Portal Games 331603 Imperial Settlers, Multicoloured

Product Information

Use Clan Action Pawn – A player can place one of their clan action pawns to perform the displayed action. Actions include explore, harvest, populate, sail and construct. When performing this action any cards that a player has in their hand that has a “explore/harvest/populate/sail/construct to build” can play their location card first before performing the clan action. Players can also spend a vegetable to move their clan pawn one space around the wheel giving them the option to perform another action. This then exhausts that clan marker.

Nine times out of ten, it doesn’t really seem to matter—you’ll be getting a wood, maybe a point, maybe a fish (new to the Imperial Settlers series in my experience, which basically serves as food for your ships). Sometimes, it ends up being two wood, a point, and a sheep; regardless, it turns the Expedition sequence into something that doesn’t carry that much weight. Designed by Ignacy Trzewiczek and published by Portal Games, Imperial Settlers is a 1–4 player, empire creating, engine building, resource gathering card game with a strong element of player interaction. One of my formative gaming experiences with my first game group in Chicago almost 10 years ago was the card-driven engine builder Imperial Settlers (2014, Portal Games). A couple of my friends in the city absolutely loved this game so it was frequently out on a table during one of our game nights. The copy that I owned was passed around between three different people in our group. Ignacy has even gone the extra mile and added 4 great solo play scenarios to the game. They tweak and change a few rules and give you a different challenges and goals. I had a blast playing it and it’s among my best solo play experiences ever.

If you haven’t entered the world of engine builder or Portal’s previous efforts, then this is definitely the game for you. Portal have a great history of supporting their games with expansions, and it already looks like this will be well supported! Even if you have played the previous games there is enough here to tempt you away and reward you for straying!

On top of that, each of the four factions has its own distinctive play style and starting perks. This makes for a very fun, albeit often frustrating and mean experience where you’ll need to determine how to best manage the available resources and abilities to maximise your pool of Victory Points, ultimately determining the winner. Raid other players, by spending axe tokens to tap one of your opponents cards (preventing them from using them that turn) Taking place over the course of five rounds, players will lead one of the Barbarian, Egyptian, Japanese and Roman factions in their quest for empire. Over the course of the game players will see a tableau of faction specific cards and shared ‘common’ cards grow from their player board as the empire expands. I’m a huge fan of Imperial Settlers, so my hopes were maybe a little too high in the case of Empires of the North.In Empires of the North, players play until someone reaches the 25-point mark, triggering the end game. Additional points come from cards played into your tableau—unlike the base game, every card here is worth exactly one point—in addition to leftover resources, with a small sweetener for leftover gold coins. Players will continue with the four phases until someone reaches 25 points. If a players reaches 25 points in the action phase then the rest of the round is played out. If a player reaches 25 points in the Expedition Phase then one more full round is played. Players score one point for each card in their empire, one point for every two resources and one point for every gold. The player with the most points is the winner. Final Thoughts on Empires of the North

If you can get past some of these issues, there’s a fun game here. I almost think Empires of the North is better for players who don’t know the Imperial Settlers base game, but I’m really not sure who this game is for. I’m only a few games in with Empires of the North, and this already has me excited to play the base game once again.Imperial Settlers includes 120 faction specific cards (30 per faction) and 84 shared ‘Common’ cards. There are tokens representing wood, stone, food and gold. There are also 40 workers plus raze and defend tokens.