Standalone, not an expansion, which already puts it ahead of a lot of sequels in my book, and it solves a real chunk of what bugged me about the first Dune Imperium without losing what made it good. Spies are the headline addition, letting you move into spaces that are already occupied instead of getting locked out, and there’s a new sandworm troop type plus a proper 3v3 team mode if you can get six players to a table. You burn through more of the Imperium deck than in the original too, and card synergies are easier to lean on now that far more cards carry faction tags.

The worker placement and deck building fusion is still the core engine, and it’s tight here in a way that stuck with me well past the session ending, tension built almost entirely out of scarcity and other players quietly blocking the exact spot you needed. I’m not even that invested in the Dune property specifically, and the theme still didn’t get in the way of how strong the actual gameplay is on its own terms.

If I’m being picky, and I am, the intrigue cards are the one system I’d cut if I could, along with wishing the card market had fixed pricing on new additions rather than the current scaling, since both introduce a little more swing than the rest of the design’s precision deserves. Someone I trust put it at an 8 or 9 with those two things fixed, and I don’t think that’s far off.

Faster paced than the original, more interesting decisions per round, and it fixes several of my actual complaints with the first game while keeping the parts that worked. This is the one I reach for now when someone asks for a Dune Imperium recommendation, full stop.