Well, what do you know, miracles can happen. Imperial is one of the first board game apps to land on the iPad way back in 2011 or so, and it was not well received by the general public. Much of this was due to the opacity of Mac Gerdt’s original design which has the feel of 18xx, but looks like a Dudes On A Map game, but it was also because the app was, how to say this nicely, not polished. Graphically, it resembled something cobbled together using scans from the cardboard version and pieces created in Microsoft Paint, but under the hood it was a rocket ship. The AI was stellar and the app included all the advanced variants, something even the big publishers don’t always pull off today. Problem is, the app hadn’t seen any love from its developer since 2013 and when iOS 11 rolled into town, Imperial finally left its spot on the home page of my iPad. I’m happy to announce that, yesterday, I was able to reinstall it thanks to a surprise patch that updated it to 64-bits.
If you’re a long time reader, you might remember me sharing my love of Imperial and its more global sequel, Imperial 2030. What other game places you in the shoes of the Illuminati, using unlimited wealth to dictate the course of history in the early 1900’s? Instead of playing a specific country you play the elite who buy stocks in the lead actors of World War I, sending their youth to the wood chipper while you rake in the profits. It’s a dark game, but abstracted enough that you have to really think about what’s happening to realize that you and your friends are the bad guys.
The game uses Mac Gerdt’s favorite mechanism, the rondel, which allows you to take one action for the countries in which you own the most stock. All the actions are listed on a circle with each country dancing merrily around it in a deadly game of ring-around-the-rosy.
Actions include mustering new troops, taxing the unwashed masses, and, of course, paying yourself (and those other pesky stockholders) dividends. While the ability to muster and maneuver is there, unlike other Dudes On a Map games you often want to send your troops and tanks to the graveyard so you don’t have to pay for them when tax season rolls around. Fewer soldiers means fewer salaries to pay, and more money into your already bulging pockets.
The updated Imperial is the exact same app we grew to love about five years ago with the added improvement that it now works with iOS 11. We did hear, way back in early 2017, that Imperial might be getting the 64-bit treatment and “more”, but after a year passed we had assumed this rumor to be false. Apparently not, and what the “more” might be is still up in the air. Hopefully the developer has been looking into improvements to bring the app up to the quality we’re used to seeing from Asmodee, Digidiced, and Czech Games. That’s a mighty high bar, so I think I’d just be happy if we got online asynchronous multiplayer. We can dream, right?
That line, “online async multiplayer is being developed” has been there from day one, no?
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