Operation: Game Night
Travis Smith, Jared Erickson, and Clay Gable get together to discuss the latest and greatest in board games in this weekly podcast. What's hot, what's hitting the table, featured discussions about board games and the board gaming culture, and the primary mission objective- to play more board games!
Operation: Game Night
Debrief: Imhotep - Strategic Boats and Blocks in Ancient Egypt
A deceptively simple game of ancient Egyptian construction becomes a masterclass in tactical timing and player interaction. Travis introduces Clay to Imhotep, the 2016 Phil Walker-Harding design that's earned a permanent place in board game collections worldwide.
What makes this unassuming box with chunky wooden blocks so engaging? The gameplay revolves around a brilliant central mechanism: loading your stones onto ships and sailing them to different monument sites to score points. The catch? Anyone can sail a ship to any destination, even if they don't have stones on board. This creates a constant tension as you watch your carefully constructed plans potentially hijacked by opponents.
Travis walks us through the five distinct monument sites - the Pyramid for immediate points, the Temple for end-of-round scoring, the Burial Chamber for connected area points, the towering Obelisk for height competition, and the Market for special ability cards. Each offers unique strategic opportunities within a game that takes just 30-45 minutes to play.
The hosts discuss what elevates Imhotep above other gateway games: its perfect balance of accessibility and depth. With just three possible actions each turn (collect stones, place a stone, or sail a ship), new players can jump right in while experienced gamers still find meaningful decisions. The satisfying tactile experience of manipulating those oversized wooden blocks adds to the appeal, making this a standout in Phil Walker-Harding's impressive design catalog.
Have you discovered Imhotep yet? Share your experiences with us and let us know which monument strategy worked best for you! Subscribe to Operation Game Night for more board game recommendations that hit that sweet spot between simplicity and strategic depth.
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Welcome to the Operation Game Night podcast. I am your host, Travis Smith. Joining me, as always, is my co-host, Clayton Gable. How are you doing, Clay?
Speaker 2:I'm doing good. How are you, Travis?
Speaker 1:I'm great, I am so good, let's talk. I'm glad to hear it, man, let's jump right in. I want to talk about Emotep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm going to come out. We had a tough episode we just recorded a little bit ago. There was a lot of painful caveats going on. I have some caveats about this game, oh, and they all have to do with our man, paul solomon. Oh man, I'm a big pulse. You know he came on our show. Check out that episode if you haven't seen it. Check out gamehead games. He's doing awesome things there.
Speaker 2:But paul is kind of somebody that I've realized his opinions on games very well align with mine, and so when he, when he like, says things he hates about games or like why he didn't like a game, they're often the same complaints I have, and when he says he likes a game, they're often games that I ended up liking as well. Uh, so he talked specifically on our podcast about his love for Phil Walker Harding and we I pressed him. I I can't remember exactly, I should have looked it up, but I asked his favorite Phil Walker Harding game and I'm pretty sure he said it was Imhotep. And I know I cause I listened to his podcast now that this game is always in like his top 10 games of all time, and so I've been. You know it's, you don't really see it and for sale anymore. It was 2016 by Cosmos, so it's not just out there at your game stores to to buy usually. But I was on Facebook marketplace and I saw somebody in the local area was selling a copy of it place and I saw somebody in the local area was selling a copy of it and I snagged it right up on the heels of hearing Phil Paul's lovely description of it and I got it played last night and it is what you expect from a Phil Walker Harden game easy to teach, simple actions, engaging gameplay, all right.
Speaker 2:So in this game, the theme I don't know Brown boxes just put me off. I shouldn't be so opposed to a beige box, but you're building pyramids and structures in Egypt. It is what it is as a theme, but essentially you have these big, chonky blocks that are stones in a quarry and each person has their own stone color. So you're using your stones to load up these boats and then sail them to different ports that end up being just like different places where you can score points. So the gameplay is super simple.
Speaker 2:On your turn, you can either take three stones from the quarry and add them to your sled and your sled's just like your personal supply of stones. You can only ever have five. So if you take that action to grab three stones and you only have space for one on your sled, you can only grab one stone. The other action you can take is to place one of your stones on a ship that has not sailed yet. The third thing you can do is if a ship has the right amount of stones on it and each ship tells you how many stones it needs before it can sail you can sail that ship to any of the boards that you want. So that's where the real engagement and fun of this game is, because you're putting your stones on these ships with these plans to sail your ship to the spot. You want to go and take the action you really want to take, but anybody else can sail that ship. They don't even have to have any stones on it. So if they see you gearing up to, you know you got two of your stones and you're going to be able to go to the obelisk space, which is probably the simplest one. To understand. The obelisks, if you're watching right now, is like the space where you can stack just your cubes up as tall as you want and at the end of the game whoever has the tallest stack gets 15 points, next tallest gets 10 and the third gets like five or something.
