Imperium: Horizons

Good deck building civilizations is now better. Much of new content, including trading module that makes games better.

I also like that this is solo friendly, because each civilization contains bot card.

For the record, I have played Imperium (all versions) nearly 400 times at the time of this writing, so I feel that my opinions hold value and credibility.

The updated C/L bots are more competitive and harder to pigeonhole, to the point where I've dropped from Sovereign to Imperator difficulty in order to reach my desired win rate. This is great because I was actually getting tired of winning all the time.

The Trade Routes expansion is a bit of a wash for me; it's just more stuff you can do at the expense of longer playtime, higher complexity, more table space, etc. The upside is that out of all possible solo combinations, it's required only about a third of the time, so this is acceptable and I will only use it when required.

Trade Routes also gives the bots some unnecessary advantages: bots never spends goods to trade, gain glory via merchant empire quicker and more cheaply than the player, and can gain cards from dynasty via Welcoming or Hopewell Exchange System (which imo is far too powerful since it can be done multiple times). I've house-ruled a few things in the Trade Route table to level out the difficulty.

Another factor in bot difficulty is the composition of the Commons deck. There are way too many * cards (and many of them are difficult to score well with), the Fame cards are swingy/situational rather than generally useful, and the overall power of the deck was reduced and/or spread thinner across all the cards in order to compensate for the Trade Routes (which is obviously a problem when you're not using the expansion). To remedy these issues, I've put together 3 custom Common decks to even things out and create a more consistent experience.

The new decks and mechanics truly evoke the cultural constraints of each faction. The civs are diverse in their gameplay and the trade routes are a fun addition.

Imperium is a complex love letter to deckbuilding and history, clearly aimed at a narrow audience of gamers. That said, it's wonderful if it fits your tastes.

Heavy deck builder / tableau builder for advanced players. Lasts long (3-5 hours), crunchy nice decisions all along. Always interested to play if I find time for it!