens and then if you gain a card from the market with a population token on it we can double the population gained it's totally cool you can see over on this side too we're going to gain victory points at the end of the game based on whatever's value is here do note that the maximum amount you can ever gain from a card is 10 vp so this one will gain 1 vp per continuous card in play that's not considered a region so we want to get a lot of continuous cards in play now let's go ahead and draw our hand of five cards we have legalism here which is an exhaust card and it's a continuous card so if we get that out into play that might be good we have the western zoo this is a region we have confucianism we have mandate of heaven that's important and we have advance okay so we have a total of three actions let's see what we want to do it takes an action to play a card out from your hand the first one we're going to play is advanced now this does not have the continuous effect icon on this so after we play this we'll place it into our discard pile they recommend placing your action tokens on the cards so you remember which actions you've done because there's going to be exhausting you might get extra actions and whatnot so i'll try and do that as well we can choose here to pay three materials to acquire either an uncivilized or a civilized card or we could pay five to actually break through which means we wouldn't have to worry about the unrest cards or we could actually just draw from the top of those specific decks well i don't have five materials i only have three to start off with so let's go ahead and pay those three oh another thing to note do you see this symbol up here what that means is i can only play this card while my civilization is in the barbaric mode if i was an empire we would no longer use this advance card this would be a useless card i want to try and get rid of it one of the best parts about this game is when you gain cards from the marketplace they actually go directly into your hand the one i am eyeing is this art card because how the chin work is they generally get a lot of unrest cards if you read this ability it's only during the solstice phase so that would be at the end of the round if we're in our barbaric mode we may pay one materials to return one of those unrest cards which is pretty cool we can also later when we're an empire spend three materials to actually gain one progress however since we're picking this card up right now we're also going to have to gain the unrest card underneath it and now we immediately replace this the card that we've replaced it with is religion and that's an amazing card for us look at this exhaust this car we can gain an action but during the solstice you either have to take an unrest card or pay three materials our second action i think i'm just going to play that art card i'm going to get it out onto the table so now when we have the solstice phase we can activate this each round this card is out on the table our third and final card and probably one of my favorites of the qin dynasty is confucianism this card you can you have to exhaust it and spend an action so it's very expensive and discard two cards but you can choose to acquire any of these types of cards tributary the uncivilized or civilized cards with population on them or you can return two unrest cards from your discard pile so i could actually discard unrest cards and then use this to get rid of them which is pretty awesome i've now done my three actions i could still do exhaust abilities but right now i don't have any that i can do so i'm going to end my turn that means we're gonna go to the cleanup phase first thing we would do is normally place one of these progress tokens on one card in the marketplace but instead since we are the qin dynasty we're gonna place a population token we're gonna drop that population token on this religion card the biggest thing this does is it makes sure that the enemy bot doesn't try and exile this card so there are going to be times when you can exile cards in the marketplace and then you will refresh it with new cards but you can't exile cards that have tokens on them so those progress tokens or these uh population tokens next we'll need to clear all of our action tokens and any of our exhaust tokens that we have out we just had our three actions we're good to go finally we can discard as many cards as we want from our hand now if you remember what i said at the beginning of the game our hand our deck size was nine so if i discard all four of these cards that will mean i'll go through my deck and i think i think that's what i'm going to do i mean i've got good cards here but yeah so i'm going to discard all of them now i get to draw up to five i have four cards here that i can draw when i can't draw my fifth one what i do is i grab that top card of my nation deck here and i put it into my discard pile this one's called writing systems then i will shuffle up my deck like so and then we'll go ahead and draw our fifth card we have prosperity school of diplomacy and unrest card duke zhang of kin and the mandate of heaven now the bot is going to go and the first thing they're going to do is roll their die they get a 2. so what that means is we're going to place this 2 right here now you see these numbers here if you were playing this game competitively that wouldn't be here at all they're only used for the solo variant of this game since we've placed this two here we're not going to activate this card we're going to activate all the rest of the cards in sequential order let's go ahead and flip that first card oh we have our unrest card this is interesting we're starting right with this one so there is an faq for this game the unrest cards were not explained for the solo bot player so let me pop up that chart again so you can see it if you look at the chart there are two parts of the chart the top part is for when the bot is in the barbarian mode and then the bottom is when it changes into an empire you use the bottom part and if you look there there are no unrest activations or card icons on the far left side so you'd think you'd do the other effects on those that's not the case what's what's been faq'd is that if you flip an unrest card like this all you do is you place it back into the pile of on of unused unrest cards that's all you do makes it a little bit easier and doesn't make the bot so insane so all we'll do with this card is discard it or put i shouldn't say discard it we're going to put it with all the other unrest cards that we have over on the right hand side of the table next we'll flip this card now this card says prosperity so let's look at that chart again that chart actually has a specific prosperity icon card name so what we have to do is discard the top card from the bot deck and then they're going to gain one prosperity or one progress per region in play oh they don't have any regions in play awesome that will change and then you may draw a card and whenever it's in bold like that that's actually talking about you as a player so what we'll do is we'll grab their deck discard the top card of it we'll also place this prosperity card into the discard pile and then we get to draw a card let's see what card we get we get an unrest card great let's go ahead and flip their next card oh it's another unrest card that's great the only bad thing is is we're removing all of their unrest cards right now so later on they're going to do more activations okay now this one is a region and it's also a continuous card so looking at that chart here you can see that there's a region and there's a continuous card effect so which one do you do you always do the one that's higher up on the chart first so since it's a region uh and that one's higher up than the continuous card effect we'll do the region effect that states to discard the top card from the bot deck play this region and then exile a card from the market the marions are going to have a ton of regions so i'm just gonna place them over here and we're gonna pile them up all the stuff that's on these cards it doesn't matter all that matters is the chart itself so we'll just place it here and then we might need to reference how many of those that they have out in play we're also going to grab the top card of their deck and simply discard it once again that's pushing them through so they can develop faster because they'll gain their dynasty cards faster as well then they have to exile a card from the marketplace they'll always go to the farthest left car that does not have any tokens on it so that would be this domestic domestication we'll discard that card into the exile area that's technically over here but i'm just gonna put it up there off camera this unrest card would then go back into this space and we immediately replenish it with archipelago that's a region since it's a region we don't have to place an unrest card underneath it our bot has now completed their turn they're going to place one of the progress tokens on the card that is straight above where this dice is then they're going to move all of their cards down over the i should say the only one that's left out down one space and then they'll replenish this up to five now i don't have any more cards in their deck so that means i'm going to have to take their discard pile shuffle it up and we're