Brazil: Imperial

Brazil: Imperial is an odd sort of Scythe clone: brisk in motion, full of ideas, and initially persuasive enough that you want to make room for it. It also has the allure of a hard-to-find title, which lets you say you own it before anyone asks the less convenient question of why.

At its centre is a 4X without the science-fiction costume: expansion, exploration, and the effort to turn your choices into progress and points. The flow is genuinely clean and streamlined, so the game does not bury its aims beneath needless friction.

That smoothness only goes so far when the parts are not properly balanced. Expedition tiles feed into scoring, and their difficulty should not count as victory points; once we corrected that mistake, the game became plainly fairer, but not appreciably more compelling. Player interaction comes through competing to develop and use the available space more efficiently, yet it never gains enough force to bind the game's many ideas together.

There are ten good ideas in here, put through a blender and served before development had finished. The result is neither bad nor irritating, and its flow saves it from total indifference. I simply expected more, and being better than Scythe is not, by itself, a medal-winning achievement.

Updated session

The second chance, with the scoring error fixed, improved the sense of fairness without changing the overall judgement. Brazil: Imperial remains an unfinished 4X with good raw material, more worth observing from a distance than bringing to the table.