Every month or so I attend a boardgames meeting with some of my colleges. Last month I discovered a really fun and challenging game; Imperial 2030 It’s kind of based on the idea of Risk; controlling the world. However this game is not based as much on luck as Risk is, it actually is based on strategy. And there are lots of options available to support different strategies.

In the game you do not directly own anything, no, this time you’re an investor. You have a big pile of money and can invest that into one of the great nations of 2030; Russia, China, India, Brazil, USA and Europe. Once you have the biggest investment in one or more of these nations you get to choose it’s fate! You can develop factories, build up armies and fleets and pay out taxes. You will have to fight the other nations to obtain the tax rights from other developing countries, to be able to obtain more points.

The game is finished once one nation has reached 25 points on the power meter. However the controlling player is not directly the winner. Points are accumulated by cross checking the amount of investment the player has done in a nation against that nations points on the power meter. It is thus very wise to invest into several of the nations to gain more points at the end of the game!

Last Wednesday (29 June) I played the game with some of my friends. At first I was scared that they would not like it, because of the quite extensive rules I had to explain. But in the end we played for nearly 4 hours to finally finish the game just before 2 am, and they liked it! And it turned out that the players who had the advantage of the Swiss Bank ended up highest in the scoring. They both invested deeply in Europe, which was the first nation to reach 25 points. Hopefully we can have another match this week ;)