I am a Twilight Imperium fan (too bad I can't get my club to stop playing eclipse) I am a sucker for 4x space strategy board games and 3rd edition I think is one of the best. I wish they would release more expansions so to have more heroes for the races other than the 3 and play around more with some of the alternate rules module.

However I do like Star Wars and Star Trek and with the new Star Wars Rebellion game many folks (including Dice tower) started comparing it to Twilight Imperium as a "spiritual successor" much like Imperial Assault is to Descent Journey through Darkness.

So what do people here think about the two games? Are they very close alike or are they nothing alike?

Nope, it's not a good comparison.

IA reimplements the descent system, rebellion and TI3 both have spaceships.

Rebellion doesn't have tech trees or exploration, it has only one map and only 2 races.

TI is a 4x game, rebellion is a asymmetrical game of hide and seek.

Both, and forbidden stars, are fantastic games but they all play differently.

Yeah, there is a superficial similarity but that is all, much like axis and allies and risk. They are really very different games.

I concur that they are different games. Although there are some mechanics from Rebellion that I like to see in TI3 (like the different dice and different health type units) Still I prefer TI3 over Rebellion.

Rebellion borrows a bit from TI3 (your Leaders are basically glorified Command tokens, for example), so although its overall a very different game it can scratch the TI3 itch when you're short on players or low on time.

I would call it an "iteration" on TI3 more than anything. People who really like TI3 (and are not pretentious about it) would probably consider Rebellion to be TI3 with a more widespread appeal. The leaders are more like strategy cards than command tokens in my opinion, except that you can have many of them.

The leaders themselves are more like command tokens, the missions you send leaders on are the equivalent of strategy cards that you spend command tokens on to perform the secondary abilities.

yeah you're absolutely right, I only played rebellion once but that makes sense. I should pick it up again!