IMPERIUM - PART 1

[Music] hi welcome back to box delights today we're playing imperium from nigel buckle and david terzi imperium consists of two boxes classics and legends you can buy one or the other they're independent of each other or you can combine them as well imperium is a card game setting civilization against civilization each box comes with eight civilizations so if you have both sets you can pick one against the other it actually plays one to four but i'm going to show you the solo game if we open up classics and take a look inside now i've actually let's do the legends as well so this is what the game looks like you get two rule books of general multiplayer rule book solo rule book you'll get punch board with tokens obviously because i'm using classics i've got everything already punched and a single six sided die and then slots for all your cards okay there's a set of common cards as well and actually the common cards from the two sets are slightly different so in the solo game you're playing two civilizations you against a bot you'll use a set of sieve cards from whichever faction you want to play against and one set of common cards choose which set you want to use now what you'll see also is that the classics i've sleeved the cards it's not something i normally do but i have noticed that some of the cards are slightly miscut so i have to sleeve them because i'm a bit fussy when it comes to shuffling cars that are not perfectly sized the downside is that the insert doesn't fit sleeved carves so there's a bit of a squeeze to get everything back in the other thing is i've printed off these little reference cards that help you with the solo i'm going to be using these in the game they don't come with the game they're from bgg user ricardo roguzzi so thanks ever so much to ricardo for making these and making them available to everybody it is just a copy of what's in the rulebook but it's just easier to have one reference card handy i like it so good job i'm using those right i'm going to get set up we're going to play celts versus the romans i'm going to be the celts i'm going to have the bot playing romans let's learn how to play this game a quick word on setup so i've grabbed the celts and the romans but i could just as easily have chosen any two from the 16 across both sets if you want to combine sets do that so i've got the two civilizations i want to play and then the common cards are uncivilized region unrest fame statement solstice so this little section plus the tributary and civilized cards all right now whichever set you choose you can use this five set of cards either from classics or from legends but if you mix and match the civilizations then you need to go look at these which are the tributary cards or either blue ones and what you'll find is that in this set there's a card for each of the other civilizations in the other set so let's say i decided to choose egyptians rather than romans as my adversary then from legends will grab egyptians okay said to the romans but then we'll remove the egyptians tributary okay remove that from the game and instead grab a random one from here you can see they've got romans in there see so i might put romans for example right just grab a random one that's not being used and then you get the tributes back up all right does that make sense so whichever two civilizations you choose make sure they're not in the tributaries set right that's how you combine them the other thing is within these common cards some of them will be marked three plus or four so we're playing solo so we're going to remove those and we're setting up as per the two player game okay so anything with three and four on taken out of the game and once you've got them all separated out back in the box you don't need them you're gonna need the single solstice card and then you've got these empire barbarian cards you're going to need two of those okay the other two back in the box we want the one reference card or the page from the rule book that refers to our ai adversary which is the romans okay so we're just gonna grab that it's double sided we'll start with the barbarian side with the kelts and i have a single color in the bottom left-hand corner so these are green romans are red take a barbarian card each solstice card goes in between this is our power card has these wiggly lines at the bottom is two sided there's a special ability on one side a for advanced and there's a b side for beginner so let's go for the beginner side look in the bottom and you'll see the color and then an icon okay like this moon these are all blank we're going to put those to the side we're going to grab all these moon ones we've got some with a star we've got some with an arrow and we've got one with a circle the one with the circle is called the accession card this goes above our power card like so we'll take all the moon cards give them a shuffle these go top of the session card the ones with all the stars these are development cards the rule book just says place things like so okay we're just going to save a little bit of space we're going to pop that on there we're going to put those on there okay so the moon's shuffled face down on top of the accession card on top of the stack of stars they don't need to be shuffled just going to place them like this these blank ones we're going to shuffle face down and this will create our deck all right this is our starting deck place this like so we're going to do exactly the same for the ai player these ones with the arrow anything with an arrow just put them up with the commons up here for now same with these if there were any uh anything with arrows on they'd go up in this commons they're not all right each of the comments has got a banner right this one's got a red banner so we're gonna place those with the red commons so we'll do exactly the same with the with the bots okay so we've got their power card their blanks face down and shuffled the development cards we've got a plus on them the session card got a circle the moon cards this is our nation deck with that shuffle place it face down okay all right okay i'll place this in between to separate our deck our player area from their player area now this is our dynasty deck actually the the star ones we need to fix this they