Archive for the 'Imperial Settlers' Category

Imperial Settlers is a new game from Portal Publishing by Ignacy Trzewiczek.  Apparently it re-implements State 51; however, I read the rules to Imperial Settlers and have played State 51 once some time ago, and Imperial Settlers appeals to me a lot more.  (Imperial Settlers was released at GenCon earlier this year, but is a Spiel release too.)

Each player is trying to make the most successful civilisation by using cards to increase their abilities and generate resources.  After 5 rounds, the player with the most Victory Points (VPs) wins – VPs can be earned during the game, as well as for locations they have at the end of the game.

Each player’s faction is slightly different and has its own set of cards, but all players can also use cards from a common deck too.  Each player gets a faction board which helps align their cards into rows of the 3 types of cards (Production, Feature, Action) – player’s own faction cards are placed to the left of their board and common cards to the right.  Each card has a colour in its lower-right to show what type of card it is too.

Each player has several cards in their hand and can pay the cost to build/place these cards so they can use their effects during their turns.  Instead of being used as a location, faction cards can become ‘deals’ which means they get tucked under the very top of the player’s faction board with just their edge protruding to show what resources these cards generate each round.

At the start of each round, players draw 1 of their faction cards and then gain 2 common cards by selecting them from a limited amount (s0 there will be some element of balancing taking items useful to you over taking ones that your opponents want.)  Then, players gain the resources/tokens/workers/cards/VPs that their locations, deals and abilities generate. Read the rest of this entry »