Nations & Imperial Settlers - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

hello shut up and sit down fans spring is here and so is imperial settlers a beautiful game we've got for you today hello I've got a board game for you it's very good and it's coordination this is a game where you develop a civilization you draft cute little building cards and set your little people to work in them in the game of the board games of these nations you develop a civilization you buy cards for the table in front of you and then Sergio citizen to work in those cars it's a game of very delicate resource management with just a su sort of fighting to deny your friends what they need in the game of managing resource income and expenditure with some rules for war so that you may pamper your friends and every card every board every token is covered in painstaking absolutely beautiful kicks little art and the cover has this rather lovely illustration of Marie Curie she's everywhere you look really on the main board and on all of the decks of cards and the box and the manual Imperial settlers is and I don't use this word lightly joyous from when you look at the cover and see this guy who may or may not be high as a kite setting off to work so when you open the box and you see all the lovely components and the little people talking on the in life from when you look through the manual which is nice beautifully laid out very simple to learn so when you invite your friends over and ask if they want to play a game of running a cute little barbarian tribe okay we're each playing a nation of tiny cute little people and we're trying to build a big big city this is your personal player board this is your Emperor and you can flip it if you want a male or female Emperor which is nice you're playing the Egyptians and so I definitely recommend not using the Ramses lookin dude but flip it to the other side because the female Egyptian Emperor is awesome she looks like she's been asleep under a Sun bed and that she probably should never have left Norwich this is a deck of personal cards we also have our own personal faction deck each time I'm going to draw one card off the faction deck we're going to put a few common cards available we're each going to take one put that into our hand we're going to do it again we're each gonna take one and put it into our hand and then we can build common buildings go on the right and special faction buildings go on the left these buildings are all worth victory points and we'll get some extra victory points along the way and then we just cozy up to you for a second okay we can see here you've got a few sources you've got food wood and stone you also have people and swords and shields but we'll get to them in a bit you'll have a hand of building cards and then you can pay to build something like this quarry this is a production building so you pay a word in a stone and that increases your income every time the production buildings also give you stuff when they're built for that's nice you can build features like a nice meeting place these are permanent buffs this gives you victory points for every pink building in your empire but again this counter you get a nice victory point or you can build action spaces like these Lumberjacks they're okay you pay the wood for them and then that's a place you can send people to work to get more wood then you have your faction specific buildings you could build this nice pyramid that produces gold and stone you can pay the stone for that and faction buildings are great they're worth more victory points but they have a cost you have to trash something from the right side of your board so you're cutting away your options and this is what the game is you can also raise common cards from your hand by using a sword and then that goes away forever and you never get the child to build it but then you get the bonuses in this case that was more buildings and then you can also take faction specific cards and then you can't build it but you can make a deal and you can pay a food and you make a deal on that permanent increase in your production but again this is more options you're cutting away Imperial settlers plays like you're some master seamstress tasked with making an utterly beautiful dress out of the clothes on your own back you're watching your friends wrestling out of their jackets and ripping apart their clothes to stitch together new fibers and it's kind of magical and scary all at once I was Carrie seem to have dropped your Nobel Prize why don't you help me pick it up now it's not of these two games are the same far from it it's more that we seem to review a great new game every week on shut up and sit down and these two games are similar enough but owning both would be like living by yourself and having two toilets extravagant not unpleasant but unsettling on a karmic level if you do an imperial settlers animations why not tweet a picture of yourself looking smug at shut up sure we definitely won't name and shame you and if you do have two toilets and you live by yourself can I have one in nations rather than having a hand of cards we have this austere shop where you can spend your gold to buy such treasures as Satan just up as Emperor Augustus or an art student trying to remember how to draw a shadow you buy these you put them onto a very limited interestingly limited number of spaces in your player board you can pay stone to socket your citizens onto these at the end of the time you pay food for each of your citizens and then you're going to get your income based on citizens on buildings of more gold more so and more food and books which allows victory points and makeup shortfalls of the other resources so out of the gate if that's the heart of this game nation seems simpler than imperial settlers or is it ba ba ba no it's definitely not simpler not no definitely not we arrived at this Soviet spreadsheet of a central board this is where players do