Jacob Picks Dune: Imperium Uprising

Jacob picks Dune: Imperium Uprising. He has played the original and the follow-up many times and says Uprising has the richer, more dynamic design.

If you have not played either Imperium or its sequel, Uprising, here is the setup: You're playing two roles at once. You build a deck and place workers, while the cards in your growing deck decide where your agents can go on the board.

What has changed is the market deck, where the cards you buy come from. It was overhauled and now carries far more intrinsic synergies and conditional payoffs.

Uprising also adds six-player team plays, two teams of three, with a Commander on each side. (That's a Commander in the Dune sense; no relation to Wednesday's Commander Night.)

They share a unique setup, a deckbuilding and worker placement hybrid, but Uprising has absorbed the lessons of its predecessor.

Hand it to fans of Brass, for the strategic intricacies, or to anyone who naturally enjoys the analytic and mathematical side of poker.

The catch is the rules. There are a lot of them to take into account, and it is pretty heavy. Once you know it, a game runs about one to two hours.

It lives on the game shelf at Bat City Games & Comics. Saturday Board Games Night is the natural place to try it, and you can always ask at the counter.

Looking for something else to try? Browse our new board games.