Whenever a new fad mechanism comes around — deck-building, trick-taking, now it seems maybe dominoes might be having a moment — I’m disappointed to discover it isn’t mancala. Because mancala is great. Speaking of which, here’s your annual reminder that Nick Case’s Pilgrim was the most overlooked title of 2023.

Imps was Nick Brachmann’s offering at this past Indie Games Night Market. You’ll never guess where I’m going with this, but it’s mancala! Mancala with fickle little imps!

Everybody knows imps live along rivers of magma.

The fickleness of your imps is perhaps the game’s defining characteristic. Which makes sense, given mancala’s customary permissiveness. When the game begins, both sides are safely tucked into their own fortress, the game’s analog of a mancala board’s player stores. Your army consists of a few imps of varying colors — we’ll get to those — plus two chieftains represented by big chunky discs. Other than that, there are a few neutral implings milling around the no man’s land between fortresses.

Turns are simple. Most of the time, you march. This is familiar mancala fare: you pick up all imps of a color and sow them one box at a time until you reach the final space. If there were any gray implings in your starting space, you also pick them up for the march, potentially increasing your reach.

Crucially, depending on the imp that lands in that final space, something exciting happens. Each color represents a different… hobby, perhaps, or impish vocation. Purple imps are vaulters. They leap across the river of lava that separates the lanes. Of course, they soften the landing by flattening an imp on the opposite side. Yellow imps are snatchers; they do the inverse, dragging targets across the lava to their own space. Green imps are throwers. They throw other imps forward. Like vaulters’ vaulting, this kills an imp in the target location. Pink is bait. They absorb hits before their kin.

On its own, this produces quite the textured landscape. It’s possible to enlist imps from the spaces in front of your fortress, ensuring you’re never without a move of some form or another. But you can also command any gathering of imps anywhere on the board, apart, naturally, from those directly dwelling in your rival’s fortress. Like I said, they’re fickle little guys. It’s the perfect flair for mancala, a game that has always emphasized the management of risk and the turnabout of using an opponent’s moves against them.

Here, though, those contrasting colors generate little hills and valleys of danger and possibility. It’s tempting to open with a rush of vaulters, but that fills an entire lane with purple dudes that might fling themselves across the lava at a moment’s notice. Similarly, it’s easy to get caught in a back-and-forth war of throwers, both sides chucking bodies to smash other bodies, but this tends to go nowhere fast.

Indeed, Imps grows more interesting as its subtler possibilities unfold. That’s where those chieftains come in.

Tracking our respective kills.

At various points, your chieftains will leave the security of their fortress, whether by choice or after being lured out by casualties in the lower ranks. Unlike their smaller brethren, they’re always loyal. No switching sides for a chieftain. But they’re also slow. Rather than marching forward with stacks of imps and implings, they can only move a single space at a time, either trundling forward or hopping to the opposite side of the river.

They’re also vulnerable. Two hits and they’re dead. Oh, and losing both chieftains means you’re out of the game, so it behooves you to keep them safe at all times. This is no easy task in a game that two turns in resembles a tropical Skittles-themed minefield.

But chieftains also represent one of the game’s greatest opportunities. Because if you can enter the opponent’s fortress with a chieftain, you earn a heap of points. As in, more points than you can possibly earn through vaulting and throwing imps. The scoring is carefully done, encouraging risk but also penalizing it, rewarding murder but not so much that it becomes the default route to success.

Okay, scratch that. Played with novices, murder is absolutely the default route. It takes a few plays before Imps reveals the subtler game beneath the impish purge happening on the surface. Before it reaches that point, the whole thing feels like a slog of attrition. I hit an imp; you hit an imp; repeat until the game concludes.

It goes without saying that that’s not the best way to play Imps, either for the sake of enjoyment or strategy, but this is one of those games I can see someone dismissing after a poor initial impression. (Not that the game, with its hand-stamped pieces and low print count, is readily available, but that’s another matter, one someone will hopefully rectify.) Rather, the game is an onion. It has layers. Yes, I’m pretty sure that simile popped into my head because of Shrek. Ogres, imps, it’s all a matter of height. That probably makes me a fantasy racist.

Attacking a chieftain.

Played the right way — with consideration for every move, yielding only the barest advantages and striking mercilessly — Brachmann has done something remarkable. Imps takes the simple rules and interplay of mancala and tweaks the formula with the gentlest of touches. The result is something that feels timeless and new at the same time. I genuinely hope this becomes one of the titles to break the confines of its indie market origins; these fickle little guys deserve to be traded between as many chieftains as possible.

A complimentary copy of Imps was provided by the designer.

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