Category Archives: Twilight Imperium 4

“Oh, make no mistake. It’s not revenge he’s after. It’s a reckoning.”

Game day, Prophecy of Kings, TI, Twilight Imperium 4

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.

Longer than a John Bonham drum solo

Game day, game night, Twilight Imperium 4

As planned our four player game of Twilight Imperium 4 (TI4) with the Prophecy of Kings (PoK) expansion took place yesterday.

Which meant Dave, Diego, Jeff, and myself gathered indoors round two tables pushed together on a hot July afternoon.

The previous evening I had confirmed that there was no booking of the community centre. It was important to know before hand if we had any time constraints (other than the place closing up for the night) before starting so we could make adjustments.

As per usual I arrived early to start setting up and merge the PoK expansion with the core game. I punctuated this with a triple quarter pounder cheese burger. Hey a galactic empire marches on its stomach.

When the others arrived there was still a little setup left to do, plus choose our factions.

Dave and Diego went with factions from the core game, whilst Jeff and I went with one of the new factions from the expansion.

The factions chosen were as follows:

  • The Nomad – me
  • The Universities of Jol-Nar – Dave
  • The Argent Flight – Jeff
  • The Mentak Coalition – Diego

By the time we finished setup (including choosing factions) nearly an hour had passed! So a 1:15pm start was really 2:15pm before our first expansionist actions were being taken.

For me TI4 (or earlier editions) is the board gaming version of epic stories like Lord of the Rings, or the Foundation series.

To be fair it might be quicker to read either than play TI4.

TI4 is an epic game. Not just because of the scale of it (it’s a massive table hog) but the inter-galactic warring factions fighting for supremacy has this epic grandeur feel.

The first few rounds were void of any conflict, and were mainly factions racing to grab planets to get the resources needed to build up their fleets for defensive and aggressive purposes.

Our first space battle was between Jeff and Diego over Mecatol Rex. Even after that skirmish combat was a rarity until the later stages.

I did quiet well developing my technology. It helped my Commander (part of PoK) enabled me to produce my command ship for free. This enabled me to develop War Sun technology and take Jeff on and rebuild very quickly after any losses.

We had two epic battles in the middle of the galaxy.

I liked what PoK bought to the core game. The leaders, mechs, factions. And it didn’t bring any real extra overhead to the game.

As a four player game we got to choose two strategy tiles each. Which was nice having two to activate. Although the second tile may not have always been one you had wanted.

We actually finished playing around 9:40pm. Yes I can see you doing the math. That’s about seven and a half hours of playtime.

A little longer than I had calculated. I’d estimated about five hours. But now you know why earlier I had checked about any bookings.

The thing is whilst you are playing you are so engrossed in the game that you have no idea what the time is. Before you know it seven hours plus have passed.

Ok you do get a hint during play when you miss phone calls asking where you are. But hey is it my fault I forgot to warn mum the game was likely to run a long time? Heck she got a McDonalds delivered out of it.

Anyway after the space dust had settled Dave’s turtling empire ended up victorious.

This was truly an epic afternoon and evening with great friends. The way a Summer Saturday truly should be spent.

Back to the Imperium

Prophecy of Kings, TI, Twilight Imperium 4

So plans are afoot to play Twilight Imperium 4 with the Prophecy of Kings expansion next Saturday.

So far with the exception of my first game of TI4 being two player I’ve only played TI4 at four to six players.

My plan is to try and get more three and four player games in. Hopefully these will be quicker than ones with higher player counts. They will still take a while to play. I’m just hoping they will not last longer than five hours!

So this coming Saturday four of us will gather and test out this theory.

In the meantime I have the living rules references being printed (along with the latest Marvel Champions one), the TI4 Achievements sheet (think video game achievements but for TI4!). These should arrive the day before we play. With a fair wind that is.

I’ve also got to finish sleeving the expansion before next weekend. A job I started about a month ago. But now I have motivation to complete it.

If this is successful I’ll be getting TI4 to the table much more often. Something I’m really looking forward to. Those future games will also involve using the content FFG put up digitally in the three Twilight Imperium Codexes.