Dune: Imperium – Uprising Design Diary 5: Six-Player Mode

October 20, 2023

In August of 2022, when I was first brainstorming possibilities for what would come next for Dune: Imperium, one of them was “a six-player expansion.” The idea was to provide extra components for players to play 3-vs-3 team games against each other, and also include some new cards and leaders. I think the pitch referred to it as the “Battle for the Golden Lion Throne” and it would pit one team led by Muad’Dib against another led by Emperor Shaddam IV.

While that focus for the product didn’t survive, the ambition to include a six-player mode did. We’d decided that we wanted to do a standalone version that “table flipped” the base Dune: Imperium game board. Since we were already creating a new board, there was an option of making the new game board double-sided and designating the back side of the board as the six-player side. And that’s what we did!

Table for Six

So, what is six-player mode and how does it generally work? First of all, it’s a way to capture some of the larger themes coming in Dune Part Two. The Emperor is getting involved, alliances are formed, and Muad’Dib emerges on Arrakis as a serious threat to the stability of the Imperium.

Secondly, it’s obviously a way to incorporate a larger play group into a Dune: Imperium experience. Each team is made up of one Commander and two Allies. The Commanders – Muad’Dib and Emperor Shaddam – each have thematic and asymmetrical starting decks and faction abilities.

Muad’Dib’s team is the only team that can summon sandworms. And, because Muad’Dib is staging a rebellion on Arrakis, he has access to much easier spice generation than the Emperor. Being on Arrakis also makes it easier for Muad’Dib to ambush opponents in combat.
The Emperor’s team has a bit of a deck-building edge as the Emperor can pluck cards from the Imperium row, pulling them into a special “Throne Row” where only the Emperor’s team can acquire them. Additionally, the Emperor’s team will have more Solari flowing into their coffers from the Emperor’s cards. This will tend to help them get Swordmasters sooner to help fight against Muad’Dib’s inherent combat advantages.

A few of Muad’Dib’s cards

And a few of Shaddam’s cards

Team-Based Gameplay

In addition to having their own unique starting decks, there are other gameplay mechanisms related to Commanders that form the core of six-player gameplay:

Commanders don’t have their own troops or influence cubes on faction tracks.
Commanders don’t have their own wooden Agents; instead they have two Agents that “point” toward one of their Allies. When a Commander sends an Agent to the board, they activate one of their Allies. When an Ally is activated, the Ally’s troops and influence cube(s) can be affected.

For example, let’s say Muad’Dib sends this Agent to Arrakeen.

As Commander, Muad’Dib has a deck and draws a card for himself. But if the Ally to his right is Lady Jessica, she will receive a troop in her garrison. Furthermore, it is her responsibility to deploy that troop and up to two more. Of course, Muad’Dib is free to give suggestions, as is the third member of the team for that matter!

This system became the heart of the mode. Three players on each team – but only two garrisons of troops. And only four influence cubes on each of the four faction tracks on the main board.

This scheme worked out pretty well, but it had a pretty big problem. Giving Commanders the ability to play to faction board spaces and push up their Allies’ influence cubes meant that the density of plays to the political arena was too high. Faction battles were fast and vicious and concluded too early in the game. To address this, each Commander is given their own personal faction board.

A personal board is special in that it sits near a Commander and only that Commander may send their Agents there. There’s no “fighting” for Influence there; a Commander can climb their Influence track unopposed. The issue that Commanders have is one of opportunity cost. You see, a Commander often has the option to send an Agent to their personal board or to the main board. If they send to the main board, they push an Ally’s Influence cube. This helps their Ally score points faster, and can help an Ally get a faction Alliance faster. What’s important to note is that those four Faction alliances are contested whereas nobody will ever try to wrestle a Commander’s Faction Alliance away.

