We focus almost exclusively on Blood & Plunder on this blog, but there are other Pirate games out there! In this review we look at Imperial Struggle, medium/heavy weight strategy board game published by GMT Games.

Basic Details for Imperial Struggle Board Game

• 2 Players
• 120-240 Minutes
• Ages 14+
• Designed by Ananda Gupta & Jason Matthews
• Art by Terry Leeds
• Published by GMT Games
• Rated 8.3/10 on BGG
  • Ranked #6 in Wargames
  • Ranked #257 in Strategy Games
  • Ranked #499 Overall
• Weighted 4.02/5 in Complexity
• MSRP $59.00
• Theme is the world competition between the French and English Empires around the world between 1697-1789
• Deep strategic and historical gameplay with low reliance on luck.

Imperial Struggle Overview

Imperial Struggle Theme

As stated above Imperial Struggle focuses on a century of conflict between the spreading empires of France and Britain between 1697 and 1789. The struggle is not only military in this game, but political and economic! One player plays as France and the other plays as Britain.

Each nation has a unique deck of “Ministry Cards” that include certain policies, people, and organizations that grant special abilities and bonuses to your nation. These choices for governance can be kept secret for a while, making it harder for your opponent to know how to counter your next move, and they can change over the course of the game.

In addition to the unique decks of Ministry Cards, most of the Event Cards that each player draws at the beginning of each turn contain different effects for France and Britain. And they have special bonuses depending on what kind of Ministry Cards you have in play!

Both the Ministry and Event cards give each nation a distinct feel with strengths and weaknesses in different spheres of the game. The starting setup is fairly even, but it also gives each nation different opportunities at the start of the game that feel very thematic.

Imperial Struggle Map

The map looks intimidating, but is easy to use after your first turn. There are 4 roundish portions of the board, each containing a different portion of the globe. Navies may move between these regions, but they are otherwise fairly independent and self contained. Each region has it’s own economic, diplomatic, and military flavors!

Imperial Struggle Game Play

The basic gameplay for Imperial Struggle is pretty simple to grasp, but becomes more and more complex and torturously tricksy to leverage in your favor as you learn the game better and better (sounds like a Plundery game I enjoy).

Imperial Struggle Scoring

Just like Twilight Struggle, there is a linear scoring track that one marker moves across so the game is either tipped in the favor of one player or the other, or exactly balanced in the middle. When any player gains points, the one marker is moved to the left or right. The game starts with the VP marker balanced at 15. If it is above 15, the French are winning and if a game turns ends at 30 or higher, the French automatically win. If the VP track marker is below 15, the British are winning and if it reaches 0, they automatically win.

The VP track is also used to track each nation’s Debt and Debt Limit and Treaty Points which are further thematic elements to manage over the course of the century.

Imperial Struggle Initiative

Whoever is losing gets to determine who goes first in each turn. Going first might let seize an important advantage right away, but going last lets you get the final say in how the board will look before scoring which is massively important. Initiative is a huge deal and not always easy to decide which way to push it if you’re currently losing and get to decide who goes first.

Imperial Struggle Basic Play – Investment Tiles

If you’ve played Twilight Struggle, 1989 Dawn of Freedom, Labyrinth, Here I Stand, Virgin Queen or any of their other big historical wargames, they all rely on a deck of cards that can be used as an event or as Action Points to accomplish various things in the game. Players take turns playing cards over the course of a turn. This game changes that up entirely, using a set of Investment Tiles (action tiles) that are available to both players each turn. This set of tiles is refreshed at the beginning of each turn and both players can see what kind of actions are available that turn. This feels way different than playing out of hands of hidden cards! One turn might really focus on Diplomacy while the next will provide much more opportunities for military build up. The public information on what is available for the entire turn forces you to try to reach into your opponent’s mind and try to figure out what their goals are!

The three main areas of the game are Diplomacy, Economic and Military. Each tile has two of these types of actions available, one as a Major Action (which you can split and augment with Debt and Treaty Points), and a Minor Action (which is much less powerful and flexible). These are randomly placed at the beginning of each turn and the combination that comes up shapes each turn.

