I think my favorite thing overall is the constant TENSION in the game.

The more i play this game the more i feel it is a masterpiece in board game design.

I love the tension of wanting to go first for worker placement to get the spots you want versus wanting to go last for combat to know exactly how everyone sits before making your final commitments.

What I like the most about Dune Imperium is how everything seems tied to the theme. Even the scarcity of points reminds me how the ressources are limited in this universe.

From the design perspective, I think Dune: Imperium has the most effective icon design I've seen in a game. There are a lot of games where the icons are too complex, unclear, or indistinguishable. Often, there are also too many icons and you have to constantly refer to the manual to remember what they mean. In Dune: Imperium, it is clear what is spice, water, agents, cards etc. when you see that icon. Each icon is clear, distinct, and meaningful.

Absolutely love this masterpiece of a game! No other game I have played creates tension between players near the end of game like this one! Always an absolute blast to play

I really enjoy Dune Imperium as well. I actually consider combat an extremely tense auction mechanism.

My favorite part is the scarcity of everything (points, resources, actions, rounds, etc.). It makes every single action vitally important.

Dune is a multiple race with (partly) hidden information...the race for VP's, the races of the 4 faction tracks and the race of the military strength track each round. This enables so much sneakiness and there are conditions to enable new alternatives dependend on how well you are doing on other tracks. So good.

I love the reveal turn. Not only is it important to play the right card for the worker placement spots, but also to keep a couple of cards to buy better cards AND maybe earn a bonus. Didn't see this interesting mechanic much in other games. Anywayssss, very good game

LOVE these "10 Things I've Learned..." Videos. Great information to consider when designing.

There's an economy to the gameplay itself that is incredibly thematic. It alludes to scarcity on Arrakis and the card play is a nice mechanical illustration of where all of the action happens in the Dune series - in the minds of the protagonists all surreptitiously working to gain an advantage over everyone else. It really is a good game!

I am totally addicted to this game. Thankfully TTS allows me to play often. I can’t think of a single game that has made it to round 9 or 10 in months.

Dune Imperium is such an amazing blend of deck building with worker placement. Maximizing your workers weakens your deck building, creating inner tension. And of course the point "scarcity" makes every game so tight. But I don't think of it as scarcity since there are many avenues to secure VP. Perhaps the most interesting aspect from a design point of view is how the balance in the game is achieved. Nothing can be completely ignored, you need points from influence tracks, bonuses from conflicts (if only to deprive opponents), resources (including card icons) to acecss some spaces and extra cards for the necessary deck building. This creates a need to prioritize your actions each turn lest someone else beats you to the punch as well as an ability to pivot your focus when things don't work out. Great point about the expansion doing what it should, addressing less used features of the base game.

Unarguably my favourite game of recent years, love it to death, great fun!

Thanks for sharing. DI is in my Top Ten!

Like all of us I’ve got games on my shelf that I haven’t tabled. After hearing the love for this game I’m ashamed this is one of them. I’m gonna solo it tonight so I can teach it to my group next week. Cheers Jamie. Top man

The round structure, cardplay, and conflict owe a lot to Arctic Scavengers, however tying it all into a worker placement system based on the cards, along with the great theme, elevates those systems to a much higher level for me than they were at in isolation in Arctic Scavengers. I still have to give credit to Arctic Scavengers for paving the way and demonstrating early on that you can create tension in how to use your cards in a deckbuilding game, that it doesn't have to be a simplistic routine of playing your whole hand every turn and deciding what to buy/attack. I also quite like the round structure. Having been introduced to worker placement through Agricola and Lords of Waterdeep, I love the tension that comes from jockeying for first player and being able to take key actions or accumulated resources. I find that I miss thay in 2orker placement games with a more continuous flow such as Whistle Mountain, which I tried recently, where you choose when to pull back your workers rather than everyone doing it at once. That style still creates an interesting decision point for you as a player since you get to choose when to open up the spots that you've been blocking, but it feels more fluid and I miss the ability to more concretely plan and block other players.

