A lot of stuff goes into my brain, some of it by choice. If I decided to watch, read, play, or do it, I'd like to talk about it here. I'm a musician, a sometime actor, a frequent player of electronic and table-top games, and a lapsed reader (though I'm getting better). I write long and awkward sentences, because the more things resemble Douglas Adams' writing, the more I want to live in the world. Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition

(originally posted to RPG.net's "Other Games Open" forum, about 10 minutes before it was posted here.)

I played Twilight Imperium last weekend and it got right under my skin. The thing is-- while I don't want to say "brilliant", or even "innovative", I do want to say "inspired". A full-on game of conquering a whole damned galaxy, or at least the important parts of it, that's not even a wargame per se: it's almost more of a "civilization" game, with "points" given for the development of technology, culture, political influence and diplomacy.

We played for three hours (and it was our first game, so we really only went up to turn three, six or so victory points) but the overall effect was absolutely breathtaking. Taking a page out of Cosmic Encounter, you have a distinct set of individual successor empires with wildly distinct feels, using only subtle variations within the rules.

But taking a page out of Race for the Galaxy and (as Third Edition calls it, "its greatest new influence") Puerto Rico, there are "non-conflict-based" ways to improve your empire and get ahead in the victory point race.

If I were to consider a fourth edition of Twilight Imperium, I'd think that the best new mechanic to roll into it would be the card-driven wargame mechanic of games like Twilight Struggle and Labyrinth. Those "influence" points on worlds all over the galaxy should be somehow factored into the way points are scored; Political Events don't seem to happen quite often enough to really make a difference. On the other hand, early expansion seems to make a really big difference. Here, racial starting numbers of ships (The N'orr, for instance, with their huge army but single carrier) can swing the game wildly.

But in its cosmic-encounter-like looseness lies a type of wide-open freedom that, even with my often analytically-paralytic group of Enderian calculator knights, allows for a tremendous amount of story-telling and role-playing in the context of a board-based strategy game about building a galactic empire. So, it wins.

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