going to add the top card of their nation's deck into this so shuffle all of these up like so and then we'll place these out oh my gosh their deck is only one card big yeah they're going to go through their deck quickly the nice thing is they didn't take my religion card yes so now what we do is we move to the solstice phase we have an effect here that says if we are a barbarian state we are we can spend one materials we can't do that we don't have it so we aren't going to activate that our ai or bot doesn't have any effects so now we'll just move to our turn we're going to go ahead and activate for our turn that means we can use our three actions and exhaust abilities so the first thing i'm going to do is use our confucianism here we have to exhaust this and spend an action and discard two cards i think it makes sense that we discard the two unrest cards because who wants to hold on to that anyways but that's going to allow us to acquire any one of these types of cards or we can actually return up to two of those unrest cards from our discard pile uh but let's not do that now you know what we're grabbing we're grabbing that religion card now you might notice something i forgot to put an unrest underneath the religion card i should have done that so that should be there we will now grab this religion card we gain that one population and let's replenish with a jade mask oh that's another great card place an unrest card underneath it like so we're also going to exhaust our chin card here that it says if you gain a card from the market with population on it double the population gained why the heck not so instead of gaining one population we just gained two more population that gives us a total of four to play with now this might be a little bit risky but that's kind of how i play i might get totally covered in unrest and i'm gonna have to figure out how to deal with that but my next two actions i'm gonna play mandate of heaven and religion so mandate of heaven gives us an exhaust effect that says add one population from the supply to a card in the market then you may abandon this card but during the solstice phase it says discard two cards so if i have this out during the solstice phase i have to discard cards now what this says when it says you may abandon this card abandon means you place that card into your discard pile so what i can do is exhaust this card then place it into my discard pile after doing the effect so i don't have to discard two cards i also have religion here which says exhaust gain one action so technically i've used all of my actions but i'm going to exhaust religion so i gain one more so now i will essentially have four actions around as long as that card is out and in play with that one additional action what do you say we play the duke zhang of kin so that will be our final action it says cannot be played unless mandate of heaven is in play you better believe i just put it into play it says return up to two of those unrest cards from your hand or discard pile i'm gonna grab the two from the discard pile i put there before i'm returning them back to the supply thank goodness then we can break through for either a region or a tributary and put this card into your history history is something that's quite unique in this game after you've played this card i now i'm going to place that card underneath my chin dynasty card i will no longer have access to it but at the end of the game if there was victory points which there isn't on this card if there was i would still gain that ability or gain those victory points so it's i still have the card but it's not going to be in my deck it's a great way to thin it and what's really cool they did this really cool thematic thing where a lot of the characters are one-time effects and then they move on to history really kind of cool how they did that it totally makes sense so let's go ahead and try and break through for either a region or a tributary and then i'm going to place this underneath my chin card there's a couple regions here i could grab i could also just say a region and grab the top card of that region deck that deck of five cards but i can usually get region cards without unrest with that breakthrough that means i don't gain the unrest so i think i'm going to go for tributary which means i need to go from the top of this main deck here i'm going to dis just reveal cards until i find a tributary and i'm going to gain it so we have espionage uh we have lakes okay that's not one all the cities oh my goodness okay here we are we have the a true skins if you see here we can only play it when we are a barbarian state but when we play we just gain two progress which is awesome i'm then going to take all the cards that i just revealed and shuffle them back up into the main deck i've now completed my four actions now there is something that i forgot to do you guys when i grabbed a nation's card and put it into my discard pile i needed to place an exhaust token there if i didn't have enough exhaust tokens to do that or i already had one on there i wouldn't have been able to place that nation's card into my discard pile it's to prevent people from maybe placing multiples in one turn or one go now what we'll do is we'll place one of these population tokens on one of the cards and i think the jade mask is just so good i'm gonna place it on the jade mask that lets me draw three cards and then put a card on top of my deck now we'll go ahead and clear all of our tokens and then as much as i like my four cards in hand i'm gonna discard all four of my cards because now when i draw up one two three four i only have four here so i'm going to place into my discard pile oh it's an unrest well at least i'm getting it out of my nation deck put that into my discard pile place that exhaust token there shuffle these up and then draw my fifth card well this hand actually looks pretty good i've gone in advance although i don't have any materials i've got the western zhao legalism school of diplomacy and writing systems now it's the bots turn now i didn't talk about what happens if you roll a six if you roll a six he's going to activate all five of their cards here and then they won't place out a progress token on any of the cards out here because they only do that based on what die they roll so let's see what they get they get a one beautiful so they won't do number one let's flip number two first the first bot card is chanakya looking at our chart here it's not advanced it's not prosperity it's not an attack card or a region card it's not a continuous it's not an empire card so it's an other it says if able acquire an uncivilized card really it's going to take my jade mask if able return a region which it can in discard oh no in the discard pile no it doesn't have any discard pile to the top of the deck place the top card from the dynasty deck into the discard pile and put this card into history well lots going on so the only uncivilized card they have out here is this jade mask so they're going to gain this one population that i put there and gain the jade mask and the unrest underneath it we're going to flip these over and that's going to be placed on top of their deck then we immediately replace that card and place an unrest we have code of laws then they're gonna have to take this region card and place this also on top of the bot deck and then they're gonna grab this top dynasty card so nanda dynasty and they're going to place that into their discard pile finally they're going to take the chanaka card and they're going to put it into history so they're going to put it underneath their marion's card and that will be the end of that card their next card they have prosperity okay looking at the chart discard the top card from the bot deck well we should know what that is because we just put it on there that is a region we'll place it in the discard pile gain one prosperity oh yes per region and play they just put that region no longer in place so they don't get any of that you may draw a card and that's for us so we're definitely going to draw a card i almost always want to draw a card we gain prosperity as a card and then we'll simply discard this all right their next one oh they have chandragupta looking at our chart here this is an other effect again if able acquire an uh uncivilized card they're not going to be able to return a region because they don't have any out they're going to place another card from their dynasty deck into their discard pile and put this one into history so they're going to take my code of laws which looked really cool and that unrest card and pop them both on top of their deck they're then going to replace that with the oracle they're going to grab another dynasty card okay this one's an unrest card and put that into their discard pile and then they're going to place chandragupta into history here we go this is their final card they're going to play it's just an unrest card so we'll just place that into the unrest pile that will end their turn since they roll to one they'll place one prosperity onto the archipelago then they will take their deck to three four five nice so at least they didn't upgrade this time but they only have one card in their deck and we know a couple of these are unrest cards which is good now we'll move to the solstice phase we're not going to be able to activate