Dune Imperium: worker placing and deck building to keep the spice flowing

The vast majority of deck building games use a simple economy at their core: the cards you play generate resources, which you then use to buy better resource-generating cards from a common pool, repeating until you've generated enough resources to accomplish the game's end goal. Competition tends to be indirect, with players vying for the same cards but not directly attacking each other (although there are a few exceptions to this, such as Star Realms).

The structure of most worker placement games is nearly identical: players compete to place their workers on the most advantageous spaces on the board, which then generate resources that are used in various combinations, ultimately earning the points that will win the game when it comes to an arbitrary conclusion, usually a pre-determined round limit or the accomplishment of a game-ending goal.

It was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea to combine these two popular game mechanisms. I don't think Dune: Imperium was the first to do it, but it does it very well, creating a game that gives players enough strategic decisions to make them feel like they're at the head of an interstellar political family.

Like most deck building games, players start with a deck of fairly mediocre cards, with the goal of using them to buy better cards that will give them the resources they need to have more efficient turns. And like most worker placement games, players start with a few workers that they take turns placing on the board in order to generate resources. What makes the game especially interesting is how these two separate mechanisms work together during play.

In order to place a worker on the board, you also need to play a card with a symbol that matches the space you want to play to, and which will often have an additional effect when you play it. The spaces on the board generate the world of Dune's much- needed resources such as spice, water, money, and political influence, and also troops which are used in a conflict phase later in the turn. Any cards left in your hand after you've played out all your workers can be used to buy new cards, but some will instead give you other of the aforementioned resources, or increase your strength during the conflict phase.

At the end of each round, players compare the number of troops they managed to generate over the course of the turn, combined with any bonuses from leftover cards, with the winner gaining a prize, usually more resources, control over the board's locations, or the victory points needed to win the game.

The game gives you a lot to think about, but the different resources and economies all flow together in a very elegant game design, with rules that rely on smoothness and consistency over the dozens of sub-rules and exceptions that can plague games of this complexity. Add to that some well-produced components and beautifully illustrated cards that still manage to be easy to read, and you have an epic, satisfying game.

Since the game's release there have been two expansions that do exactly what expansions should: they make the game better without making it more complicated. In this case, some of the underdeveloped and less interesting sections of the worker placement board are replaced with new game mechanisms, and of course more cards are added to the deck building selection.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A great variation on both the worker placement and deck building genres that fits the theme like a glove.

• Dune: Imperium official website
• Dune: Imperium on BoardGameGeek

Imperius: sometimes great artwork is enough

Imperius caught my attention entirely due to its striking artwork, which crisply illustrates a far-future interstellar empire (clearly based on Frank Herbert's Dune) where great houses vie for power through a combination of two-faced intrigue and raw military might.

Each player is given an assortments of cards in their color, representing characters such as nobles, bodyguards, and assassins. All the players' cards are shuffled together (along with a handful of event cards) and then redistributed by means of a card draft: each player is dealt a hand of 5 cards, keeping one and passing the rest to the next player until all the cards have been drafted. The strategy here is to balance taking cards you know you want with keeping powerful cards out of the hands of your opponents.

The thing that makes drafting a little different in this game is that you're not just drafting cards from your own faction. You're also looking at which of your opponents' cards you would prefer to have some control over; for example, if you want to make good use of your Noble, you may want to also draft your opponent's Assassin in order to keep it from interfering with your plans (more on how the cards interact in a moment).

Once players have drafted their cards for the round, they take turns playing them to various different location cards at the center of the board. Two cards can go to each location face down, but once that limit is reached, remaining cards are played face up, so you have to choose carefully which cards you want to keep a secret and which ones you don't mind your opponents knowing about. After everyone has deployed their cards, the cards that have been played to each location are revealed and resolved in a pre-determined order (not necessarily the order they were played in).

As cards are resolved, Assassins kill Nobles, Royal Guards protect Nobles from getting killed, Ambassadors and Nobles (if they survived the Assassin) score victory points, and Commanders place control points on locations, which in turn score points at the end of the game. Each character has a rating in strength and favor, which are used to determine who wins if, for example, two different players have their Noble at the same location.

What makes this really interesting is that you aren't always playing your own characters, so you might play an opponent's Ambassador to a planet that isn't worth many points, in order to keep him out of your way, or you may even be able to play one opponent's Assassin against another opponent's Noble, paving the way for you to sneak the location's victory points out from under them.

The game play describes a lot of dramatic intrigue. It might be a little bit more interesting if the game took place in a world that we knew more about, such as the aforementioned Dune or even Star Wars, but the evocative artwork paints a detailed picture of an interstellar setting that seems a lot deeper than it is.

Rating: 4 (out of 5): Imperius has some unusual concepts that can be a struggle to explain to new players, but once everyone understands the basic strategy it's a compelling mid-weight game with simple mechanics but a lot of depth.

• Imperius official website
• Imperius on BoardGameGeek

Dune: a world fit for a CCG

Frank Herbert's Dune series of novels are about a universe populated by many different factions, each with its own distinct personality and flavor, using every resource at their disposal to fight for control of the most powerful planet in existence. It's a concept that sounds tailor-made for the type of epic strategy game that most collectible card games published in the 1990s tried to be.

