Imperial Instruction

I'm going to follow on from my previous blog post and tell you a bit about a game I played recently, and what I learned from it.

The game in question was Twilight Imperium 3. It was the first time I'd had the opportunity to play the game face to face and although it was an all day gaming event with plenty of time I was still anxious to keep playing time low so I could get to play some more games later on! Also I'd be teaching the game to new players and I didn't want it to overwhelm them with complexity. So I used my limited experience with the game to try and pick options to keep play time and learning curve to a minimum.

Well from the base game I picked the "Age of Empires" option which lays out all the objectives from the start. This helps play time by allowing players to focus on actions which allow them to get VPs every turn and helps the new players because they're not going to be at a disadvantage from never having seen the objective deck. I was using the conflict-oriented objectives from the expansion in the assumption that more conflict is a good thing but in retrospect I'm not so sure that's a good assumption. Firstly more combat means more dice and that means more randomness in the quest for VPs - you may or may not like this and I'm pretty on the fence about it myself. From a play time perspective though it actually slows things down as people keep on throwing in ships and then building more - plus combat is fairly slow to resolve. In the event the actual objectives dealt included virtually every non-conflict one from the conflict deck so it was kind of a moot point, but I might try mixing the two decks for another game.

Next choice was what strategy cards to use. I chose to use the "II" variants from the expansion for all the cards that had them and the original ones for all the rest. I did this for two reasons. Firstly to use the variant "Bureaucracy" card with Age of Empires requires a house rule, which would be further annoying things for new players to remember and contrary to the text printed on the card. Second using "Imperial II" gives the game another source of potential VPs to speed up play without having to resort to the dull original Imperial card.

What else? Well, artifacts were an obvious choice to put some more VP in the game although I declined to use the "voice of the council" option since no-one ever seems to bother with it. A pre-set board was used to speed up play, avoid having to teach the rules for laying out galaxy maps and to ensure balance since new players are notoriously bad at constructing a "sensible" galaxy when left to themselves. I also left out the Winnarian Guardians as that slows the conquest of Metacol Rex and thus the rate of VP gain. As a final shot I took three races out of the deck before we started - the Saar for complexity, the Xxcha because they clash with "Diplomacy II" and would have meant more differences in play from the text on the card and the Yssaril because the pass ability helps slow the game down.

In the event we had four players - Saardak N'orr, Letnev, Mentak and myself as the Winnu. The opening rounds went as one might expect with people expanding their empires and claiming the first couple of easy victory points, with two players getting a head start through artifact planets. One thing I didn't forsee was that with the low level of trade agreements on offer and the inability to use political cards as resources it took several rounds before people had enough resources to start building big ships and regularly claiming tech advances.

Anyway, after the initial stage I got dealt a "flank speed" card and from this I formed the basis of a plan. I took some newly-minted carriers and ground force from my home system and using the card and the XRD transporter tech I'd previously acquired, landed a bunch of troops on Metacol Rex. I saved my resources that round and built a space dock on my last move, allowing me to complete my secret objective which was to hold MR, have a space dock there and have two tech advances in three different colours. This put me up to 5VP. I was hopeful I'd get at least one from the Imperial II card next round and I'd bought red tech to put me in a position to gain another 2VP from a "five techs in one colour" objective without needing further prerequisites and for the other two I was confident I could keep the Rex for a few rounds and milk it for VPs.

Sorry for all the quotes.

I did get my VP from the imperial card the following turn but then odd things began to happen. The Mentak built a huge fleet ready to strike at Metacol while the Sardak, oddly, was obsessively building PDS units on the planet next door. The Letnev player seemed to be entirely out of it by this stage, being last in VP and not having any obvious ability to claim more. So I got my War Sun tech and built one of the big ships right there on Metacol with the aim of scaring off everyone else - it worked and I held it for another "Imperial II" VP the following round, although the Mentak had used some of their by now immense fleet to take away a couple of my planets, leaving me in something of a resources blight.

By this time I was well in the lead and the other players had started to gang up against me. My ground forces on the Rex went down to a plague card from the Letnev player and then the Mentak stormed in taking Metacol Rex and some more planets off me, leaving me 3VP short of my goal and virtually nothing to build new fleets with. I had the five tech objective pretty much in the bag - just one short and I'd got first pick of strategy cards the following round - so I needed another one. There was a 1VP objective out for "invade a planet containing at least one GF" and I had a far-flung carrier in a system with 2GF that had been there virtually since the start of the game. It was within reach of a Sardak planet with just 1GF defending - so in it went and my Winnu soldiers duly dispatched the enemy for the missing VP. Victory was within my grasp.

