Space biff squamos9/16/2023 ![]() ![]() The ships, man, the ships, they’re textured like stucco or corduroy or sandstone. Colony worlds might be barren planets or fortified rocks, shipyards for churning out units or factory planets that attract nearby carrion hunters. Every single thing on the map has its own distinct texture. Perhaps its visual noise doesn’t matter because everything feels distinct. Can legibility be overrated? Imperium makes a strong case. It’s still an imperfect image, but that’s part of the charm. Threats over there an unsecured border world here an opportunity to burn a rival colony world for extra renown next door. For those actually playing the game, somewhere around its second turn the static resolves into an image. It’s the sort of game that someone new to games might glance at with all the timidity of sighting the sun. The result is a cataclysm of information: cards stacked atop cards, cards splayed slightly to indicate fleet sizes, the carefully-laid grid of planet gone skewampus, even smaller token ship cards (or, in the deluxe edition, miniature plastic ships) adding even more noise to the signal. The entire game is played out on a grid of planet cards, tarot-sized, which around the midgame become entirely insufficient for fanning out your burgeoning fleets. Income, cards from a deck, moving ships around, spending a once-per-turn action point to colonize a planet or extract additional resources. On one level, Imperium feels like something you might have played years and years ago. There are two ways to win: either you gain enough renown that everybody is shamed into bending the knee, or else you colonize enough planets that the contest is hopeless and everybody falls in line. Your task is to expand outward, exploring sectors for colonization and conquest, eventually brushing up against rival empires and atomizing them with powerful beams of weaponized light. At the beginning, everybody has a homeworld equidistant from the imperial capital. And it is one hundred percent, absolutely, without a doubt how simple it is. With that out of the way, we can talk about what makes this such a special game. There’s something about a ritual war of ascension, a void scepter, a big contest called the contention - ohhhhh - but I think we can all agree that nothing here is going to blow any minds. There are a bunch of space empires trying to become the biggest space empire of them all. The bug faction deploys their dreaded space sea cucumbers.įor the sake of everybody’s time, I’m going to assume you know the gist. Instead, Imperium has become one of my favorite rapid-fire space games in a very short amount of time. If that were the only thing going for it, it might be enough. Pare away the fat, leave nothing but muscle and spiked appendages and laser cannons. Can we fast-forward through the exposition already?Ĭolor me surprised, because Imperium: The Contention is entirely happy to fast-forward through not only the exposition, but also through the extra hours that distend most games about space empires. Space empires, space bugs, space mafia, space humans. And don’t tell me I need to read the fluff at the beginning of the rulebook to understand the meaning behind The Contention. ![]() Second, there has never in the history of contentions been a contention that deserved the definite article. First of all, there is now a moratorium on using “imperium” in any more game titles. Gary Dworetsky’s Imperium: The Contention just might be one of the most unfortunate titles ever to appear on my table. ![]()
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