Dune: Imperium Rise of IX

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Dune: Imperium - Rise of Ix expansion adds three new houses and six playable leaders". Dicebreaker. 2021-07-08 . Retrieved 2022-11-09. Over the last few months, we’ve enjoyed digging into some of the new gameplay twists and strategic surprises on the way in Dune: Imperium – Rise of Ixin a series of Design Diariesthat explore what the first expansion has in store. Instead of using any Conflict I cards, 5 randomly selected Conflict II cards are placed on top of 5 Conflict III cards. Dreadnaughts shake up the combat, and Tech Tiles affect the entire game. They are also just plain fun to use. Tech Tiles are these big sweeping effects that you get to add to your engine, and that’s fun. They can also incentivize actions you might not normally take. You have new ‘unload’ cards that give you reveal rewards even if you don’t use them on your reveal turns as long as you discard or trash a card instead. These cards are very powerful and did allow me to create a few little neat combos previously unseen in Dune Imperium.

All of the new mechanisms slot into solo mode nicely, complete with new House Hagel cards. The solo mode retains the same feeling of completeness that the original had and is every bit as easy to run, with very little overhead. It’s a bummer that the House Hagel AI can only play as two of the new leaders, but that’s my only complaint.Some of the new cards introduce easy-to-use new mechanisms. Take CHOAM Delegate, for example. You will notice that its location icon looks different, it’s an infiltrate icon, and all factions have a version of it. It simply allows you to place an agent on a faction space even if another player’s agent is already there. You can sit, in intense thought, sweating because each decision you make is crucial. The intensity isn’t because it’s complicated, however, at least in the mechanical sense. But because of the thread that every action weaves, culminating in a woven web of paths. The ripples of which you feel all game. Verdict The reason games felt close in the original is because of how limited victory points were. A more skilled player would win every time, but a less skilled one would still look as if they came close because it’s fairly easy to meet a certain threshold of victory points, even if you play badly. Rally no longer exists, for example, and you can no longer sell spice to CHOAM. Hall of Oratory has been replaced by Tech Negotiator, and no longer grants a troop. This directly changes many of the ways you would go about gathering Solari and Troops, but the replacements serve similar purposes with slightly more depth.

Dune: Imperium, Cryptid and Living Forest nominated for 2022 Spiel des Jahres awards". Dicebreaker. 2022-05-23 . Retrieved 2022-11-09. That illusion is shattered in Rise of Ix, nothing actually changed in that regard, the game isn’t less tight. It’s just the skill gap will be more obvious due to the expanded nature of the game.

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One Imperium card in the expansion is somewhat peculiar in that it asks you to discard twocards. That’s a big ask, so you’d expect a big effect. In this case, the payoff is a Dreadnought, built at Ix and delivered by the Spacing Guild. I will say this right off the bat, I will never play Dune Imperium again without Rise Of IX. While it does not change too much the things that are added are brilliant. The Tech is exciting and powerful, the Dreadnoughts add a lot to battles and all the new cards and systems add more variety and decision space for very little overhead. The expansion continues with the same feat that the original game pulls off: presenting the factions and planets in a way that is enriching for fans of the expanded Dune universe, while remaining completely accessible for anyone not familiar with the source material. All you need to know is right there on the table. If you sat down to play and didn’t know that Ix was the most technologically advanced planet in the Imperium, a cursory glance at the Ix game board will make it obvious that if you want the new Tech tiles, you go to Ix. The expansion introduces six new unique leaders. Each one features its own strengths for you to take advantage of and they feel balanced compared to the base game’s leaders. My only disappointment is that only two of them are able to be played against in solo mode.

Rather than returning to your supply they stay on the board forever and can be used to hold spaces on the board if you win, drip-feeding your resources throughout the game. These Dreadnoughts really alter the battles and see’s players rushing to build them and dominate the battlefield.Either way, Dune Imperium was already a stellar game, and Rise of Ix is a fantastic expansion. One that takes something great and elevates it by adding targeted content to its strong points and expands on everything that made the core game great in the first place. Many Tech Tiles offer victory points, either at the end or during the game. Even the ones that don’t grant victory points have such a colossal impact, alongside the other additions in Rise of Ix, that it largely takes the weight off of the end-game Intrigue cards. That’s something that vexed me in the base game. One of the reasons why they were an issue is there was a very limited number of ways to gain victory points. An end-game intrigue card essentially flipped the table at the last second. You have many more options in Rise of Ix and that makes them less impactful. During the design phase, I set the cost of this card to 1 persuasion. It was an educated guess and I knew it might be too good, but I’ve found that by setting my initial guesses more toward the powerful side, that will ensure that developers will buy those cards and try to break them! In this case, it was indeed too little an investment for such an impactful card, so, during development, we raised the cost to 3.