Wow, well it's the morning after the night before when we finished an epic game of Twilight Imperium. It was another 3 player game with the same players as before: myself, my girlfriend Alex and my mate Tony but using the expansion and several variants we had never used before. Game length was long- coming in at about 9 and a half hours between start and finish! However, this wasn't massively representative of actual game time had we been focused on keeping the time down because:
1) We were using a lot (but not all) of the variants which we had never used before.
2)We had dedicated the entire day to Twilight Imperium- we understood from the beginning it would take a long time so we weren't going to be bothered by the time- we would simply enjoy the game and if it finished late at night, my friend Tony could crash around ours instead of worrying about going home. to that extend we played at quite a relax pace often getting up to add more music to the play list on the computer or getting a beer in addition to having a 3 to 5 minute break at the end of every Status Phase.
3) We also went to the local super market to pick up dinner which we then prepared and ate whilst playing.
All in all, with added familiarity and perhaps some focus we could quite happily cut the playing time in half. However, when there's only 3 of you willing to dedicate the entire day to the game, it's not necessary. With more players of course, this would have to be a bit more disciplined!
The variants in play were:
- 3 player Preset Map with Age of Empire (this time though we used the map exactly instead of subbing out expansion systems for base game ones)
- Variant Strategy Cards with Bureaucracy (using the Red Tape home brew variant found on the net)
- Variant Objective Cards
- Wormhole Nexus
- Leaders
- Territorial Distant Suns
- Artifacts
- Race Specific Tech
- Guardians of Mecatol Rex
Naturally all the new political and actions cards were shuffled into the existing decks.
To summarise the game, the random races assigned were as followed:
- I drew the Fire Slaves (Embers of Muatt)
- My girlfriend drew the posh-gits (Winnu)
- My mate Tony drew the Arab-Cats (Emirates of Hacan)
This was a little bit of a shame, my plan was to try and play this one by being as subtle as possible and encouraging the other two to go to war with each other. This was obviously right out of the question when my race's starting forces included a War Sun!
Long story I short, I decided to go to town- forming trade agreements at first but knowing full well they were going to be broken. Incidentally I never attacked anyone once except in retaliation. Throughout the game I kept enforcing how honest I was to any agreements made (so I can better capitalise on this in future games
). My main mistake with the game was that I completed my secret objective too easily and racked up the Victory Points too quickly, At one point I was winning 8-3-1 in VPs. Unfortunately this, combined with the War Sun made me Public Enemy #1 and from that point on I was assaulted on all fronts. Thankfully I was able to preserve a lot of my forces by conceeding ground, then counter attacking in force (and of course, the tactical use of actions cards- enhanced armour - I love you). However, it wasn't enough. Had we played to 9 VPs as recommend with Bureaucracy I would have won, but we played to 10. By playing well, and by sneakily back stabbing her Hacan ally in the back at the last second, my girlfriend declared Victory for Winnu (in a moment of sheer silliness, Tony had left his Home System unprotected and it was near a wormhole- my girlfriend's cruisers zoomed in and destroyed his homesystem's space docks for her S.O). It was a great game, much fun was had by all although I cursed myself for not getting the speaker token in the last turn- had I done so I would have won- I was 9 VP, about to claim 2 VPs for a Stage 2 public objective but my girlfriend got to claim them first as she was the speaker!)
To conclude, if I ever again suspect there's a slight chance someone is about to get all the VPs they need and I'm in the running for winning the game, I will do my best to get the **** speaker token! In our first game (vanilla TI3) we felt the speaker token was a bit pointless to game play it didn't do that much if everyone was following the Imperial I, Initiative game clock. However, in this game it dawned on us just how important it is.
