NecrosaroIII
Ultimate DQ Fan
One of my dream games to play is Twilight Imperium. I finally played a game last night. A group of five players, each playing for the first time. A couple of my thoughts:
1 - The game design is some of the most elegant I've seen in a board game. Especially bizarre since it's a Fantasy Flight game, which usually have mechanics that are not that fun. Here everything is fantastic.
2 - The diplomacy is extremely organic. Here is a great example. I played as the Mentak, basically space pirates. My neighbors were Hacan, which are a faction that specializes in trade. I would commit piracy every time he did trades. So I had no particular reason to invade or attack him. He certainly had reasons to attack me, but I basically had to make deals in other ways to keep him happy and essentially turn a blind eye. Amazing.
3 - The game is as long as they say. We played for 12 hours. Only 5 victory points were scored during that time. We had to stop playing because it was close to midnight. Based on our pace, we could have probably kept going for another 3 hours
4 - "Slow build up" that turns into a quick climax. For the first 10 hours, there was no fighting. Just build up, followed by a lot of posturing, bluffing and initimidating. We were trying our best to avoid combat. It was my fault the dam broke, so to speak. At the assembly, I assassinated a player's representative. He didn't like that. For the rest of the game, he decided that since he didn't think he was gonna win, he was going to make damn sure I wasn't either. He committed all of his attention to trying to invade my home system. And so I had to commit all of my resources to defend my planet. It essentially turned into an endless siege and stalemate.
With that player's forces tied up trying to sweep me off the map, HIS neighbor felt confident to act on their own plans since they knew they wouldn't be fighting a two front war. Essentially a chain reaction of war broke out.
1 - The game design is some of the most elegant I've seen in a board game. Especially bizarre since it's a Fantasy Flight game, which usually have mechanics that are not that fun. Here everything is fantastic.
2 - The diplomacy is extremely organic. Here is a great example. I played as the Mentak, basically space pirates. My neighbors were Hacan, which are a faction that specializes in trade. I would commit piracy every time he did trades. So I had no particular reason to invade or attack him. He certainly had reasons to attack me, but I basically had to make deals in other ways to keep him happy and essentially turn a blind eye. Amazing.
3 - The game is as long as they say. We played for 12 hours. Only 5 victory points were scored during that time. We had to stop playing because it was close to midnight. Based on our pace, we could have probably kept going for another 3 hours
4 - "Slow build up" that turns into a quick climax. For the first 10 hours, there was no fighting. Just build up, followed by a lot of posturing, bluffing and initimidating. We were trying our best to avoid combat. It was my fault the dam broke, so to speak. At the assembly, I assassinated a player's representative. He didn't like that. For the rest of the game, he decided that since he didn't think he was gonna win, he was going to make damn sure I wasn't either. He committed all of his attention to trying to invade my home system. And so I had to commit all of my resources to defend my planet. It essentially turned into an endless siege and stalemate.
With that player's forces tied up trying to sweep me off the map, HIS neighbor felt confident to act on their own plans since they knew they wouldn't be fighting a two front war. Essentially a chain reaction of war broke out.