their bookkeeping literally because the track around the edge is where you keep track your books but believe it or not this is actually the most fun thing about nations because you've got your books here and you've got your nation stability track here and you've got your war track here but all this the numbers that you've got these things is are irrelevant right because the only thing that matters is your position relative to other players and that is actually really interesting and a ton of month the number of books you have doesn't matter its how many other players you have more books down just like in real life your stability is irrelevant it's only if you have the least stability of all your friends you need to start worrying in your war your actual massage your army doesn't matter it's just that you've got someone you can beat up and of course when other players are trying to avoid being in these positions suddenly you've got this bizarre thing where you get a massive military and all the other players to give up and your massive military something he looks ridiculous and so does there's this this is nations for all of its battles of Sparta and Spartan artwork for its Classical Age is depicted in classic board game page commanding a nation in nations is downright silly partially because whenever you buy another great building you always have to cover up something else and because each of these things produce two randomly as they're like eight different things you can get in this game you're always totally failing to produce something which is funny but mostly commanding a nation is absurd because the games just Rams the goal posts down your friends pants right in most board games in most economic engine creation games the goals are sort of arbitrarily they're like random numbers of the set at set points which can be a little tedious and if they randomized them it's annoying but in attaching them to your friends like it becomes like whether it's surprising and interesting and funny but never annoying like if you say if you're king of the books and you think you've got all the books and you get lazy then your friends suddenly produces twenty books in one turn by accident like in a Riptide that's funny if you miscalculate something in your stability drops down to minus two that's bad but then hey maybe there was some cloud cover in your friends head and he just dropped down to minus three saving you and like I said yeah when you get a massive military you're going to take the wind out of your friend sails and then when a few values will drop to zero if a game were to do that from the drawer of a card that would be annoying but your friends doing it it makes sense it immediately makes nations very deep and very rich because there's an amount of second-guessing your friends and their capabilities and what they'll want to do nations give us a nation's take us away masterfully and what I mean by that is for example if two people are tied for a reward neither of them get it if they're both tied for a penalty both of them get it and that actually works really great because equally nations is incredibly generous in your resource generation you end up trying to make golden then you total up your income and you accidentally make a ton of got stolen and food and victory points and you go like yeah I've won the jackpot on this cardboard fruit machine but I've got this one problem that I just can't plug it is so much more fun and funnier than the art employees let me think through all of its use of colour and wonderful cartoonish people and I'll go there the most fun art I've ever seen in a board game Imperial settlers is actually a more mean po-faced game the nations nations does a pretty good job of hiding who's in the lead and you really don't know who's winning whereas in imperial settlers you can see if someone town just spreads whereas in like nations you just get this absurd generosity cornucopia of just just vomits resources at you and this each turn it's like you get another little splash of gasoline in your engine and you're trying to see how you can make it go the farthest and most importantly everyone gets one sword token a ton but if you manage to get your production such that you have two swords you can go and burn someone else's area just like you can use one to burn one from your hand except you're burning it from them and this exchange didn't awful for them I mean you obviously get the raise bonus from killing it they do get a little piece of wood kind of like to say sorry and they can still use this building as the foundation to build one of their faction buildings but still this mechanic is huge so your games originated with this kind of conflict being absent you're able to build an engine and enjoy your friends company without being forced into direct aggression here no and frankly it is a huge relief to be able to have that really smart friend who always wins at these kind of games and go and burn down his house but it cuts both ways well this is a lovely bouncing mechanic of course him three or four player games player can see you doing well and specifically try and target them now your smartest friend if he has a good engine if he's getting resources but also if he's just getting loads of swords because he's so clever he can go over and take your only source of wood production and flip it facedown and get two woods for the privilege knocking you out of the game and slapping your engine over it's the dictionary definition of a bugger I don't want to overstate the importance of this raising thing let me skip to the end spoilers sharp and sit down recommends Imperial settlers all right this art is fun just drawing a card and seeing what wonderful picture you're going to get is fun continuing this lineage that we have in common sit down favorite race for the galaxy is fun where you're given a handful of fabulous options but every time you play one you're probably going to have to