Imperial Struggle is a behemoth of a game. It’s sprawling board dominates the table but it still overflows onto to two individual player mats and a separate board for each of the game’s four wars - only one of which will be in play at a time thankfully. It is also a game that takes many hours to play - I played it by email using the game’s Vassal module (no table I own is large enough to fit the whole game in physical space) and let’s just say that we were playing for a while. In person I would expect a game to be a full day affair. This scale is more understandable given that the game covers nearly a century of Anglo-French rivalry and conflict, from 1697 to 1789. Beyond its sheer scope, it is both one of the most interesting and frustrating games I have played so far this year. Sometimes I think I love it while other times I’m so annoyed I swear I won’t take another turn. Still, inexorably, I was dragged through the full game despite my periodic protests. I’m going to try and put my conflicted thoughts down and hopefully that will exorcise me of their constant hassling in my head.
Even on my desktop I can’t fit the entire play area on one monitor. This is as much of the initial map as I could reliably manage. Look at all that possibility space!
It is hard to talk about Imperial Struggle without briefly mentioning Twilight Struggle, the previous game by designers Jason Matthews and Ananda Gupta which for many years was the number one ranked game on boardgame database BoardGameGeek.com. The thing is that besides sharing designers and a naming scheme the two games have very little in common. Twilight Struggle is one of the archetypical card driven wargames - a genre invented by Mark Herman in his game We the People in which players have a hand of cards that they play either for events written on the card or to take actions using points provided by the card. Imperial Struggle has cards, but it’s not a card driven game let alone one as typical, and refined, as Twilight Struggle. You could extract all the cards from Imperial Struggle and, while it would make the game worse, it would still function as a playable game. The same can not be said about Twilight Struggle or any classic CDG - the cards are essential to those games. I don’t raise this as a criticism of Imperial Struggle, I think making the game its own distinct thing was the right decision rather than trying to make a seventeenth century Twilight Struggle clone. However, fans of Twilight Struggle may not find Imperial Struggle to their taste. The one thing that arguably the games do share is the scope, both cover long periods of history, and the abstracted nature of control and influence they use to represent political (and military) power by historical empires. They share a historic vision if not the mechanics that underpin that vision.
End of the first Peace Turn. Positions have shifted, stakes have been made, but this was early stages. Trends would become more apparent later.
In Imperial Struggle players take control of either Britain or France - representing broadly the kingdoms’ respective political, economic, and military interests rather than being any one individual monarch or other individual. Play takes place across a gorgeous map representing North America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent, as well as a side board representing the next war on the turn track. Play is divided into two types of turn: Peace and War. During a Peace turn players take turns selecting an Investment Tile which will given them points to spend on a Major action and a smaller number of points for a Minor Action. There are three kinds of actions: Economic, Political, and Military, each of which comes with their own symbol on the tile. Depending on what type of Action is depicted on the tile players will be able to do a number of things including (but not limited to) taking control of spaces on the main board, removing an opponent’s control, deploying naval squadrons, and adding more military assets to the next war. Minor Actions are similar to Major ones except that they can only be used to achieve one task and some options are not available for Minor Actions.
Depending on what spaces a player controls on the map they may have Advantage Tiles which can be activated once a round for a special ability such as placing Conflict Markers or reducing the cost of an Action. Players can also accumulate Debt to add points to their actions, up to a limit that increases over the course of the game. Certain Investment Tiles will also allow players to use a card from their hand for its Event.
The first war - this gives you the idea of what the war board looks like. The tiles are randomly drawn and then you add one for each listed region in each of the theatres. At this stage I was lagging in VPs, a gap I would later make up but at the cost of focusing on the more military side of this conflict.
War turns have far fewer decisions for players to make. Each war has its own side board which is divided into a number of theaters. Tiles are drawn randomly to each theater and placed face down so players have a starting strength that is known only to them. Players can enhance their chances of winning a war during the preceding peace turns by adding more tiles to the theater, upgrading their tile at that location, or by controlling spaces on the main map that contribute to the war effort. During a War turn the relative strengths are summed up and the victor receives spoils based on their margin of victory, few decisions are made until the spoils are being assigned. While on the one hand I appreciate the simplicity of this mechanism, I found it kind of underwhelming as an experience. You complete a bunch of basic math and assign the spoils. It’s not very exciting.
Victory points are won in both Peace and War turns. During War points are received as part of spoils by the winners. In Peace Turns points can be won by controlling a majority of locations in a given region. The exact number of points varies between rounds, which means you can’t just routinely go all in on one region but need to spread your influence around. Players also compete for control of three randomly drawn trade goods which will give rewards at the end of the turn.