art we have no materials and unfortunately with religion we're going to gain one unrest card we'll place that into our hand now it's our turn let's activate our three actions and you know the first thing i'm going to do i'm going to exhaust religion so i have four oh and i forgot i have this out oh i should have activated that and discarded it ah this is the problem of recording i really should have exhausted this added a population and then abandoned it but i forgot to do it so since this is out we have to discard two cards we'll discard the school of diplomacy and prosperity not great but i got to do something and i need to get rid of this this card is a bit of a double edged sword it says -2 vp if not in play at the end of the game so at the end of the game we actually will gain 2 minus 2 vp if we don't have this out but if we have this out it's going to cause us to discard cards kind of obnoxious our first action for this turn we're going to play legalism we can exhaust this to pay a three population and inquire either a region or a tributary so i'm going to exhaust this now and i'm going to try and claim a region but i have to lose three out of the four of my population a bit rough but i think it might be worth it we're also going to be smart and activate our mandate of heaven we're going to add one progress from the supply to a card in the market then you may abandon this card we're definitely abandoning this card we're going to place that one population on this lowlands card and we're going to grab it exile a card from the market that means we can you know remove it from the market and then we may garrison a card what gareth singing means is we can place any card that's in our hand underneath this card that essentially takes it out of our deck but it's not considered in play so we can't do that with that mandate of heaven and say that it's in play but it's not in our deck that's cheating but what's nice about this card is during the solstice i will have to discard a car but i can gain some materials i really need a way of gaining materials so this is going to go to our hand we'll replace that with a new region that one will be the grasslands we'll also exhaust our chin card here that's our last exhaust card so we can double the amount of population that we got from that card so we'll grab another one that is a total of three we have three more actions we're going to play all three of these cards two of them are regions and one is just the writing systems which we can exhaust to put a card from our discard pile into your history to draw a card now i want to talk about this unrest card i'd love to be able to put that into our history but remember we're gonna gain all the victory points of what's in our history so then we'd gain the minus two so i don't want to do that that's the same with garrison cards you're going to include them when you're calculating your score so you can't garrison something that's negative victory points and assume you're not going to deal with it the only way you can get rid of something like that is exiling it then it's no longer in your deck or in your history or out in your play area let's now activate these one at a time so this one we can gain one awesome one materials that's our first materials this one we don't have to worry about this one here we have to exile cars in the market we don't get a choice we may garrison a card and i'm not going to do that either the only two cards we can exile are these two because of the ones that do not have tokens on them so i guess i'm going to do the grasslands and we'll reveal a new one we have the more that was my four actions this round i have used all five of my exhaust tokens so that means i'm just going to place one of the population onto the oracle fingers cross he doesn't take it he's probably going to we'll now clean up all of our tokens we'll discard any cards that we would like to discard i'm going to discard both of these cards and then we're going to draw up to our hand size we only have three cards into our hand oh look at that the two unrest and the etruscans great we are then going to take our discard pile along with another nation's card glory awesome glory i need to have three regions out to be able to activate and that lets us get fame cards that's why i wanted to put these two out hopefully i can get a third one the two additional cards we drew were the school of diplomacy and the mandate of heaven and for whatever reason it's really easy for me to forget to do this i'm gonna place that exhaust token there to show that i can't grab more cards right now our bot is next oh they rolled a one again this card has not been activated two times in a row now i wonder what it is we'll flip their number two card oh it's just an unrest card here's their number three okay this looks to be a continuous card so they're going to gain one progress that'll be their first progress then discard the top card of the bot deck and put this into history they only have one card in their deck we'll discard advance they'll take that code of laws and they will bury it their next card will be another unrest wow i didn't realize how many unrest they had okay and now we have a jade mask looking at the chart here i believe that's an other as well and they're gonna steal my next uncivilized card that i wanted that oracle oh so they're going to do that they don't have any regions in play they're going to place the top part of their dynasty deck into their discard and put this card into history so they're going to grab this getting their second population what a jerk we're going to flip up the last one of the uncivilized after this when we need to put a card there we'll just grab from the main deck they're going to fly through their dynasty cards taking this top one pointing it into their discard pile they're going to take this one and throw it into history yeah they're going to take away my jade mask and hide it i hate it then they'll place one progress token here they'll take their deck and look at their deck is only too big so that means they're going to take their next dynasty card they're only what three cards away from becoming an empire already gondara is going to go into their discard pile let's shuffle and we've placed out our two additional cards let's move to the solstice phase first things first we have our lowlands card here we can gain three materials that will get us to four but then we have to discard a card well that's going to be really hard i think i'm going to discard an unrest what do you think then what we can do is we can pay one of those materials which we definitely will to return one of the unrest cards in her hand let's do that so i'll put this unrest card back into the supply and then with our religion card we have to either choose to gain an unrest or pay three materials i think i'm going to gain an unrest oh so much unrest over here after all of that it is now back to our turn so the first thing i'm going to do because i love doing this we're going to use our religion to gain a fourth action love it let's see what four actions we want to do my first action is i'm going to play the mandate of heaven i'm then going to exhaust it placing one population onto this watermill card i'm then going to abandon this son of a gun and put him in the discard pile action 2 i'm going to use my confucianism and an exhaust token and i'm going to spend an action and discard two cards i'm going to discard school of diplomacy and unrest i'm going to be able to acquire any one of these three cards or i could get rid of two unrest cards but now i have to have a population token on it well i just happened to do that with the water mill i'll grab that water mill and that one population as well as the unrest and put it into my hand i'll then replenish that card with education and that will get an unrest card because it is a civilized card and that came from the main deck because the civil our uncivilized deck is now empty i'm then going to use my final exhaust token on legalism i'm going to spend three population here to acquire a region that archipelago region has two progress on it don't mind if i do let's then replenish that with espionage that will gain an unrest card then i'll have my last two actions playing the watermelon and the archipelago so the watermill is another exhaust effect i don't have any more exhaust tokens so we'll just leave that out into play but the archipelago here you may put a card for your discard pile into your history although i like this card the school of diplomacy i seem to never use it and it's usually just clogging up my hand so i'm going to go ahead and put that into history so that's on my deck but i don't get victory points for it either so it's just out of the way we then have to exile a card from the market and i may garrison a card i don't think i want to garrison anything right now let's go ahead and exile this education i'm just going to leave the unrest there because no actually i don't need it because we've got another region we've got the lakes we've done all of our actions used all of our exhaust tokens so it's time to place our population token and i think i'm going to place it here in the mercenaries i'm hoping i can maybe get this card you can see here our play area is starting to implode i love it if i miss anything sorry let's get all of our