All other things being equal, playtesters found that it was much more important to send an Agent to the common board and win the contested alliance points. This prompted me to buff the personal Faction board spaces so that it became a more interesting overall puzzle. Yes, a Commander can avoid their own personal Faction board and push toward dominance in the shared political landscape. But they’ll be giving up powerful effects on their personal board. How to navigate this puzzle is something that Commanders need to think about while playing this mode.

Not only are personal board spaces more powerful, but there are two bonuses (at influence 1 and 3) on the personal Influence tracks that provide rewards for the entire team. For example, when Shaddam reaches 1 influence on his personal Emperor track, he and each of his Allies receive 1 Solari.

New Factions & Faction Icon Mapping

Moving the Fremen and Emperor factions off the main board onto the Commanders’ personal boards meant that the main board was suddenly in need of two additional factions. It struck me that the concepts of “the Great Houses” and “Fringe Worlds” were good candidates for the 5^th and 6^th factions of Dune: Imperium, with the Great Houses being closely-linked to the concept of the Emperor, or the Imperium. And the Fringe Worlds (think Tleilax & Ix) are somewhat similar to the Fremen – they’re atypical worlds and people in the Dune universe; not part of the core, feudal power structure at the heart of the Imperium.

Six-player mode uses Agent icon “mapping” to allow players to send Agents to six different Faction areas while only using the standard four Agent icons. I’m not going to go into all the details of how this works, but I think a single example can lead you to an intuitive conclusion:

Muad’Dib can use a Fremen icon to either send an Agent to the Fringe Worlds or his personal Faction board which represents the Fremen. All other players in the game can only use Fremen icons to send Agents to the Fringe Worlds.

If you want to learn more, you could download the six-player rulebook or feel free to drop by our Discord and I or someone else who worked on the game will be happy to provide more clarity.

We’re Going to Need a Bigger Board

It was obvious up front that the standard board was going to have problems if we just added two more players to the mix. This challenge wasn’t an especially scary one, especially with the option to ship a double-sided board.

Before going with the double-sided approach, I attempted to introduce a new rule to effectively enlarge the number of board spaces: Commanders’ Agents don’t block non-Commander Agents, except on faction board spaces. In other words, a Commander and a non-Commander could each send an Agent to Arrakeen. But the same wasn’t true for Bene Gesserit Secrets. This failed spectacularly. The rule was just too hard to internalize during your first couple games, adding too much friction to the fun of playing. So, it was abandoned in favor of actually expanding the number of board spaces. (Side note: There were a lot of experiments that failed while working on this mode and Dune: Imperium – Uprising, in general. But if I listed all my failures, these articles would take too long to write and to read! But, as a designer, I think you need to look at failures as a natural part of the process; each failure is a learning opportunity.)

I’ll spare you all the details of the multiple attempts and iterations of the game board and simply show the final board.

While many board spaces are different from the normal side of the board, there are two new board spaces here: Carthag and Habbanya Erg. Carthag is the same old Carthag that we all know and love from base Dune: Imperium. Habbanya Erg is a fourth Maker space, which felt needed when six players were scrapping for spice from the Arrakis deserts. It’s similar to Hagga Basin in that it only costs one water, but instead of calling worms into battle, you can draw cards. Thematically, Habbanya Erg made sense because it’s a pretty far distance from Hagga Basin, and I thought it was reasonable that there could be more exploration happening out there (represented by card draw) rather than sandworm warfare.

Addressing Duration & Downtime

A couple big issues pop up when you simply add players to a game that was refined for a smaller number: the overall duration of the game could get out of hand, and the amount of downtime between turns could feel interminable.

The fact that the game is team-based does help. Players can chat about their objectives, opportunities, etc. and the core Commander mechanics push players to do this because of the shared military forces and political influence.

I think most Dune: Imperium players would agree that having a Swordmaster is fun. Doing more things per round? Sign me up, right? But the flip side of that coin is that players who don’t have Swordmasters now have to sit through more turns where opponents are acting and they are waiting. When you go to six players? Well, in the earliest six-player prototype, the development team had a consensus opinion that it was simply too much waiting. Something had to be done.