Points are absolute, so when the French player gains points they are taken from the British - a lower score is better for the French. In addition, there are several conditions that can trigger an earlier end of the game. If one player reaches their end of the victory track, they immediately win. Alternatively, if one player wins every theatre in a war by the maximum margin they automatically win the game. As a game these victory conditions are interesting but I did struggle to understand what they would actually represent. What does a French victory look like as opposed to a British one? The lesson from the game seems to be that while each side suffers periodic setbacks the struggle between these two powers continues for many decades so it is hard to view victory or defeat as nothing but a temporary setback. This was something that didn’t really bother me as I was playing the game, but after I finished it kind of felt like the narrative of the game had been artificially interrupted by its sudden ending.
Right before the next war - this time we had two Peace Turns to prepare. At this stage I was feeling pretty good about India and Europe but I could feel North America slipping away. I definitely didn’t invest enough in my navies, which would cause the wars to slowly snowball against me.
As you might be able to tell, this is a game with a lot of moving parts. I am not even going into Ministry Cards, the differences in the game’s three Eras, Protected/Isolated spaces, how presence is used to determine which spaces you can act on, or the additional cost for some (but not all) actions if you take them across multiple regions in the main map. There is just a lot going on and I played my entire game with the rulebook open in another tab. We’ll come back to this later.
Imperial Struggle feels like it takes a lot of cues from Eurogame design. The selection of the Investment Tile and the ability to take a slightly weaker space to play a card in your hand for some kind of bonus feels reminiscent of the worker placement mechanic popular in may Eurogames. I mean this as a good thing, I think the Investment Tile selection may be my favourite part of the game. Each tile is slightly different and a random assortment are drawn each round- but they only reshuffle when all of them have been used so you will see all the tiles multiple times over the course of a game. You also leave one tile unused every round, which seems like a small thing but adds an element of the unknown I really like - you can’t just calculate which tiles will be played each round. Selecting an Investment Tile is tense and far more engaging than most worker placement games I’ve played. It’s excellent.
The war’s aftermath. I’m still feeling good about victory points - I secured a lead that I would not lose. However, my military failures had cost me some key forts in India and North America which would cause problems further down the line. There are apparently other ways to take forts but in our game they only seemed to switch as a spoil of war.
The main map is also gorgeous and beautifully done. While it is initially completely overwhelming with so many options for actions to take, once the game gets going it narrows down into a series of very intense conflicts over certain spaces and regions. You never feel like you have enough actions to do everything you want and every region can feel tense. The fact that there are four theaters also makes for great situations where you can largely cede control of one to go all in on another. In my game, as the French I ended up completely giving up on India but had an iron grip on Europe for most of the game. This strategy can be very risky because you don’t know what the value of each region will be over the course of the game, but it can also be effective and creates a great narrative.
I also mostly enjoy the little bit of spice that the Advantage Tiles add to the game, pushing you to control certain areas and rewarding you if you do but in some cases further urging you to keep acting in that one region when maybe you should be shoring up your position in a different one. Choosing what to do during the Peace Turns often felt very tense and kept me very engaged throughout. I could definitely see it being exhausting if I were playing the game all in one sitting, though.
Which gets to my biggest problem with Imperial Struggle: it’s too big. For my taste there is probably around 30% more game here than there needs to be. The game is long for one thing, I think potentially too long especially without any obvious shorter scenarios, but I also understand that it’s trying to cover a huge amount of history. Instead my problem lies more with the many little specific rules that you have to keep track of. There are multiple minor systems that you have to understand to be able to play the game but which can be very difficult to learn and hard to remember. Things like how a Minor Action can’t be used to un-flag one of your opponents space, or how you have to flip your Ministry Cards to use them - but if you deliberately choose not to then you can change them between turns of the same Era (they are automatically reset between Eras), or tracking protected versus isolated spaces, or the special rules for taking control of Forts - which I’m still not sure I fully understand.
Right before the outbreak of the Seven Years War. I was barely holding on in India and North America and had decided to focus my attention more on the Caribbean and Europe - a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time..
It’s overwhelming and especially early on I resented how fiddly the game felt. My opponent and I replayed our first three turns multiple times because we kept finding errors (sometimes with the assistance of someone more experienced than we were) and that was not a fun experience. I admit this is partially the result of how we played - play by email is more open to correction than playing live where we would have just moved on. However, had we played in person and not caught these mistakes we may have failed to actually learn the correct way to play the game. Even late in the game we were discovering rules we had missed or forgotten - such as you can only use one Advantage Tile per region and not more than two in a single action. I expect some people really enjoy all of this nuance and that it probably has a noticeable impact on the game’s balance, especially at high levels of play, but as someone approaching it casually I found it very off-putting. Given the game’s length and complexity it is not something I will be playing very often which means that while I would probably play it again I’ll inevitably have to relearn all these minor rules which I’m not looking forward to. I bet its very rewarding if you and a friend are determined to play it consistently over a span of a few weeks, but I know that won’t be me and as a game I would play only rarely I think the fiddly nature of its complexity is off putting.
