Twilight Imperium

So on thursday and friday I got to play Twilight Imperium for both the first and second time. This means that over the course of a 48 hour period I spent nearly 12 of it playing Twilight Imperium. Astounding. The first game was mostly a 5 hour tutorial on how to play the damn game. It had some very memorable moments to it and in general it was a lot of fun but we also got some pretty basic things wrong.

So the next game went much better. Some random thoughts:

1) Taking the Imperial Stradegy is scary. It marks you as a contender for the throne and immediatly paints a target on you. Going dead last doesn't help either. The thing is I am not sure how you are supposed to stop that alien who always goes first from always taking the Imperial Stradegy and just winning other than punking their home world. Long story short on the second game we were a good 2 hours in before someone grabbed it for the first time. Then it all became on.

2) Technology is waaaaay more important than I initially thought it was. Paticularly anything that makes your fighters better at fighting and the tech that makes your dreadnoughts move two hexes. I didn't realize this until I watched a player I was about to move in on destroy a neighbor's fleet with a swarm of fighters all of whom hit on a 7 that is what made me retreat and I started screaming through the tech tree. By then it was to late though and the building was about to close so we had to leave.

3) I am going to consider replacing imperial with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is far less threatening and might help goose people into playing more agressivly.

4) Trade. One player liked taking the trade stradegy and then he would cancel all the trade deals. It took nearly 3 hours of him doing this before I realized just how crippling to the game's ecconomy that was. I wasn't able to effectively use my race's ability which is to take trade goods from people who have three or more trade goods, and all sorts of other people had trouble researching technologies (me), building fleets on the fly, and all sorts of other things. It was actually a brilliant move. Of course eventually, I utitlized a worm hole and punked his home planet. I was going to take and hold them but then a nieghbor blockaded the worm hole so I couldn't get through without starting a major conflict I wasn't ready for because I didn't have any bloody tecs. Heh.

5) I lost. But I had a helluvalot of fun.

6) For the most part the second game was pretty much rules problems free. I need to look up just how often planetary defenses fire but other than that it went really well. I want to play again, right now in fact. But we are going to be taking a break from the game which is prolly for the best.

In short, I am glad I bought the game I truely feel it is worth every penny and I knows that the next time we play things are going to be god damned epic all the way though.