So what did we make of the expansion? In essence, it was truly excellent. Vanilla TI3 is good fun however, it's definitely lacking in something and this becomes quite apparent once you have the expansion. Whilst we're glad we kept to vanilla TI3 for our first game to learn the mechanics and would recommend all-newbie games to do the same in the future, we wouldn't go back to it now. As for the variants we used:
3 player Preset Map with Age of Empire : Again this was a good choice, the Age of Empire variant really helps focus the game and whilst we'll eventually try a game without it- we'll definitely be keeping this variant for the time being. The preset map was again, good. We had used it before but in our first game we subbed out the expansion tiles for vanilla ones. In this game we used it with all the tiles laid out in the map-i.e. hope's end and the trade stations. These were interesting in of themselves- nice little additions to the game without changing anything big. Hope's end will be more useful when we use Shock Troops. Our next game will involve randomly creating the map as normal for the first time- it'll be nice to have a different layout. It's my understanding that it can take sometime so we'll probably end up creating it the night before we play. What do you think?
Variant Strategy Cards with Bureaucracy : Superb. I can see why everybody thinks they're superior. They made planning strategy more interesting as there was rarely an obvious choice and all the cards worked well together. Bureaucracy is also much better than Imperial I. As we were using the age of empire variant, we modified the game by placing a 'red tape' marker on all the objectives. Objectives could not be claimed whislt they had this marker. The bureaucracy card removed the markers in the same way objectives would be revealed if not using Age of Empire. This worked really well and combined with the cards ability to allow you to claim an extra objective there and then, made it a good choice in the mid to late game. Perhaps the only card I would sub out in future is Warfare II. We didn't really liked the way it worked as it too easy to forget to move the marker or to add+1 to your combat rolls. We'd use it again, but I reckon Warfare I is just as good, if not a bit better. What's the general consensus here?
Another card which stood out as being significantly better was Assembly over the original Political. It was much more fun having your own agendas to present and politics was much more important in this game. Although I think the political cards in this game -so far- seem quite weak and not as interesting compared with the ones in Warrior Knights (for example), there were some nice ones that we came across. These cards though merely added a bit of spice, what we really liked in terms of the political nature of the game was there was a LOT of political discussion as to the rammifications of different player actions and a lot of deals were discussed and made. This was great fun and added just the right level of political debate for our game. I also like how the Assembly card governs how the speaker token is moved.
*It looks like this post is getting to be a lot longer than I anticipated, I'll try and wrap it up quickly!*
Variant Objective Cards : These were very good. Definately more warfare orientated but not everything involved attacking another player- there were a few 'peaceful' ones in there. Overall these promoted more player interaction and added a level of drama as fulfilling some objectives would mean breaking deals with other players that would help you get another objective. In the future I may add cards from the vanilla objective set to make an optimised list of cards to randomly choose from but to be honest I may not bother- these variant objectives were great as they were.
Wormhole Nexus : Good fun. It allowed fast ships like cruisers to traverse huge sections of the board for surprise raids into enemy systems. I'd use this again.
Leaders : These were alright, they had a bit of an effect but not much. I could take them or leave them. I'd probably leave them out in smaller games and use them when there were more players when trading captured characters can come into play a bit better.
Territorial Distant Suns : This was the first time we used Distant Suns and reading through the effects we decided to use the Territorial varaint and we're glad we did. Overall we really, really liked this variant. This added a lot of flavour and fun to the game and we'll be using this variant again for sure. It did add some time and in larger game (6-8 players, and possibly 5) we'd probably leave them out to help speed up game play (unless we had the weekend to play).
Race Specific Tech and Guardians of Mecatol Rex : I've grouped these together as these aren't massive changes to the game. These were nice additions that didn't affect game length and I see no reason to always use these.
Artifacts : These surprised me as they're such a simple addition but added so much to TI3 and are probably my favourite additions to the game. Undiscovered artifacts were subject to much negotiation as to the rights of different players to explore them first and once the genuine artifacts were revealed they added even more to the political debates that went on and obviously became important strategic locations to defend/gain control of whilst also trying to use your forces to expand elsewhere in the galaxy.
Phew, finally there! If you're still with me, thanks for reading this far! I'd appreciate your comments! As you can see, we really enjoyed our game and the variant rules. Our next game will be similar although we'll drop leaders, create the map ourselves and possibly use Warfare I instead. In addition we'll add shock troops and whilst i'm not convinced by how much they'll be used, we'll add facilities just to give them a go.
Cheers,
El
One thing I think you played wrong:
