Boardgame Review: Dune Imperium is an Everything Sandwich

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Boardgame Review: Dune Imperium is an Everything Sandwich<br>Tastes pretty good though

theahura<br>May 21, 2026

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When I was a kid I tried making an everything-I-love sandwich. If you’ve never had an everything-I-love sandwich, the recipe is simple. You take everything you love and put it in between two slices of bread and try to eat it.<br>I’m worried that you read “everything I love that would be reasonable to put in a sandwich.” But that’s not what I wrote. I wrote “everything I love.” So, for 8 year old me, that included Costco taquitos, and fruit by the foot, and bologna, and ice cream, and lunchables (which kind? Does it matter?)<br>And you know what? That shit tasted awful. It made no sense. Threw most of it out, never made one of those sandwiches again.<br>Anyway, let’s talk about Dune Imperium.

AHHHWAYYYYYAHEEEEJAAAAAAAAA — the woman screaming on the dune soundtrack<br>My buddy Azraf got me this game as a birthday present 4 months after my actual birthday, because he knows I don’t like birthday gifts but I’m ok with random “here is a gift because you’re my friend” gifts that land on a totally non specific Tuesday. In the time since he got it, we’ve played the game maybe a dozen times with the friend group. The box says that a game takes about 60 minutes to run through. This is a lie. We have yet to finish a game in under three hours.<br>Dune Imperium is what you get when you take your favorite mechanisms from every other board game you’ve played, and stick it into a single game. It’s got the worker placement mechanics of Agricola or Viticulture. It’s got the deck building mechanics of Star Realms or Dominion. It’s got the betting / positioning mechanics of poker. It even has the random bullshit cards that you get in Catan.<br>It is, in other words, an “everything-I-love” sandwich as a boardgame. Except unlike my childhood culinary monstrosity, Dune Imperium actually works. It works really well. Last I checked, Dune Imperium was sitting at number 6 on the boardgamegeek rankings.<br>How? What kind of alchemy makes a game this convoluted actually fun?<br>My current best guess: the game has a sort of circular rhythm to it, which makes the whole thing function.<br>The rough structure of Dune goes like this:<br>The game has ten rounds, and each round involves players going in a circle taking a turn until no one can do anything anymore;

On your turn you play a card. Based on the card, some things happen, and you can place an agent somewhere on the board that doesn’t already have an agent on it;

Placing an agent may require some resources (water, spice, coin), and will often give you some resources (water, spice, coin, military units, persuasion, card draw);

Once you run out of agents, you can pick up some new cards from a shared market using any permission you have, and add them to your deck;

Once everyone has finished, you evaluate who invested the most in military units — that person wins the combat for that round and gets some award;

The round resets and the next player in the circle goes first…unless someone has 10 victory points, in which case the game ends.

It sounds like there are a lot of options, but unless you do something really stupid you’re pretty much on rails for most of your turns. You get some water. The next turn, the water lets you get some spice. The next turn, you turn the spice into units. The next turn, you deploy all the units and win a combat. Now you’re out of units and out of resources, so you start the cycle again.<br>There’s something very civ-coded about these mechanics. At each step it feels like you’re making some complicated decision; in practice, you are highly limited by what resources you have, what cards you have, and where your opponents place their agents. You’re basically forced to do something useful with your agents each turn. Good players will negotiate with each other and try to block other players, and there is some skill required in figuring out how many troops to deploy for a given combat (any troops you deploy will be removed for the next turn, regardless of whether you won or not, so figuring out what to bet is all about reading your opponents). But in general this is not a tactics-heavy game. In half of our games, players would simply pre-move before the other players had finished their turns, because they knew that new information wouldn’t change their play.<br>Instead, all of the actual skill of the game is in the long term strategy. Again, the game is only ten rounds. Almost all of the victory points that you need to win are doled out in the last three rounds. And basically every game I’ve been in has been shockingly close, which I think is due to a combination of the relatively short amount of time to build an engine and the amount of ‘guidance’ even new players have in terms of basic tactics. As a result, good players are constantly scheming about their last few turns from the very...