One Play Review #2 - Twilight Imperium 4

Space is looking rather busy today...

Ever since I got into gaming, Twilight Imperium 4 has been at the top of the list of games I wanted to try. Now, thanks to some awesome guys organising a game at the UKGE, I had a chance to play it and experience the sprawling space epic for myself.

First things first, if you've done any research into the game at all, you will have already noticed that there is absolutely nothing small about Twilight Imperium 4. From the myriad of races to choose from to the countless planets, spaceships, action and political cards, this game is so infamous for it's sheer size that I'm quite certain it alone is enough to scare some people off, but, if you have the War Suns to embrace all the excess, what awaits you inside is a one of a kind social experience. You will scheme and bluff, make alliances and break them, engage in epic space battles and vote in even more epic space politics - the fate of the galaxy will be in your hands and you will love every second of it.

For a few sweet rounds I too held the universe in the palm of my green hand

Yes, when you first you see Twilight Imperium laid out in front of you and hear of the things you can do in the game, it sounds extremely complicated, but if you just take a closer look, you will find that behind this facade lies a pretty straight forward, and, dare I say, elegant game. You start the game with 7 command tokens split between 3 different pools - 2 in Tactic, 3 in Fleet and 2 in Strategy. The 'Tactic' tokens are used to 'Active' a system - you place a token onto the system tile to either move your ships into it or to produce something in that system and as long as your token is in the system, you cannot take any more actions in that system on your subsequent turns in that round. The number of tokens you have in the 'Fleet' pool determines how many spaceships you can have in one system, which can seem pretty unimportant at the beginning, but when an opponent moves in to attack your system with an army of 4 Dreadnoughts, a War Sun and a couple of cruisers for good measure, and you can only muster up a couple of Dreadnoughts for defence due to that capacity limit, it's importance becomes clear. Finally, the 'Strategy' tokens are one of the key elements that prevent this game from becoming a complete snooze fest while you're waiting for your own turn to come. At the beginning of each round you get to pick 1 or 2 Strategy cards (depending on the number of players) - this is an additional action that will let you do things like research technologies, obtain trade goods, construct buildings on your controlled systems, etc. and will play a large part in influencing how you'll play this round. However, in a great design decision, each of these Strategy cards also has a secondary action that the rest of players can do by spending a token from their Strategy pool, so you are never just waiting for the turn to come back to you, instead watching the other players, waiting for them to use a card that can help you change the course of the whole game.

Then we come to Space Combat and Politics. The combat in the game is very simple - one player moves into a system controlled by another and they roll a die for each ship they have in that system with a value you need to roll for a successful hit indicated on your player sheet. The Politics however is much more exciting topic (not a sentence one hears often!) - once one of the players had gains control of Mecatol Rex, a sort of political centre of the universe, at the end of each round the players get to draw two agenda cards and vote whether to pass or reject them. These agenda cards differ wildly from providing a small boost to one of the players, to screwing over another or establishing a whole new rule to the game and everyone's ability to swing a vote depends on how many planets they control.

A foreign Space Ball in your system is generally regarded as 'Having a bad day'

So far so simple - you use some tokens to take some actions, engage in a bit of fighting, take over some planets and vote on some laws. If Twilight Imperium stopped here, it would be a perfectly serviceable, probably even pretty good game, but it's what happens above the table that elevates TI4 from a game that's simply good to an excellent one that you will remember long after the planets are back in the box. Twilight Imperium is full of players constantly talking to each other - whether it's to pass a beneficial law, to form flimsy alliances, to stop another player from running away with victory or just to establish a trade deal. You will always be involved in something, if not by directly participating in the negotiations then by considering how their deal will affect your side of the galaxy and perhaps even making your own offers just to stop their deals from happening.

Finally, I should address the game length as I feel this is the point that scares most people off giving Twilight Imperium a try. Yes, it's certainly a long game - ours took about 4 hours and that is considered to be on the short side of things (not to mention the fact that out of 4 people I was the only newbie who's never played before), however, at no point in the game did I feel like the it was dragging and was quite surprised when I saw how much time had actually gone by. Because of the level of interaction you have with the others, because there is almost always something you can do outside your turn, because every action, every deal, alliance or battle the other players participate in can change the course of the entire game and ruin your best laid plans, it feels like there is never a point during the entire game when you are not involved in the unfolding story.

Twilight Imperium 4 is like any good space epic movie or series, except here YOU are the main character - will you conquer the galaxy or will you watch your alliances crumble, your fleet perish and your home world burn to ashes at the hands of those you considered friends? Well that, my friend, is completely up to you, but I'm sure that, if you're willing to invest the time into it, Twilight Imperium will give you a story you won't soon forget.