Dune Imperium's Rise Of Ix expansion is out now, adding new leaders, new mode to the digital board game

I'm hooked on Dune Imperium, a deckbuilder and worker placement digital board game I'm only just beginning to get my head around. Here comes some news to send my head spinning again: the Rise Of Ix expansion is out now, which adds three new factions, six new leaders, a new mode and much more.

The Rise Of Ix expansion is currently only available for the Steam version of the game, where it costs £8.50.

Ix adds additional strategic layers to the existing game, including a technology track for players to advance along, and new dreadnought units that can be used during combat. All of these are represented as new spaces on the board to which players can send their agents.

There are also 35 new cards which can be added to your deck, and a new Epic Game Mode where where players fight for 12 victory points rather than the 10 of the base game. I've wished almost every match of Dune Imperium I've played could have gone longer, and I wonder if this might fulfil that wish.

The update also comes with a set of bugfixes for the base game, including improvements to the AI that takes over when players resign, improved AI behaviour when playing Staged Incident, and other miscellaneous improvements to skirmish games.

Earlier this month, Sin played both recent Dune strategy games, Imperium and real-time cousin Spice Wars. She found both to be successful adaptations, in spite of or because of all they jettison from the source material.

I haven't played Spice Wars, which means I can confidently state that Imperium is definitely better. I'm not sure if I'm going to dive immediately into Rise Of Ix - I really don't feel as if I'm bored of the base game yet - but I'll definitely get to it in due course.