To address this, we changed the definition of what you get by recruiting a Swordmaster to your side while playing six-player mode. There’s a big new benefit, which is that you get a Swordmaster token added to your garrison.

Once you have a Swordmaster token, you receive +2 swords in each of your reveal turns for the rest of the game. And if you’re a Commander, you get to choose which Ally you’re activating when you take a reveal turn, so you can pass your swords to whichever Ally you think might benefit the most from them.

When we realized we had a Swordmaster problem, one of the first things we tried was playtesting with no Swordmaster Agents. But what we found was that certain types of decks, such as Bene Gesserit combo decks, felt weak to pursue. So we made a change to Swordmaster Agents that proved to be interesting:

When you recruit a Swordmaster, not only do you get a Swordmaster token but you receive your extra Swordmaster Agent.
However, if you ever send your Swordmaster Agent to the board during a round, you must remove that Agent from the game at the end of a round.

With these rules, you simply get to choose which round to get a burst of activity from your Swordmaster Agent. Navigating this as a player can be an interesting puzzle: do you use it right away and gain some kind of tempo advantage in the game? Do you wait and get a big advantage in a combat? Or wait until you’ve got a card combo you want to pull off? The decision is yours.

How Do Conflicts Work, Anyway?

We’ve briefly touched on concepts such as Commanders helping their Allies deploy troops to the Conflict and Swordmaster tokens providing bonus swords, but for clarity, let’s go over how Conflicts actually work in six-player mode.

Commanders don’t have combat strength but each Ally does. Any Allies fight for themselves. You don’t combine strengths of Allies. This means that the normal method of distributing rewards remains mostly the same. So, three rewards will likely be given out, and it’s very likely that two Allies on the same team will receive two of the rewards and only one Ally from the other team will receive a reward. It’s up to teams to coordinate properly. You probably don’t want to fight super hard against your own Ally. At the same time, if your Ally is going for the first place reward, it’s reasonable to fight for the second place reward.

The Great Houses Faction, Teamwork, and Communication Rules

As mentioned, the six-player board includes two new factions: the Fringe Worlds and the Great Houses. The Fringe Worlds board spaces use icons you’ve seen before. The board spaces at Great Houses, on the other hand, include some new iconography. Let’s go over them.

When you send an Agent to the Military Support board space, you can recruit 3 troops for your Allies, given in any combination. Furthermore, any of these troops may immediately be deployed to the Conflict. With the combat rules noted above where Allies don’t combine forces, this board space represents a mechanic that represents the thematic opportunity of sending troop assistance to an ally.

Economic Support shares the theme of cooperation, but it does so by allowing players to make trades. Whoever sends an Agent to this space may trade any number of one resource type (spice, Solari, water, or even Intrigue cards) to another player on their team. Then, in turn, that other player may trade back. So, for example, you could send an Agent to this space, give an Intrigue card to your Commander, and then your Commander could gift you with some amount of spice or Solari.

Obviously with a team game, communication is a big part of the fun. We decided to go with “public communication only” rules. That is, you can’t go to another room and have a secret discussion or send a text message to someone else on your team. Anything you have to say must be said in front of the group, representing the fact that there are spies and listening devices everywhere. So, players may want to wait for certain windows of opportunity to declare things about coordination because the other team is always listening. I’ve been in more than one game where one player suggested a trade and the other team promptly blocked Economic Support and executed a trade of their own.

Wrapping Up

Six-player mode was an exciting bonus to add to the Uprising box, and I hope you get a chance to try it. It’s certainly not going to be for every group, but I also expect some groups to love it. No matter how many players are entering the battle (well, from one to six, anyway!), Dune: Imperium – Uprising offers new strategic challenges for your table to explore. I’ll see you on Arrakis!

– Paul Dennen