The Dune CCG was originally published in 1997, and it has a lot in common with the majority of games published at around that time. The structure of the game is very complicated, with an elaborate system of battle comprising four different types of conflict and numerous, highly structured windows of opportunity to play cards that will affect the battle's outcome. The game's core mechanic revolves around the buying and selling of spice, for which there is a constantly fluctuating exchange rate. It also requires players to keep track of their numeric influence value, which changes throughout the game and can be used for various game effects.

Players use location cards to generate money, which is used to buy spice and pay for cards, but even getting those into play has an added layer of complexity. Locations (and other resource-generating cards) and main characters are played from a side deck, and when a player attempts to play one of these cards, the other players have an opportunity to bid the cost of the character or resource up higher in the hopes of making the card too costly to play, or at the very least causing a drain on their opponents' finances.

The mainstays of a player's deck are the persona cards, representing the unique characters working for the player's faction, and holdings, representing the player's income-generating property. All of these cards are unique, so a player's copy of a particular persona or resource card can't be played if another player already has it in play.

Over the course of the game, players put their personas and resources into play, bolster them with equipment and enhancements, and use them to attack the other players' cards via one of the four different methods of conflict: dueling, intrigue, battle, or arbitration. Each type of attack can only target certain cards, and each has its own rewards for success and penalties for failure.

One thing I definitely like about the game is that characters tend not to be as disposable and replaceable as they are in other CCGs. Here, when a character loses a battle they are turned face-down, and can be re-purchased by their player on a later turn; a nice touch that reflects the indefinite nature of death in the Dune books, where characters frequently return to life as ghola clones, or simply turn out to have narrowly escaped certain doom. It also helps the game feel like one of long term strategy rather than short term cost-benefit analysis.

All the action is in the service of helping the player get 10 influence points, and accumulate 10 spice. Neither is as easy as it sounds, as there is only a finite amount of spice available at the start of the game, so more has to be generated via game effects, and influence can be spent to help with card costs, or lost as a result of losing battles, so it can be difficult to hold on to.

It's a lot to take in, and a lot to remember while playing, but somehow this level of complexity seems in line with the tone of the Dune books, and doesn't seem out of place.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Honestly I don't think we've played Dune enough to give it an accurate rating, but  we're intrigued enough to keep playing, in spite of the game's complexity and the difficulty in finding cards for an 18-year-old collectible card game.

The spice must flow

Avalon Hill's Dune board game, based on Frank Herbert's science fiction masterpiece and published in 1979, has achieved a kind of cult status among gamers. The game has been out of print since 1984, which adds considerably to its mystique, with copies selling online for $100 or more when they can be found at all. Fantasy Flight Games tried unsuccessfully to reprint the game in 2012: they were able to obtain the rights to the game from its original designers, but were unable to acquire a license for the Dune content from Frank Herbert's estate. They instead set it in their Twilight Imperium universe and published a revised version of the game as Rex: Final Days of an Empire.

The game play is relatively simple: each player controls one of six interplanetary factions from the novel, and attempts to take control of three or more of the five stronghold areas on the board, which represents a map of the planet Dune. Players control areas by shipping army units into play, and if two players have armies in the same area they fight it out.

The combat system is one of the many unique things about they game. When a battle breaks out, each player secretly bids a number of the units they have available in the contested area. The player who bid the most units wins the battle and wipes out all of the opposing units, but the winner still loses all the units he bid as well. So a player can't bid all of his units if he wants to stay in control of the area after the battle is over. Players on either side can use a leader to add to their total in the battle, as well as weapons to try to take out their opponent's leader and defenses to protect their own leader. Players also have access to treachery cards which can affect the results of battle, and at the start of the game each player randomly chooses one opposing leader as their traitor; if your opponent reveals your traitor as their leader, you automatically win the battle.

In addition to fighting over territory, players can collect spice from randomly determined areas of the board, which gives them the resources they need to pay for more troops. Even that isn't as easy as it sounds, as there is a roving sandstorm that moves around the board and wipes out everything in its path unless it's protected by rocky terrain or a stronghold.

At certain points during the game, the legendary sandworm appears, and players have the opportunity to form alliances. Players in an alliance share victory, although their victory conditions are a bit harder. More importantly, allied players can help each other out. They can't combine their armies, but they can pay for each other's army shipping, make use of each other's traitors, and they can use their faction's special ability to help all the other players in their alliance. For example, the Spacing Guild gets to ship armies to Dune for half price, the Atreides get to peek at Treachery cards as they are being distributed, and the Harkonnens start with four traitors rather than one.

Each time a new sandworm appears, players get the chance to withdraw from alliances and enter into new ones. For most of the game's hardcore enthusiasts, this wheeling and dealing is the real point of the game, and what sets it apart from other, similar empire building games.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) An intriguing and compelling game, but it really needs a full table of six players to get the most out of it.

• Dune on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 4, 2014