I so rarely get more than one person in my home at a time that would be interested in Twilight Imperium. Will the expansion have official 2-player variant rules? I would love that so much.

There has been no mention of 2-player rules in the previews FFG has put out. Frankly I think you need at least 4 to get a proper game of TI going, so I would be surprised if they did include such a thing.

All hope is not lost, though. Check out the TI3 page on Boardgamegeek, there may well be 2-player variant rules out there already.

Unless you only know one other person interested in playing TI, why not invite them all over at once? =)

a friend and i tried 2eaces each with a 'permament alliace' with the option of combing the vp as for the teams instead of individual wins.

And how did that work out?

Rakados said:

Yep, how'd that work out? I'm really interested to know how a 2players/2races game goes.

My buddy and I play a 4 player game, where we control 2 races each.

-The races must be placed across the board from one another.
-They can never occupy the same tile at the same time. (You can have one of your races in space, and the other on a planet, but never both in space or on a planet together)
-Your other race can never qualify you for a VP (such as blockading a space dock)
-Write down 2 different VP totals required for a 'win' and keep it hidden, write down a race for each number. (We choose, 8 and 12.) So the other player is never sure which race is close to victory, as soon as one race hits it's VP total, the game is over.
-On political, pull 3 agenda's, tally up total votes. Write down (hidden) what your votes are for each agenda, then reveal. Ties go to the Speaker, agenda's with no votes are discarded. (We remove one political card... I think it's called public execution, where elected race loses all action cards, exhausts all planets, and is -1 on all combat for the whole round.)
-If your playing with Assembly, no one team can be speaker twice in a row. (This prevents one team picking first over and over)

I love this option, it keeps the base rules pretty much the same, introduces a little political instability and with 2 competent players can be over in a matter of 3-3.5 hours. I have run these rules with a few friends probably 10-15 times, each game can really go either way. Putting the 2 values on VP win values makes it so that your enemy never really knows which of your factions is closest to winning, this prevents your enemy using 2 races to gang up on one of yours who's close to winning.