Last week I wrote about the philosophy behind the new expansion for Imperial Settlers. Today let me go and dive into the details of each deck. What exactly did we do? What cards made it to the appropriate decks? Romans In a base game of Imperial Settlers Romans built a lot of buildings, their strong suit was a stone resource, and their most powerful feature was the feature cards! Administration and Headquarters, when built early in the game were changing Romans into a steamroller. How we approached this concept in the expansion? Still a lot of stones, and yes, cool feature cards again. The main engine card in the deck is a Tax Collector. It changes locations you Conquered(grabbed from the other player) into a feature card. That speeds up the Roman engine. We also added some defense cards like Crossbow maker which can turn a Common card into a barrier, into a ...

We Didn’t Start the Fire expansion for Imperial Settlers is a small Empire pack. One would say it is just a 50 card you’ll shuffle and hopefully, get some replayability. The other will say that these 50 cards changed the whole game. How is that? The expansion introduces the idea of Conquest action. Instead of spending 2 Raze tokens to Raze enemy Common location, you can now spend 2 Raze tokens to grab the most left Faction card in any row (either Production, Feature, or Action) in an enemy Empire, take it and add to your Empire. You just moved the border. Now, this building is in your area of influence. The border moved. One small rule. Believe me. It changes everything. The number of new synergies that are born is infinite. Romans play with Pyramids. Barbarians play with Administration. Japanese build Dark Chapels. There is a ton of crazy stuff going ...

We were on the right track. I exactly knew what I wanted to achieve with the expansion. I exactly knew what the title of the expansion would be. We were ready to rock. The expansion was supposed to increase interaction between players, make the game more brutal and aggressive and it was supposed to mess with the faction cards. The goals were clear. The title – We didn’t start the fire – was awesome. We were so much ready. *** Asia prepared the first prototype. She came with this really neat idea that instantly blew my mind – instead of razing locations (that means removing them from the game), players would steal locations. The card is not removed from the game. It just changes the owner. It’s a border war, those locations that are near the border are always in trouble, the border moves – sometimes you are part of this country, sometimes ...

Let’s watch together, how we didn’t start the fire.