Finished. Tom won, and it wasn’t really close at the end, despite the French (me) having essentially run the British out of North America.
The American Revolution was a tie! Despite my owning every fort and territory in North America, Tom cleverly leveraged the Hessians and the Spanish to prevent the formation of greatest nation on Earth. But it wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
I was thinking we would use the VASSAL module and drop box or Google drive to store move files. That will handle cards and what not. Communication through the forum, with moves posted in the thread, ideally.
I would love to be able to play some of the turns out in real time, but I don’t think that will feasible given time zones and availability restrictions.
So the site wargameroom.com has all these implementations of GMT games. Here I Stand is one of them. For a forum game what you’re thinking is probably best but those programs do handle rules enforcement and may be good for live games.
Btw despite that appearance, both of those games were face-to-face. The Atlantic Chase game probably took four hours, with an hour of teaching included in that. Imperial Struggle—even not counting lunch and other breaks—was seven.
Wow, Imperial Struggle was definitely one of those ‘I can’t wait to see this one’ games, didn’t realize it was that long.
Is that because it was a teaching/ learning game? Looking at it previously it seemed in line with Twilight Struggle for length, do you have that sense?
Thanks. Is it worth that extra time/ complexity? From a thematic perspective this is a historical theme that I have more interest in. Twilight Struggle has a lot of depth, for sure, but once you know the deck, you can definitely play quickly. Would this be true of this game in time as well?
I don’t know that I’ve played it enough to get a sense of whether it is deeper than Twilight Struggle. Events do not drive the action quite as much, as the event cards are not the sole driver of the action. There always seems to be more happening on the Imperial Struggle board than the Twilight Struggle board to me.
I have enjoyed playing it. If you ever want to do a vassal session, I can walk you through it, if we can ever get a time when one of us is not busy with kids.
No. The difference is that the Twilight Struggle board is always the same. The Imperial Struggle board is always different. The VP are randomized for each theater, and the commodities/trade goods are as well. It would be like playing Twilight Struggle where you had no idea what each region would be worth next turn, and you also had to deal with a bunch of ancillary victory objectives that were likely more valuable than the regions themselves. Plus, half the countries had super powers like “turn an adjacent country invisible.”
There are board positions on the Imperial Struggle board where I could have spent half an hour analyzing one move. The reason I didn’t is that there is a certain game etiquette to “keep things moving.” But the game lends itself to analysis paralysis far more than Twilight Struggle.
Part of this, also, is that you have to analyze a menu of nine chits that drive the action (the investment tiles) because those chits determine what actions you and your opponent can take. Only one tile with a diplomatic major action? What if there are two? How many of each? Event tiles?
And then you have to figure out how the wars (an entirely different board, basically) are going to affect the map position once they are resolved at the end of the turn.
The game is far more dynamic than Twilight Struggle. Not sure if that’s necessarily good.
The mechanics of Imperial Struggle are far more complex, also. In Twilight Struggle, you play a card and do ONE THING. In Imperial Struggle, you play no cards. You first choose a tile from the nine available. That has a major action, a minor action, and might allow you to play an event. You might also get to upgrade a war tile. If you play an event, you need to resolve that, which might mean another major action. You could easily be doing three or four things on each action round.
I certainly felt that too after my first game of Imperial Struggle. I’m still interested in it but I had also recently got Caesar versus Gaul and wanted to push my opponent in to trying that next. I am a huge fan of Washington’s War and Caesar v Gaul seems lot like that and more of a traditional CDG.
When I’m ready I’ll want to try Imperial Struggle again but it’s not th op of the list at the moment.