throw away another that's fun and stretching out your tiny ball of resources so you've got three stone and then you build a rubble pile that gives you another stone you spend on a stone in a wood throwing away the rubble pile to build a dino you know and then maybe just trying to stay in the round a little longer keeping your two swords back just in case your friend just before you throne finishes because if you pass you can't play anymore you're just hanging around and Katie burns down your farm because then you're going to burn down his village because maybe you don't even want to raise or nothing at all maybe you're just being friends that is fun but I'll tell you what Imperial settlers is a bit more fun if you're winning and this is interesting because this is at odds just like everything I've talked about before with the are actually this game requires you to be on the ball whole time you can tell about a first time because if you have a bad turn one two three four or five you'll lose to the player who had consistently decent turns all the way through it's a very traditional European board game in that sense that means that after you've played Imperial subtle as a couple of times and then you know what kind of a game it is if you sit down with your friends and you joke and you tell them about the funny Egyptian with the sunburn you'll also be thinking stressing slightly worrying like a horse at a paddock waiting knowing he's about to go into the race because this guy his guy might seem nice but he's got no time for well mix like clay testing both these games I could have sworn that I was going to recommend imperial settlers over nations but I had it all planned out I was going to talk about how while on board game geek nations is ranked higher than Imperial settlers that's because BoardGameGeek can have this myopic attitude towards art design you know design is praised and they talk about art but aren't design despite being this craft that people can spend their whole lives getting better at but they can pour blood and sweat and love and hundreds upon hundreds of hours into making a board game a nicer object it's ignored when it comes to rankings which doesn't make a great deal of sense and I was going to say you know what Imperial settlers is a smarter game but I actually don't know if it is I think nations still despite looking you know like it does and despite having this board which everyone has to read but you can't angle both of them towards all of the players which is really annoying I do still think nations is smarter I love so much about it I love the decisions I love the randomness in imperial settlers you can just draw a card that's not very good for your situation but in this with the shop there are always so many cards and it's so easy to retrofit your empire and you know replace you let's get that there you go focus focus little camera you can do it and replace your madrassas with that lens or replace your bank with a ball core everybody outside one say the bankers everybody outside go go here take this paddle it's really funny I love that you have to make the decision as to whether to expand your empire removing either like handling yourself with a food debt or a stability debt before you know what the event is that turn that's really interesting it's just so strong the modifier has productive art it does have hard it wants you to play this game for decades to come there's a whole extra deck of cards you meant to play with after you've only played a couple of games there's another Jackie card for the game treats as if it's radioactive or something and you only meant to play them when you really know what you're doing and then the player boards are double sided with beginner side and then advanced asymmetrical where side and the main Soviet spreadsheet ball hood has different difficulty settings that change the tiniest just one rule for each player's do how many resources you get if you don't grow your population and that radically changes how hard the game is so people who are familiar can play it with other people and just enjoy the journey and I'm struggling together it's almost but it's not quite thank you he's almost one of those games where you finish it after two hours and you touch up your victory points that's a bit tedious but then you don't really care who wins but it's not you do you do care who wins but you're almost done but you do and it's better not be that twice you bought the Battle of Agincourt thousand years ago and screwed you out of the money you needed to buy Magellan so do we recommend nations over Imperial settlers ah ok so I was just buying the first expansion for Imperial settlers called why can't we be friends which had cars you're in your town that your friends can then use but you get the worker thing is important to promise some serious post-release support for Imperial settlers and I could buy settlers this expansion and I've money that's known for ACOG Heroes for the price of Nations although we didn't actually pay for imperial settlers so hang on what is it oversaturated Quinn's I need to buy loads more cokes here we need a conclusion to the review ok well you and I are fussing over extremely fine details because that's what shut up and sit down does but basically it's really simple if you like you know a world history and you threw out the idea of swapping you know your medieval armies for Renaissance era Musketeers then by nations and if you like tiny ninjas Imperial segments it can't be that simple and basically is by no wait don't leave it's so depressing here [Music] [Music]

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 171,537

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Shut Up Show, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees

Id: bGBOYu4pMa0

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/chickeninferno]

I own both....and bought both after watching this review.

[u/takabrash]

Two years ago.