Review: Imperial Settlers – Solo Play

I’m always on the lookout for good two-player games and Imperial Settlers sits in an elevated position on my list. It plays well with higher numbers but for those inclined to AP or generally slow play, the down-time can really pull the life out of the game making it run two-three times longer than anticipated for a game like this. But when playing with two, you chop out most of the down-time, condensing the fun into a much tighter time-frame. In addition, the direct conflict features of the game become much more “in your face” as players only have one other player to attack. Take that!

I never paid much attention to solo variant (official or unofficial) but as the years go by, I find myself asking about solo variants more. At times, it’s nice to pull out a game and play through a few sessions as a nice alternative to getting sucked into another night of mindless YouTube-ing or bad movies on Netflix.

Imperial Settlers is a card-drafting, resource management game where players take on the role of one of the variable power factions. At the beginning of each round players go through a drafting phase increasing the number of cards in hand.

Then players gather resources (e.g. wood, stone, people, swords, cards, apples and gold) and then, in turn, each player attempts to spend all their resources as efficiently as possible to attack other player’s buildings (cards) and to build their own buildings. Buildings come in two flavors (common and faction) earning players 1 and 2 points respectively if remaining at the end of the game (not razed/attacked by other players).

In addition each common or faction building affords the builder addition goods each round, benefits for taking other actions, or the ability to activate them to generate other items, points, goods, etc.

Finally, each player has free access to a market to swap people for goods. Each faction comes with a special ability (e.g. keep as much gold as you want from round to round) and its own faction deck of building cards. Without special abilities afforded by built buildings, players must discard all unspent goods at the end of each round.

In the solo game, the player plays against a virtual player that attacks at the end of each round by flipping up two cards from an attack deck. The symbols on the deck determine which building the virtual player is attacking each round. The solo player cannot prevent the success of the attack.

Your goal as a solo player is to try to build more faction cards in your settlement tableau than the virtual player (he gets two every round during the card drafting phase and gets to keep those unless the solo player attacks and razes them). That’s not terribly difficult so the solo play is really more about seeing how many points you can earn in the 5 rounds of the game.

The solo game flies by and you can churn through the 5 rounds in 15-20 fun-filled minutes. I’ve played solo roughly a dozen times and still find fun in the experience. Each faction plays a little differently but in my experience, even with the same faction, scores can vary wildly from one game to the next depending on which cards you draft. If you have a copy, give the solo game a try. I don’t think I’d go out of my way to pick up a copy strictly for solo play but if it’s sitting there on the shelf, why not?

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