I try to play a heavy board game once a week. By heavy, we're talking 45 minutes per participant. Tons of pieces, rules, interactions, etc.
One of the heaviest games out there is Twilight Imperium. A massive space themed 4X that alternates between two key modes of making board moves and having political arguments.
As you can see, the gaming table barely fits a four person game (it goes up to a ridiculous 7 or so I believe).
The Prelude
The hardest part of TI is finding people insane enough to do a session. This behemoth had sat untouched on my buddy's shelf for months, maybe even a year. Some time in 2021, four of us got together around 5pm to play a 10-point round. We didn't get out until 4am.
So, it's a test of endurance as much as a puzzle and competition. Those that suffered the 4am ridiculousness took a long breather before the game pictured above.
When it was time to tackle it again, we planned a bit smarter.
A 14-point game (plus expansion)
Arrival time was 11am. We wanted to be done before midnight.
Those that arrived a little earlier helped to set up. It was at this point we had to decide: 10 points or 14 points? In TI, your opportunities to earn points are few and far between. The game ends immediately when someone hits the limit (so turn order can become a huge thing). We figured: "We're starting early! Everyone knows how to play! We can handle 14."
Spoiler Alert: this beast lasted until 2am. Our general estimate is that TI games = 1 hour per point. Assuming no one is learning.
Fast forward to the final moments
Telling the full story of this game would turn into a literal novel, plus I wouldn't remember a fifth of what actually happened. Brief cliff notes:
- Red player (top right) got off to an amazing start, building a good engine for their aggressive alien race. Early favourite to win.
- Purple and Blue (bottom) stayed pretty friendly throughout; Purple was a fighter but Blue had a lot of movement manipulation power.
- Green took early control of the centre (a key spot), and many impassioned arguments took place around fights in that area.
As it turned out, Purple was poised to win the whole thing around midnight (12 hours in). The semi-random objectives that came up suited them perfectly—easy points!
But then it all fell apart.
A cascade of craziness
The only way to stop Purple in the last moments was to take their home planet (you can't score points when you don't control it). But Purple's whole thing is turtling, and their home planet was extremely well defended.
All other players started freezing out Purple's ability to score their winning points. This, plus general weariness, caused Purple to make some big mistakes. The end up snookering themselves by a point or so.
Now, early favourite Red is the clear winner so long as they can hold their home planet until the end of the round (when all players pass).
Blue points out to Green (who had all but given up) that Red holds a weak planet worth a point to Green (thanks to some wacky expansion rules). Green and Blue decide to totally gang up on Red, striking for the home planet.
Meanwhile, fishing for points, Purple gives Blue a full point, trading for a thing that let them draw a relic which could be a point... (it wasn't).
Green, using Blue's movement bonuses, cracks open Red's defense of the home planet. Blue finishes it off, taking control. Now Green is set to win, as Red cannot earn points.
BUT! Blue finds out (due to more wacky expansion rules) that it was actually worth a point to take Red's home planet.
That, plus Purple's point, immediately hands the game to Blue.
By this time, it was nearly 2am. What a game.
Check out SUSD's review of TI
If you're into board games, you probably know this YT channel. Awesome, hilarious, and useful reviews for the latest/greatest tabletop games. This vid will give you more of a sense of how TI works :)
Hope you enjoyed this post! Let me know if board game tales like this are of interest... I've a bunch of them (though this is probably the most intense, heh).