Gryphter said:
My fiance is interested in Twilight Imperium, she asked me to get some feedback from you guys.
So it's good, but possibly long and drags in the middle depending on how many players you have?
Is there a lot of stat tracking/math involved? Are there a lot of cards, chits, pieces, etc to keep track of during a single game?
This here is a big concern for me with every game: are the rules/cards written out in a manner that can be subjectively interpreted? if so, is it bad? This is a direct issue for me due to Magic the Gathering and Last Night on Earth; where you have to analyze the order of the words in the text, where 2 people can come up with different end results on how cards work due to the way the text is interpreted. Know what I mean? i can elaborate if not
I know I've mentioned it before, but to me TI is an event game. I personally don't have a problem with the length. I love the epic crawl of moving out of my home system and making my move on the galaxy.
As for the bits and pieces to keep track of, it's not as crazy as FFG's Civilization or even the new Mansions of Madness if you just play the base game, but there are a lot of plastic ship pieces, a few decks of cards each player needs to manage, and if you decide to get into the included variants, lots of extra chits that you can swap in and out. It can get a little hectic when you have decent size fleets doing battle (and if there is a ground assault thrown in there as well that will add to the complication) as each ship has its own attack values, etc. but what I did was buy a lot of extra 10 sided dice in various colors so players could roll one color to represent a specific brand of ship. That has helped.
The rules are typical FFG rules: simple mechanics layered with all kinds of fiddly exceptions and actions requiring subtle timing. We've played 4 or 5 times now and we still have to work on rules interpretations. And given that we haven't played since late summer I'm assuming we'll need to spend some time refreshing ourselves to the basic rule set.
With all that said TI:3 is easily in my top 3 favorite games. Growing up a scifi geek, this game scratches the itch to lead my own intergalactic expansion with trade and politics thrown in to boot. It's awesome.
I'm also one to recommend getting the Shattered Empires expansion with the base set. It's an expensive barrier of entry but it adds so many more options and variants that you can customize games along a crazy amount of criteria. Plus the new Strategy Cards and Objective cards spur conflict, which the base game did not (and could thus lead to turtling by players).