However, Letnev, who'd been quietly turtling away for the last few rounds, building forces and claiming virtually nothing and apparently out of the game had a plan as well. He took Imperial II as his first choice in the last round and suddenly pushed out, using the cards ability to claim multiple objectives and artifacts to gain VP at a most alarming rate. In the status phase he managed to creep up to 9VP while I just got in there with the ten, claiming the win even though I had virtually nothing by my home system left on the board to my name.

My plan worked fairly well - the 4 player game, with setup time and the inevitable learning curve for the new players - weighed in at 5 hours which isn't too bad. I can seem myself sticking with that set of speed options for future face to face games. The time passed like absolutely nothing - we'd got two hours in before anyone even bothered to look up from the board to check the time - which for me is always the sign of a really great game.

So what did I learn from this fantastic game session?

Firstly I'll chip in with the oft-repeated adage that it's better to play one brilliant five hour game than five one-hour rubbish ones. I managed to get in a game of Roborally afterward which took around 90 minutes. It was my first ever game and it wasn't bad but there's no way I'd have sacrificed that fantastic game of TI3 for three sessions of Roborally. Of course if you like short games for the mechanics and not just because they're short then good for you - but the moral is don't kid yourself that shorter games are better just because you can play more of them. Time spent having fun is time spent having fun whether the activities are varied or not. When we'd finished an onlooker asked how long the game had taken and, looking somewhat aghast at the answer, asked whether it was worth it. All four players gave him a resounding "YES"!

Secondly - and possibly controversially - I noticed a curious thing about two blokes at that game day who'd come to game with female friends or partners. Both had come with bags full of Eurogames and both had eyes popping out of their head when they saw the TI3 setup. Both asked their female acquaintances if they wouldn't mind stepping out of the Euros to spend the bulk of the day playing TI3 - one ended up joining in and the other didn't. This makes me wonder two things. Firstly it seems that AT games with their often violent themes and frequent backstabbing gameplay have a greater appeal to men than women. That in itself isn't surprising but the experience has made me wonder whether a number of guys who have game-philic partners aren't kept in the Euro fold by their women insisting that they play quick, low-conflict games and that given the chance they'd leap into the AT universe like a fish into water. I wonder also how much of the venom we get from some of the Euro crowd is caused by repressed envy from this sort of behaviour.

Thirdly it made me think long and hard about the diplomatic metagame. This is very much a feature of TI3 and can strongly influence the course of a game but I think my experience in this session showed that the TI3 design does an absolutely brilliant job of limiting it to just another set of strategic choices, thanks largely to the nature of objectives in the game. In other long, conflict orientated games this balancing mechanism isn't there and the metagame can completely dominate the play beyond and influence the dice or strategic choice can have. Paradoxically, having played a game which demonstrated how best to allow the metagame but limit it's influence I've finally decided that long games with dominant metagame themes aren't really for me. Except Diplomacy of course, but that's a special case in which the metagame basically is the game.

The fourth point is one of complexity. TI3 is supposedly a complex game yet my three neophyte players all knew what they were doing by the end of the first turn. This isn't a testament to my brilliance at explaining games but rather a testament to the fact that length and number of rules is only one aspect of complexity. TI3 has a system which is logically consistent both internally and with regard to the theme it attempts to portray - this is a hard concept to define but basically, when I read the TI3 rulebook by the time I was halfway through I was able to make good and accurate guesses about the way the remaining rules were going to work. Today I attempted to read two rulebooks - one for the wargame Paths of Glory and one for the euro Imperial - one was long and one was short but both left me utterly baffled about how to play the game. In the case of PoG this is because the rules are full of special cases and exceptions. In the case of Imperial it is - like many games slimmed to the merest essentials of rules - because the rules have little connection to the scenario they're trying to portray. So don't dismiss a game as being "too complex" just because of the length of the rules - read them first, or have someone teach you. Similarly don't go thinking you can jump right in and play a game just because it has short rules - they won't always reveal how the game plays and they may hide a dizzying depth of strategy.

So that'll do for the day. I just wanted to add a short note to the blog readers to say that I'm going to be moving jobs in a few weeks and my ability to make regular posts is going to dry up, at least for a while.