should be in victory point order which they are twos twos threes fours and then these stars there's some where the question mark on treat them as five vps okay and the ones with question marks would go on top is the highest and then we'll put them in reverse order face down okay like so so that's our dynasty deck now we've got to think about these commons the commons go in the common market and we've got a market board that's kind of in these three separate tokens we're going to create a single line to create our market board looks like this these red cards they're unrest we're going to place them in a pile below here below this red icon the purple fame cards we need to pick out one card it's called king of kings okay he's got an a and a b side we're going to place it with the a side up here above this purple icon i'm going to take the rest of the fame cards give them a shuffle we're going to place them sideways perpendicular on top we're going to remove the top two cards from the fame deck they're going to go back in the box they're out of the game next we've got the yellow region cards we're just going to give this deck a shuffle there's a region area here we're going to take six of those cards place them above the region area okay the rest is down to the side we'll come back to those in a bit next we'll take the green these are the uncivilized cards okay uncivilized you'll notice that the leaf the green leaf icon is the bot on the bottom of each of those cards it also has the civilization icon but as a matter just look at the green banner at the top give those a shuffle take six of those above this part of the market okay the rest place them with those region cards that we've not used now we'll take the white civilized cards do the same take six place them over this area the rest then we take the blue tribute cards we're just going to stick them on this deck there isn't an area for trippity cards specifically this deck now is the main deck so it's got all the remaining civilized and civilized region and tributary cards we're going to give that a shot for you'll notice there's an area just for that place this sideways now we're going to create the market we're going to draw two cards from the main deck and then one card from the civilized uncivilized and region cards okay that's our market with the exception of region cards there may be some region cards here remember with the exception of region cards so all uncivilized civilized and tributaries we're gonna place an unrest card beneath it we're nearly done set up finally we're gonna grab progress tokens for every civilized card that doesn't have the inciv uncivilized these are progress tokens some people call them victory point tokens we're going to place one on each civilized card all right the one with just the pillar the white pillar icon the aim of this game is to score victory points these progress tokens act like victory points talking of tokens we've got some tokens numbered one to six we don't need number six we need one to five we're going to place them this is just for the solo game and each one of these spots in the market and this will help decide what the bot is going to do remember the bot deck i'm going to take five cards i'm going to place them underneath these numbers one to five we're going to be first player so that makes things easy we're going to draw a hand of five cards from our deck okay right how does this game play what's it all about we're a civilization we begin the game of barbarian civilization each of these 16 civilizations plays very differently so you might want to play a single civilization over and over until you get familiar with it their setup might be slightly different the makeup of their decks the size of their decks some will remain barbarians some will start in empire some will never become empire that kind of stuff all this stuff is different per civilization so what the designers have done is they've ranked each of the nations i'm saying civilizations they're called nations in difficulty so celts for example are difficulty too right the romans difficulty one what that means is how complicated are they to play utopians are difficulty five for example okay arthurians difficulty five whichever set you get it does describe the full set of nations okay the eight set from the other box so it is a temptation to to buy both i mean i got imperium classics and then went out and bought legends the very next day so the aim of the game is to win victory points we're playing empires nations in the time period from 3000 bc up to 1066 the battle of hastings in the rule book they do excuse some of the terms like barbarian and so on but they're just mechanical terms so they they paid attention to the historical significance of each sieve and our nation and how they play and the types of cards they play and that kind of stuff as well this is a new kind of deck building game our deck starts small as we develop our nation then we're going to be building our deck from this market of cards opening up new options and there's some interesting deck building mechanisms that we'll experience as we play things that make it an interesting deck builder with fascinating tactics some of the cars that we pick up will have victory points in the bottom right so our deck is going to ultimately determine our score along with these progress tokens the game end will be triggered by a number of different factors when this main deck runs out when we advance our civilization which is when we get through this lot hit this point okay and then get through all of our development cards that will end the game if this fame king of kings is flipped face down there's a way to get that frame card we'll talk about that when we get into it and also if collapse all right the collapse of civilization is triggered when this unrest pile is emptied then the solo game if that should happen then we immediately lose the game what's one of those other end game points is triggered we count our score if we've got more than the bot then we win the games can be played in a series of rounds so we start with our deck we've got a hand of five cards we're going to play cards from our hand take actions redraw turn passes they take their turn back and forth okay until one of those end game triggers