Yesterday a subset of Maclab was summoned to play Twilight Imperium, one of Zen's many board games. It's ideally a 6-player game (though an 8-player expansion is available) and is definitely an all-day event. We started playing at about noon and barely finished by 6PM.
Under the watchful eyes of Zen and Peter, the only two who had played before, the galaxy was semi-randomly generated and our fleets and technologies organised.
It would be a mistake to try to explain the complicated mechanics of the game in a little blog post, so I won't.
In a nutshell, you don't win by wiping out all the other people, which would take far too long. Instead your overall aim is to gain "victory points" which you do primarily by fulfilling "public objectives" which anyone and everyone is able to complete, and your own "secret objectives" which are worth more victory points but are more difficult. You try to keep your secret objectives to yourself so that others don't stop you from achieving them.
There is a detailed tech tree to give you all kinds of marvellous advantages, an inter-player trade system, a system of political influence and various laws which can be enacted.
Space battles are an orderly affair with all outcomes decided by rolling 10-sided dice, but technologies can give your ships an edge. They might also let you build a War Sun or two, which are extremely powerful. I built two of them and used them to crush Mr Ford. Unfortunately for me, attacking another player's fleet is not worth any victory points itself, but it can be fun.
The game progressed slowly through the day. Quite slowly:
- Just after we started (12:38 PM)
- 1:52 PM
- 2:30 PM
- 4:00 PM
- The winning board (5:45 PM)
The action is not so much what happens on the board, but the excited discussions and arguments about what laws are acceptable, who is allowed to take what planets without risking retaliation and trying to convince other players to play their cards in a way useful to you.
Being undistracted from the goal of achieving many victory points, Zen emerged the winner and we packed up the many, many pieces carefully into little plastic bags.
Now we just need to play again having learned how it works. Thanks folks for a good game and day. :)
One Comment
Lets do that again!!
One Trackback
[...] of 6 hours, which is enough to turn most new players off. The action on the game board happens at a snail’s pace. The abilities afforded to each race keep the game in balance, but often can stunt the most awesome [...]