The tiles also give you small perks to upgrade your armies or play event cards.

Imperial Struggle Turn Structure

This game plays out over 3 different “eras,” punctuated by 4 major war turn resolutions. The Succession Era focuses on the War of Spanish Succession, the Empire Era is interrupted by the War of Austrian Succession and culminates in the War of Austrian Succession, the Revolution Era is punctuated by the 7 Years War and culminates in the American Revolution.

Each Peace turn focuses on diplomacy, geographic jockeying, economic supremacy, and preparing armies for the war turn. This is where the meat of the game is played. Players take turns selecting an Investment Tile, then performing both the Major and Minor actions on that tile, along with possible Event Cards and Army Upgrade actions granted by the tile.

The War turns are fairly simple and quick resolutions of everything put in place during the peace turns.

At the end of each peace turn, you score for geographic and diplomatic dominance in the region (the reward randomly predetermined at the beginning of each era) and for economic dominance in 3 of the 6 different economic commodities (Fur, Fish, Sugar, Tobacco, Spice and Cotton). These economic rewards predictably change over the course of the game, so planning a long term economic strategy from the beginning can pay off.

Each War turn actually contains 3-4 different wars (or theaters of war), fought in different regions of the world, usually 1 in each of the 3 portions of the map: the Caribbean, Europe, North American and India. For example, the first War Turn, the War of the Spanish Succession, resolves conflicts in Central Europe, Spain, the Jacobite Rebellion in England, and Queen Anne’s War in North America. The outcomes of wars are determined by army tiles (strength and abilities hidden from enemy until resolution), presence of naval ships, ministry cards, in play, diplomatic control in the region, and fortifications held in the region.

Imperial Struggle Diplomacy and Advantage Tiles

Leveraging your diplomatic efforts gain you “Advantage Tiles” that give you little perks and advantages in each region of the board. For example, if you have good relations with the Iroquois, it becomes much easier to drive off your enemies from land regions in North America, giving you a better chance of dominating the fur trade. Or if you promote privateering in the Caribbean, you can plunge your enemy’s colonies into chaos, forcing them devote military resources to restoring order and production from those colonies.

The European Advantage tiles are super interesting, and many of them represent alliances or coalitions with more than one nation at a time. European politics become very complex!

Imperial Struggle Game Length

This is a pretty long game. It can end early if one side really does well, but if you play through all 10 turns, it will take 3-4 hours. But, we found that it was very easy to sit down and play 1-3 turns, then get up and come back later and continue the game (assuming you have place to leave the game out for a couple days). Each turn has a scoring resolution of some nature, so it was a satisfying game session just to play 1-2 turns.

The box says 2-4 hours while Twilight Struggle is listed as 2-3 hours. That feels realistic and we did have some games end early, maybe even before 2 hours in one case.

Imperial Struggle Fun Factor

If you’re a history nerd and love a rich, strategic game, this has a huge fun factor! France and Britain feel very different. The swings of fortune can be dramatic. There is plenty of sneaky and tricky maneuvering to do. Trying to keep tabs on the variable regional scoring, the economic scoring, and preparing well for each major war is INTENSE!

Piracy is really a fairly small part of this game, but I found it very fun to play out the grand drama of world politics in which the buccaneering and piracy which we enjoy in Blood & Plunder is actually a fairly small part. It is a fun and refreshing historical perspective.

Balance in Imperial Struggle

In our first plays, it seemed that France had an edge. In repeated plays, we found ways for the British to counter some of those advantages. Doing some reading on the BGG forums seemed to indicate this was a common experience. If one of the two player jumping into this game may be less accustomed to a big game like this, or less good at strategy, let them play France in the first game. It might be a little easier.

Best Audience for Imperial Struggle

The game is recommended for ages 14+ and that’s pretty much the “high end” of any board game age recommendations. It’s not a simple game, but the rules are mercifully short (17 pages).