Speaker 2:Another place you can go is the burial chamber and in this, like, the positioning on the boats matters as well, because when the boat docks at that board, the stones leave the boat from the front of the boat to the back. And when you put stones in the burial chamber, you like fill it out in columns from top to bottom, so the first stone out goes in the top left, next one goes under that and then there are columns of three. You start the next column and at the end of the game you score points for how big of an area of connected stones you have in that burial chamber. Another board is the pyramid, so the pyramid scores right away and essentially it's the same deal as the burial chamber, where you unload from front to back and each, like space on the pyramid, has a certain number of points. So there's some that are worth one point If you're the one that puts your stone there. There's some that are worth three, so that one you're really trying to time, like when your stone gets unloaded, to get placed on those pyramid spots and get those points. The temple is a board that scores at the end of every round and basically it's just a wall of bricks and at the end of the round you score points for each one of yours. That is visible from the top. So, like when the row fills up, you start stacking again. So at the end of each round it's kind of like a shifting point accumulation engine that you can have and it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:The final spot is the market and if you have stones on a ship that docks there, you can take these cards from the market. Some of the cards you can keep and use them to take an action, and they do things that basically just break the rule of you can only take one action on your turn. So instead of just being able to put a stone on a ship on your turn, you can put the stone on the ship and sail it, which is a huge benefit. So you can get those type of cards. You can get cards that give you end game scoring points, like the purple cards. They're called statues and basically you're just set collecting them, and I ended up with like five or six of those purple cards. They're called statues and basically you're just set collecting them, and I ended up with like five or six of those purple cards at the end of the game and it scored like 15 points, which was cool. So that's like the basic gameplay.
Speaker 2:Once all the ships that were available dock on a port, and there's five boards and only four ships, so one of the spaces isn't going to get anything delivered to each round. But yeah, once all those ships dock, the round ends. You score that temple to see who had the most. You know who you could see from the top and then you draw a new round card and that tells you what type of ships you put out. So there's, like you know, ships that have like five spaces on the ship, there's ships that have one space on it, and so each round there's just a different configuration of ships that you can put your stones onto and then the game plays out like that over the course of six rounds and it's a pretty snappy little affair and I really dug this game because it's so engaging with other people and your actions are so simple.
Speaker 2:You know. I mean deciding whether you want to take stones, place a stone or sail a ship is basically the three things you're deciding to do every turn. If you have a blue card you can decide to do that. But in that you're just always trying to think a couple steps ahead of people like, okay, I see Josh loaded up his stone on that ship with two spaces on it. I could sail that ship somewhere that's not going to matter for Josh, or I could try and get my stone on a different ship. And it's just that like mind game of trying to get in each other's heads about where they might want to go, where it's going to be good for you to go. How can you set yourself up on these ships so that, no matter where they sail, you're going to end up getting something you might want? And just the variety of the different boards. They're simple enough, like scoring criteria, that you can understand it really quick, but they're all just different enough that it's interesting and makes for a fun game, I think.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the market. How does that work?
Speaker 2:The market. So you dock there and, like the other spots, you unload the stones from the front to the back, each stone that you have on that ship. You can take one card from the market and, like I said, they're end game scoring cards, they're action cards, or there's red cards too that like immediately, let you place a stone in a different board. So it'll say, like you take the red card, it says immediately, place one of your stones in the pyramid. So you can set up a pretty cool turn like that. If, like, the next stone to be placed on the pyramid would be like a four point stone is uh, is how that works? And then at the end of the round, those market cards go away, four new ones come out and what?
Speaker 1:what about? Like, um, you have the quarry that has all the different blocks on it of different colors. What about, like these individual, uh, individual boards that have five of your color blocks? How does this work?
Speaker 2:so those are just your, your like personal sled. So it's just kind of managing when you need to resupply that sled because, like I said at the beginning, you can. You, the most you can grab is three stones, but your sled only holds five. So ideally you don't want to be taking a ton of those turns where you have to restock. So you might be drawn to really whittle your sled down to nothing left on it. But then you're kind of hosed because now you can't place a stone and you're kind of depending on the board state. You might not be able to do anything that you want to do. So finding the right moment where you're like right now I don't really know what's going on with these ships I could use a couple stones on my sled. I'm just going to take some fill back up and see what other people do before my next turn. So it's just kind of like a restocking turn. It's all about the timing and when you decide to do these things.
Speaker 2:I don't know how much you can really strategize this game. I've only played it once. I'm sure you can really get into the nitty-gritty, but I just thought that was a fun affair. Um, pretty breezy 30, 45 minutes. We played at four players. Uh it it just I think it's a great game. Uh, might I mean I might be with Paul. This might be one of the coolest Phil Walker Harding games that I've played. It doesn't hurt. The cubes are fun to manipulate Like they aren't regular board game cubes.
Speaker 1:These things are like blocks, like building blocks, I mean they are a hoot to handle do you have, I mean, besides the artwork and the drab color scheme, do you have, like any other, complaints about the game?
