March 05, 2005
Twilight Imperium, 3rd Edition
I recently played an expansive space conquest game, Twilight Imperium.
The received wisdom says that you can't judge things by their covers, but there certainly are clues that you can pick out, and discern a few things. If you pick up a paperback book, and the cover is poorly printed, or if it has a stylized skull, or a torn-open shirt, you might be able to make some guesses as to what to expect inside.
Twilight Imperium comes in a vividly illustrated heavy box that measures 12 inches by 24 inches. You might not be able to know from that the quality of the game, but you would be able to deduce that it's probably an expensive game and there are a lot of pieces. You might even anticipate that a complex game awaits you inside.
And you'd be right. The list price is $79.95. There are plastic spaceships, cardboard map tiles, event cards, and markers inside that box. A lot of cardboard.
The game is one of the most complicated games I've seen in a while. There's an interesting mechanic for selecting turn order, which involves selecting "strategy cards" during the first phase of the round. Each strategy card gives the owner a special power to use during his turn, but it also gives everybody else a special power on their turn. Each strategy card also has a number on it which determines turn order. Examples of strategy cards include "Trader", who is able to generate money through the use of trade contracts, "Diplomat", who is able to preempt combat, and "Engineer", who gets a bonus on purchasing new technologies.
One mechanic I was delighted to see in this game was the use of public and private rewards. The game is played to ten points, and there are numerous ways to score points. Some are available to all players, but some are dealt out face down to players and kept secret. This leads to some very interesting negotiations - things that are of little value to you may be of great value to your opponent.
A few things to be prepared for - this is not "RISK in space". Combat is a rare thing in the game, although you certainly spend a lot of the game preparing for the possibility of armed conflict. Diplomacy and treachery are far more rewarding than brute force aggression.
Also worth planning around is that the game takes a while to learn, and even experienced players will take around three hours to complete a game. I've played 5 1/2 hours of the game so far, which amounted to a single game, and we hadn't finished yet by that time.
Bottom Line: an enjoyable opportunity to lay claim to planets. It's worth playing just to see a lot of different game mechanics put together well.
Posted by tsmaster at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)