This game is best for 2 adults that love history and will have a chance to play it several times within a year. A large game like this takes a couple plays to fully absorb, and you’ll want to play again within a reasonable timeframe so you won’t forget everything you learned on your first play!

I would recommend this highly to either the “board gaming married couple,” a parent-teenager combo, or two friends that regularly meet to play games. I would not recommend this as a “one off” game. It will take a while to learn, setup, and make mistakes on your first play through. Then you can really dig into it on your second play.

If you were to do a “one off,” maybe playing with a friend at a game convention, I would encourage you to play through at least a couple turns by yourself. Watch a video, read the rulebook, play both sides through half the game, then you’ll be prepared to enjoy a real session with an opponent rather than bumbling through the rulebook and making a lot of mistakes and drawing out your first play.

My wife and I found this a very enjoyable game to play together. Historical, deep, easily “segment-able,” beautiful, and asymmetric but balanced. We played it 6 or 7 times in the course of about a month. We would end a game and immediately be ready to try it again (which is rare for us grizzled veteran board gamers!).

Learning Imperial Struggle

There is an abundance of great resources on the internet for learning almost any game nowadays! There are a couple good videos reviewing and/or teaching you how to play Imperial Struggle. I listened to one of these and it helped give me a good idea of how the game works, but it didn’t replace the rulebook.

The Rulebook is pretty good, with a decent index and organized decently. It was small enough to read through in one sitting with my wife without either of us dying of old age or boredom. There was also a second booklet included in the game that was a fully narrated play of an entire first turn which really helps some people see how a game works. Looking through that book helped answer some questions for us.

Imperial Struggle Production Value

This is a beautiful game! It’s a GMT game, so there’s no minis or extravagance, but the board is functional and looks great, the cards are well laid out with great period art, the chits and bits are all fine. I keep using Twilight Struggle as a comparison because I assume more people have played it, but this is certainly a step up from that game in production values. Twilight Struggle is fine, but this is just a little nicer all around. Or maybe I just like 18th century aesthetics more than 20th century.

Imperial Struggle Replayability

We found this game very replay-able. In fact, it needs a couple plays. But aside from learning the game well, there are elements that make repeated plays enjoyable.

First, the Ministry Cards give each nation several ways to approach a game. The French player can really focus on European diplomacy and try to undermine British rule through the ongoing Jacobite plots. Or, they can ignore that and focus on good relations with the rest of the European powers, raking in bonus “Treaty” action points from favor with other monarchs. Or they can focus on building their naval power and supporting their outlying colonies. The British have meaningful choices between strong banking, aggressive mercantilism, or stronger relations with Ireland and Scotland to scuttle the Jacobite plots. Some Ministry Cards seem stronger than others, but after several plays, some were expected and then subverting those expectations and going a different direction was really fun!

Each region gets a point value assigned to it at the beginning of each turn, so sometimes the Caribbean might be super important all through a game, and other times it might be rubbish. Or that valuable region might keep changing! The game kept getting better for us on repeated plays. Great stuff!

Final Thoughts on the Imperial Struggle Board Game

This is one of the most enjoyable board games my wife and I have come across in some time! We loved it. It was historically enjoyable, strategically crunchy and satisfying, and easy for us to sit down and play for an hour or two in an evening. If you’ve played a game like Twilight Struggle, or a heavier Euro Game like Agricola, and enjoy this period of world history, this could be a great game for you! At a $60 MSRP, the price is very reasonable for what you’re getting. Imperial Struggle is available on Amazon for $49.81 (at the time of writing this article).

Look for more in this series of reviews of Pirate themed board games here on Blood & Pigment.

Article by Joseph Forster

Additional Recommended Reading

• Treasure Island Board Game Review here on Blood & Pigment
• Imperial Struggle review from The Dice Tower
• Imperial Struggle on BoardGameGeek
• Learn to Play video from Game in a Nutshell
• Imperial Struggle Rulebook
• How to Play Imperial Struggle from Legendary Tactics (great video)
• Imperial Struggle on GMT’s website
• VASSAL Module for Imperial Struggle