Twilight Imperium – First Thoughts

If there is one game that strikes fear and wonder into the tabletop game playing community in equal measure it is Twilight Imperium. A colossus of a game that has cast a long shadow over other ‘epic’ scale games since its first release in 1997.

For those not familiar, a brief overview. Twilight Imperium sees you taking on the role of an alien race. From robot viruses to sentient plants, the races are varied and all give different benefits or penalties (and sometimes both). Your aim, in fourth edition at least, is to rack up 10 victory points first by completing public and private goals. These can encourage fleet building, planet conquering, tech development, or all sorts of other aims. It’s a game in the 4x mould of expand, exploit, explore, and exterminate.

Twilight Imperium has a reputation as an all day epic. That reputation is not wrong, but I feel it needs some caveats. Firstly if you just sit down and focus on the game, with a break for food of course, we found we could get through the game (while learning it) in about 7 hours. This was with 4 players and I think it would go much faster in subsequent plays.

There is a lot of ‘stuff’ in Twlight Imperium but the core mechanisms of the game are actually very straightforward. You get command tokens which you place on 3 parts of your player board to tell you what you can do in a turn.

Tactics: Place tokens here in order to do things on the board. Ship movement and building are controlled by this.

Fleet: This tells you how big a fleet you can have in any one hex. Ramp this up when you are defending or attacking. Down when you want to spread yourself thinner and do more.

Strategy: this allows you to follow other peoples role selections.

This last one touches on the other core mechanism. At the start of each round you choose a role. Not only does this role give you the turn order, it also gives you a special action to perform. This might be building technology, engaging in diplomacy, or readying for war etc. You must take this action before you can pass, taking you out of the current round. Other players can follow this special action with their strategy tokens, but it is usually a weaker version of the action you get to perform.

From the tactics pool we get to put command tokens on the board to move around and build. Place a token on a hex to produce more units, ground or space. Place another to move ships to the hex you are placing the token on. The slightly tricky thing here is that ships can’t move out of a system with one of your command tokens on it. This forces you to plan ahead a bit in a way that is understandable with a nice level of difficulty. You can of course just forget repeatedly like I did instead.

There are a lot of bells and whistles around this core command token/role selection mechanism, but these are the fundamental things you are manipulating. I found the technology decks overwhelming in my first game, with loads of cards to read through and figure out not only how to get, but which ones to get. Depending on the faction your are playing you will need to engage with those more or less.

Planets are explored and conquered, giving you their card. These are then used to pay for ships, influence votes, and contribute towards the building of technology. The cards make it super easy to keep track of what you own, though you will need a good amount of space around your player board to accommodate them.

Combat is dice based and can be a little long winded as folk throw dice back and forth. It’s fine but almost the weakest aspect of the game, despite all the miniatures associated with it. We found combat tended to be pretty brutal on both sides.

Twilight Imperium is a lot to take in. For your first play I would advise focusing on the strength of your faction. You might have specific technology cards you can build towards, or have right from the off. Certainly some technology will be better for you than others.

Try not to know everything straight off as I just don’t think that is possible. Focus on the command tokens and roles and what they will allow you to achieve on given turn. Let the goals, both public and private, guide you towards what will get you points. Have a good think about your turn, but when it is your turn do get through it as quickly as you can. I played it at 4-player and that seemed perfect for a learning game. We also played with the expansion and unlocking some of the extras you get for your faction gives you a few more guides to work with.

I enjoyed Twilight Imperium a lot more than I thought I would. I have no desire to own it, but my friends have this copy so I hope to get a chance to play it some more. It is a lot to take in, but the core mechanisms are very straightforward. If you get the chance, I would urge you to give this game a shot. It’s over the top, pulpy, and full of drama and I mean all those as compliments. You will not play anything else like it.

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