tokens back we'll then discard our two cards that are in hand we have four cards here in our deck i've been able to do it every time is it a good thing i don't know we are now one away from becoming an empire we're going to place the eastern zoo into our deck let's shuffle it up and we'll draw one card it is the etruscans it's time for our ai to go we rolled a five not a one so that means they are going to activate this card what is it oh it's just a location looking at our chart we will discard the top card of their bot deck and then play this and exile a card from the marketplace so the top card of their deck is this one we'll just place that into their discard pile we'll play this out onto the table and the farthest left card here is espionage we'll go ahead and exile that replenish we have a location so we'll put this unrest back their second card will be just an unrest card so i'll just discard that their third their oracle card that they stole from me and that is going to be the other effect if able acquire an uncivilized card they can't ha if able return a region in discard to the top of the bot deck can't do that place the top card of their dynasty deck into their discard and put this into their history this card will be placed into history which by the way it's going to be worth 5vp for them oh i was so mad when they took that and they now have the indian elephants in their discard pile they have one more card they'll flip over it's just a region looking at the chart discard the top card from the bot deck so we'll discard another region and then put this into play and exile a card they're going to exile the farthest left most card and that's a bit of a bummer this fortified region is actually awesome but we'll get rid of that we'll place a new one okay this one is an uncivilized and civilized card so it gains an unrest card the more will then gain a progress token and we'll push this down let's see do they have enough cards two three four oh they just don't now looking at their dynasty deck they have another card here they have two more once they gain glory actually they only have one more once they gain that glory they become an empire and their deck is tiny we'll shuffle these up and place it here now it's the solstice phase starting with the lowlands we'll gain three materials that's gonna put us at six yes but then we have to discard a card how about the unrest then we'll do the religion effect gaining that unrest but then we'll spend one from art and we're still in the barbarian state just for a little bit pay one to return one so we'll just return the one that we got from the religion back to the supply i like that now it's time for us to go and the first thing is i need to take this token and place it on to my developments area because i did get a nation card this turn so i only have four of these tokens to use this route bummer and i'm definitely going to use one for the religion so i can gain a fourth action our first action will be to use the etruscans now i really should have used them a lot more but it is what it is they are only good when we're in the barbarian stage so that's why i really want to use in this now at least i'll gain two progress that'll put us up to a total of five i think of those then it seems like a perfect time for writing systems we're going to exhaust this put a card from our discard pile into your history to draw a card well we're going to put him in the history we're not going to see him again but they'll gain us three victory points at the end of the game and we get to draw a car which is actually pretty nice so we're going to draw the eastern zoo out action 2 we're going to play prosperity all players may draw a card now that includes the the bot we are going to draw a card we're going to grab the mandate of heaven they're going to simply take the top card of their deck and discard it so they discard the indian elephants that's right good i don't like that card now we get to choose one gain one materials per the grain symbols on all the cards out and play or gain one population per region and play i have three regions in play but the grain symbols i also have three and i'd much prefer to have the materials so i'm going to gain three materials i don't honestly know if it's grain but that's what i'm calling it you can see that's the symbol there i have one there i have one on the eastern or western zoo and then i have one on the archipelago this means i don't need to feel bad about using advance for our third action and we're going to use five materials we still have three left we're going to break through for an uncivilized or civilized card the mercenaries are a little too good to pass up on i'm gonna get a population and two more progress also they give me a free play which means i can play it for free it costs nothing to play it and then i just pay one population to gain an additional action yeah i am oh and as i did the breakthrough i don't gain the unrest card that's the whole reason i did that let's replace that with the amphitheater now remember i'm not going to be able to play that until i become an empire which i'm hoping will be at the end of this turn but during this turn i will not be able to play this because i am still a barbaric state i'm going to use this exhaust token so that i can then double the amount of population that i got from that so i'll gain one more population so i've got three population and three materials and five six seven progress i have a hand of four cards i have one more action to take you know what i'm taking glory this card cannot be garrisoned so i can't put it underneath the location i have to abandon three locations i have three or regions i have three regions out i'm going to take all three and put them in my discard pile ugh that means it's going to clog up my discard pile but now what i get to do is look at the top two cards of the fame deck and then i can take one of those cards and put the other one back sweet those are usually high victory point cards so we have independent it's a free play card we gain three materials and two population and gains of gains us three vp at the end of the game or we have magnificent free play draw card you may return an unrest card five vp whoa uh whoa which one do i want you know i keep getting unrest so this would help with the unrest but this gained three materials yeah but it's only worth three vp sometimes i have found i get too excited about the game and then when i come up my vp i'm like wait a second ah maybe we'll get magnificent later let's go ahead and grab uh independent i'll put magnificent back on top of the deck and this will go into my hand we've completed our turn we get to place one of the population tokens on a card in the marketplace i'm going to put it on the amphitheater we'll then clear up all of our tokens and then we get to decide if we want to discard any cards i'm going to discard all three of these keeping independent in my hand it's only worth three vp you guys i did the wrong choice oh i will then draw i've got three cards here plus the one that's four oh my gosh look at all of that unrest i might know what i'm going to be doing next time i still get to draw one more card since i can't i now will gain the long walls card but that will mean i have to place an exhaust token on to my development cards here but the next time i go through my deck i can purchase one of these as long as i have the materials to do so i'll place this into my discard pile shuffle it up and we'll go ahead and draw a card and we have another unrest yeah look at this hand four unrest and an independent hmm i think i might know what i'm going to do next turn oh i almost forgot i need to flip this card there we go we are now officially an empire go chins our bot will be next to go and they rolled a four still no sixes that's awesome our first card oh it's just an unrest card we'll just discard that okay what's our second one do we have advance they're still in the barbaric state so we're still looking at the top of this chart if able spend one progress well they have absolutely one exactly one progress to acquire one civilized card looking at the civilized cards out here this one is going to gain them five victory points plus one is six this one's only getting them one that's it and this one is five so they're gonna go for the money lenders they're gonna get that uh progress back but that also means since it's an acquire they're gonna get that unrest card and we'll replenish that with a new one we have the cataphract then they'll just discard advance let's flip over their next one they have prosperity all the interesting ones discard the top card from the bot deck so their top card should be that unrest card that we just saw yep then gain one ah dang gain one prosperity per location or region and play but we do get to draw a card they only have two regions in place so they'll gain two more of this prosperity and then we get to draw a card our card is the long walls sweet their last card here we have a continuous card looking at the chart that says gain one prosperity boy they're just gonna start gaining this all the way up they've got four of them discard the top card of the bot deck and put this in into history their top card is that money lenders card and putting this into history means it's gone for good they'll place a progress on the