The Things I Like Are Objectively The Best
By Marc Q
Here we go, folks. The finale. The ultimate post. The last stand of this ridiculous multiple-page rant about why the things I like are actually, demonstrably, better than the things that everyone else likes!
Of course, I don’t really believe that. I have spent significant digital ink explaining while quality might be objective, tastes and preferences are still thoroughly subjective. Also, just because I like a thing doesn’t make it good, and just because I dislike something (looking at you, Risk) doesn’t intrinsically mean it’s bad. This level of nuance is often difficult to communicate in an elegant, expedient way. Let it never be said that I will use ten words when several thousand will suffice.
So, with that preamble thoroughly ambled, let’s talk about it. Numero uno. The big cheese. The grand poobah. The best board game that has ever been made!
One of the biggest, heaviest games available in the store, capable of deflecting small-caliber firearms at close range, filled with six glorious sets of plastic ships, and more tokens than you can shake a dreadnaught at. Pax Magnifica, Bellum Gloriosum, indeed!
Is it for everyone? Heck no! Twilight Imperium is a game I almost never recommend to customers because the subset of people who will love it is exceptionally uncommon. But let’s talk for a moment why.
When teaching players a new game, one of the foundational elements is to describe what you have to do to win. For games like Ticket to Ride, this is a pretty straightforward process: you want to earn points. You do this by connecting cities on the map. The strategy and variety of the game come from how you approach that core loop. Do you try to connect a lot of shorter routes, or a few longer ones? Do you focus on getting in the way of other players, ignore everyone else, or something in-between? Or a game like Avalon, which has players secretly trying to sabotage the efforts of the other players, and everyone is trying to either lie their way to victory or discover who is lying. Nice, straight lines between “This is what you need to do to win” and mechanics in the game that let you pursue that victory through various strategies.
But Twilight Imperium does something very different. Instead of telling you what you need to do to win, it instead asks you “What do you want to do?” and then provides you with the methods and tools to win the game by doing that.
For example, a traditional 4X board game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) will have elements of diplomacy in negotiating borders with other players, or trading resources for immediate or future considerations. But those are usually tangential elements, something that you do in order to enable scoring points by the usual mechanics of the game (capturing relics, or claiming territory, or researching valuable technologies). And yes, Twilight Imperium allows you to do all of those other things, but there are also ways to score victory points specifically through diplomatic channels, or through economic maneuvering, or backstabbing betrayals. The game doesn’t force you down a single road to score points, and instead the galaxy opens up to embrace the style of play you are in the mood for.
All of this comes at both a monetary and rules cost, though. TI4 is a big, expensive game, and the rulebook is thirty-odd pages long (plus a Living Rulebook and FAQ available through the Fantasy Flight Games website). There are optional errata, updates, and an entire set of Codexes which incorporate updated rules, new factions… yeah, it’s complicated.
It’s also a time commitment. I have a lot of experience (as you may be shocked to learn), and it still takes me a very respectable 45 minutes per player to run a full game (if focusing on a shorter playtime). A solid 6 player game will reasonably take about 4 or 5 hours to finish, and if I’m including the sublime Prophecy of Kings expansion then we’re bumping up to at least 60 to 90 minutes per player, making it a full day affair.
The last game we played on a weeknight started at around 8pm and the final plasma torpedoes were detonating around midnight as a new emperor of the galaxy was crowned. The wily Naalu with their advanced starfighters raced to the ruins of the imperial throneworld and held it for just long enough to secure an ancient relic, which allowed them to seize the win.
The game before that I had everyone arrive at my home at 10am. We built the map while chirping each other, broke for a quick lunch, and then dove headlong into the chaos for a solid six additional hours until the Naaz-Rohka Alliance, their starships streaking through nameless voids and shattered worlds, seized victory through a combination of aggressive exploration, shrewd politics, and the iron-fist of their fleets darkening the skies of enemy worlds.
I could wax poetic for hours about TI. It’s as emotional as a space opera, as tense as a knife-fight in a phone booth, and as clever as a convention of foxes gathered to determine the most clever fox. If you are the right kind of player, somebody who loves the idea of playing a game that moulds itself to the kind of game you want, the mood you are in, and the experience you want everyone at the table to have… I whole-heartedly recommend Twilight Imperium 4.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if you’ve played TI4, or if it sounds like fun for you!
Ian’s addition: Twilight Imperium 4th Edition was a game my group planned to play weeks in advance. Everyone who came agreed to watch an instructional video beforehand. I read the rules a few times to teach anything the video missed, as it was everyone’s first time playing. And even with that preparation, we referenced the rules more than a few times as the first few turns rolled out.
At the end of the day, everyone had a good time playing TI4. We made an event out of it, meals and all. One takeaway from the group was that after the game was up and running, it wasn’t as complicated as we were all preparing for. At its core, TI4 is simply a race to 10 victory points. Each turn everyone is selecting from 8 different core actions; which other players may copy if they have the resources. This simple action system made it easy to see the possibilities available to you on a turn, and made it easier to assume the strategies your opponents may implement. Of course there are many layers added on top of that core, but ultimately it was approachable despite how complex it is.
If you are hungry for a game that will take a full day to play for the first time, one that will fill your largest table with components and players… Twilight Imperium is definitely worth the investment.