Imperium is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 board wargame

Board wargame

A board wargame is a wargame with a set playing surface or board, as opposed to being played on a computer, or in a more free-form playing area as in miniatures games. The hobby around this type of game got its start in 1954 with the publication of Tactics, and saw its greatest popularity in the...

 that was published in 1977

1977 in games

This page lists board and card games, wargames, miniatures games, and table-top role-playing games published in 1977. For video and console games, see 1977 in video gaming.-Significant games-related events of 1977:...

 by the Conflict Game Company and GDW

Game Designers' Workshop

Game Designers' Workshop was a wargame and role-playing game publisher from 1973 to 1996. Many of their games are now carried by other publishers.-History:Game Designers' Workshop was originally established June 22, 1973...

. It was designed by Marc W. Miller

Marc W. Miller

Marc Miller is an award-winning wargame and role-playing game designer and author.-Career Beginnings:Marc Miller, along with Rich Banner and Frank Chadwick circa 1972, was a member of the Illinois State University Games Club. Banner engineered a grant which funded the printing of blank hex sheets...

 and developed by Frank Chadwick

Frank Chadwick

Frank Chadwick is a multiple-award–winning game designer and New York Times Best Selling author.-Beginnings:Frank Chadwick, along with Rich Banner and Marc Miller, were members of the Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal Games Club. They used their club funding to design war games...

 and John Harshman. The game came in a cardboard box illustrated with a space battle on the exterior. It included a cardboard-mounted, folding map of a local region of the Milky Way

Milky Way

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky...

 galaxy

Galaxy

A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias , literally "milky", a...

, a set of rules and charts, and the 352 counters

Counter (board wargames)

Boardgame counters are usually small cardboard squares moved around on the map of a wargame to represent armies, military units or individual military personnel. The first modern mass-market wargame, based on cardboard counters and hex-board maps, was Tactics, invented by Charles S. Roberts in 1952...

 representing the various spacecraft, ground units, and markers, and a six-sided die

Dice

A die is a small throwable object with multiple resting positions, used for generating random numbers...

.

A new edition of this game, Imperium, 3rd Millennium, was published in 2001 by Avalanche Press

Avalanche Press

Avalanche Press is an American company that publishes board wargames and has published some role-playing game supplements. An extremely prolific company, they have produced many respected contributions to the wargame community, most notably The Great War at Sea and Panzer Grenadier series, as well...

. This new release had improved graphics and updated rules. In 2002, I3M was nominated for four Origins Award

Origins Award

The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the game industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so the 1979 awards were given at the 1980 Origins.The Origins Award is commonly...

s. Avalanche Press has since abandoned the game, having decided not to renew the license to produce it.

Description

This is a two-player game that simulated a conflict between the emerging Terran (human) Confederation and an immense and ancient alien empire, the Imperium. The Sun and nearby stars lie at the extreme edge of this alien space-faring civilization, and the humans struggle to expand against this powerful state.

This setting is the conflict between Earth when it is just beginning to explore space, and the powerful First Imperium in the history of the Traveller Universe from the Traveller

Traveller (role-playing game)

Traveller is a series of related science fiction role-playing games, the first published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop and subsequent editions by various companies remaining in print to this day. The game was inspired from such classic science fiction stories as the Dumarest saga series by...

role-playing game

Role-playing game

A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...

. The rules, locations and technologies are based on concepts from Traveller, and even some seemingly arbitrary rules are based on the history of the Traveller Universe. For example in the first edition the Imperial player was prevented from building fighters (F) and Carriers (CV) until after the Terran player had done so, this represented the "historical" inertia of the Imperium to recognise the Terran threat. While the game is to many players just a stand alone wargame, it also allows Traveller fans to play out what is known as the first Interstellar War, the conflict that in official Traveller history led to the First Imperium (or Ziru Sirka) being replaced by the Second Imperium (or Rule of Man).

The fold-out map depicts a nearby region of the Galaxy that includes important nearby stars as well as hyperspace jump routes between them. This sector forms a single province within the Imperium. The map is printed on a dark background and is overlaid by a hex

Hex map

A hex map, hex board or hex grid is a gameboard design commonly used in wargames of all scales. The map is subdivided into small regular hexagons of identical size.-Advantages and disadvantages:...

 grid. Each hex represents a half parsec

Parsec

The parsec is a unit of length used in astronomy. It is about 3.26 light-years, or just under 31 trillion kilometres ....

, which would require about 1.8 years to traverse traveling at 90% the speed of light. Along the edges of the map are tracks for marking turns and tallying resources. The map includes a number of commonly-known stars, such as Alpha Centauri

Alpha Centauri

Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Centaurus...

, Procyon

Procyon

Procyon is the brightest star in the constellation Canis Minor. To the naked eye, it appears to be a single star, the seventh brightest in the night sky with a visual apparent magnitude of 0.34...

, Sirius

Sirius

Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. With a visual apparent magnitude of −1.46, it is almost twice as bright as Canopus, the next brightest star. The name "Sirius" is derived from the Ancient Greek: Seirios . The star has the Bayer designation Alpha Canis Majoris...

, Epsilon Indi

Epsilon Indi

Epsilon Indi is a K-type main-sequence star approximately 12 light-years away in the constellation of Indus. Two brown dwarfs, found in 2003, orbit the star.- Observation :...

, and Altair, as well as a considerable number with more exotic names. Only a dozen stars have naturally-habitable planets, although many more have planetary systems with outpost-capable worlds.

