With a few years behind us, returning to Imperium is like catching up with an old friend. A messy friend, one who hasn’t ever gotten their life together, but a good friend who’s never given me reason to regret their acquaintance. When Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi first unveiled their hybrid deck-builder / civilization game, there was so much material that it had to be split across two separate boxes, Classics and Legends. Horizons adds half as much again to the collection, and shows these designers once again at their most creative.

The Inuit try to survive another winter.

Of course, this being Imperium, there’s the need to struggle through the learning process all over again. A bicycle, which according to proverb one never forgets how to ride, this is not. The rulebook is much improved over the original, but that isn’t saying much; many critical rules are still relegated to a glossary, while others are scattered like breadcrumbs across multiple pages. The cards hardly help. The two action types, regular and exhaustion, ought to have been icons. Solstice, when players activate special effects in between rounds, should have been a setting sun or something. Anything to shorten this interminable poring through marketplaces of cards. As before, Imperium: Horizons technically supports up to four players, but that’s like saying sitting in line to renew your driver’s license is a pleasant way to pass the afternoon.

I list the game’s flaws up front because they belie the actual protein of the thing. Horizons improves on Classics and Legends in every regard except those that seem most obvious.

But that’s not the point. To some degree, the messiness is part of the charm. Certainly, it’s easy to bellyache after three boxes stuffed with civilizations and ideas and interlocking systems. Trim too much and Imperium might lose the jagged edges that allow it to reach into so many unexplored corners.

I’ll give an example. Last week, I played as the Inuit. Now, very few civilization games would risk including the Inuit. Despite settling an admirable swath of territory and surviving some of the planet’s harshest conditions, the Inuit never hit what civilization games traditionally presuppose as the usual benchmarks for success — big monuments, flashy conquests, tech trees. There would be no place for them in, say, Clash of Cultures.

But the system created by Buckle and Turczi manages to represent them alongside other societies like the Taino, the Wagadou, and the Aksumites, and in such a way that doesn’t even feel like any more of a stretch than traditional inclusions like Egypt or Rome.

Trade routes add player interaction and new ways to get ahead.

How did they do it? By taking some of those jagged systems and leveraging them in new directions. Here, the main alteration is the state card. For most civilizations, this is a means for charting their linear progression. When the game begins, everybody is a “barbarian.” After a certain amount of development, you become an “empire,” with access to more refined architectural and cultural structures. It’s a perfectly serviceable representation of that hoary trope of the civgame genre, the idea that successful civilizations follow a specific arc.

For the Inuit, however, each alternating turn sees them swapping between summer (“empire”) and winter (“barbarian”). When the climate is warm, they have a full hand and can play more advanced cards. Then winter settles in, their hand size drops from five to three, and they need to stretch their resources to make it out the other side.

Along the way, Buckle and Turczi go to great lengths to prevent this seasonal rhythm from feeling too hidebound or, worse, essentialist. For instance, I dropped a word three sentences ago, “advanced,” that might give the wrong impression of how the Inuit handle. Because, sure, they have more wiggle room in the summer, and “civilized” cards tend to be worth more points than their barbarian counterparts. But many of the Inuit’s wintertime cards are crucial to their long-term success. Lean times drive them to develop new technologies, nabbing cards from the shared market, or take shelter in igloos to stockpile resources or manpower, or develop bone knapping or throat-singing as cultural identifiers.

And that’s before we even broach the topic of the Inuit’s history. Unlike other cultures, the Inuit don’t begin with a way to record their deeds. That’s quite the limiting factor, especially since many cards are only worth points once tucked into in a civilization’s written record. With time, however, the Inuit develop oral histories. Now they can store cards like everybody else!

That’s only the half of it. While oral history has its drawbacks — waiting half the game to store cards in your history is a big one — these living tradents confer certain advantages. Unlike a written text, a communal elder can actualize history rather than merely repeating it. Paired with bone carving, the Inuit may optionally withdraw cards from their history. If you don’t know Imperium, you might not realize how huge of a boon that is. Most cards deposited into your history tend to offer powerful single-use effects. By drawing them out of their history, the Inuit can utilize those cards over and over again.

In other words, their progression isn’t linear. Rather than graduating from villages to obelisks or from sailing to conquering the Mediterranean, the Inuit are given their due as a civilization marked by deep tradition. In most civgames, they would be a footnote, either totally absent or a minor culture swallowed up by an empire in its race to consume the entire world. Here, they stand alongside everybody else. It isn’t quite Greenland, but it’s far closer than one might expect.

My empire: buncha bogs

And that’s only one of fourteen civilizations included in Imperium: Horizons. Not all of them are as creative as the Inuit, or even as historical. Like the Legends box, which included Atlanteans, Utopians, and Arthurians, Buckle and Turczi allow for some mischief, tossing in Cultists and Martians as potential cultures.

For the most part, though, Imperium has always cast an unusually wide net into the sea of history. The Taino cross oceans in canoes and parlay their political structure, confederated free tribes, into a useful method for suppressing dissent. The Abbasids transform regional unrest into rapid expansion, irrigating the Tigris and positioning themselves as masters of trade. The Magyars conquer everybody’s territory until they’re tamed by Christianity, at which point they tame Christianity back with their saints and relics.

In the meantime, Horizons offers more than those fourteen new civilizations. Its second-biggest addition is trade networks. These special cards appear from the market and can be activated with trade goods for various bonuses. While it’s possible to use your own trade routes, there are advantages to using someone else’s, generating additional goods for both parties. After a few exchanges back and forth, trade routes mature and permit one-time advantages before resetting back to their baseline. It’s a clever way to get everyone a little more invested in what’s happening across the table, whether in a fellow player’s tableau or in the solitaire bot’s pile.

Speaking of robots, Horizons even manages some improvements there. Solitaire Imperium has always been a formidable option, offering a deceptively clever system that runs in tandem with your own empire. The gist is that each civilization comes with its own list of behaviors; rather than reading the text of their cards, you cross-reference their icons with a small flowchart to determine how they behave, what they steal from the market, how they gain and spend resources, and so forth. The cultures in Horizons come with their own solitaire bots, but far more importantly they add tarot-sized flowchart cards for the civilizations from Classics and Legends as well. No more cross-referencing the manual just to play solo. Thank goodness.

The charts for solitaire mode are much appreciated.

I’ve always been impressed with Imperium, but Horizons outdoes even the first two installments in the series. The small improvements are nice enough, but the real draw is the appreciation Buckle and Turczi show for the breadth of the human experience. This is a game where conquerors and traders can brush elbows with oral tradents and songmasters. Also, yes, Martians. I wish every civilization game were this thoughtful, this playful, this enraptured with the beauty of our species.

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A complimentary copy was provided.