lakes slot sliding down all of their cards let's see two or three now they're going to have to grab a card here they're going to put the indian elephants into their deck let's shuffle these up and they are all set to go moving to the solstice phase we have art where we can now pay three materials to gain one victory point essentially i want all my materials so i'm not going to do that and then for religion we're definitely going to gain the one unrest card we're not going to pay the three materials to put that into our hand we no longer have that location in play to gain the materials a bit of a bummer but it is what it is now it's our turn and we're going to do the real quick activation we're going to call it revolt all we do is take all the cards the unrest cards into our hand and put them back into the supply unfortunately though that means we cannot do any actions not even free once so that's going to end our activation i'm going to place a second population onto this amphitheater hoping he does not grab that one we'll get our exhaust token back from our development cards i'm going to keep the two cards in my hand i might be slowing myself down too much but i like them too much oh we've got glory that's not great i don't have any regions in play prosperity also is not great here's our hand of five well that sure was a quick turn huh uh oh a five so close to a six but no six for uh the bot i will take that so our first card oh we've got the dynasty card this one is real simple they're just going to gain one up progress and then discard it second card what do we have here we have a region so they're going to discard the top card of their bot deck so that's going to be the indian elephants it's actually nicely discard that and then they're going to uh play this out and then exile a card on the market they'll exile this city let's see what their next card is going to be astronomy we'll flip their third card we've got the a city continuous card now when they're going to gain one of the prosperity tokens and then discard the top card of the bot deck and then this will be placed into history so they're going to discard advance actually that's nice but this will go into history so it's gone for good their final card activation is money lenders that one it's just going to be gaining one prosperity boy they are all of a sudden racking up points like nobody's business i mean i guess i did get rid of negative eight points with that action that i did but it always feels terrible when they do a ton of stuff and we do nothing okay and i think yep look at this two three they are going to gain their glory card which means now they're going to move from a barbarian state over to an empire as well let's shuffle these up and they are set to go for the next turn of course we first have to do our solstice with that we're going to activate our religion and that means we have to grab an unrest card i'm not going to pay the three materials i really want that and now we'll start our turn uh our first actions as an empire always so important right first thing we're going to do is exhaust religion to go ahead and gain that fourth action then we'll move to confucianism spending an exhaustion token and an action token discarding glory and unrest so we can acquire a card with a population token on it we happen to have just the thing with this amphitheater we'll go ahead and grab this we will have to grab the unrest card as well since it's an acquire but we also are gaining it to population let's refresh with an another card we have a civil service that will gain an unrest card and what do you say we exhaust our chin dynasty here so we can double the amount of population gained by that card so we actually gained four so i'll remove one of these and place a five token there that is nice well then of course play our free card here it does not cost us an action we're going to gain three materials and two population for independent next we'll play our long walls one for an action and amphitheater for an action this one has a passive effect that we can now reduce the cost of the materials to play one of those unrest cards by two so i haven't really read one of these cards to you but you can get rid of it by spending an action and you choose to pay either one population or three materials or discard two cards to get rid of this this allows us to do that with only a cost of one materials our amphitheater here we can exhaust this to return an unrest car from our discard pile to gain one of those progress tokens definitely going to do that but during the solstice we will have to discard a card i think we'll deal with it because getting rid of unrest cards from our discard pile is pretty awesome for our final action we're gonna play the eastern zoo we will gain one more population i think it gives us a total of ten we are going to garrison this prosperity so i'm gonna place it underneath it it doesn't mean it's gone forever but at least it's out of my deck i want to cycle quickly through the through my deck i'm looking to make all the long walls if i can and each one is going to gain us victory points per the ones that are out in place so i want them out we've completed our actions let's go ahead and place one population onto civil service we'll then replenish our tokens we can choose to discard a card the only card in my hand is this unrest definitely going to discard that and then we drop to five one two three four five we had six cards left bummer so we have mercenaries the western zoo we have the archipelago advance and lowlands back to our ai we'll roll this up he rolls a five still no six so his first card and now this is going to use the bottom part of the chart if we look here these indian elephants are an attack card and you're going to see it says breakthrough for a tributary put this card into history then i have to recall one of my regions let's see what tributary he finds and he gets the um the macedonians that'll be placed on top of his deck when i recall a region i'll just take this eastern zoo and put it into my hand any card that's garrisoned with it will also go to my hand card number two we have just an unrest card card number three we have prosperity now looking at the bottom of the chart though prosperity doesn't have anything here so it's not any of these top ones it looks like we just go to other others just gaining one of these progress tokens the last card to activate we have the indian elephants okay now this one is two different types if you look at the chart it is a barbarian card but it's also an attack card but the barbarian one is on top so we're going to do that first it says if able return a region in the discard pile to the top of the deck can't do that and then we're just going to put this card into history what that means is we'll place a third progress on the moors i need to get the moors uh then we will replenish two three four five no cards in their deck now let's go to the solstice phase looking at what we have here i'm not going to activate art but i do think i'm going to activate religion i've got lots of materials i'm going to discard three of them so i do not gain that unrest token or unrest card i should say i do though because i have the amphitheater have to discard a card and i think what i'm going to do is discard advance moving back to my turn the first thing i'm going to do is my religion i'm going to gain one action so i'll have four actions this turn i'm also going to use my writing systems here i can put a card from my discard pile into history to draw a card i'm going to put advance because advance i can't use i am no longer a barbarian state so i'm going to put that into history and that's going to allow me to draw the last card on my deck which is the mandate of heaven next i'm going to exhaust the amphitheater and i'm going to return from my discard pile one of these unrest cards now i'm pretty sure i forgot to do this last time i should have gained one progress token because i still only had seven now i should have a total of nine i personally don't feel like i have enough actions so what i'm going to do is play the mercenaries here it's a free play pay one of my uh population to gain a fifth action this turn so many actions i see a card i'd really like to get so what i'm going to do is exhaust confucianism and spend in action i'm going to discard two cards prosperity and the mandate of heaven and i'm going to claim one card with a population token on it this civil service is pretty awesome and has a passive where it can increase our hand size by one and during the solstice we'll gain two materials i need lots of materials to build walls right so i'm going to go ahead and grab this gaining that one population will refresh it with a city and i'll place an unrest card underneath it and this is too hard for me to resist i'm going to exhaust legalism spending three population and i'm going to gain a region the moors has three progress on it it's too hard for me not to grab and we'll replenish that with the highlands can you believe with all of that i still have four actions to do first one civil service we're just gonna put it out second one the western zoo out we'll gain one materials that'll put us back up to four materials i'm not going to garrison a card we're then going to play the lowlands we have to exile a card from the marketplace