Imperial Settlers

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The significant difference between the various factions make this game right up my street and the game play doesn't dissapoint. Best as 2 player

Two things stand out; it's an engine builder and it's (somewhat) asymmetrical in it's strategy. The later (in particular) salvages the game IMHO as it prevents players from just cracking the engine formulas and running the game into the ground. Still possible, but less likely. Driven by cards, each side will ultimately build a slightly different engine that is tailored to their faction's strength and to counter the other faction. In particular, that what the opponents faction is helps (in some way) determine what you should do to counter them; "do they produce lots of gold by require workers? Time to raze their worker production and hamper them." That sort of stuff help gives the game some staying power as each faction will have a weakness and counter that you will need to work on. The cards really save it as it's not a rote execution of each factions strategy; the initial lookout draft and what cards comes up also keeps the game fresh. The solo game is no slouch, and if you're into that sort of thing works really well, but the game shines at 2p. Above that, and I find it drags and it's tough to keep track of what everyone else is doing (although, that's only necessary when razing as there is only so much one can do to stop people outside of that).

I think the three dings I have against it are that it's basically an engine builder (which I find aren't particularly interesting or interactive). It solves the later by asymmetry and ability to break sections of their engine which is nice. Second, while it's interactive in the draft (passively) and razing (actively), that's about it. I get the appeal, it's just not something that turns me on. Last, passing sort of blows (although the exploration tile promos do help solve that problem). Still, an ok game and I do enjoy my plays (even the solo mode was interesting and deserving of praise), but it only gets so many plays before it just gets old, for instance, Lewis & Clark has a much more interesting and opaque decision tree, which holds it together, but L&C less interactive which is a trade off.

04-27-2015: After two plays, this could go up to an 8 or further down to a 6 or 5 based on how the next play goes. I've played three of Ignacy's games now (this along with Witcher and Robinson Crusoe) and the overwhelming feeling I've had through three different games and 7-8 hours of combined gameplay is: frustration. They haven't been fun, which to me is a cardinal sin for a board game.

I think this one would probably be best capped at 1-2 players. Restricting it to one action per player per turn makes the game exponentially longer. I need to play a card, so I do an action that gives me resources. Wait. Wait. Wait. Spend those resources to play the card. Wait. Wait. Wait. Use an action to get people. Wait. Wait. Wait. Play people on the card for points. Sigh... this makes me really appreciate games like Manhattan Project where I can do a similar series of turns in about 30 seconds.

It's very much a multiplayer solitaire. Unless someone is killing your cards you don't really care what anyone else is doing. The 45-90 minutes suggested game length is laughable. Our two games so far with three and four players have taken 2-3 hours each. You only go through a portion of your deck so it's very luck dependent on what cards you happen to draw. And hopefully if you were lucky enough to draw a good card you got it earlier in the game rather than later.

I feel this game would be really great if you could cut down on the game length and make the card draws more strategic versus luck-based (ability to look through your deck rather than shuffle and hope). This should also be 90 minutes at most but it's never been close to that for us.

Disclaimer: I usually play as the color red, so both games so far I played with Romans. If there is a combination of cards I should play, I haven't found them yet.

UPDATE 05-05-15: I played it again as a 2 player game with my wife and enjoyed it a lot more that way - significantly less downtime - and played as the Barbarians rather than the Romans.

UPDATE 06-06-15: I played again as the Japanese and won handily, after finishing in last place my first three games. I don't see my rating going up much at all from here. I feel about this game similar to the way I feel about Seasons -- great components, great cards, but in order to win I have to be a jerk, and I hate those types of games.

Location: MSK

Was surprisingly disappointed with this one. Very solitaire. Buildings aren't very interesting; produce resources, or spend x to get y, or turn x into VP. Later turns are just a sprawling tree of resource juggling actions that gave me tunnel vision. Good solo game, because other players are basically redundant!

Barbarians are broken. So if you play them every time you can easily win. But that seems stupid. I don't get why people love this game.

Nothing really new here, but the gameplay is tried and tested and interesting. Becomes quite fiddly after a while though, AP prone, no wonder you stop after five rounds. It really makes sense to employ a time-keeping device so the players don't take too long for their turns. Lots of fun!

Very interesting is that there are multiple races that play differently. This gives substance to subsequent plays.