About Imperial Miners
⛏️ Imperial Miners is a light but combotastic engine-builder with a clever cascading card activation mechanic. Players will be playing cards to build their mines, digging ever deeper, with each card reactivating a line of cards above it. It’s all about finding synergies and churning out points effectively!
The game’s structure is simple: 🧐 you just play for 10 rounds, always drawing an event card, then choosing a card to place in your mine. The rules state that you can play simultaneously. It is one of those game where doing that will mean you have no idea what the others are doing when they activate big combo chains, but waiting for your turn can be a bit long for such a light game. 😶 Maybe this would mean solo is the way, but it’s pure beat-your-own-score.
You have a player board with 3 actions that you can choose from every round, as your board will be a part of your action chains. Under it you basically have four virtual lines where the 4 levels of cards can go. This means you cannot dig deeper than 4, so there is a limit to how many times you can activate cards. ☝️ Each game you also choose 3 random tracks - players will be able to advance on these to gain bonuses.
The core of the fun are the 6 factions of cards in the game. These all have some common effects and synergies with each other, so you want to specialize. 💪 Like, Atlanteans place down cog tiles and have some effects that scale with these cogs; or Barbarians have powerful effects but could disable themselves, so you need a turn to clear away rubble. They’re all interesting.
💬 Ultimately the game is very fun on paper, but playing it we felt a bit underwhelmed. I felt like it didn’t really matter which card I chose from my hand, all of them were powerful. Yes of course, some plays will earn more points, causing you to win in the long run, but decisions never felt tight enough. Gold is your biggest restriction but with some engines you can be swimming in gold.
I know this is a simple light game, but I really wish that my decisions somehow mattered more. And while we enjoy multiplayer solitaire games, this is maybe too solitaire.
