I'm breaking out TI for an 8-player game in three weeks' time (been two years since the last game!), and I'm considering playing with the multi-galaxy preset board. Are the split boards good to play on? Are there any optional or house rules I should adopt when using them? They look like fun, but I'm worried it'll divide the game into two slow four-player games with little interaction between the boards unless all the Mecatol Rex secret objectives come out. Although in a standard game I hardly notice what's happening on the other side of the galaxy anyway.

Those maps rely on wormholes to shrink the galaxy.

So it might be a good idea to remove any politics cards that close the wormholes.

It would be up to you to leave in politics that would alter the way wormholes work, like making all wormholes adjacent to all other wormholes.

I believe that one is called Restructing the Wormholes or something similiar.

With a reliance on wormholes, it might be a good idea to remove Keeper of the Gates secret objective as that will be more difficult to achieve.

Thanks for the advice. I was strongly considering removing Keeper of the Gates - I'm not a fan of it to begin with, and it'd be almost impossible on this map. Removing the ability to close the wormholes definitely sounds like a good idea, I'd forgotten about that card. Allowing alpha-beta wormhole travel would spice things up a bit, if it manages to come out ... I think I'll leave that one in.

I'll post again with the our experiences of the split-galaxy game in a couple of weeks' time.