Twilight Imperium Impressions

News has been a little slow lately, which has been unfortunate because although I've wanted to write up a few more entries, I haven't been seeing interesting enough content worth discussing as of late. I've spent the last week or so playing Left 4 Dead, which I finally spent enough time playing to really get into. I've also been replaying the campaign for Dawn of War II, a game that appeals to me personally and I think has been underrated by the gaming public.

This weekend, I spent the week up at a friend's house near Albany NY. We saw the Star Trek movie in IMAX (which was insane by the way, go and see it now) and geeked out on board games.

We played one game of Power Grid, Puerto Rico and Twilight Imperium 3rd edition each, and several games of Colossal Arena (which is a great game for casual gamers and also great when you only have three or four people. I don't recommend playing it with more than four).

Power Grid and Puerto Rico are two games that we have played before and have really enjoyed. Power Grid in particular is a fantastic game, though our first few game experiences were significantly hampered by one of the worst rulebook layouts I have ever seen.

Twilight Imperium, though is the topic of the post. Twilight is one of those games that tries to be the "game of the ages" and attempts to bite off more than it can chew. The game costs about $80, and the rulebook for this game is intense. The basic jist of the game is that you control a space faring empire that is trying to take over the galaxy. The gameboard is built during each game and can be balanced or very one sided. There is battle, trade, sabotage, exploration, technology, alliances and mission systems which must all be understood by each player, and a lot of book-keeping to go along with the game's relatively slow pace.

It took us about two hours of explaining the rules to the new players (only three of the players knew how to play the game) before we finally felt comfortable starting the game up. We had taken some time beforehand to make sure that all player's starting stacks were somewhat balanced (so one person didn't have too much production, influence, etc). We were also playing with all of the errata for the game (yes, there is a lot of errata in this game), including a custom change for the Imperial action to make it require players to control Mecatol Rex in order to get the 2 Victory Points.

Still, after all that errata, it really wasn't a good play experience. The game becomes bogged down with several of its elements, and many mechanics seem to reward sitting back and hoping that the other players take each other out with you moving in for the kill. We quit about 5 turns into the game simply because noone wanted to make an aggressive move until we got bored enough and had played nearly all of our units.

The biggest problem with the game for me was simply that I got caught between the two "best" players at the table in my estimation. I had a pretty defensive race, which I didn't realize when I picked it but was made abundantly clear as the game went on. At one point I wanted to move on the player to my left, but the best that I could do was attack one of the worlds adjacent to his homeworld, beat up his small fleet there, and get counterattacked by his fleet at the adjacent sector after he had built at his homeworld in the interim.

The whole experience made me realize one thing about game design: design games that encourage people to take risks and PLAY THE GAME. By the time we stopped, no-one could tell who was in a strong position simply because it was so difficult to identify all of the ships in one space, so even evaluating attacks required us to broadcast our intentions to the rest of the group.

I think TI might have worked better in another group that was more risk-taking and perhaps had a better grasp of the rules. Still, it is sometimes fair to judge a game on the merit of a single playthrough, and although I will probably end up trying TI again at some point, I can certainly say that the game would be better off if it was a bit easier to understand and encouraged players to take risks.

-Jon