Imperial Miners Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Imperial Miners, a quick playing card game published by Portal Games. In Imperial Miners, players are building out their engine over the course of 10 rounds, trying to earn the most points.

Imperial Setters came out in 2014 and I’d probably still rank it in my top 10 or so of favorite games. Fast forward five years and we have Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North. While that was a good title, I never really enjoyed it as much as the original Imperial Settlers.

This year though, the Imperial Settlers universe gets just a little bit bigger with the release of Imperial Miners. It’s a light engine-building card game for 1-5 players that takes about 20-30 minutes to play. Imperial Miners plays well at any player count.

Imperial Miners is played over the course of 10 rounds. Each round starts with an event phase (Note: all the events are beneficial). Then, each player chooses a card from their hand to add to their tableau. Any number of level 1 cards can be played, but level 2-4 cards must be supported by at least 1 card of a level higher. Cards are offset, so one card can support two cards below it.

Cards of levels 2-3 cost gold to play, while levels 1 and 4 are free. After playing the card (and activating it), you also trace a path back to the top of your board and activate every card along that path. After all players have played and activated their cards, the round ends and a new one begins.

One final thing to note is that each game has 3 progress boards (out of 6 total). Many cards will let you “advance”, and when you do so, you move your marker up a specified number of spaces on the progress board and gain the reward for the space you land on. Once you finish the board, you get a final reward before moving