Imnia is a game I’ve found about accidentally, and please… give me more accidents like that! A city builder, with a bunch of fresh mechanics, and both familiar and unfamiliar setting, piqued my interest right from the beginning.
As its Kickstarter campaign is drawing near, more and more details about the board game are surfacing. And as a city development-economy game addict (since Civ 1 for early 90s hardware) I just can’t skip it.
This week a heavy dose of new info was released, and the authors have announced a giveaway including 1 Concordia Salsa and 3 copies of IMNIA Royal (the premium edition). If you’re interested: there’s a link below the article. But before that, let’s delve deeper into the new stuff about the title. If you want to read about the basics and the core idea – check out our previous piece here.
Looking Good
First of all: the presentation. Imnia got heavily redesigned visuals-wise. Building cards – the main element of the game are now a whole lot different. They’ve gone from being horizontal to vertical.
New cards feel more classic, gamey and somehow make entire Imnia more readable and stylish. There seems to be more iconography (and gameplay information in general) added to make everything faster, and should lead to opening the rulebook as rarely as possible.
One of the new additions is the main board looking like a painting of a city on a hill, with castle standing proudly above all other buildings. New physical additions also include meeples in few different shapes. While the resources and characters are still in the form of cards, things like trackers, stewards and boats are wooden.
Fluff and visual side: we love it now.
Geeknson Board Game Table | QUESTOWER Ads Sytsem
Evolution Makes the Revolution
One of the new gameplay details, we’ve learned about, is the trading aspect of the game. In fact, it’s one of the most vital parts of each session. Rare and valuable items come from overseas trade and might be hard to come by.
Talking about trading: there’s was a market speculation mechanism introduced. During summer: players can make use of their ports and swap exotic goods. The game in fact comes with season dial, and each quarter of the year grants additional actions ready for taking.
There were some hints about each player having an individual city board earlier, but now it works like this: players build their cities out of cards and place their workers on these directly. The aspect of competing for actions (like in good old Agricola) got turned on its head. BlackSea Interactive have also added a more classic common board (one we mentioned in the visuals section) as yet another component – most likely to encourage more forms of competition.
Stewards, Influence and Other Luxuries of Being a Lord
Another newly mentioned element are the stewards. At first each player has 3 of these, but that amount can increase thanks to certain, uncommon situations. As noble as they may sound, they are (almost) equal to what you usually call “workers” in this types of games.
Placing stewards on buildings unleashes special building abilities. These are the meat of this game, often can completely change somebody’s situation or even let you recruit characters (in the form of cards), who will aid you later. There’s also a mechanic, we mentioned in the previous article, that lets you place stewards in towns owned by other players, while paying with your influence.
Influence tracker stays as important as before and grows when completing certain parts of quests. Reach the end – and you get the chance at building a wonder… which leads to winning the game. Wonders have different building requirements, so completing quests with proper rewards beforehand, makes winning easier to achieve… unless someone was faster to pull it off.
Imnia on Kickstarter
The game is set to launch sometime in the second half of March. The whole thing is shaping up to be much deeper than I expected, and even more up my valley.
I will tell you more and review the game, when the prototype reaches us in the following weeks. Until next time!
>>> Giveaway link
