Dune: Imperium – Uprising Design Diary 2: Sandworms, Conflicts, and the Shield Wall

I’d wager that most of you reading this know that the universe of Dune is rich and varied. However, if you asked people with passing knowledge of the franchise to name something about it, the majority of them would probably come up with “uh…the giant sandworms?”

A stronger, louder presence of worms has been something you’ve asked for since the beginning of Dune: Imperium…and that’s what we’re discussing in today’s design article!

When I was just getting rolling on my Dune: Imperium – Uprising work in the fall of 2022, I sent Scott Martins – President of Dire Wolf and the product line’s Executive Producer – an email status update detailing how excited I was about a new spy mechanic that I’d fleshed out.

His reply was simply: “I only have one word for you, kid: Worms.”

The mighty sandworms are hard to acquire and have some limitations, but provide 3 strength in the Conflict and double your earned rewards! Bless the Maker and His water!

The message was clear, as I could read between the lines having worked with the guy for over 15 years. Spies are fine, he was saying without saying anything, as he trusts my design know-how. But he didn’t want me to lose sight of the fact that sandworms rule the Dune franchise. We’d certainly included the concept of sandworms in Dune: Imperium, but now as we were crafting a new product to celebrate Dune Part 2, we knew that sandworms would play a more pivotal role in this second film. So, we similarly wanted them to play a larger role in this expansion.

My first serious attempt at incorporating sandworms into Uprising was actually tied to spies. I was trying out some ideas where spies were cardboard tokens and when you placed them, you could secretly decide what kind of spy to place. (Note: This idea did not survive. We’ll be talking more about what spies actually do in a later Design Diary.) One of the spy types was a saboteur and – without going into details – your spice harvesting operations could be disrupted by an enemy saboteur, if a worm showed up and your harvesting equipment was sabotaged. But this idea didn’t survive for long; ultimately, it felt too coupled to spies and didn’t feel like it was giving worms the prominent position that we wanted.

My next attempt was what I informally called “battle worms” and ended up somewhat close to the final product. I added an option at Hagga Basin to call one worm instead of harvesting 2 spice, but only if you had 3 influence with the Fremen. Similarly, I offered an option to call two worms at the Great Flat if you were willing to turn down the 3 base spice there. Other than that, as a starting point, the rules for worms were about as simple as possible: they are special units that you can push into the conflict but they’re strength 5! Looking back in my notes, I was going to set them to strength 4, but I decided to push them to 5 just to make sure that we experienced them. I mean, how could playtesters turn that down? Well, they certainly didn’t.

And I found out, when I decided to make myself the poor, misguided tester who decided to ignore the Fremen to see how they felt from the other side: dealing with that kind of force projection (particularly when a worm player had 2 water for double battle worms) was nearly impossible to compete with. On the bright side, the play pattern of going to the desert to call worms into battle was a fundamentally satisfying one for the other players. But unsurprisingly, worms had to be toned down somehow.

Over the next few weeks, I tried various tweaks to the battle worm formula. There was a whole line of experiments wherein only one player could earn the ability to summon worms. While that felt true to the canonical story of Dune, it was ultimately rejected because it placed too much importance on the results of a race. At the same time, there was a lesson to be learned by that approach – thematic resonance matters, and we didn’t want worm summoning to be so common that everyone has worms in a typical game. As a development team, we called that (mechanically-potent but thematically-undesirable) result “wormfests.” I was also struggling with the issues around tying worms to 3 Fremen Influence coupled worm strategies with the Fremen alliance. If you’re going for one, you’re essentially pushed toward going for the other. And it felt pretty bad to be on the losing end of the alliance after you’d pushed in so hard just to get worm access. This kind of political commitment also forced you to commit very early to the strategy, which ultimately made it feel a little too “locked in” and felt too hard to perform a strategic pivot, either into or out of the strategy.

Where we landed addressed all those above issues, by introducing maker hooks tokens that you could earn by visiting Sietch Tabr. This meant you only had to obtain two Fremen Influence (unless you grabbed an early Undercover Asset, a rule-breaking card revealed in the first Uprising design article), so you didn’t necessarily feel the need to go for the Fremen alliance. It also slowed down multiple players from getting worm access, because of the nature of your Agent blocking your opponents’ Agents from going to Sietch Tabr, even if they had unlocked access.

The other big issue, of course, was the combat dominance that I mentioned. Even at 4 strength, worms were a force that couldn’t reasonably be dealt with, certainly with the earliest, simplest rules which treated them like any other unit in that you could garrison them! It didn’t take long to remove the ability to garrison them, not just because of how outrageously difficult it was to fight against an opponent who had that much force projection, but also because the ability to garrison sandworms was clearly not very thematic. Sandworms are a force of nature. To be fair to myself, garrisoned worms didn’t last long; I only started there to keep the rules about as simple as possible.

Desert Power’s reveal lets you summon a sandworm if you have Maker Hooks and spend one water. It’s one of very limited cards in Uprising that can  summon a “surprise” sandworm during a reveal turn.

