Sunday 18 March 2018

Into the Twilight

Following on from last night's epic Times of Crisis, another operatic battle loomed on the horizon. Specifically, the Chippenham horizon, as I made my way eastwards to join Chris and pals Stuart and Paul for the debut play - for us - of Twilight Imperium.

Chris and I had a little warm-up game of Cosmic Run to get us in the mood, which I won by a narrow two-point margin. Then as Paul and Stuart arrived, we began setting up the main event.


This beast as been around for some time, highly respected in many quarters albeit guardedly (because of playtime) even amongst its admirers. Chris recently found himself in possession of the fourth edition (I guess he bought it) and each of us had spent a little time swotting up in preparation. Said preparation had warned us that a first play would take "all day" but with the evening ahead of us, we sat down at 3.30 with a vague notion of being done at a reasonable hour.

The first 45 minutes was a brief overview from Chris and refresher of the main rules. And at 4.15 or so, we began.


Like Eclipse - a game it inspired - Twilight Imperium sees you battling over the systems of a galaxy, only the premise being that we are each hoping to impress some ruling titans (I forget their name) by being the first to reach ten points. Ten points! You'd think it wouldn't take that long. But it does.

Each of us has a starting hex and - like Eclipse - we are inexorably drawn towards the centre hex Mecatol Rex, as it is the most powerful planet and potentially rewards you with a victory point for ownership. In a game with margins this fine, that's a big swing.


Play progresses through the selection of Strategy Cards - in a four player game everyone chooses two, and you get the primary action on your card. Everyone else gets the secondary action on your card, presuming they want to take it and can afford it. And there are also other actions too - activating a system in order to produce there, or move there and take control of planets. Activating an action card (there are many, and wildly varied) as well as trading with each other, fighting with each other (obviously) and, once Mecatol Rex is occupied, voting for laws and directives at the end of each round.


Paul was first in there and I found myself the beneficiary of the first vote, being elected Minister for Exploration. Stuart though wasn't keen on Paul sitting pretty in the middle of the board, and ploughed in to take it from him. Everyone voted in a crap law that penalised technology development, so I repealed it with an action card. Chris keep kicking himself for his own moves, Paul kept forgetting his faction's special power, and we all fell foul of our Eclipse-ic conditioning, forgetting that you can't move ships from a system that's already been activated this round.

We also slightly misunderstood the production rule, but corrected ourselves in round three.

Chris and I were first to trade (turn commodities into trade goods!) giving ourselves more spending power. Stuart remained aggressive throughout, seeing off Chris' attack on Mecatol Rex and powering through a wormhole to bat my solitary cruiser out of a hex at the other end.

Also at the end of a round is the opportunity to achieve objectives - some are public, some are secret. You can only achieve one of each in each round... but other objectives can be achieved during the action phase by meeting its requirements in combat or via some other means... I attacked Stuart's flagship and successfully destroyed it in order to meet a secret objective, and Chris placed four planetary defence systems on the board.


I began tweeting the whole thing in progress (@gamesnightguru) but would sometimes realise that many minutes, if not an hour, had passed since my last missive, as we all weighed up options and cursed our lack of command tokens (to activate things, or take secondary actions) or our previous decisions, or each other. Usually Paul. Paul's insistence that his faction was 'fragile' belied a steely determination, as he chipped away on the score track early on and set a healthy 4 point lead at one stage. We tried to inch our way back, with all our vague scattergun manoeuvring beginning to coalesce into something approaching logic, and Chris and Stuart actively going after Paul on the board, squeezing him into a narrow space.

But when 11 o'clock rolled into sight we agreed the current round would be the last one, with Paul's lead unassailable and, as it turned out, a pretty good plan to get the last two points he needed for a bona fide victory in a subsequent round anyway!

It ended

Paul 8
Chris and Sam 5
Stuart 4

And we stood, stretched and gazed down upon the last seven and a half hours of our lives, bar a short break for pizza. The verdict across the quartet was pretty much the same - a good game, perhaps a great game, with certainly more nuance to explore than we had uncovered in a single play. But was it worthy of the time investment needed? I certainly felt that although it had more going on than Eclipse, the successor ticked the space opera box in a third of the time, and I wasn't mad keen on all the action cards either - some seemed to spill over into arbitrary Take That territory, whereas others were a neat boost in battle or a way to retreat intact.

Inevitably a new day brought a wistful nostalgia though and this morning I'm intrigued to try it again while it's still fresh...

Meanwhile back in time we packed away and finished our evening with the pallet-cleanser of NMBR9. I put too much investment in the second 3 coming up early...


And suffered as a result, as Paul broke 100 for his second win of the night and Chris and Stuart claimed 2nd and 3rd. Chat returned to Twilight Imperium again, with what-ifs and hmmms running through everybody's heads.

*

This morning Chris and I were going to play Riverboat, but with the snow coming down hard and the memory of being stranded in Dublin fresh in my mind, I decided to head home while the roads were still open. An intriguing, dramatic night! Thanks Chris and all.

8 comments:

  1. Thats a fair and accurate review of the evening and although the time it took to play is actually too long to make it practical to play regularly I didn't notice it and was engaged throughout.

    A bit too soon to give up on it yet but offers of playing opportunities might be few and far between. I do think that we missed a lot of the nuances and maybe didn't play aggressively enough for proper negotiations to take place. I think its a shame that action cards can't be traded by all. I think that would add an extra missing element.....

    Thanks for taking the time to try it, I really enjoyed the evening even if the game felt a bit flat...

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  2. I wouldn't say the game fell flat. To me it was more that the longer a game is, the more i kinda need to be impressed by it at the other end (a simplification but hopefully a clear one) and I wasn't sure I was *more* impressed by TI than I was by Eclipse, say, or even something like Shogun or Scythe.

    But like you Chris I enjoyed it - it is an event game and felt like an event. Paul played really well I think. I was maybe too cautious, waiting for the right moment to strike. And I'm intrigued enough to play it again, even if I'm not going to rush out and buy it!

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    1. Yeah I agree. Difficult to justify the time and money expenditure!!

      I'm glad I've got it though....

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  3. It's stayed in my head all weekend. I reckon with a bit of familiarity that playtime will drop substantially. There's TOO MANY GAMES!

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    1. Me too. I'm wondering if I expected too much of it and it actually delivers in other areas I didn't consider such as scale...... Only one way to find out!!!

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