Designer: Ignacy Trzewiczek

Start with nothing, and forge a mighty empire, mostly by upgrading moldy ruins into fancy buildings, such as pyramids, casinos and circus tents.

Imperial Settlers is a tableau building game. Players will draw several cards per turn, and play them. Doing so will build buildings that adds to the capability of your kingdom – some generate resources every turn, others add effects that trigger when game events occur, and others give the players triggerable effects.

Interesting Mechanic: 3 Ways to play a card. Buildings you draw can be placed if you have the correct resources. However, these cards can also be ‘razed’ (thrown away) for a quick jolt of resources, or turned into trade routes (which allows players to pursue a steady resource stream). This mechanic helps ensure that almost every card you draw has some sort of utility, no matter when in the game you draw it.

Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Factions. In many ways, Imperial Settlers is a reworking of 51st State, a work by the same designer set in a post-apocalyptic hellscape that narrowly missed this list. Imperial Settlers has one cool feature that makes this game a strong improvement – faction decks. Each player effectively has a unique set of cards that he draws from, and the decks are strongly assymetric, and lean on entirely different mechanics. This not only adds replay value to the formula, it also makes the game have much stronger and more ludicrous combos that fire off far more frequently.

Despite the above, many gamers still prefer 51st State for a few reasons – one that is frequently cited is the cutesy art style of Imperial Settlers. Still, if you like a relatively quick game that focuses on building an economic engine, either of these two games are great, but I’d have to give Imperial Settlers the nod.

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(Photo Credit: Geek Dad)