happens now to help us with this we've got a whole bunch of tokens i've already told you about progress tokens we start the game with one progress token we also start with three action tokens that's because on each of our turns we can take three actions we're gonna place these on our state card okay a barbarian state card so each turn we take three actions we redraw our hand from our deck each time we get through our deck we draw one of these nation building cards and build up our deck once we got through this we go to our session card which is when we flip from barbarian to empire and then we can start playing out our advanced development and cards can trigger the game out remember okay so we've got three action tokens we also take five exhaustion tokens right other games other deck builders will do stuff like player cards tap it or exhaust it we have exhaustion tokens so that's exactly the same when a card exhausts you place a token on it so the five kind of gives you a maximum number of exhausts that you can do tilting i've heard used those kind of effects so five exhaustions three actions and our civilization our nation also has some resources they've got population and they've got materials things that we can build with we start with three materials these are these and two population okay now we can begin and take our ten on your turn you can do one of three things you can either choose activate innovate or revolt let's look at those in reverse order revolt says if you picked up any unrest cards okay and in your hand unrest is stuff that's kind of clogs up your deck what you can do is get rid of those unrest cards put them back over there in the market remember if that unrest empties we immediately lose the game but for a revolt action what you can do is return any unrest in your hand to that deck and end your turn that's it that's all you do innovate says that's the second option discard your whole hand grab one of those cards from the market i'll show you that when it comes to it the third option the most common action is activate all right so it's activate innovate or revolt so let's say we want to activate and this is where we use our action tokens so to take an action we remove an action token from our state card and with the action you can play a card from your hand so my first action i'm going to play this cauldron right into my player now for my second action i can play this other card from my hand there's some cards in my hand it's called conquer it says pay to population to acquire a region or tributary or pay three to break through a regional tributary now i've only got two population so actually um i'd rather break through than the choir but we'll come to that in a second i've just played the cauldron and as well as playing actions as soon as you activate you can then start exhausting cards that are already in your play area right these are these ones with this infinity symbol these are permanents that stay in your play area so i could if i wished exhaust this card you can't use it exhaustibility is when you innovate or revolt only when you activate only when you're taking actions okay this is what these exhaust tokens are for we've got five of them so you can do this five times during your activate so to exhaust we place an exhaust on the cauldron and it says pay one progress to gain two population now i forgive you for the card sleeves let me just show you i mean the artwork's great but actually i'm not showing it off to its best because of these sleeves pay one progress so i'm going to lose one progress that's one victory point we'll put that back in the stock and we'll gain two population cool i want that population because i'm going to use it to pay for other effects like conquer so as my action i'm going to play this conquer card it says pay to population to acquire a region or tributary or pay three population to break through a region or tributary okay so this is how we get stuff from the market you can acquire it or you can break through it what's the difference when you acquire a card pick a card remember it says we can take a tributary or a region so that's either the chin or the coast okay this is a blue tributary with the blue flag a yellow region with the yellow hills when you acquire a card from the market you take it and you put it in your hand if it had any other cards attached to it like this unrest that would also come to your hand so if i acquired the chin here i would take these two cards right unrust is going to stuff up my deck if the card that you acquire had any progress tokens on it you'd take those as well right so that's a choir what about breakthrough the only difference with breakthrough is let's say i choose to take this tributary you don't take the unrest card i just take the card put it in my hand that stays where it is it doesn't clog up my deck the other option is when you break through instead of taking the one that's here in the market revealed you can take the one from the deck above instead if i choose okay so that's these three tributaries only exist in this main deck right if i choose to break through for a tributary from the main deck i just reveal cards one by one until i reveal a tributary added to my hands reach out for those i drew stick them back on top okay that can also apply let's say i was trying to take a region there wasn't one here and this deck was empty remember there's only six cards here so at some point they're going to get exhausted then you draw from the main deck instead remember main main deck empty is a game end trigger right so let's say i want to take the chin all right and i'm going to break through i don't want this unrest card right so this says pay two to acquire which would give me that unrest or pay three population to break through so i'm going to play three population and stick that chin card in my hand okay that goes off to the unrest pile then we real fill the market with the card drawn from the main deck it's a region remember regions don't get unrest cards so that's my no sorry that's my second action first action then i exhaust the action second action so my third action i could now play the chin this nation i've just conquered it has an ongoing passive effect that increases my hand size by one and also it has one victory point