So following up on that last little conversation fragment I posted, this weekend was about Twilight Imperium, 3rd Edition, otherwise known as the Biggest, Most Beastiest Game I Believe I Have Ever Played And That Includes The World of Warcraft Board Game And That One Weighed About Fifty Pounds.
In short, the game is Master of Orion, Tabletop Edition. You are a race of aliens living in turbulent times, and you must build a space-faring empire, research technologies and take over the galaxy! In real life, this would take several generations and the combined might of worlds. Fortunately, Twilight Imperium is a board game and will instead only take you and some friends about 7 hours. Not so coincidentally, this is the only real beef I have with the game: you’ll need to plan to spend the whole day, afternoon and evening to get through it. Sometimes though, there are times where you (gasp!) want to play a game that has about a thousand and one little pieces and 3 decks of cards per player, where the board sprawls across two kitchen tables and to be blunt, shit gets epic.
The coolest thing about Imperium is that it liberally borrows mechanics from just about every other game I like. It has public role selection (Puerto Rico) that governs turn order (Citadels) on battling your spaceships on a hexagonal board (Nexus Ops/Settlers) against players with special powers that break the rules (Cosmic Encounter). All this happens to accompany all the other American-style mechanics that govern diplomacy, trading, politics, technology trees and epic space battles. Fortunately, all these mechanics manage to play relatively nicely with each other. They’re all present and compete for your attention, but they don’t step on each others toes. Being a Fantasy Flight game, the rules are well laid out in a big nice book and aside from not giving you any bags for the billions of bits you’ll get, (seriously FF you couldn’t shell out another buck per game to toss a handful of ziplocs in there WTF) the components are certainly worth their weight.
I like Twilight Imperium, and if you can stomach all of the caveats that this is a big, long, complicated game for nerds, you’ll probably like it too.