The game includes a variety of ship types, ranging in size from the small scouts and fighters to the mighty battleship

Battleship

A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of heavy caliber guns. Battleships were larger, better armed and armored than cruisers and destroyers. As the largest armed ships in a fleet, battleships were used to attain command of the sea and represented the apex of a...

s. The ship counters are blue for the Terrans and red for the Imperium. Each counter includes a set of ratings, the ship type, and a silhouette. The combat ratings give the Beam weapon combat factor, the Missile factor, and the Screen factor. Beam weapons are for close range combat, while missiles are best fired at long range. Typically a beam weapon is slightly more effective than missiles, and Terrans have better beam weapon ratings while the Imperium favors missiles. Ships with a black silhouette can perform a jump between stars, while a white silhouette can only remain in orbit.

The following ship types are available for production: Scout, destroyer

Destroyer

In naval terminology, a destroyer is a fast and maneuverable yet long-endurance warship intended to escort larger vessels in a fleet, convoy or battle group and defend them against smaller, powerful, short-range attackers. Destroyers, originally called torpedo-boat destroyers in 1892, evolved from...

, several different types of cruiser

Cruiser

A cruiser is a type of warship. The term has been in use for several hundreds of years, and has had different meanings throughout this period...

s, dreadnaught, improved dreadnaught, battleship, monitor

Monitor (warship)

A monitor was a class of relatively small warship which was neither fast nor strongly armoured but carried disproportionately large guns. They were used by some navies from the 1860s until the end of World War II, and saw their final use by the United States Navy during the Vietnam War.The monitors...

, missile boat, mother ship (similar to an aircraft carrier

Aircraft carrier

An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations...

), fighter

Fighter aircraft

A fighter aircraft is a military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat with other aircraft, as opposed to a bomber, which is designed primarily to attack ground targets...

, transport

Transport

Transport or transportation is the movement of people, cattle, animals and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, rail, road, water, cable, pipeline, and space. The field can be divided into infrastructure, vehicles, and operations...

 and tanker.

The available jump routes can significantly hinder the movement of a side's forces. Certain star systems act as bottle-necks, and can be used by each side as a defensive front. Two of the stars do not allow refueling, so tankers are required to leave these sites. Ships (excepting fighters and missile boats) are allowed to move at sub-light speeds across the hex map, and so can move directly from star to star without following the jump routes. However the movement rate of these ships is only one hex per turn.

Game play

The game consists of a sequence of turns with alternating player-turns, each consisting of multiple phases. Each turn represents a period of two years. The game includes an economic system in which the units on each side are produced and maintained. The Terran income is based on what type of world the player currently possesses, and whether it is connected by friendly jump paths to Sol

Sun

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...

. The Imperial income has a fixed budget, but an increment for each connected outpost and world.

The Terran player always moves first in each turn. Each player turn begins with an economics phase. The player then performs movement and combat, followed by the opposing player's reaction movement and combat phase, and finally the second movement and combat phases. Then the Imperial player repeats the same sequence and the turn ends.

Combat is somewhat abstracted, with the ships being lined up off map. First the players roll 'initiative' to see who determines combat range (long or short) with the smaller fleet gaining a bonus to their die roll. The defender places the ships down one at a time, and the attacker places a ship down to match. At the end, any left-over ships can be assigned to any enemy vessels, or kept out of combat. Dice are then rolled to determine which ships are destroyed. Combat continues until one side is destroyed or until either player decides to disengage.

The game also includes abstracted rules for ground combat. Terran land units are green while Imperium units are black. In addition to regular land units and planetary defense units that can oppose a landing, there are special drop troops that can land on a planet without requiring a ship to transport them to the surface. If one side is all standard troops and the other side is all drop troops, the standard troops gain a bonus artillery attack against the drop troops to simulate the inability of the drop troops to carry a lot of heavy vehicles with them. The ground units have a single combat factor, plus a symbol and a unit identifier. Surface combat used a combat differential with the defense combat factor subtracted from the attacker's combat factor. A die is then rolled to determine whether the unit is destroyed.

Victory is determined by a "Glory Point" tally earned by the Imperium. Points are gained for conquering worlds and lost for their conquest by the Terrans. A habitable world is worth four Glory Points and an outpost world is worth one. If at the end of a turn the Glory Point total has reached the amount necessary for victory, then the Imperium player wins. If the total drops sufficiently, the Terran player can likewise win. The range between the amount required for Imperium or Terran victory begins to shrink after turn three, representing the decreasing appetite for continued hostilities.

The game system includes a random events table for various Imperium events. These can favor or hinder the Imperium player. The game is fought as a series of wars forming a lengthy campaign. Thus these random events can affect the course of some of the wars. There is also a system built into the game for production, colonization, and other changes during the inter-war periods. Ships can age and be scrapped; the Emperor can grant or withdraw permission to build certain ship types, and territory can be exchanged.

Foreign-language versions

• This game was published in Swedish
  Swedish language
  Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
  
   by Äventyrsspel under the name Empire. The name change came about because Äventyrspel was concerned about possible confusion with their Star Wars licensed role-playing products released at the same time as this game.
• A German
  German language
  German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
  
  edition was produced in 1990 by Fantasy Productions.

External links

• http://www.avalanchepress.com/ThePrecious.php Page at Avalanche Press detailing the creation of the new edition and why AP has dropped the license.
• Review of Imperium, 3rd Millennium at The Wargamer.
• Reviews of Imperium, 3rd Millennium at GamingReport.com.