I’m going to be honest, my original impression of this game was, “what on earth is ‘breakthrough’?” The keywords were unnecessarily complicated, the gameplay felt bulky, I just couldn’t wrap my head around how to play this game – which is sorta crucial...
After those first few tries, I pushed it aside, and there it sat for a year and a half, collecting dust, looking up at me sadly asking why it had been abandoned. It came close to being sold…
Until one day this year, when I finally decided to give it one more chance.
So, I wiped away the dust, pulled the lid, and you know what? It’s become my new favourite game of all time! In fact, I even got my partner into it, and they don’t like complex games. But we are obsessed!
With many a play under my belt, Solo and 2 players, I now feel I can offer some handy insights to those who are wondering whether this is for them.
A Word on the Designers
Kudos to the designers, Nigel Buckle and David Turczi, the game is an incredible feat. I don’t know what sort of brain it takes to create this, but this is a very clever board game design. Apparently, it took Nigel Buckle 15 years to develop the idea!
Components and Basics
Okay, so about the game – it’s a non-collectible, deck building historical card game. That sounds like a lot…
Classics comes with eight civilizations that you can play as
- Carthaginians
- Celts
- Greeks
- Macedonians
- Persians
- Romans
- Scythians
- Vikings
Each of these civilizations is asymmetrical and have differing difficulties. Classics is recommended for first timers as it has lower-level difficulty decks than the other iterations of Imperium. You start as ‘Barbarians,’ and throughout the game will eventually become an ‘Empire’.
Four different types of cards make up your civilization deck:
- ‘Nation’ card – this indicates your civilization and any important actions/exhaust abilities that are exclusive to it. It also stores your ‘history’ – another clever concept.
- Starting cards – these are mostly barbarian cards, and miscellaneous cards which are particular to your civilization and assist you in your path to Empire.
- ‘Accession’ cards – each time you run out of cards in the draw stack, you pull the top card from the Accession deck and shuffle it into the discard pile to create your new draw deck. Once you have added all ‘Accession’ cards, you become an Empire!
- ‘Development’ cards – these are civilization specific cards which are unlocked once you become an Empire and can be purchased as an action. They are all worth those delicious Victory Points (some worth more than others)!
Though each civilization deck is asymmetrical, most of them have the above deck build, though there are some clever caveats – for example, the Vikings never become an Empire, and there are alternative ways for them to stay competitive.
Additionally, you have the following decks, included in the box:
- Uncivilised deck
- Civilized deck
- Regions
- Tributary deck
- Unrest deck
- Fame deck
- Misc cards – Barbarian/Empire reminder card, Solstice reminder card
You start the game with your base civilization of choice and through the rounds you may ‘Acquire’ or ‘Breakthrough’ (more on that later) to get different cards from the above decks to bulk out and improve your civilization. Some come with victory points, others help you get there, and unrest takes away victory points (bad unrest!).
The main goal is to end the game with more Victory Points (VP) than the opponent, whether that be against the bot or another human.
Components wise, the box is sturdy and strong, with individual sections in the plastic moulds for each deck. If you like to sleeve your cards, however, these don’t fit nicely back into the moulds. I also find it’s hard to differentiate which civilization/deck is which when they are in the box, due to the deck names being underneath the mould. This thing could really do with some dividers!
You also get cardboard tokens – the quality here is fine and I have no complaints.
We get resource tokens numbered – 1, 5 and 10
Population tokens numbered – 1, 5 and 10
Victory point tokens numbered – 1, 5 and 10
I say numbered, but unfortunately, they are indicated by little notches, and by each denomination being slightly larger than the last. Some people have highlighted that this can make it a bit confusing as they look similar and it probably would have been better if they had actual numbers on them instead.
The tokens are bundled together into a middle section in the box, which makes it fiddly having to sort them each time you setup. I’ve solved this by bagging them by type (Resource, Population, Victory) and popping them back in the mould, but it’s not super ideal and the fit isn’t perfect.
As for the cards themselves – these are standard sized. The artwork, from Mihajlo Dimitrievski (Shipwrights of the North Sea), exhibits bold colours and beautiful images that capture and transport you.
My major critique here is the card quality. It took only 2 plays, whereby shuffling and handling caused some of the corners to fray. This shouldn’t really be happening after two plays, and to be clear I am not a harsh shuffler (I have dainty little hands). To mitigate this, I have sleeved them but do your research on sleeves and be aware the box will no longer fit them perfectly.
2 Players
So how does it play?
You might look at this game and think – a card game can’t possibly transport me to 60 CE?
Alas, it can and it does!
Thematic flavours for every deck abound. The Macedonians, for example are focussed on building up regions (expanding their territories, which is a major part of their real story), and leaders also play an important part in moving the civilization forward – for example, you are unable to play Alexander until Philip II is in your history – this relates to real events as Alexander took the reins of power after his father Philip II was murdered.
Gameplay follows a specific flow, you take it turn by turn, firstly drawing up to 5 cards, you then get a choice:
- Activate – you get 3 actions – so you could play three cards from your hand, and resolve their effects, for example. Then 5 exhausts – so you can, if able, exhaust 5 tableau cards with exhaust effects.
- Innovate – not sure why they called it this, but you basically discard your hand to ‘Breakthrough’ (pick up a card from the market but don’t take the unrest), but you can’t take further actions.
- Revolt – Get rid of all the unrest in your hand but you can’t take further actions.
More keywords! But once you understand the concepts these are very simple and fairly easy to learn. Nevertheless, the keywords and rulebook were the first thing that shut my brain down from engaging and nearly put me off the whole thing – something to be aware of.
And that brings me to two more keywords:
‘Breakthrough’ – playing specific kinds of cards will have the ‘Breakthrough’ keyword which allows you to pick up a card from the market to your hand, without taking the unrest – nice!
