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Imperial Struggle

52.00€

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Board Game Geek Reviews


  1. 7.5 out of 10

    July 2020: Provisional rating based on limited plays. Not really like [i]Twilight Struggle[/i] at all, in terms of feel or play style. That's not necessarily a bad thing. This one takes a bit more (in terms of rules overhead) to grasp, with a lot of little exceptions that, while probably needed for balance reasons, nonetheless make the overall architecture less straight forward. That said, there's a lot of delicious puzzling here--choosing ministry cards that hopefully interact well with event cards, and then choosing investment tiles based on whether they will permit playing those events and what other types of action points they will grant, all while trying to balance area majorities (during peace time) across four regions (North America, Caribbean, Europe, India), six commodities (Furs, Fish, Tobacco, Sugar, Cotton, Spice), and a prestige metric, all while trying to prepare for military victory in four major wars (each with three or four separate theaters). Phew! All of that balancing can prove a bit distracting at times, as it is rather difficult to read board state at just a glance. Ultimately, this is a little easier during peace time, as the regions are generally self-contained (notable exception in the Revolutionary Era if the U.S. comes into play), and the commodities are confined to particular regions (fish/fur in North America, sugar/tobacco in the Caribbean, cotton/spice in India), but harder to glance and tell how one is doing in terms of preparedness for a particular war theater. The board does (generally) contain indication of which political alliances will grant bonuses in which of the major wars, but that doesn't necessarily translate over to giving one the information one needs as to how one is performing in any particular theater of that war (at least with the portion of such theater that is open information). I've tried tracking the various metrics with dice, but that requires a bit of upkeep time that lengthens an already long game. This would be a feature that would be easily solvable should this game ever get an electronic implementation like [i]Twilight Struggle[/i]. Really looking forward to exploring this one more to see if it will ultimately have legs as long as [i]Twilight Struggle[/i] which I still enjoy and find compelling after 700+ plays.

  2. 7.5 out of 10

    Première partie très prometteuse, je craignais un jeu trop froid à l'explication des règles, mais non! Je développerai après 2 ou 3 parties. PS : après avoir rejoué quelques fois au jeu, je le trouve un peu "sec", il manque de chrome. ça n'enlève rien à ses qualités, j'y rejouerai, mais je baisse sa note. Re PS : après y avoir rejoué, quel jeu, mais quel jeu! Il y a tant de choses à faire, tant de choses à gérer! Le côté tactique (choix de la dernière tuile d'un type, utilisation des avantages) et stratégique (priorité des investissements) se mêlent à merveille. Je me sens comme un chef d'état qui gère la politique globale de son pays!

  3. 8 out of 10

    My wife and I played the game a few times. Even though this seems to be a good game it is way to complicated for us. The complexity rating at Boardgamegeek of 3.88/5 is accurate.

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Note: Before posting questions on rules, components, or clarifications or any other questions; please refer to the Imperial Struggle Corrections and Clarifications document. This file was created by, and is maintained by, the designers. As of July 2020 a set of Living Rules have been released.

In 1697 the Sun King, Louis XIV, emerged from a decade of war with his Continental ambitions still unsatisfied. Meanwhile, King William III of England sat easier on his new throne than he ever had before. With the Spanish succession crisis unresolved and looming, there were no illusions that the new century would be a quiet one. But neither France nor England could have anticipated the tumult of the years to come: a Second Hundred Years’ War, during which these two tenacious adversaries would compete fiercely and proudly along every axis of human achievement. On battlefields from India to Canada to the Caribbean Sea their armies and fleets would clash; in the salons of Paris and the coffee-houses of London the modern world’s politics and economics would be born; and finally a revolution would rock the foundations of society – a revolution that could have ended not in blood and terror but in a triumph of democracy and liberty that might have transformed the world beyond imagining.

Imperial Struggle is a two-player game depicting the 18th-century rivalry between France and Britain. It begins in 1697, as the two realms wait warily for the King of Spain to name an heir, and ends in 1789, when a new order brought down the Bastille. The game is not merely about war: both France and Britain must build the foundations of colonial wealth, deal with the other nations of Europe, and compete for glory across the span of human endeavor.

Imperial Struggle covers almost 100 years of history and four major wars. Yet it remains a low-complexity game, playable in a short evening. It aims to honor its spiritual ancestor, Twilight Struggle, by pushing further in the direction of simple rules and playable systems, while maintaining global scope and historical sweep in the scope of a single evening. In peace turns, players build their economic interests and alliances, and take advantage of historical events represented by Event cards. They must choose their investments wisely, but also with an eye to denying these opportunities to their opponent. In war turns, each theater can bring great rewards of conquest and prestige, but territorial gains can disappear at the treaty table. At the end of the century, will the British rule an empire on which the sun never sets? Or will France light the way for the world, as the superpower of the Sun King’s dreams or the republic of Lafayette’s?

—description from the publisher

Ages

12+
Players

2 Players
Play Time

120m – 240m
Designer

Ananda Gupta, Jason Matthews
Mechanics

Area Majority / Influence, Events, Campaign / Battle Card Driven, Card Drafting, Point to Point Movement, Secret Unit Deployment, Simulation
Theme

Age of Reason, Wargame
Publisher

Devir, DiceTree Games, GMT Games, Udo Grebe Gamedesign, PHALANX
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