House rules for Dune:Imperium

So my girlfriend and I love playing german and strategic boardgames like Catan, Spitz Pass auf, Terraforming Mars, Würfel-WG and Catch the Moon. Now we decided to give Dune:Imperium a try to see what all the hype was about. After a few playthroughs we felt like the decisions were just too obvious for our taste. Maybe it's our experience with strategy games but this game just felt like there was always one "best option" to take and the winner was the person who had the better options thrown at them. So we decided to spice (pun intended) things up a bit by adding some extra game mechanics we really enjoy:

  1. The Charackter is always selected for both players. Noone should win because they draw the signet ring more often than the opponent.

  2. At the beginning of each turn we throw a custom die with results ranging from 3-7 to determine the amount of cards in your hand. We felt this gives the deck building aspect more of an impact since you can't just "count what you draw" every turn.

  3. For games with 4 Players we added intrigue cards that reverse the turn order as well as a card that lets one opponent skip their turn entirely to enable more comebacks. This gives you opportunitys to actually steal the alliances which most often than not are just held by the player who crosses the alliance-line first until the game ends.

  4. On a reveal turn all players reveal simultaneously. We count to three and whoever can grab the card they want to buy the fastest, gets that card. This makes it less predictable who gets which card as anyone could potentially get the Kwisatz Haderach if they got good enough reflexes.

  5. And Lastly - but thats more for flavor reasons as we like the aspect of "danger" that comes from being a spice farmer in the Dune films - each round the second player has to stack the new bonus spice. And when the stack falls over, the other players distribute the spice evenly between them, starting with the last player. (In a 2P game the other player gets all the bonus spice).

We really enjoy the changes and it makes for a much deeper, complex and less linear experience. With these rules implemented it got the #2 spot on our favorite games list, right after Terraforming Mars. Let us know what you think if you try them out yourself :)