So,
Imperialism: Road to Domination.
We settled on a 3-player game, with myself, Neil and Chris (after a bit of wheedling and cajoling). Although I'd read the rule book and pushed the pieces around in advance, making the trip through the rules less ghastly than it would otherwise have been, it still wasn't too easy to grasp (as first games rarely are).
Now we've played we understand what we should have been trying to do - be in first place on each of about 8 or 9 commodity tracks, and grab VP Achievement cards from the display. Grabbing a VP card usually required either a certain combination of commodity points, a large army/navy (represented on another track), or having conquered a number of territory cards (which need armies/navies plus cash to conquer). There aren't many other ways to gain VPs; some territories have bonus VPs, changing religion - which can be done once - brings in VPs (though you score better at the end if your power remains Catholic), and topping out on the Prestige resource track also earns points. But Achievement cards and track position is the main way. I wish that had been clear from the start.
Something else that we didn't realise was that rushing down *either* the army *or* the navy track, while ignoring the other one, was a recipe for longer-term stagnation (I must confess, I spent the first half of the game thinking that it was the only "sensible" way to play, and the last half of the game thinking how wrong I'd been during the first half). The territory cards are important because they are the most efficient way to move your markers along the commodity tracks (which you need for VPs at the end of the game as well as income/bonuses during it), and once you run out of easy "medium army/medium navy" cards and get onto the ones which require a balanced mix, you can struggle to claw your way back up the other track.
Turns are relatively simple; discard (if you want) and then draw new cards, then choose one of five actions - which must be a different action to the one chosen on your previous turn.
The five actions are:
- Tax (take a ridiculously small amount of money; this action is almost akin to passing on your turn);
- Develop (take some benefit from one commodity track, usually money; gain a bigger benefit if you're in first place on that track; and then take some economic action which either involves getting more money or spending some of it);
- Conquest (meet the Army & Navy requirements of one of your territory cards and pay the gold needed to put it into play);
- Intrigue (play up to two cards to improve your position/hamper someone else's); and
- War (start a fight with an opponent, comparing either Army or Navy strengths with a few mods; the winner gets a couple of points, but if the defender loses, they have to chose a penalty to pay).
In theory, Wars are a bit uncertain but can bring in some decent rewards; in practice, because I'd shot up the Army track I was unstoppable on land, Neil had a huge fleet so could win any naval war, and Chris lagged behind on both but was never worth picking on. Oh, and three "certain victory" wars I started were shut down by inconvenient event card play. Grrr. Hopefully Wars have more influence on a game where everyone is playing a bit better than we were.
Intrigue plays were usually a matter of picking on the obvious target (i.e. whoever the leader was) to rob them of a few coins and mess with their Develop-Conquest-Develop-Conquest routine.
And the game does largely revolve around Conquest of new territories (going up the commodity tracks), and Developing (taking the economic benefit of those commodities).
Neil won, though not by as much as he'd threatened to at one stage (my position on the commodity tracks brought in quite a few bonuses); Chris trailed in third. Now Chris had got off to a slow start - you need to build your Army and Navy early on, to get enough critical mass going to start laying out territories, and Chris was about 2 turns behind Neil and I in getting things going. I've seen criticisms of Imperialism that it exhibits the "rich get richer" flaw, and that might be right. Or maybe we just played poorly and made poor early decisions.
I confess that I'm often guilty of writing off a new game after just one play, and that I might be more guilty of that when it's not a game I bought. There are a couple of factors that lie behind the second phenomenon - if I've bought a game, I want to get some money's worth out of it, and will try to extract a couple of plays before giving up on the game; but also if I bought it that decision was prompted by *something* that ought to predispose me to like the game (a recommendation, a review, something about the game's mechanisms perhaps). And similarly if I haven't bought a game myself, sometimes there are reasons why I didn't (a review, a negative comment by someone else, something about the game's mechanisms perhaps) - hence the lower level of willingness to give such a game a second outing. but in all cases gaming time is precious, and we all have too many good - or even great - games to allow the merely OK, quite good or not bad games to take up precious time on the table.
Where does Imperialism fit into the pantheon? I'm not at all sure. On the one hand, I brought home THREE "civilization-style" games from Essen (Imperialism,
Hyperborea and
Historia). I knew that at least one of them would not be my cup of tea. I played Historia three times before deciding that the level of decisions and of interaction were insufficient for the game's length. I suppose that Imperialism also deserves at least one more crack of the whip (especially as we played quite poorly). And it left me with a similar feeling to
Panamax - there's something going on with the game that I just haven't got a handle on yet, and it might be very good when I do.
Where Imperialism fell down for me though takes me back to those two key benchmarks - meaningful decisions and worthwhile interaction. the game has interaction. I played another "civilization" game at Essen -
Progress: Evolution of Technology. It had a tech tree. It had nice cards. It had too much luck, the "rich get richer" problem in spades, and zero interaction. Imperialism clearly isn't that bad. The player interaction is probably more meaningful when players know how best to interact, and when and why they should do so. But there's clearly plenty of scope for interaction - I've seen it described as having "take that" elements (which it clearly has), and two of the four main options on a player's turn are interactive.
No, where it may well fall down is on my "meaningful decisions" criteria. Because I struggled somewhat to see what meaningful decisions I had on each of my turns. If I was holding a territory card and could meet its requirements, it was pretty much a no-brainer to play it. If I didn't, take a Develop action to be able to meet the criteria on my next turn. A hand size of just five cards meant that there were rarely more than two Intrigue cards on hand - and often they might not both be playable - so Intrigue actions were only taken when the cards - and board situation - dictated it. War? Well, the imbalance in our early-game approaches meant that every fight was pretty one-sided, so the weak players hoarded event cards that would shut down a war, and the rich players often had better things to do.
So, jury's out. I'll try to play it again in the next week or so, though. And I'll be able too pass on the lessons of this first game to hopefully make that a better experience.