per three permanent cards in play excluding regions okay it's a variable number of victory points at the end of the game all right this is going to help me well that's it i've taken my three actions that was my activate turn done so now we clean up first move doing we clean up is we take a progress token from the supply and we choose a card from the market one of these five and we place that progress token on it i'm going to our mysticism's quite good yeah i really like mysticism i'm gonna pop that here okay mysticism i'm putting it here because remember when you take cards you take progress tokens so if i think that's the card i want to take next time put a progress token on it obviously in a multiplayer game you're kind of giving other players a clue as to what you're after and it incentivizes other players to take those cards because they got more progress more progress is more victory points we'll see what the bot does about that well the other card i was tempted by was coast getting lots of regions this is like conquering these places this is like developing cultures yeah what i just did is went out and conquered the chin this is like going and taking over another civilization you know another nation so i conquered the chin thematically but settling the coast settling the rivers they're opening up new effects for us exhaust effects so yeah i'm tempted by this one as well um but i kind of like this one let's see what happens then a multiplayer game while you're clearing up the rest of your player area the next player can carry on but obviously in a solo game where we're on our own these are going to go back on our state card as is this now we can choose before we end our turn and redraw to discard any number of cards we wish from our hand so if we wanted to get rid of some of these cards we could do maybe we want to get through our deck maybe they're not useful to us maybe it's just stuff clogging up our deck we don't want to as it goes so we're going to keep hold of these and instead we'll just draw back up to our new hand size which would normally be five but because of the chin it's now six so i'm gonna draw three more cards first is an unrest then we get another permanent kelsey car and another unrest okay this goes to our discord pile right that's it that's the end of our turn now let's move to the box 10. first thing we do is roll the six sided die it's just one to six it's the regular six sided die okay we've rolled a one we place this on the card at number one spot now if we rolled a six we place it off over here and if you want to you can place this here but number six here and with a number six you're not tagging any of the five cards in the market for the bottom okay as it goes they're tagging this spot in the market this acts like their hand and just like we played cards from our hand they're gonna now start playing cards from the hand they're gonna play cards with the exception of the one with the dice on it okay so the dies here we're gonna start playing cards from left to right starting with this one so flip it over now we're going to ignore everything on the card we're going to ignore all the text right and this is where the bot plays differently from what a regular player would all we're looking at is the type of card it is it's a conquer card with a barbarian red axe icon here and this is where we go to this reference card our state card or the box state card is currently barbarian if they'd progressed to empire we'd flip over and we'd use the empire side okay if you don't have these cards remember you're going to the solo rule book you're going to scroll to the back scroll you're going to flip to the back and we've got romans barbarian romans empire okay and what we're looking for is the type of card it is all right i'll show you with the rule book first because that's probably what you're going to be doing you start at the top does it have this black sword icon no does it have the fame icon no is it named glory now it's called conquer does it have the region icon no it's a grey card does it have the permanent infinity symbol no is it advanced no is it prosperity no right we've sort of gotten all the way scrolled we've got all the way down to the red battle axe so that's all we do right just go for work away from the top down if we ignore ignore ignore and it's none of these then it just does other which is gain two materials right this one says if able spend two three population to break through for a tributary card it doesn't have any resources yet otherwise if able acquire a region okay you can acquire a region otherwise gain one population all right so that's what we're going to do he's going to acquire if a boy is going to acquire a region he can acquire a region because there's two available all right so why may he not be able to require a region maybe when this stack's empty and there's nothing in the main market there's two regions that you could acquire this one and this one the river of the coast we want the coast don't let it be the coast which one does he choose it chooses the one that's worth the most points this one's worth two this one's worth two this one's with one these are not worth any points if there were any progress tokens on them it would add points okay you treat these victory point tokens these progress takes as if they're worth one each so actually that one's worth three that one's worth two that one's worth three ignore the unrest sitting underneath remember it's not breaking through it says acquire if able acquire a region regions don't have unrest anyway okay so these are both equally zero victory points in the case of a tie like that you just choose the one in the lowest numbered slots okay so he's going for the river cards they acquire just go on top of their deck that means of course that they're going to come out in their next hand that's it done now we move on to number three and working away from the top it hits the region card okay the region logic says i'll put it on here because it's bigger not this not this not this okay it's the region card yeah that's the first icon that matches see discard the top card from the bot deck and then play this region and then exile a card from the market right so one two three three steps discard the top kept deck card from the