Impression

I closed out 2022 with Impression, an economic euro I had been itching to get to the table for a long time. As medieval printers, we chase commissions and the prestige of becoming the city’s foremost printing house. It is a little brain-burning and takes some digesting, but beneath its initial roughness I found a game with genuine interest.

Its core is a two-phase worker-placement system, and that is the element that sets it apart most. It did not feel like yet another recycling of an overcrowded mechanism: its two-part structure meaningfully feeds everything that follows, from resource management to building my engine. Placement decisions do not remain isolated; they open up or constrain what I can build afterwards.

From there, the engine building really sings. Rather than the usual restrained, sterile euro, this lets me commit outright atrocities with technology chains and typesetting bonuses, assembling strings of bonus actions that feel almost uncontrolled. That can leave other players behind with a distinctly unpleasant feeling, even if that barrage of actions does not translate proportionally into end-game points.

Its major problem is the iconography, which sets the game up from five metres away and executes it. Too many icons look far too similar, while their differences are crucial: mistaking a two-millimetre arrow for a lightning bolt is enough to blow up my whole strategy or send me chasing the completely wrong thing. That is a shame, because it will be difficult to convince someone to give it a second chance after such a first encounter. Still, behind that unnecessary friction lies a fairly interesting euro. And I certainly would not call it a 4.4-complexity game: it is an approachable euro that simply needed a little more polish.