I just had a vision of a week of TI gaming fun. Imagine this:

Day 1 and 2: Playing the historic scenario from SotT. (Yes, my gaming group is that slow)

Day 3: Playing the battle of Mecatol Rex with REX: Final Days of an Empire .

Day 4 and 5: Playing a normal game. (Once again: slow gaming group)

The entire history in three games.

One could make sure that the same races are in all three games. Or at least the two first games.

I suppose if the gaming group plays fast it could be done on one weekend...

To conclude: Epicness!

Ingenious!

Hmm, let's make this post a bit more substantial. Are you making it akin to a three game tournament? It would be cool if there was a way to tie in the events from one game to impact on another, eg, were the Sol player to win the REX game, then they could accrue a minor bonus for the final TI game?

Well I wasn't really thinking about making any type of official combo-rules, but i do see potential to elaborate on the idea.

For instance: Why stop at making the winner of REX game gain a bonus in Main game? It would be more timelinely (if there is such a word) that the winner of the historic scenario would get a slight bonus in REX. The timespan between REX and Main Game is, after all, 2000 years according to the REX flavortext.

But like I said: There is great potential for houserules to pop up around the whole thing and how the three games would be connected.

Seeing as how I, never having played the earlier DUNE game, don't exactly know how REX plays or what bonus to give to the winner of the SotT historic scenario I suppose a starting boost to the number of troops or resources would be adequate.

And as for teh winner of the REX game I suppose that a permanent +3 influence bonus might be not bad. Maybe too not bad.... +2 or even +1 might suffice...

Just wanted to bump my idea. Maybe get a few more ideas from others?

Fnoffen said:

The first thing I'm going to do with the REX game rules are released is try to think up ways to meaningfully combine it with the SotT scenario game. I still have some hope that FFG will have some official rules for combining them, but more than likely, they're not going to bother.

Right before the status phase, there could be a Rex Phase. There should be some way to tie influence and alliances between the two games with slight changes. I'm also thinking that the powers of the factions in the REX game could be based on their positioning in the space game. For example, the emperor role in the Rex game could be given to whoever controls the Mecatol Rex system. The person who controls the space in the Quan system could get the trade advantage (look at "treachery cards" up for bid), and so on. The Lazax would start with most of the advantages, but they would need to win both games in order to achieve victory. I'm anxious to see if any such system would be workable.

Fnoffen said:

The original Dune board game had an expansion called Spice Harvest that added a sort of mini-game that was played before the proper game and the outcome determined players' starting positions and starting Spice values. I imagine something similar could be cooked up to play a short game of TI3 (possibly inspired by or related to the Shards historical scenario), the results of which would influence starting positions and Influence values for Rex in like kind.

*bumping* And voila!