First Look at Imperial Settlers: Roll & Write

Roll and write games need no longer be seen as light, throwaway affairs. Ganz Schön Clever showed the power of combo triggering. Now Imperial Settlers Roll & Write arrives to throw engine building into the mix. It works in a very clever and actually quite thematic way.

Just as in the original Imperial Settlers, you are each gathering resources and building buildings which then offer an on going benefit. This may be as simple as getting an extra food each round, or unlocking a bonus action when the dice roll doubles. That’s already a fair bit more interesting than your basic roll and write and offers up a fair few options for where to focus each time you play. But the real cool twist lies in the advance game.

The core scoring method comes from marking off the boxes on a set of four tracks across the top of your empire board. But this doubles up as a place to establish buildings across your empire, and in so doing improve the reward for having that building. So that farm that was producing 1 extra food is now producing two, each round, because you were able to draw its shape across adjacent completed spaces of those tracks. This pulls you away from simply focussing on one resource and asks you to spread out and pivot to scoring later on. It rewards a bit of forward thinking with how you set up your engine and spend your resources.

I’d say it rather pushes the limits on what you can be expected to track of in a game like this though. The roll of the dice gives you some resources and a set number of actions. You add to that any resources your buildings are generating. There is no formal space to track what resources you have available this round nor how many you’ve spent as you go through. Which isn’t too much of a problem until you add in Harvesting, spending an action to gain extra resources from the limited number of sources at the bottom of your empire. Trying to juggle all of that while you plan and replan your turn gets a bit much. It feels like a game that deserved some resource pieces though if you own the original Imperial Settlers you could at least raid that.

I was very impressed with the original and wish there was a stronger mechanical connection to it, beyond the similar theme of Empire engine building. The stand out mechanics of Imperial Settlers that feel like they are missing here are the raiding – burning other player’s buildings for bonus resources – and the mix of Empire specific and common buildings. With regards to the former there is very little player interaction beyond a draft of easily underestimated but quite good items to use that round. That s hardly unusual in this genre but I felt a game using the name Imperial Settlers could have done more to make things interactive.

The empire asymmetry could be resolved with the special deck the game comes bundled with: pages of unique building sets. But these are intended for solo play rather than mixing between everyone so the ‘canonical’ game sees all empires on an equal footing. Neither of these are negatives about Imperial Settlers Roll & Write per say, I would just appreciate a game series being tied together by the elements that defined it as unique originally. Call it an absence of a potential positive.

The real draw of Imperial Settlers Roll & Write then is its clever twist on roll and write mechanics. I can say I would be very happy to play this again, although not necessarily more than other roll and writes beyond the novelty. But with a bit of effort this game could deliver a huge degree of novelty thanks to its solo mode deck of 50 unique building sheets. Printing or photocopying some duplicates will give you all the variety you could want! But this goes beyond what I saw in my demo so I can sadly only hope that it meets its potential there.

This write up of Imperial Settlers Roll & Write is based on a demo at the UK Games Expo 2019.