we can garrison i'm not going to do that and then here we'll gain one population and we can garrison i'm not going to do that so let's go ahead and take care of the market quick let's remove this astronomy and let's see what we get instead we get another region of the planes we've used all of our exhausts and all of our actions so we'll place one population onto cataphract hoping maybe i can get that card we have a pretty nice looking board state here we're going to reclaim all of our tokens we're most definitely going to discard the three cards we have in hand now when we try and draw up we have no cards in our decks so that means we can purchase one of our development cards and without a doubt we're going for long walls too we can exhaust that and pay one population to draw a cart absolutely it costs us a total of two of our materials and two population and you can see here we're going to gain one victory point per long wall in play every long wall says that so the more that we have of those out the more victory points we're gonna get now this will go into our discard pile and we get to draw up to seven uh six cards because of civil service civil service gives our hand size increased by one here's our hand of six we've got mercenary independent more archipelago glory and our long walls too we of course have to place one exhaust token on our development cards we cannot gain another until we remove that the qin dynasty is moving along let's see about the mauryans okay we rolled a three so they're not going to flip that card our first one if we look here this is a barbarian card it says return a region in our discard pile we do not have a region so then we're just going to place this card into history oh boy it's becoming a race okay now we have the macadonians the macadonians it looks like we have here gain one prosperity so they'll gain another prosperity and we're going to put this into their history we'll flip their next card over oh it's the same thing it's going to gain them one more progress and then they will put this into history their final card here is going to give them let's see if abel return an unrest card from their discard pile they don't have that otherwise gain one of this for their progress and put this card in history and oh boy are they going to rush through their deck you guys they're going to place a progress token here move this down they only have two cards in their discard pile so they're gonna gain one of these cards that's worth five victory points i'm gonna shuffle these up to a three or four and then from what i understand they're just gonna gain this one too and put it up to five they are gonna end this game quick and they're going to gain a ton of points let's activate all of our solstice effects we have the amphitheater we're going to have to discard the moors we have to discard a card on our hand we'll gain three materials because of this solstice effect so give us three but then we have to discard a card so i'm going to discard the archipelago then here we'll just gain two more materials that gives us a total of seven materials we'll then grab an unrest card for our religion card and with all the materials that we have we're definitely going to spend three of them to then be able to gain another progress token i want progress tokens now it's back to our turn so we're going to do our free play for the mercenaries spending one of our population we now have four actions this turn we'll also play independent which is free we're going to gain three materials and two population we'll then go ahead and play the long walls for our first of four actions wow we have lots of actions we are going to exhaust that and spend one of our population putting us down to six to be able to draw a card let's see what we get we get an unrest then i think we'll exhaust confucianism and use an action discarding both unrest cards so we can claim a card in the market we'll claim this cataphract here but we're also going to gain the unrest card okay then we'll place this unrest card here and we have corruption we'll then exhaust our amphitheater and remove one of these unrest cards they love going to the amphitheater and it's going to gain us another progress how much progress do i have i have 10 11 12 34 i 15 progress this card just seems awesome we're going to play it each other player abandons a region so the ai is just going to take one of the regions here and place it in their discard pile thank goodness you may acquire a region or a tributary we don't have any tributaries out so i'll do a region you can even do this if you garrison this card which is cool we're going to snag this planes card because it can give us more prosperity or not prosperity progress and we have leadership here i'll put an unrest card underneath it i don't exactly love discarding two cards around so i am going to play for my final action glory we cannot garrison it abandon three regions i have my three regions here put them into my discard pile we can look at the top two fame cards of the deck and keep one we knew about magnificent it's a free play draw a card you may return an unrest card it's worth five vp or we have a free play draw two cards worth 8vp as much as i like the 8vp i think i need to have more ways to get rid of those unrest cards they're still clogging up my decks and i don't want to end with a ton of them so i think i'm going to go with magnificent this time the final thing i'm going to do is use my writing systems i'm going to exhaust that and put a card in my discard pile into my history to draw a card i don't feel like i need all of these locations or regions so i'm going to put the mores into my history that does allow me to draw a card which is prosperity we'll then place one population on the corruption card now let's clean up our tokens we're going to discard three out of the four cards i'm gonna keep that magnificent into my hand it's just too good we're going to then draw up we only have one card yes the mandate of heaven i need to get that out soon now we can develop but by doing that we have to place one exhaust token on there to develop this long walls 4 we're gonna have to spend two materials and two population but this has an awesome exhaust if you have at least three long walls in play exhaust this card and return a card to the top of your deck to gain an action because i don't have enough actions right and once again if i get this out then each of those cards will be worth 3vp we drew our remaining four cards remember our hand size is six now we got two on ra unrest and the cataphract all right maureen's you haven't let me down about rolling a six let's keep it up beautiful that's a two i'll take that first card they will activate is a glory card it says if able abandon three regions oh i just got rid of that one region they only have two out they're not going to get a fame card otherwise just simply gain one of these progress tokens i'll take that and this goes into their discard pile here we go card number three we've got prosperity that's just going to gain them one more of the progress tokens and that gets placed into the discard pile our next one we have mathematics that is if able no no actually that is the continuous so that says if able return and unrest from the discard pile we don't have one otherwise gain one progress and then put this card into history so they're going to lose this card it's gone forever their deck is going to be essentially non-existent which means they're going to end the game real quick we have another continuous card so it's going to do the same thing it's going to place one progress on to their card and they're going to put this into history well i have to say i've never played a game like this one has been very different from my other plays which is cool uh because look at this they have three that's not even going to be enough so i need to grab two of their development cards they only have four when this is done then we each get one more round and the game's over so i have shuffled up there are two more development cards that was probably ten more points they just put on to the board too so they're killing me i think now we're moving to the solstice phase first thing we'll do is we have to discard a card why don't we discard an unrest huh then we gain two materials but i'm going to spend three so i'm just going to essentially spend one so i don't have to place another unrest in my deck because i'm pretty sure the bot is going to finish the game in the next two rounds i do think we're going to keep the art going we're going to spend three materials so we only have one left it's a little risky but i want that progress token i as many progress tokens as i can get will be good so i have 16 now we'll move to our turn and the first thing we'll do is use our amphitheater get rid of some of that unrest in our discard pile and gain another progress token so that's 17. we'll then exhaust religion to gain that fourth action again we'll then exhaust our long walls three here pain one of our population we only have four population left but that's going to allow us to draw a card and the car we're going to gain is independent we'll then play for free this magnificent card we get to remove an unrest card and we get to draw yet another card i need to keep drawing i need to get another long wall hopefully if i can even