Portal Games 331603 Imperial Settlers, Multicoloured

Product Information

It takes a minimum of two raze tokens to destroy an enemy’s building, and you usually won’t have that. If your civilization was build and razed more times, than you could remember, we have a treat for you.

As our beloved game, Imperial Settlers, continues to grow and reach new fans, the inevitable has happened: it has become necessary for us to errata a few cards. I already want to go back and play the base game, to remember what that last round looked like, exhausting a dozen different cards to get more actions to get more stuff or score a bunch of points. I find this to be a great little twist on the usual resource production mechanic, and adds one more element to the strategic thinking needed during the game. I use The Broken Token’s Imperial Settlers organizer personally, but there are a few others out there to choose from.

Overall, the cardboard components are very good quality, thick enough to stand up to many, many plays. Many faction buildings require you to sacrifice a common location before you can build them – foundations can fill that role, even if they don’t do anything else other than take up space. At the beginning of play, you’ll have seven cards – three will be faction cards, and four will be common cards. Between the favour tokens and extra actions/resources gained by constructing buildings on your village sheet, you can sway the odds in your favour a little at least!

Already, mere seconds into the game, let alone the round and you are making decisions which will significantly impact your engine. The next Nifty Thing TM is the Command Wheel, which in essence is a worker placement system with a twist. During Gen Con 2022, I spoke with the team at Portal and I thought it would be cool to round out the set by taking a look at Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North, a 2019 standalone game based in the same Imperial Settlers universe.This notion of “plan quick and act fast” pretty much perfectly encapsulates Empires of the North for me. There is an advance mode in the game which allows you to draw the buildings from your village sheet onto your empire sheet, which allows you to multiply the value of those bonuses.