Dune Imperium was my biggest surprise, quickly became one of my favorite games and is also so easy to pull out because almost everyone that plays it enjoys it and it’s not very difficult to teach. It has all the excitement of a three hour game but usually takes less than two, something my other favorite games Scythe and Root do as well. I’m not normally crazy about worker placement, WP games that I enjoy usually have some other major mechanism at play to make them interesting like the timing in Pendulum or Tzolkin, the engine building in Viticulture, or the follow mechanism in Formosa Tea… but one thing worker placements tend to have is an overwhelming number of board spaces to choose from and they often need some way to narrow that decision space down. Games that I like or hear good things about have different ways to do it but Dune Imperium’s cards are by far my favorite approach to this that I’ve seen so far.

Some really interesting mechanisms here. I appreciate you always digging into the positives of games.

Thanks Jamie for the video today! Absolutely love Dune Imperium and it is probably my most played game in 2022 so far! I agree with all of your points in the video. I really like the deck building design that forces players to balance the worker placement flexibility with the power of strong reveal turns. The tension over what others are doing and which cards to play is excellent and I really appreciate how this adds to the theme.

This was a great video, Jamie. I have not played Dune Imperium but now I definitely want to play it.

One of my favorite games and this helped frame a lot of what I enjoy. What I would like to see most are alternative maps - especially variants on the factions. We've seen in Arnak how just changing the research track adds to the game and it can work here. Another idea would be an option for losing a battle in third place like getting an intrigue card.

This was my most played game of 2022. The new expansion (Immortality) is great as well! I love Dune Imperium!

Great game! The last time I played I won and didn't even place an agent in the final round. With the cards in hand I had exactly what I needed to get a Spice must flow card, hit ten points and win the game! I really enjoy that extremes of play like that are a viable option.

We had a game of Dune I yesterday, with the expansion. And we played with the Epic mode. Took us 3hs!!!! With 4 players! But we ha such a great time

Recently got gifted Dune Imperium but I’m yet to play it. Your excitement for the game makes me want to crack the plastic and get it ready to play. 🥰

Such a great game. I need to get the expansion, though.

Great video about a great game. Well done Jamie. Dune Imperium is my favorite game of all time even though I have only won twice in about 20 games 😅 Both on tie breaks Scythe is in my top5, another great game

You hit ever great point on the game. Well done 👍

Arnak is my favorite game, but given the theme and tension of Dune, it is a strong candidate for the throne when I manage to get my hands on it.

I always get excited for expansions but I am having trouble thinking about what I’d want from another expansion. Maybe a way to churn the imperium row as part of a agent/reveal bonus on some new cards. I don’t own a lot of games this tight so normally I love robust expansions with new features to throw into them whereas this one it’s honestly hard to think where they could go next. At this point I think a “more stuff” expansion is all I’d need.

Hi Jamey. I have the minis and fancy tokens for this game. I think they add to the flavour, and increase the sense of occasion.

"The true heart of the theme is how it's integrated with mechanics and not just the components [AKA minis]" shots fired CMON

I appreciate all you do for us! I just recently started watching your content and feel it is some of the best. Most of the time I have a small attention span and can only take a 10min video, but I find myself watching your entire videos no matter the length. Anyway when I heard you say that you had a Dune Imperium video, I had to see it….you didn’t disappoint Thank you so much

This is a wonderful game. The only down side is that it is unlikely to come to Boardgame Arena due to having the IP.

Interesting analysis. I think, between this and Arnak, Expeditions is probably going to be compared much more to Arnak as a card-driven worker-placement game. The fact that you are adding worker placement spots in both games and increasing the amount of cool stuff you can do each turn is definitely going to give people similar feelings. Needles to say, they're distinct enough that few people will feel the need to replace one with the other.

Check your camera's settings. Something (auto white balance maybe? Or autoexposure incorrectly center weighted?) is causing your background to constantly, distractingly and dramatically change all through the video. To see it very, very easily: put the speed up to 1.5x or higher and watch the red thing hanging in the "closet" area behind you. Or the window's reflection on the floor.