keep up with this ai well then free play are independent gaining three materials that'll put us up to four and a total of six for our population for our first action we're most definitely going to put the long walls out exhaust if you have at least three long walls in play exhaust this card and return a card to the top of your deck to gain an action while i was trying to find any way possible for me to be able to cycle through my deck i'm going to be one card away you guys from what i'm seeing i'm going to play the planes for one action that will allow me to gain another progress token which is good exile carved from the market i'm just going to exile the highlands here i'm going to put that into the exile and we'll just refresh that with another region the peninsula i'm then going to use the cataphract and i'm going to make the bot player discard his gundara but i am not going to claim any more cards i don't want more cards and then my third action i'm going to play out the mandate of heaven then use my final exhaust to place a population token i'm going to place that on leadership which you'll see in a second and i don't want to have to discard three cards a turn so i am going to abandon it by discarding it i'll place another population token on leadership just in case i can get it it's going to allow me to draw cards which is really what i need right now i've refreshed all of my tokens i don't have any cards in hand i'm going to draw six one two three four five six you see it not enough so we've got mercenaries archipelago glory western eastern zhao and lowlands it's the ai next they'll roll a five still no sixes so their first card this one they're going to break through for a tributary then they'll put this into history we have to recall a region so we're going to recall the planes that we have out let's see what tributary they're going to get so oh they get this one the phoenicians next they'll flip this one they have glory if abel abandoned three regions they can't otherwise they're just going to gain one of these progress tokens i will definitely take that that gets discarded card number three they have prosperity i love prosperity all it's going to do is gain them one victory point thank goodness that gets discarded let's reveal their last card and they have a continuous location so looking on here they are region region comes first discard the top card of the bot deck so they'll discard the phoenicians and then what they will do is play this and exile a card from the marketplace the only one they can exile is this peninsula and will refresh it with the rainforest they'll place that progress on the rainforest card slide this down they have one card left in their deck uh one two three four oh my gosh they're deck five yes we should have at least one or two more rounds maybe maybe two more that should allow me to get another wall out i think all right and they have two cards in their deck we'll move to that solstice the first thing we'll do is gain one unrest because of our religion and then we'll immediately exhaust it because of our amphitheater and then that means during our turn we can gain another progress we'll gain two more materials because of our civil service and then we're going to continue to pay for the art to gain another progress token i love it i think that puts us up to 19 of those and what do you say we make that 20. we're going to start our turn we're going to exhaust the amphitheater we're going to return one of these from our discard pile into the supply and we're going to gain our 20th prog progress we'll exhaust religion to get our fourth action token and we'll spend one of our population and a free play on the mercenaries to gain our fifth action we're then going to use four actions out of our five to play all four of these this will gain us one more materials putting us up to four this one gave us one more population one two three four five six total population this will gain us another progress we do have to exile a card from the marketplace we'll do that in a second and then glory we're just going to discard all three of these or abandon them to be able to look at the top two cards of that fame deck and choose one so we know this one eminent and what is this one we have imperial eminent lets us draw two cards and gives us a free play oh that's kind of appealing but after i get this last wall i might want to just go for victory points this one choose to break through for any of these items and you may choose an exile card or put this into your history it's worth 8vp if it's in your history 2 vp otherwise i think i'm just going to go with the eminent because that for sure gives us 8 vp and we get to draw cards now i'm not 100 certain on this but since every one of these cards has a token on it i don't think i can exile any of them so i won't now let's go ahead and play our eminent card it's free i get to draw two cards looking here i only have one card available to me so when i have to reshuffle i can do a development but i need to spend one of my exhaust tokens to do it and at this point i don't even care what that long wall does i want it on the table so it is two materials and two population that will go into our discard pile and we'll shuffle it up let's draw that one additional card and we have the eastern zoo my final action i'll just play the eastern zoo i'm gonna gain another population bringing me back up to five i don't think you know what yeah i'm gonna garrison prosperity i don't really need it right now so let's go ahead and garrison that we'll then place one population on the corruption card we've replenished our tokens i'm going to go ahead and discard these two cards that were in my hand let's drop to six one two three four five six two that i can't develop that would have been awesome uh i do have two more regions and glory so potentially i could get another fame card next turn the bot is next we'll roll it up a two i guess the six is just not going to show up this game i do have a feeling that we're only going to have one more turn after this so hopefully i can get that long wall out if able return any unrest cards from the discard otherwise gain one of the progress and then put into history so this is gone number three here we have the same thing it's going to gain a one progress and then put that into history yeah we are so going to end i think we're gonna get one more turn number four okay this is a region first it's going to put it into play and it cannot exile anything from the marketplace from how i understand and then the last card we have glory oh and it just got three you know what that means it's going to gain a fame card so it is going to take all three of its regions and abandon them we're going to put them in their discard pile but then they gain that top fame car which by the way for them is going to be worth eight victory points oh let's put it on top of their deck why did i have to flip glory you know i really have no idea who's gonna win this game i really don't okay let's see one two three of four they are going to get their last development card so this means we each have one more turn and the game is done moving into the solstice phase i'll go ahead and gain one unrest card then i'm going to discard a card and i will discard that on rest card which will give me one progress during my turn i love that we'll then gain two materials because of our civil service and then i'm going to take a chance that i'll be able to get at least two materials i'm going to spend three for our art to eke out one more progress token okay this is it this is our last activation let's see how many points we can eke out first thing religion and that's going to give us our fourth action second we're going to net ourselves three points here by exhausting the amphitheater removing that unrest and then gaining another progress token that puts us at 23 progress we're then going to exhaust the long walls if we have at least three walls in play we can place one card on top of our deck to then be able to gain one additional action that would be a total of five actions this round i'm going to take that i'll go ahead and place the mandate of heaven on top of our deck and then i'll exhaust writing systems i'm going to put this region into our history because i don't need that to be able to draw a card oh wait what is it oh yeah it's the mandate of heaven we have one more exhaust token let's use it here we're going to pay one of our population we have four left we get to draw a card and we have independent we'll then play our two free cards we're going to gain three more materials putting us at four and two more population putting us at six we're going to play this just to draw a card let's see we get we get the cat effect and we have no unrest in our hand so we can't do that one let's now use our five actions we're going to play both the planes and the western zoo we're going to gain one progress because of this i'm not going to exile or garrison that one will gain another materials that'll put us at five we're then going to use our next two actions just to put out the mandate of heaven and long walls number two we got all four walls out each card is worth four victory points then and this i'm gonna leave out and play so no minus two vp yes and then for our final action we're going to play glory we're going to abandon these