Brazil: Imperial

On my first encounter, Brazil: Imperial felt like an eccentric Scythe clone: more streamlined, with several clever touches and a flow that keeps you pleasantly occupied. It is not a bad game, nor did it annoy me at the table. I simply expected more from it, and that expectation ended up feeling fuller than the game itself.

At its core, it tries to offer a 4X experience without the sci-fi, working from a familiar logic of development and imperial expansion, but at a quicker, cleaner pace than Scythe. It has plenty of interesting ideas; the issue is that they do not always end up feeling like one coherent system rather than things merely existing alongside one another.

The interaction was not what bothered me as much as the feeling around balance and scoring. On our second play, we discovered that we had counted the points from the difficulty of expedition tiles incorrectly: that difficulty does not count as victory points. The correction made it clearly fairer, but it did not substantially change the impression that the game still needs more work for everything it attempts to do to fit together properly.

It also has that exotic aura of a hard-to-find indie title, especially given its distribution problems in Europe. Yes, you can say you own it and sound like a perfectly respectable scene kid. But beneath that shiny rarity, I see ten good ideas in a blender and an “all right, folks, sell it now” coming from the next room.

Final verdict: it is better than Scythe, which is not exactly a triumphant badge of honour here. It has a nice flow and enough quality that I would not dismiss it as a failure, but it did not excite me, even after its second chance. Watch it from a distance for now; perhaps a corrected second edition will finally make these ideas worth as much as they promise.

Updated session

The second play largely confirmed my initial reservations. Correcting the scoring of expedition tiles improved the balance and made the experience fairer, but it did not solve my central problem: Brazil: Imperial still feels like development stopped just before the final, necessary round of testing.