Cool video man. I haven't played a lot of board/card games, in fact this is the first worker placement game I really got into. I recently got the digital version on steam and have been playing it like non-stop. I'm not a game designer, I'm a programmer, but I've been designing a game in my spare time for a few years now, so I've been thinking about game-design, it's like a turn based or simultaneous-turn on the computer, what I call "slow-time strategy" game... anyway, I really like this game too. I think what I enjoy about it is the level of complexity is at a minimum while offering the players a large number of decisions on any given action. The balance between known and unknown information is good. The randomness of the rewards for winning conflicts allows players to choose correctly or incorrectly (theoretically) based on the state of the game. Players don't know what cards will come from the draft board, what intrigue cards will be drawn by them or other players. Players also don't know what cards their opponents have in hand (most of the time). Sometimes, they can know exactly what cards they have if they've been paying attention to what cards were acquired and which were already played or trashed. So I guess what I like about that is instead of having a large deck and a large discard pile, the deck sizes stay pretty small so it's less work to guess what a payer might have. The fact that almost every choice you make in the game (besides playing intrigue cards or drafting one of the two auto-replenishing cards) modifies the choices other players can take is interesting as well. It encourages you to balance accomplishing your own goals with disrupting your opponents. Frame a fun turn based, resource gambling, deck-building, territory claiming game like this in the Denis Villeneuve's Dune and you've got a fantastic game.

Love DI. I think they can enhance the player boards a little more by being a little more creative with each benefits they get.

Love this game, many plays in, still yet to add expansions (even though have both of them).

The race to 10 points reminds me of Euphoria. The asymmetry connected to a particular card reminds me of the Luna mechanism in Red Rising. The action gating reminds me of Paladins of the West Kingdom, which has a really clever mechanism for upgrading the gating as the game goes on. The combat reminds me a bit of 7 Wonders in the way that it happens every round, but obviously a little more complex in Dune Imperium. The rarity of drawing cards (vs. Dominion or Clank) reminds me of Lost Ruins of Arnak. The sneakiness reminds me of the Trap cards in Tapestry. I also am reminded of the way your Lord card is hidden until the end of the game in Waterdeep.

"Dune Imperium" is really a great design. I didn't believe it at first (the graphic design of the board repelled me), but I came around on it. Still, I think the best part of "Dune Imperium" is that it's neatly thematic even with its mechanics. But I don't like the expansion so far, especially because it doesn't seem that thematic to me, but also because I find the added mechanics not that good (dreadnoughts, shipping track).

I love this game. I have learned to reverse draft the leaders base upon tiers to make it more competitive in our group. There are some discussions that the leaders aren't balanced; particularly, the ones that interact with the influence tracks are better. Which one did you play with during your 1 hour game?

So many levels of stinkiness, Jamey! 27:51 I had to cover my nose by the end of my DI play through!

Wow, over in 1h? That's a feat! My two player games go around 2h.

I did not like the base game all that much, but that may have been partly because I hadn't figured it out the couple times I played. But with the Rise of Ix, it has become one of my favorites. I don't know anyone who does not play it using the RoI expansion any more, and it's one of the more played games in my larger group (about 15-20 people playing off and on)

Are these longer videos available in podcast format?

I think it was a bad move to base it on the IP of the movies, instead of the overall Dune IP. The movies are the new shiny, the game design should be made to stand the test of time.

Red Rising Imperium would be epic… just sayin’.

Fun game, but I felt the graphics were so comparatively small on the board that it didn't bring any of the theme forward. Compared to the original Dune game (haven't played the reprint) where you really get the sense that you are playing on Arrakis based on the sandy board, plus the sandstorm. There were just boring squares and tracks with tiny art that are so small that you don't thematically associate it with what's happening. From a gaming standpoint, it's all clear and iconography is solid, but the Dune-ish graphical tie-in is weak. Just looking at the board in this video makes me sad. Missed opportunity.

P.S., the new movie sucks. The older, Lynch version has a lot of weaknesses, but it did a much better job making you care about the characters, portraying Paul Atreides as he should be, instead of a whiny little beyotch, and, while the voiceover is annoying, it does a wonderful job of filling in details that are utterly missing from the newer movie, which spends far more time on action sequences and doesn't explain a lot of stuff that is important -- e.g., why knives rather than bullets, which the new movie never explains. The only good part of the new movie is the thopters, which are really cool and could not have been done in the 80s with 80s FX limits. And by the way, if you have not READ the original trilogy, you should, it's arguably one of the best pieces of FICTION ever written, and ranks up there as one of the best SF book/series there is.