bot deck all right so that card is picked up is going into the discard pile he's working his way through his deck remember to try and get these cards out so every time you go right cycle through your deck one card comes off you're getting closer to a session session means we move to empire empire means we can start playing developments we're heading towards game ends and score a lot of points okay so it's got sulk of the bop deck play this region so this is going to go into his play area i'm going to put these over here regions that he's players put it down here region that he's played and then exile a card from the market oh we should have filled that gap because that's probably the one that's going to exile actually always refill the market after a card is acquired or broken through so the card it chooses the bot will never exile a card with a token on it they've all got tokens the box just ignores it and doesn't exile a card which card does he exile just the one in the lowest slot number so yeah it's going to be this exports card exiled cards try and keep tidy just go this is the exile symbol they just go face down over to the right here they're kind of out of the game there are effects that could bring back an exiled card but for now that's where it's going you can place them face up face down doesn't matter all right let's refill that spot and it's a tributary so it needs an unrest card okay that's that card played next two more to go so the bot is doing quite a lot of stuff oh it's the glory card okay i'll go back to the i'll go back to the solo rule book just because it's a little bit easier to show on on camera so glory is a named card it's not got the sword icon it's not got the fame icon it's the named card glory glory is the way to get fame okay that's what the effects they have so it says glory if able abandon three regions they've only got one they've only just played one region yeah they literally just did it to gain the top fame card otherwise gain one progress and you recall a region ah so they gain a progress i'll put it here and then we have to recall so recall means taking it and placing back into our hand a region now fortunately we've not played a region yet and we didn't have any in our hand but if we played one of these then we'd have to recall it so the bob can attack you look out for that okay these are going to the bots discount house and they should be over here now okay last one card number five is city of rome city of rome is let's just go back to the rule book for this not that one not that one not that one not that one okay it's an infinity one permanent effect it says game one population put this card into history okay game one population one population so he's gathering resources effectively and placed into history history is kind of like burying a card you might have seen in other games things like that um it's not it's it's out of your deck it's not your discard you're saving it for game end you place it underneath your power card and this is a good way to you know if you if i gain something like this it says the sumerians it cannot be played but it could it's got three victory points so how do you get that how'd you get that out there without it clogging up your deck you can put it in history okay so the city of rome has been confined to history people will talk about the city of rome for centuries to come it's there if it had any victory points on it they would count at the end of the game it's now out of the box deck no longer clogging up their deck all right but of course that means if it was your if it was a player card they wouldn't be able to use the effect anymore and for the bot it means it won't be in their deck to trigger this effect anymore gaining population right so it is down in the annals of history underneath the power card no longer part of the game right until scoring that's it that's the end of the bot's turn they played out the remainder of their cards now we'll just do a little bit of cleanup just like us they add a progress token where do they add it they add it here where their die was all right so if this was number three they'd be adding it up here it's number one they're adding it on the cataphract here there's two progress there now if this were number three here what i do now is then shuffle this down to the number one spot but we're already there and then we redraw from their deck to fill back up to number five okay they still got cards in their deck but their deck is still very short one card left that's it back to us just before we wrap up you might be thinking oh this is a target now there's two progress on there so yeah that's i mean progress is valuable but it has see this blue icon up here same for this civilized card that's the empire icon okay at the moment we are barbarian we're a barbarian nation we can't play empire cards right that's what this axe means when we move and upgrade when we get through this we get through and we change to empire then we won't be able to play these barbarian cards anymore okay some nations have special abilities i don't want to spoil everything but there's lots to discover in this game so although it's valuable if i take it now potentially with the idea of using it later it's going to clog up my deck for quite some time and for as long as we're still barbarian all right make sense so lots of strategies lots of ways to play this game so many great ideas in here but i've set myself up nicely for the ongoing turn i've got my cauldron i've got my chin we're all good i've got a hand with six cards um one of the designers nigel did buckle did check my video and i have made a little mistake here with the with the unrest i've still got the four player three plus player and rest cards so i've given myself too many so they need to go it was the ones that came from the the kelp deck so they need to be like this all right that's better okay so we've only got four left in this deck we've got to keep an eye on unrest okay good that's it then join me next time as we continue this playthrough of imperium from osprey games

Channel: Ricky Royal

Views: 6,908

Rating: 4.9542856 out of 5

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Id: M4chQyfEppo

Length: 38min 41sec (2321 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021