Original Twilight Imperium III need for Shattered Empire expansion?

By bugmenot2, in Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition

Hey, I was just wondering if I need to buy Twilight Imperium III if I want to play with the Shattered Empire expansion. Is Shattered Empire its own standalone game?

well, you wouldn't have Mecatol Rex, the main rule book, and possibly you wouldn't have enough space hexes to make the board. So I'm going to go with, yes, you need the original game.

Affraid you have to buy it yes.

But the game is an absolute gem... You will not regret buying it as long as you manage to scrape together enough friends to play it once in a while :)

bugmenot2 said:

Hey, I was just wondering if I need to buy Twilight Imperium III if I want to play with the Shattered Empire expansion. Is Shattered Empire its own standalone game?

Yes, you require the base game to use the expansion. It just doesn't work otherwise. I'm pretty sure it says somewhere on the box that you need TI3 to use this product, too. It definitely was not intended to be used alone.

I'm sure if you were desperate, though, you could probably play some funky 2-player version with only the expansion. Of course, you'd need to know the rules of the base game, and I'm not sure how fun the game would be with the limited supply of ACs and PCs from the expansion, but I suppose if you really wanted to you could.

That being said, you'd be much, much, much better off with the base game.

It is actually just about possible to play SE on it's own, with the following caveats:

* You can only play 2-player, as you don't have the pieces for more.

* Mecatol Rex needs to be replaced by some other system (Hope's End, for example)

* You don't have a VP track, Speaker token, or bonus counters. These would have to be improvised.

* You have very few Secret Objectives, and at least one doesn't make sense 2-player. You may have to cut them entirely, in fact.

But I wouldn't really recommend it. It's not much cheaper than the base game, and you get a lot less stuff in general. You'd want to be very sure you'd never want to play more than 2 player.

You can't really play it without the original, unless you allready know the rules and plan on changing them completely. It is worth it to buy the game. I know a couple of people who have purchased multiple copies of the game. If you get really desperate go to your local gaming store and ask to try the game out. Some placeses will actually help set up a gaming session for you.