There is no other more apt title for a review I could write for this game. It kicks ass. It's that simple. I mean, this is a game about the 1st world war (well, sort of) and the player that wins is the one with the most money in the end. We wage war for profit. We kill our own soldiers because we don't want to feed them at taxation. We steal the command of other player's country right before that huge attack, just so you can send the troops to the opposite way.

How cool is that?

After a while, though, you realize that this really is a stock-market kind of game. It really is about helping your investments and how to hurt other player's. The war is just how you do it. And one could hardly call it a war, the zero-luck factor after a while makes it feel like a simple process. You can plan everything ahead very calmly, if you burn your brain enough, everything will work out well and you'll end up with your pockets filled with cash.

Of course, unless someone does something unexpected. Like in most stock-market games (I've found so far), in this game you can't really win all by yourself. You have to learn how to ride the wave of other player's actions. You have to keep an eye open for what they're planning and doing, because every little action in this game counts, and you can't possibly be in charge of all of them.

Because of that, everyone playing it has to "take it seriously", and by that I mean player C's mistake can cost player B his victory in quite the direct manner. You can't put all of your money in a single country (well, not usually), so part of your VPs in the end will come from other player's management of your investments.

And this game probably has the tightest endgame scoring out of all the games I own. This impression that I have is probably helped by the fact that you can't really calculate how everyone's doing in the middle of the game. After a country reaches 25 in the taxation track (the condition for the end of the game), you take out a piece of paper, do a few multiplications and after 5 minutes or so, you'll see who won, unless, of course, it's by a really wide margin (one player owns all the stock of the 5x country and all the other nations are at 2x). Some people might be annoyed at this, so I think it bears mentioning.

The one true fault of the game, I think, is the fact that a player can be eliminated out of the competition in the first few rounds. IF he's not careful, he might lose control of his country right before taxation, and the first big bonus makes a HUGE difference. Like in most investment games, 10 dollars in the beginning is worth a lot more than 10 in the end, so missing out on an apparently small bonus (6 bucks doesn't seem a lot in a game that ends at 120, 130 points) can really hurt you all the way through the end.

Another aspect that can be interpreted as a flaw is the opaque nature of the game's strategy. A beginner will be completely lost in his first match of this (unless he knows 18xx games), and will only really understand how the game works after you do the endgame scoring. You can give as many examples as you want, throw any strategy tips you can come up with: from my experience, a newbie will only understand this game after the first match is over.

I think this fault is mitigated by the fact that the theme is so damn cool. I mean, waging wars for money? Country's control moving between players during a match? I've yet to meet someone who doesn't find the idea interesting.

Even though this game has no random element to it, and the rondel puts one action right after the other, I think the replay value on this one is magnificent. I've seen every one of the 6 countries do well in one game and do badly in another, everything really depends on how EVERYTHING works out. The fact that Russia produced last turn may be an incentive for austria to move into taxation, which makes germany focus his troops on France, who will then stop trying to pressure england. I've seen one purchase of a bond have continent-wide repercussions (with the controller of the country changing, wars were stopped and started in just a single turn). This kind of domino effect can happen in this game, and is always delightful to watch (unless you've just gotten screwed by it).

One small little thing that I should also say is that when you play without the investor card (definitely the way I recommend), at the end of every turn there will be a turn for buying bonds of that particular country that just moved. This is done by an annoying and repetitive round of asking "so, you want any bonds of this country?" to every player in seating order, commencing from the current controller of the country. There's no real way to make this more streamlined, because the order of the players is really important here, so you can't ask "does anyone want any bonds from this country?". Nope. You have to ask "hey, Mr. Sitting-to-my-left, do you want any bonds? Nope? and Mr. Right-in-front-of-me, do you?", and so on. This happens at the end of every turn, so it gets repetitive.

All in all, I rate Imperial a 9.5. I'm always willing to play it, and always willing to teach it (and this one requires a bit more patience, you'll have to repeat things over and over again because of its counter-intuitive elements). It scales pretty well from 3 to 5 players (being considerably different experiences from a strategy point of view with each one of those player numbers). With 6, I wouldn't recommend it, you'll frequently find players without a country (a fragile position to be in, although not impossible to recover from). You can win by playing without control of any countries, but I'm not sure most gamers would be able (or even willing) to do so.

The two flaws this game has (the possibility of someone getting hosed right in the beginning and have no chance to win and the annoying question-asking round at the end of every turn) would be enough to take a full point out of the final score, maybe even more. But here the game is so cool that it manages to remain with this high grade.

I think a great example of this game's awesomeness is the fact that so many people in my game group own it. Since games tend to be pricy here in Brazil (international shipping and import tax), when we buy games we try to complement each other's collection, so we get a chance at playing many different games. When I bought this game, I knew about 4 people here in Brasília that already had it, two of which I played regularly with. I still bought it (cost me something close to 90 dollars, I think). A game this cool, I had to own it.