There are certain games that if you get them to the table once a year you are lucky.

Those games are usually epic in nature, both in table space and in scope.

Often the games take a large part of a day to play. Several hours for sure.

Another trait of the ones that have stood the test of time, even deemed a classic. Is that despite taking such a long time to play, that when you are playing the game you don’t actually notice the passage of time. You poke your head up out of being immersed in the game and realise that four hours of just passed by. Playing them doesn’t feel that long.

I like to think of them as experiences. Even events.

Twilight Imperium 4 with the Prophecy of Kings expansion is one such game.

Despite life trying to throw obstacles in the way (I had to say no I couldn’t do a couple of things when asked) yesterday was the day for 2024 for Twilight Imperium 4 and the Prophecy of Kings expansion to hit the table.

This day had been planned for over a month.

As usual for this type of game finding a day that six people were free to get together and compete for galactic domination is a nightmare.

So once we had the date set there was going to be nothing on this earth stopping this going ahead.

I’d been looking forward to playing TI4 all week.

I’ve not gamed on a Saturday for a few weeks. The day has been a chill day, do my washing etc.

I arrived at Charlene’s (who was hosting for the day) an hour before we were due to start playing at midday to setup.

Yes it does take a while to set the game up. You need to be sure of the player count if using one of the pre-made maps in the rulebooks. Luckily there were no last minute cancellations for our six player game.

We had to call our game to an end at 7pm because I had work the next day.

At that time we had just finished the fourth round! There were another five rounds to go! If we had had the time!

We’d had our first agenda stage in the previous round after Anthony had raced to middle of the Galaxy and claimed Mecatol Rex as his. That was quite funny because that had left Marcin feeling a little butt hurt after the first agenda vote because he had listened to Diego. Who had mistakenly misidentified the planet type that would be exhausted for the next round for those voting against the motion if the against won. So instead of only screwing me out of three action tokens because I wanted the for motion to win. He shot himself in the foot and lost about half of his planets.

In that final round there was a reckoning between Mr War Sun aka Marcin and me. I’d like to say the space battle was epic but my large fleet of a cruiser, three dreadnoughts, two destroyers, and my flagship, plus action card shenanigans were too much for his measly war sun, two fighters, and cruiser.

My space bombardment destroyed his troop unit, leaving our mech units to duke it out. With my mech ultimately being victorious.

That left Marcin with just two systems that be controlled. Early in the round Anthony had foiled any plan Marcin had of reoccupying his home system (he’d had to abandon it the previous round to claim a victory point).

If we had played longer I think we could have destroyed all of Marcin’s forces. That would have been funny.

A big big thank you to Charlene for hosting. A big thank you to Marcin, Anthony, Diego, and Ben. I had an amazing afternoon.

PS Diego won on the tiebreaker against Ben.