Hi everyone,

Managed an 8 player game lasting 7 rounds in about 6 hours sunday night/monday morning, at a local university convention.

I would like to mention how incredibly useful playing Twilight Imperium is with a whiteboard.

Photo here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bladedwings/3565587112/

Being able to track turn order, public objectives, new laws and the current score is so useful. Considering that we normally use our living room floor to play, this has shown us that it is really worth the time to book a room at the university.

I think that making it so easy to see the objectives really helped everyone try for points, rather than the normally even split between people trying to kill each other with war suns and people trying to win. This was the closest a game I've played.

I still won, though.

I can see the benefits of a whiteboard, but to be honest, I don't see anything on the board that the cards wouldn't portray. What does the Whiteboard provide that the included component's don't? Maybe I'm just missing something

That seems cool. You might want to have a tech chart up there too. Makes it easy to see who has what when it comes to tech.

sigmazero13 said:

I can see the benefit - The common information is clearly visible to everyone all the time, rather than on the edge of the table, where you have to walk to see it. Or worse yet, on another table.

We've toyed with the idea of rigging a camera to a projector, and use that to display the common play area with laws, objectives and such. We haven't realised this yet though.

blarknob said:

With an 8 player game, it might end up taking too much space. What I think I'll do for the next one, though, is stick control markers next to each objective, showing who has completed what.

But yeah, the idea was mostly to make it big, obvious and easy to see for everyone what was happening with scores and suchlike, without having to shout across the play area.

For this game, I also put all the planet cards on each planet on the board, so that as soon as someone colonised one, they could pick it up, rather than shout at whoever had the pile of planets next to them and ask them to get it.

magicoctopus said:

That makes sense. Almost all of my Face-to-face games have been 4-player, and table space hasn't been a problem, and everything has been easy to see. I guess with larger games, the whiteboard idea would definitely be more useful

magicoctopus said:

"Hat! We thought of 'Native American Headdress' before we thought of 'hat!'"

Sorry, I'll shut up now =P