Eventually sandworm strength dropped to 3. As strong as a dreadnought from Rise of Ix. And if that was all they did, they’d be too weak. But it should be noted that some cards can augment a sandworm strategy. And an important design breakthrough came when I was brainstorming special abilities for them and found one that was very exciting: what if, when you have at least one sandworm in the Conflict, you get to double your rewards from the Conflict?! Oh, yeah, now we’re talking! This introduced a new and exciting aspect to the game while at the same time allowing for interaction and counterplay. At 3 strength and no garrisoning, sandworms are by no means a sinch to win any given battle: An opponent with Heighliner access can certainly come over the top of a worm player in most circumstances. But, a well-played worm strategy can involve troop backup from other board spaces, and when a player pulls various strings to get a Conflict win and doubles it, well, good for them. This felt much nicer than the relatively easy pushes of huge strength numbers.

Once we were satisfied with the rules of sandworms (strength 3, they go directly into battle and are never in garrisons, earning double rewards), we evolved the game board a bit more, dropping the Great Flat in favor of a new space called “Deep Desert.” It would now require 3 water to harvest 4 spice or summon 2 sandworms. The new board presents more opportunities to gather water, so we were confident that a 3-water space could properly “soak up” water supplies and create a new feel for the Uprising board. Especially when we also changed up the Research Station, slanting it more toward combat participation compared to the base game’s Research Station.

Rising Conflict

Because of the sandworm ability to double Conflict rewards, I think it’s worth noting some changes with Uprising’s Conflict cards:

1. Second and third place rewards are generally larger than those found on base Dune: Imperium Conflict cards, representative of the rising action we’ll see in Dune Part 2.
2. First place rewards are generally worse. (Except they’re not, when you factor in battle icons…more on those below.)
3. Some Conflicts represent locations protected by the Shield Wall.

Let’s talk through these one at a time. The first point is self-explanatory and the ramifications are not difficult to predict. Larger second and third place rewards mean that players will be more motivated to enter combat. A common “kicker” for taking second or third place is earning a troop. So, if you can find a way to earn one of these rewards by only committing a single troop, well, clearly it was worth fighting for, because you effectively won’t lose that troop.

The second point is easily seen by looking at some cards. Take Shadow Contest. The first reward for Shadow Contest is not much better than the second reward, and arguably worse in many situations where a Bene Gesserit influence isn’t important to you. The twist is that “battle icon” in the top right corner of the card. You see, when you win a Conflict, you get to take the Conflict card and place it in front of you. And if you ever match two of the same battle icons, you flip both Conflict cards face down and immediately score a Victory Point. Thus, every first place reward also comes with a fraction of a Victory Point.

The desert mouse, the crysknife, and the ornithopter make some Conflicts worth more to some players than others!

To add more interest to this battle icon system, every player receives an Objective card at the start of the game. These cards simply give each player one battle icon from the outset of the game and thus a fraction of a Victory Point. Finally, this causes Conflicts to be evaluated differently by different players throughout the course of the game, which can add a significant bit of interest when it comes down to trying to predict what your opponents are up to. There are three different battle icons, and the game comes with a suite of 5 battle cards to handle various player counts. Note also that the distribution of Objective cards also doubles as a randomizer to give one player the first player marker. (Note the first player icon on the “desert mouse” Objective.

There’s also a cycle of Intrigue cards that allows a player to either secretly have a stake in a particular icon or to have essentially already earned their Victory Point from a pair of battle icons even if it looks like they’re only halfway there, but they won’t technically claim that Point until the endgame.

The Shield Wall

Finally, let’s talk about the Shield Wall. Some Conflicts represent battles for locations that are protected from storms and worms by the Shield Wall. For these Conflicts, calling worms into the Conflict is not allowed… unless the Shield Wall has been detonated by a player. Here are the two Conflict cards that represent fighting over the Imperial Basin board space.

So, what’s a worm player to do, if some of the best real estate on Arrakis is off limits for your mighty sandworm-backed army? Two words: Massive. Explosion. There’s a special icon, printed at Sietch Tabr and found on a handful of Intrigue cards, that gives a player the option to remove the Shield Wall token from the game board. After which all hell breaks loose on Arrakis as sandworms at that point are now allowed to enter these critical Conflicts.

Note: I bet there are readers who are wondering this: if you win the Battle for Imperial Basin with a sandworm in your army, what exactly do you get to double? The answer is essentially that you double everything that you can. You can’t double the battle icon and you can’t double “taking control” of the Basin. But you will earn 2 Victory Points, plus the ability to convert 4 spice into a Victory Point, plus the ability to convert another 4 spice into a Victory Point. If you have 8 spice and an Ornithopter battle icon already in front of you, that battle can be worth an incredible 5 Victory Points!

The stakes of war have never been higher than in the late stages of Dune: Imperium – Uprising! Until next time, Long Live the FightersSandworms!

– Paul Dennen

Go Deeper on Uprising!

Ready to learn more? Dig into Dune: Imperium – Uprising in the full Design Diary series!

Dune: Imperium - Uprising Design Diaries
Dune: Imperium - Uprising
Sandworms, Conflicts and the Shield Wall
Spies
Contracts
Leaders
Six-Player Mode
Solo, Two-Player and Companion App Modes

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