Imperium: Horizons Board Game Review
Thanks partly to the influence of Sid Meier’s series of Civilization video games, the genre brings to mind vast maps, exploration and inter-empire conflict, whether that’s on the screen or the table with board games. But back in 2006, a card game called Through the Ages changed all that by giving players civilization-building in all its glory without a map. As bizarre as this sounds, it was brilliant, and paved the way for other card-only conquest titles. Arguably the most successful of these was the Imperium series, which used very novel mechanics to bring to life the developmental arc of civilizations. Now it’s back in the form of Imperium: Horizons, a new, tidier, edition with all-new strategic concepts and all-new civilizations to play.
What’s in the Box
Imperium: Horizons is a heavy box, and it’s a heavy box because it’s full of cards. There’s almost nothing else in there except for a few card punchboards and a handy divider that separates the very many card decks in the game, plus a slotted lid where you can store the punched tokens. Each division is helpfully labeled with the deck that’s supposed to go there.
The cards themselves are decent quality, and the art is distinctive and colorful, full of detail but with a charming rough edge, like a comic strip. The style fits in perfectly with the previous two Imperium games, Classics and Legends. There’s a unique deck for each of the 14 civilizations included in the game, plus several decks of common cards, and a set of replacement cards for the older games in the series that tweak some of the effects.
While the inclusion of a rulebook should be obvious, it’s worth nothing that this is a revised and expanded ruleset over the older editions, with some new play concepts and extended examples to make things clear.
Rules and How it Plays
One of the biggest differentiations between Imperium and other civilization games is that each player gets their own historical civilization to play, with a unique starter deck. These are often wildly different from each other, and sometimes come with their own rules. Some, like the Utopians and the Inuit, get minor tweaks like different numbers of starting resources or exhaust tokens. Others, like the Martians and the Cultists, are radically different, lacking entire parts of the decks other civilizations have, replacing them with new concepts like the Martian gadgets or the double-sided Cultist ceremony cards. Even for those like that Magyars that stay wholly within the rules as written, every deck requires its own approach to play.
It’s also a deck-building game. Most nations start off in a barbaric state, with a small draw deck and a number of Nation cards. As the game goes on, you’ll add and remove cards from your draw deck, fine-tuning your strategy as you go. Sometimes, you’ll buy common cards from a market. Also, most civilizations have a deck of Nation cards, a random one of which gets added to your play deck on each reshuffle. Once all these have been depleted, your civilization flips from a barbaric to a imperial state and can start adding its Development cards from a separate pile: these must be paid for with resources rather than added for free. Being civilized or barbaric impacts which cards you can pick up from the market, and also the effects of other cards that you play.
Imperium: Horizons is a heavy box, and it’s a heavy box because it’s full of cards.
Acquiring new cards from the market usually also means picking up unrest cards. These clog up your hand and, if the unrest deck runs out, will end the game early in a collapse. Then the player with the fewest unrest cards will win. Otherwise, your goal is to accumulate points, which will come from diverse sources, depending on your civilization. Many cards are worth points at the game end, often chaining in with other game aspects. Mostly you’ll be taking action turns which involve you playing cards to build up your civilization or, sometimes, attacking other players — but you can also take revolt turns to rid yourself of unrest or innovate turns which let you gain new cards without taking unrest.
By this point, it’s hopefully clear that Imperium: Horizons is a pretty complex and unusual game, with so many cards and civilizations that break its core rules that trying to explain them all would be a waste of effort. This is both the game’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The core game flow is hard to grasp and, even then, you’ll have a fresh learning curve to climb with each new civilization you try to play. While you can get a feel for how to approach it from your opening hand, there’s a lot of nuance in the strategy, and you’ll probably need multiple games to master each faction. This is a colossal ask in terms of play time. To make things worse, all the cards must be separated back into their individual decks at the end of each game, making setup and teardown time-consuming.
Your reward for putting in the effort is a game of astonishing variety and grace. Its core loop is innovative, but the deck-building is actually a lovely stand-in for the slow pace of social development. Each run through your deck adds a new card, representing a new technology, the rise to power of an important leader, some additional lands you’ve discovered and so forth. The flip from barbarism to civilization suddenly unlocks huge new card acquisition, effect combos, and point-scoring opportunities. Yet no two of the game’s civilizations go about doing these things in the same way, and different match-ups will thus spawn even more variation. The market of common cards will also be different each time, ensuring you always have to stay on your toes in terms of strategy.
This level of flexibility allows you, to some extent, to tailor the game to your own taste. Attack cards and the new trade routes rules give a significant level of player interaction to the game. You’ll need to build up to your attacks carefully, timing them well to maximise their impact. Because you’ll also see when other players are adding attack cards to their deck, you must also try to defend your own position. But if you don’t want this kind of aggressive play, you can choose to play using only peaceful nations, such as the Japanese or the exploration-focused Polynesians. There’s even a low-aggression variant for a bit of both worlds.
Whichever way you play, it’s all about feeling your way through the strategies available to you, playing to your nation’s strengths which keeping a close eye on what everyone else is doing. There are a plethora of combo opportunities available across the breadth of rules. Sometimes you’ll be looking to execute one direct from your hand, and at others you’ll be putting a multi-turn plan into motion to try and pull off a particularly powerful play. So it scratches both tactical and strategy board game itches, while the low randomness and potential for interaction ensures it’s both deep but also thrilling.
Where to Buy
Get it at AmazonGet it at Osprey GamesGet it at Walmart
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