Speaker 2:um, I would say, just on a first play, I really had, I had ideas of what I thought I should be doing, but, like I said, I don't know. I think this strategy is kind of allude you, at least for a little while. I mean, you'll still have fun playing because you know your ship's going to sail somewhere, your stones are going to be on it, you're going to get to do something. But I had a hard time figuring out that timing of like. Okay, it's my turn. I could sail this ship right now. I have one of my stones on it, but do I want to place another stone on it and risk somebody else taking it somewhere? And risk somebody else taking it somewhere?
Speaker 2:And just those decisions were kind of elusive on the first play, knowing how that was all going to play out. So I don't know. I mean that would be my only complaint For the weight of game it is. I think it gives you a heck of a lot of like what feel like interesting decisions. Like I said, I don't know how interesting they actually are, but it feels like you can make some interesting decisions, and you can definitely.
Speaker 2:I guess maybe another complaint could be that it can feel mean Like when you just decide to sail a ship that you have no stake in somewhere and just put people off their plan because that seemed like the right thing to do, like that could rub some people the wrong way. But yeah, again it's a lighter family game and I I don't really personally have a problem with that in a 30 to 45 minute game. If, if somebody sailed my ship somewhere because again you're going to get something like it might not be the thing that you really wanted, but you're going to get to place your stones out and you're going to get the score points probably and you're going to get to get cards, like there's not a bad thing to have happen, it's just maybe not the best thing yeah, you might not get the most amount of points Is the largest ship, this four-block ship.
Speaker 1:Is there any larger?
Speaker 2:than that. I think there's a five-block ship. Okay, I could be wrong.
Speaker 1:On your turn. You sail a ship to the quarry.
Speaker 2:The quarry is the supply you sail to the pyramids, the temple, the burial chamber or the obelisk site.
Speaker 1:And then they automatically return to the quarry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the stones, no the boats, the boats stay docked. So if in that round somebody has already sailed to the obelisk, nobody else can sail a ship there. Okay.
Speaker 1:Can you? Can you sail a ship before it's full?
Speaker 2:Yes, so each, yeah, so each like size ship has a number of stone that need to be on it before you can sail, and you can see it like it's printed on the boat. The two size ship needs at least one stone on it before you can sail, and you can see it like it's printed on the boat the two size ship needs at least one stone on it before you can sail it. Okay, three or four size ship, I think it's two and three, so it's usually like one one less than the amount that it can hold and you can send it off I was gonna say like if you have the four-block ship and they load one on there and then you sail it immediately, you could really mess with somebody's plan.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that's pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is interesting, and there's also a ship that is a one-seater, so a little kayak, and it only has space for one cube on it.
Speaker 2:So you are really taking a gamble if you put your stone on there because it's so easy for someone to just, you know, throw, throw you into the wolves somewhere. But I, I think this is just a cool game and I it's like right at the weight of game that I want to play right now. Uh, for people that you know might, might not be gamers, but they're like interested in playing a game, like my brother-in-law and my sister is who I played it with last night and I was able to explain this to them in five minutes and they had no issues, like it was just so breezy to play with them. I think this is a great one to have on hand to show people because again, you it feels uh meatier than your, like unos or whatever, cards against humanity, and yet it still keeps things moving so nicely with that. Just one action per turn. The action choices are very understandable and the scoring as long as you understand the scoring and explain it well enough, people will pick it up quickly.
Speaker 1:Phil Walker-Harding has some killer designs and is probably one of our favorite designers here at OGN. What makes this stand out amongst some of his other designs?
Speaker 2:Jeez, I feel like I'm being interviewed here. This is beautiful, you know, I definitely. I would say that the interaction with the other players, I think, is definitely way more heads up, trying to see what other people are doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, pretty high level of player interaction?
Speaker 2:yeah, for sure. I mean just the fact that at any moment your, your ship can get sailed somewhere, like you're always paying attention to what, what everybody's doing on their turn. Where did they put that cube on that ship? Yeah, oh they. They put it in the second seat. They probably want to get off on the pyramids and get that four-point spot. Like those moments it's just very heads up. So I'm struggling to think of his other games, like you know. I mean Baron Park is probably another one of my favorite Phil Walker Harding games and it does have some like like you're racing for different things, so you kind of have to pay attention to who might be collecting the polar bear, uh, enclosures. But this definitely has way more interaction than something like that I am interested.
Speaker 1:Maybe we should uh keep an eye out for this one at uh world series of board gaming. Maybe we could check it out from the library.
Speaker 2:I would love to play this with you guys at world series of board game. It would be. It'd be a breeze and I think we'd have a good time with it heck, yeah, did we do it I think we did it. That's a lightweight 2016 game by phil walker harding imhotep. I think there's imhotep the dueluel. I want to check that out too. Ooh, that'd be fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you for sharing Imhotep with us. Of course, awesome. This has been OGN briefing Imhotep by Phil Walker Harding. I've been Travis, he has been Clay and we're out Outro Music.