Imperial Struggle’s topic is also briefly worth some reflection. This is a game that is very explicitly about Empire - its protagonists are two imperial powers battling for global supremacy and much of the board is represented by colonies. During a period when we are increasingly reexamining board games’ fascination with imperialism with a more critical eye Imperial Struggle occupies an interesting space. It is not exactly an advocate for Empire but it’s arguably not explicitly anti-imperial. At the games’ zoomed out perspective there is little room for personal struggles and the atrocities of colonialism, but I do think it does a decent job of covering how Imperialism was viewed by the European powers responsible for it and in abstracting their motives. Much like how Twilight Struggle deliberately distorted reality to present it as it was viewed by the protagonists of the time, Imperial Struggle gives insight into how these two European powers would have viewed the rest of the world. That said, I could easily see people being uncomfortable with its depiction of imperial conquest and rule. I’m prepared to give Imperial Struggle some benefit of the doubt in that it is offering a more nuanced depiction of how European empire and colonialism came to be than most games on the topic, but it is still a game about empire with a very Europe-centric view which doesn’t do very much to radically alter our understanding of the impact of colonialism on the rest of the world.
Right before the final round of wars. I felt pretty good going into this on victory points. I had completely lost control of India and North America but the Caribbean was very competitive and I had a pretty strong grip on Europe. From a victory points position things could be a lot worse.
One thing I did feel was missing from the game was Africa. With its focus on geographical control and conflict it kind of makes sense that Africa would not feature - direct colonial rule in Africa came in a later period than this game covers - but at the same time the absence of the slave trade is glaring. The period between 1700 and 1800 was the height of the international slave trade with over six million Africans transported across the Atlantic - nearly half of the total over the entire period of American chattel slavery. The game includes markets for Tobacco and Sugar Cane but no Slavery - the means by which those industries were made to function. I appreciate that including slavery in a game like this would probably make a lot of players very uncomfortable, but it is the truth of the history and if there’s any element of Imperial Struggle’s representation of history that makes me uncomfortable it is the absence of this important part of history. I don’t have an easy solution for how you incorporate something horrible like the international slave trade in a game that’s meant to be fun, but it also doesn’t feel like something that can be ignored or potentially left to just a few event cards. And that’s just the slave trade, there was more to European and African relations than just the trade in humans so while they may not have been strictly colonies it is impossible to ignore the specter of colonial control in Africa during this period. It just feels like a major part of the story of early modern European expansion is missing from the game with the exclusion of Africa, which is compounded by the fact that Africa is often left out of these stories.
This is where it all went wrong - I tried to stem the bleeding in North America, accepting the other two as likely not going very well for me, but a final push that cost me Spain resulted in me losing all of these wars by the maximum margin. That triggered an automatic defeat. Had I known the game better and studied the wars further in advance I might have been able to avoid this, but with all the information I was already taking on board that was never practical. In the end my opponent’s earlier war successes helped build to this crushing defeat that neither of us had actually seen coming! Honestly, it felt a little anti-climactic…
On the whole I wasn’t particularly enamoured with Imperial Struggle as a means to engage with the history of this period. I don’t feel like I’m much more informed about the history than I was before. I think if people already know history very well then they will enjoy recognising the cards they draw or characters on Ministry cards, but I didn’t particularly feel like I was engaging with it as a relative neophyte to this particular topic. Whether this will bother people will depend on the way they want their games to engage with historical topics. I don’t think Imperial Struggle fails, but I also didn’t feel like it drew me in as much as I would like. It seemed to me like it was a game first and about the history second, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, it would probably be less interesting if it were more of a simulation than a game, but I just found the balance wasn’t quite to my taste.
Overall, I found Imperial Struggle to be a fascinating piece of game design on an interesting, if actually quite grim, period of history. The ambition of its scope is impressive and it largely succeeds at delivering a game that feels like you are playing out a century long rivalry between two major European powers. That said, it is also a game that is more complex, and fiddly, than suits my taste and it will not be making a regular appearance in my gaming. I have actually since passed on my physical copy because I cannot imagine myself ever getting it to the table (if I ever even got a table large enough to accommodate it!) Still, while I am not entirely enamoured with it if you told me this was your favourite game of all time I easily could understand that perspective even if I don’t share it.