Intergalactic Space Mega Battle: Now with added sauce
Thursday, March 29th, 2007I’m of course talking about the Twilight Imperium III game session which we did over the Chinese New Year at my place. The added sauce comes from the Shattered Empires expansion set which was bought the week before from the local boardgame crack dealer.
As this is the first time we added the expansion and that many Malaysian boardgamers are probably interested in knowing how it plays, this will be a semi-review of it.
There are a lot of new OPTIONAL stuff which comes with the expansion set. We chose the following options:
1) New races
We added in the 4 new races for random selection. The new races are interesting and gives a player a whole new way of playing the game.
2) New political, action and secret objective cards
More sauce to an already varied game. Nothing particularly stands out in this first game.
3) New tech cards
More sauce and finally, a way to really hamstrung those pesky fighters
4) Variant strategy cards
These draw a mix reaction.
a) Leadership - not as powerful as the old Initiative to go first. However still picked often due to it providing command counters to fulfill one of the new public objectives
b) diplomacy II - we played it wrong the whole game as we used it to ’signal’ jam an opponent’s system every turn. You can actually signal jam your own system with your opponent’s command counters only, thereby preventing them invading you. Not sure about this as it’s really a different ability from the old diplomacy.
c) assembly - having an ability to choose which agendas to resolve is quite powerful and will at least be useful to the player activating the ability. However, in practise we find it difficult to have a big enough selection of political cards to do anything useful. Perhaps a house rule to cycle cards or draw more cards is in order.
d) production - quite a favourite pick, especially for turtling or peaceful players. Speeds up units massing, but that’s about it.
e) trade II - now this is quite nasty, being able to cancel specific trade agreements instead of a blanket all around.
f) warfare II - this is quite a poor pick as we missed the double activation ability of the old warfare strategy. the +1 dice roll is nice, but the one turn activation kinda prevents sneak attack. Maybe if we can activate and attack immediately.
g) technology II - the star of the lot, tech II makes getting tech a lot more easier… making that war sun faster to come out.
h) beauracracy - another mix reaction. the ‘as many objective as bonus counter’ mechanic is quite cool, however, the game becomes a little pointless in the beginning as no one is willing to take this strategy card to reveal public objectives for all.
All being said, a four player game again is optimum with the new strategy cards. Other than that, I would mix and match next time with Initiative, Diplomacy II, assembly, logistics, trade II, warfare, technology II and imperial II.
5) variant objectives
these objectives encourage more conflict. quite good
6) race specific technologies
some races absolutely rely on them to function. must play
7) wormhole nexus
very scary, wormholes are now ultra functional and the universe just became smaller and crowded.
Before we start our game, we had our Bah Kut Teh to carry us through the day!
Setup time! Our races were Clan of Saar -yellow (heng), Embers of Muaat -blue (paul), Naalu -black (ivan), Jol Nar - purple (edward) and Lizix - green (alvin).
universe setup. resources on the Jol-Nar, Lizix, Naalu belt.
Purple troops, prepared for deployment onto the battlefield. Curious, really, how people like to arrange their units during game time…
Talking about arranging, feast your eyes on mine!
As the game progresses, the units were put on board as they were built… then taken off as they were destroyed. The units naturally lose their formation
The Lizix (green) made an early grab for Mecatol Rex, citing ignorance from other races as an excuse. Unbeknowst to Lizix, Embers (blue) and Saar (yellow) had being eyeing the prime victory point gaining real estate as well, staging their fleets in close proximity…
The Embers (blue) strike!! Their mighty warsun cleared out Lizix’s (green) ships AND ground troops using their deathstar strike! The Embers really made good use of their early superiority on this.
Tragedy! Naalu (black) invaded Embers (blue) while their warsun was out conquering Mecatol Rex. A string of lucky rolls consigned Embers’ ships to destruction as Naalu made use of their psychic abilities to make preemptive strikes. Saar (yellow) can be seen here happily making a small invasion on Lizix (green) world, thanks in part to the conflict-oriented objective cards.
Here Lizix (green) retook their system, Naalu (black) continued their steamrolling of Embers (blue) using their special lucky dice while Jol-Nar (purple) took over a vacated Mecatol Rex. Lizix allied with Naalu and pressed on Embers’ undefended systems.
After many many turns, the races ar estill at 0 & 1 victory points… thanks in no part to the unattractive beauracracy strategy card. There’s no shortage of command counters to be had with the Leadership strategy card, hence no one took strategy cards for the sake of only one or two bonus counters.
The whole setup towards the game end.
The game ended with either Lizix or Naalu winning (can’t remember). The new expansion actually favors military conquest as peaceful races now will find it hard to fulfill objectives and thus gain points. There’s still some optional items in the expansion that we did not play. Perhaps those items can alter the gameplay experience, e.g. artifacts, space mines, shock troops, etc.
However, as mentioned above, the strategy cards mix for the next game will be chosen based on the number of players. Our group is kinda peaceful and the amount of conflict in this game is a bit out of our sorts. Oh well, we’ll find out in our next game session!