‘Acquire’ – some cards in your deck will have the ‘Acquire’ keyword which allows you to pick up a card from the market, but you must take that nasty Unrest! Darn!
There are many ways to manage the cards in your hand, and after repeated plays, I’ve yet to take a turn where I am unable to do anything meaningful.
Every decision made, has significance and impact.
Interaction is minimal, and therefore if you like games that involve heavy interaction and screwing others over, then this may not be your jive.
We found at 2 players, gameplay is tight and engaging, and though it lacks interaction, it more than makes up for it in depth.
Despite this, if the other player takes a little longer in their decision-making, this can mean you are waiting around. We are going to try and use our downtime to plot our next turn. We’ve not got our 2 player games under 2.5 hours just yet, but I am hopeful this new technique will help.
Solstice actions – these are free actions, which occur as per specific pinned cards in the tableau. I would recommend placing the solstice specific cards together in the tableau, if you have space as it’s tricky to keep track of them later in the game.
End Game Scoring
Unfortunately, scoring is cumbersome for this game and there isn’t a very intuitive scoring system.
It’s pretty much a case of counting up points in your play area, hand, discard and history. Then calculating multiplier points of cards (cards with * or ? symbols) which is where it becomes confusing and lengthy and leaves room for error.
Luckily though, there is now a free scoring website/app, crafted by a fan, which can be used for Classics, Legends and Horizons sets, and will calculate for you – all you need to do is enter the resources and cards in the specified areas, and it will work out the rest – score!
One is the loneliest number…but it doesn’t have to be!
And now we come to the Solo Review.
There is a separate rulebook for Solo play, which is useful, but I would have liked some more examples and photos as I am more of a visual learner.
The solo bot design is like nothing I have come across. This thing actually plays like a human!
You set up the market as normal, however for the ‘bot’, their civilization deck is sorted in a slightly different manner. The development cards are organized in descending point order (highest at top, lowest at bottom), then the Accession cards atop that. Similarly to your own deck, once the bot runs out of draw deck, they shuffle the top card into the discard deck. The development card organization, mimics human behaviour, because if a human player is able, of course they will go for the highest scoring card first.
Below the market, you place markers, numbered 1 – 5 and then from the bot’s draw deck you fill this with face down cards. Cleverly this mirrors a hand of cards – it’s simple and logical.
Regarding bot card resolution, Nigel and David have refined specific resolution tables for each card type the bot deck has in hand – resolutions for Barbarian state and Empire state. Each civilization has a different table, and this must have taken them a very long time to balance but it’s super intuitive and makes you feel like you’re playing against a human who is making human decisions.
Turn order is the same for yourself as it is in the regular multiplayer games, but the main difference is that you are resolving the bot hand and managing the cleanup etc. so there is more hand management here.
After a few turns, you get used to this and it sort of becomes second nature – I was able to cycle through the bot turn quickly.
This is the most fun I have had to date with a solo game, and I don’t feel it is too different than playing with another human (apart from the chatting in between!).
The system design is clever, intuitive, and once learned can be simpler than it first appears.
Play time at solo tends to be about 2 hours, so roughly an hour less than 2 player.
On to the critique. My main gripe here is more to do with components or lack thereof for solo play. Having read many BGG and Reddit forums on this game, I understand that a lot of people like to play this game solo. Given that, it’s such a shame that they didn’t include separate reference cards for the bot resolution phase. Having reference cards for each bot civilization would have really assisted and made it far less fiddly. Instead, we must sift through the rulebook.
There are, however, thanks to some fantastic fans, now printable reference cards of these same tables, which are available on BGG.
Conclusions
The design is excellent, logical intuitive, and this is quite possibly the best Solo game I have played thus far. This is peak solo design and will be remembered for it.
2 player also plays great, but I would consider 2 to be the maximum for this game due to the downtime and extra time more players would add on.
The gameplay is in your journey, your deck, how you build it, how you craft your civilization – you feel like you’re achieving something – and you come out of each game feeling like you’ve seen the rise and possible fall of an empire. It’s fantastic stuff and its inspired me to learn more about the civilizations included in the box.
Now, this didn’t come easy to me, and it won’t for some others either. I am not good with too many keywords, and it took some persistence for me to learn them. For some people, maybe this won’t be a problem – especially if they are used to card games like Race for the Galaxy, which employs keywords a plenty.
Honestly, I think the juice is worth the squeeze. And if you are like me, I highly recommend watching a playthrough on YouTube/BGG – the best I’ve come across is Paul Grogan, who did a series of videos for the game (he runs a site on YouTube called ‘Gaming Rules’). This playthrough just made everything click together for me and helped me get this game to the table.
Yes, the Rulebooks are clunky, lengthy, heavy in keywords, and don’t have enough examples. Yes, the game might need a bit of TLC with regards to box organization, sleeving, printing of reference cards, but in my opinion it’s worth it for the amount of play, variability and depth of gameplay. It’s addictive!
Eight civilizations – all playing differently? And throw in the combinations of market cards, you’ve got a whole lot of game for the price.
I hope you enjoy, and like me, maybe you will invest in Legends and even Horizons – I know I will! I just can’t get enough!
Overall Score: 85
Artwork: 5/5
Complexity: 4/5
Replayability: 5/5
Player Interaction: 2/5
Component Quality: 3/5
Likes:
- Fresh and trailblazing solo design
- Lot of game in the box
- Asymmetrical
- Depth
- Rich theme implemented in clever card-play
Dislikes:
- In-box organization tricky for sleeved cards and many counters
- Clean-up can be lengthy
- Scoring very long
- Card quality
- Rulebook is not very accessible