three this was garrison so we'll get discarded as well that means we get to look at the top two and these are the final two cards of the famed deck we have outstanding and proud i have a feeling this is pretty obvious we're gonna grab outstanding because it's worth seven vp this one would be worth 12 vp if it was garrisoned but i don't have any way of guaranteeing it it's 8vp if it's in our history and it's only worth 3vp otherwise and it doesn't even do anything it can't even play it so we're just going to grab outstanding that's going to give us 7 vp at the end we'll put this on top of the deck we might as well play it just because it sounds like fun we can put up to two cards from our discard pile into our history we'll do uh prosperity and archipelago we'll end our turn placing one population on the lakes we've refreshed our tokens let's go ahead and discard this card we need to draw up to five we'll draw this one that means we can now develop our develop options are pretty minimal as to what can help us i mean these terracotta warriors would be amazing seven vp of garrisoned even three in history but i'm not going to get them there so i'm just going to do mathematics that costs three materials so i have two left and one population and we'll put this into our discard pile we also have to place an exhaust token here here we have our hand of six it's not really gonna matter let's see what the bot does a six oh man okay so he's gonna activate all of his cards to end the game i absolutely cannot complain that only happened one time okay so this is a region uh we're going to discard the top card of the bot deck put this out and we can't exile anything from the marketplace so we'll discard another region he'll put this region out into play that shouldn't do anything for him i don't think okay we have a fame card if abel return one of the region cards from the discard pile back onto the top of the deck so this one's just going to go back on top of the deck and then we'll place this into history their next card will be prosperity that's just going to be the other they're going to gain one of these progress tokens that's one vp for them number four okay this is a tributary card they're just going to gain one progress and they're going to put that into history so this is gone and then finally their last action oh this one is a barbarian state so if abel return this to the discard pile and oh yeah return one of the regions the discard pile can't do that and then put this into history beautiful they didn't even do much we do still have to activate the solstice phase so i'll go ahead and discard a card for this one for our mandate of heaven i have to discard two cards i don't care what they are i'll discard these two thank goodness we have civil service because we'll gain two more materials that puts us up to four and then i'm going to spend these three for our religion card here so we do not have to take an unrest card well and that is it boy my brain is fried you guys so now first thing you need to do i'm going to take all of the development cards i did not develop and remove them from the game i'm not going to count those we do the same for the ai except for that they got all the development cards that's how we ended the game that's why i'm still thinking they might win this even though i feel like i did pretty well oh i forgot to move this i did pretty well but i don't know if i kept up with them let's start with let's do the bot calculation first to calculate the bot score the first thing you'll do is count every progress token each one is worth one victory point so he's got 10 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 points for his progress tokens then for every set of 10 other tokens so that would be the population or the materials he'd gain one additional point well he only has two so he'll gain a zero for that now we'll count all the points in his deck i've grabbed only the victory point cards and you'll see how this works so we just start adding them up one plus three which is four five six seven eight nine plus one is ten plus two more is twelve now if there's a question mark you read and whatever higher value is here they'll take so that's one which is 13. this one they'll get eight so that's 21. whenever you see an asterisk they automatically get five points so that's 26 31 36 41 46. so they have 46 points for this they have all these other cards here but none of them are victory points uh so yeah we don't have to count any of those and remember they don't include their morian's card either so they have 46 plus 21 giving them a total of 67 points this actually is super low i it felt kind of weird this game and i will say that uh all the other games they've scored around 80 points so i don't know exactly what happened here but sometimes it's just the way the cards fall so i'm actually pretty sure i killed them here we'll see we'll start by counting up our progress tokens these tokens don't count as anything for us we have 10 20 1 2 3 4. we have 24 progress tokens that's 24 points then i like to count any cards that just have a basic victory point value so we have religion for one art will also give us one for two and then our civil service those out here that will give us two more then from underneath our history cards the only one that we had that had victory points is this one for three we had some in our decks we had three here and we had two for mathematics we had 5 for magnificent we had 7 for this one my goodness we we did great a 2 for this one and an 8 for this one so that's a total of 34 points i'm going to double check my math quick but i think that's right after checking out my basic victory points i look for question marks i actually don't have any question marks so i got a zero there then we go for our asterisks this is where we're gonna make bank we have four walls each one having the same vp one vp per long wall in play well i have one two three four of those so each one of these is worth four victory points four eight twelve sixteen we then do get to score for the chin card and we gain one vp per continuous card that's in play that's not a region i think it's pretty safe to say we got 10 victory points there one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and then we still have three more on top of that we also have the amphitheater here we gain one victory point per five progress tokens i had 20 uh 24 of them so that's gonna gain us four victory points i then with this watermill gain a victory point per any of these icons and i think that means anywhere you guys let me know if i'm wrong but i have one on the planes here so that's one two looking at the western zhao and then three more with the moors the archipelago has two of the symbols so that's a total of five victory points and then the final card that we can score is our mercenaries here we gain one victory point per four population i have five so that's plus one that would be a total of 36 victory points for the asterisks if my math is right that means the bot scored 67 and we scored 94. we blew them out of the water uh but yet normally they'd be somewhere in the 80s so i don't know what happened there i mean the three other times i've played they've always hit around the 80 mark 80 85. so i was actually amazed this one only was 67. i think yeah i don't know i'm sure i did a couple things wrong when you're recording and talking so i'm not even going to count this as a win i will say this though right after i'm done recording and editing this you know what i'm going to do pick a different faction i think i'm going to try a level 3 now and i'm curious do you guys want to see another one i don't know if there's any more challenging ones that are out the our arturians look amazing they have to go on quest that's totally my type of thing but look at all of these different civilizations i'm getting the classic one sometime today hopefully and so between that and this one i have 16 civilizations that i can play around with and there's a campaign mode where you can play with the same civilization against different ones in a specific order if you can beat all of them you can actually win the game and record your score oh i will say i am happy with pretty much everything about this game except for one thing and that is i do feel like the game tends to be slightly longer than what i want it to be it's really good but i do sometimes get that fatigue especially with there's so much to think about and when you're playing this for i'd say it's at least a 90 minute game when you're activating the ai and having to make sure you do everything right there uh that i do sometimes feel exhausted after it but maybe that's a good thing i will say i want to play more but it doesn't mean that i always can anyways i hope this was helpful let me know if you see anything else that i did wrong that i don't make notes on and i will put them in as klingon subtitles and a pinned comment so people know i hope you can get this to the table and play yourself have a great rest of your day i'll catch you at the next stop

Channel: One Stop Co-op Shop

Views: 20,688

Keywords: board, game, one stop, co-op shop, oscs, imperium, legends, david turczi, solo, play, playthrough, deckbuilder, osprey games

Id: M0Q7UziP6so

Length: 84min 17sec (5057 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021