Jasrags(dot)net

I am going to attempt to blog again, this time i am going to post about our almost weekly board gaming sessions. Because this was an after thought i have no pictures to go along with this post and no detailed notes, our next session will more detailed. This is more of a recap of how things went and not a "how to play" guide.

Game: Twilight Imperium

Number of players: 6 Me (Jason), Robert, Thomas, Greg, Leroy and Abel

Duration of play: 7 hours

Notes: Shattered Empire expansion used, used the "Variant Strategy Card" and "Variant Objectives" options with the preset 6 player map from FF games.

Let me start with a little background about us and this game. We attempted to play it around a year ago with 6 players as well and had what i would consider a FAIL of a game. No one really understood the rules and it ended abruptly when one the players had to leave due to time. This caused me to do some heavy investigation on BGG.com and found that i was not the only one having difficulty with this game. So after about a year we decided to try again. This time changing some of the base rules around and adding in the expansion to make it a bit easier to get through.

So once all the gamers arrived we started drafting for the race we would play for the game. This was done by handing out 2 random race cards at a time to a player and letting them choose one to play. (Slight side node we removed 'The Clan of Saar' from the draft due to the amount of rule exceptions that it has). The races chosen were as follows:

• Jason - Sardakk N'orr
  
• Greg - The Yssaril Tribe
  
• Robert - The Naalu Collective
  
• Abel - Embers of Muaat
  
• Thomas - Barony of Letnev
• Leroy - ?
  

The rounds go like this:

1. Strategic Phase - From the "Speaker" clockwise players choose 1 of the 8 strategy cards available. The 2 remaining cards receive bonus counters for the next round.
2. Action Phase - This is where the bulk of the game happens. In turn order "Number on your strategy card" you take one action of the following; Execute your strategy card, Transfer action - move units between two adjacent systems, Tactical Action - move to a specific sector, Play an action card or Pass. This continues until all players have exhausted their actions and have to pass.
   
3. Status Phase - This is the "cleanup" phase where counters are returned, new cards distributed and victory points are awarded.

Our first round took about 1 hour to complete, this was due to having to reference the rule book frequently for every player. In the future we will play with the "Simulated early turns" option, this allows players on their turn to take all their actions at one after another, this is easy to do in the first or second round as there is very little player to player interaction at this stage of the game.

The second round went a bit faster and by the end of the game we were doing entire rounds in about 45 minutes. Near the end of our session it actually started getting pretty tense, Leroy and Thomas had formed an alliance and Thomas was in strong control of the center of the map. I was blocking Leroy's flank and was in a alliance with Greg. Abel was on a war path against Robert with his two war suns which made for a pretty interesting battle. All in all when we called the game Thomas ended up winning followed by Abel and Robert. I feel if we had time to finish it out we would have seen some pretty epic space battles between the remaining players but overall Thomas would hold the center planet and win on victory points.

What we learned:

• TI is epic, i have seen posts that say plan for 45 minutes / player, but i would say until you have a core group of players that all know the rules well, plan on 1.5 hours / player.
• Next time we will player with the "Age of Empire" variant which sets in a built in game timer between 7 and 10 rounds.
  
• As with most part heavy game (TI has a ton of parts!) organization can knock off a ton of your setup and tear down time for the game. I found that 10 of the Plano 2-3500 PROLATCH™ STOWAWAY boxes hold all 8 race pieces and all the other game counters. Then i bought 14 "gem/bead" holders form Jo-Anns to hold the race flags, leaders and command tokens.

The closest thing i can compare this game to is risk, but on a much deeper level. All risk game i have played have really turned into boring battles of attrition, but at least with TI i was interested in pretty much every move by every player. I think we are going to try to play this again in a few months and see if we like it more now that the rules are fresh.

House Rules:

• War Sun Limit - Only one war sun allowed per sector
• Alliances - Alliances are tied to the trade contracts, if you have a trade contract with someone you are not allowed to attack them and you may move through sectors containing their ships, but you may not stop. Trade contracts can be canceled by the Trade strategy card or in the status phase.