The drawback of my new role is that my days off each week move around. So it’s not guaranteed I am off at the weekend or even our fortnightly club meet-ups.

What this means is I am more reliant on ad-hoc gaming sessions and peoples availability mid-week than ever to get any gaming it.

Luckily Thursday evening Marcin, Charlene, and Julie were free to play a game of Brazil Imperium.

Once again I went with some synergy with my era cards. Once again it was paintings that was the linking factor.

Whilst the others went after resources or built as their first actions I went after a painting. Particularly as the one I grabbed allowed me to use gold cards as science tokens, followed a couple of turns later by grabbing a painting that allowed me to use wool as gold.

So for much of the early game I felt I was playing catch up to the others as I kind of started setting up a paintings engine in my early turns that would give me early access to science, and worked towards my objectives.

It felt very explosive once I did start building and expanding my empire.

Marcin was the first to complete the first era and the second. However I wasn’t far behind completing my first two era objectives.

However my early investment in the painting engine paid off and I was in a great position to complete my third era objective and trigger the end of the game.

After all the tallying was done Marcin’s more aggressive building snagged him a comprehensive victory.

Having chosen a four player map that was in the middle for the chance of conflict between players, there was no conflict. The opportunities were there. Particularly against my empire as it was fairly late compared to the others that I had my monarch out, or built up my forces for my final era objective.

It had seemed a good idea to game Thursday evening. But as I woke up Friday morning at ten past four the next morning to get ready for work it seemed less so.

The plus point for my tired body was my shift was only five hours.

However my other brilliant idea a couple of days earlier was to arrange a session to play Twilight Imperium if it arrived in time that evening.

Luckily my optimism was well placed and Twilight Imperium did arrive whilst I was at work. So the gaming session could go ahead.

I spent a therapeutic half hour sleeving the cards in Twilight Inscription. Luckily I had just enough. But it was close. Damn close.

The rest of the afternoon before the session was spent watching YouTube rules videos for the game, reading the rules, and dozing off. Yep I was apparently tired!

For some reason I had got it in my head that Twilight Inscription played between one and four players.

But it does not.

Twilight Inscription actually plays up to eight players!

Which kinda makes sense considering the game it’s meant to be based on also plays that many.

However! I don’t think I’ll ever play with more than four players just on a practical level.

This game is a space hog.

My mind boggles at the size table you’d need for that player count. There is no way everyone would see the Mecatol board and the four objective cards. However I can see this working as a remote play game if everyone playing has a copy.

On the 6ft by 2.5ft table we were on it would have been snug with a fourth player but possible.

Twilight Inscription is both a flip and write AND a roll and write. It makes great use of both. You work through the event deck that gives you resources in an expansion event or triggers a warfare or political event. Plus during the expansion event you also roll the dice to get further resources to use. I quite like this combo, it works really well here.

Let’s address the elephant in the room about Twilight Inscription. This is not a cut down version of Twilight Imperium. It really is it’s own thing set in the Twilight Imperium universe.

It does have a 4X feel, after all each of the four player boards is one of those X’s. However the only real player interaction comes in the form of the voting and warfare.

Component wise it knocks it out of the park. The dice are large chunky affairs that feel really nice to roll. But you do need big hands to roll all six at once. The chalk pens I like. You do need a cloth to clean the boards with at the end. It is a pain to use the erasers on the ends of the supplied pens. But the chalk pens don’t smudge once dry on the board. Which is really important in the game as you play the game moving between the various player boards.

Compared to other roll and writes Twilight Imperium takes a lot of setup. You are constructing the event deck, shuffling the artifact deck, randomly selecting objectives and political cards, choosing a faction to play.

For me I did feel I was empire building, exploring the stars and battling my neighbours. So I think the theme came through.

If you don’t ever play eight players then selecting player boards randomly, and using the unique side of each board, with one of the 24 factions. Then there is an incredible amount of variety each game. With no two games being the same from a player setup side of things.

The political and objective decks are very small, and would have been nice to have more cards for these. I can see these feeling very tired very quickly. The event deck could have done with having more cards too.

I don’t really think I can give advice on how to play this after a single game and how badly I did.

I got my arsed kicked royally in this first game as the scores below show. But I still had a blast playing the game.

My run of “great” decisions continues today with an afternoon of D&D before doing a seven hour shift!

I never learn.