Tabletop Game Review: Twilight Imperium

Review Summary

Twilight Imperium is for you if you enjoy:

1. Grand strategy with high levels of intrigue and tension.

2. Factional asymmetry and long-term planning.

3. Full-day gaming sessions with friends.

4. Games about conflicts IN SPACE!

However, it is best avoided if you:

1. Prefer short, casual games.

2. Dislike conflict-heavy playstyles.

3. Struggle to get 3–5 other people to join you for board games consistently.

4. Don’t like SPACE.

The game also works best if you are willing to house rule to keep vanquished players included, but we’ll touch on that further near the end.

Now, Onto the Article!

Disclaimer: this is a first-impression review. I’m not an expert at playing Twilight Imperium, and so far I’ve only experienced the base game. This article is about how I’ve found that experience so far.

Just the other day, the Breton rang me up.

“Yo Gryph, I want to try out a new sci-fi tabletop game with some of my friends this week. You keen to join?”

I didn’t need much convincing. The Breton wasn’t just a fellow player during my D&D sessions; he collects Warhammer minis, reads up on lesser-known RPG systems, and has just recently gotten into Trench Crusade. Clearly he has good taste.

“Sure, man. Do I need to bring anything?”

“Nah bro, we’re trying it on Tabletop Simulator first. If we like it I’ll buy a box for us to use in person.”

“Great. Let’s do it. What’s the game called?”

“Twilight Imperium.”

Roll credits.

Our First Game—Setup & Stand-Out Mechanics

First off, this game is moderately complex, and I need to get that fact out of the way now.

Is it as complex as something like WH:40K? No, actually.

In fact, if you’re used to playing games like Risk or Catan, you may even find some of Twilight Imperium’s systems intuitive.

Some of them.

I’d still rate this game as more complex than either of those two. But, if you have the time to read over the rules carefully and playtest a few rounds with your friends, it’s absolutely worth it.

The first game I ever played of Twilight Imperium took about two hours. No one won, because the only person who really knew the rules was the Breton, and for this game he wasn’t playing to win; he was taking his time to teach the rules to everyone else.

We never actually finished that particular game. We sort of just played as long as we could until the realities of trying to play a board game in the evening during the middle of the week caught up to us and we all had to retire for the night.

Was this first game experience slow? Yes, but still nowhere near as slow as Monopoly. And anyways, I was hooked.

In the game’s setup phase, you use a series of hexagonal tiles to construct a galaxy. This will be the board everyone plays on.

Then, each player starts at a specific point along the edge of this board, with a specific home star system assigned to them depending on their faction.

Ah yes, factions. Like a game of Stellaris or Civilization (to name some videogame equivalents), Twilight Imperium is not symmetrically balanced. Depending on the faction you choose, you’ll have different abilities, modifiers, starting resources, ship stats, and even technologies.

Although I can’t remember the proper faction names off-hand, I have affectionately nicknamed a few of them: “Helldivers” for the carrier-focused human generalists, “Space Khajit” for the cat-like aliens who specialize in trade, and “Silicon Valley” for the hyper-elitist technocracy faction, just to name a few.

Needless to say, I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.

To help players keep track of their abilities and civ-specific nuances, each faction has its own little board for you to hold onto which summarizes its special rules. This board also has a little lore blurb that recounts recent galactic history from your civilization’s perspective.

Comparing those perspectives, and how they differ, is a lot of fun.

After reading each board (and the general rules), you get a good sense of the state of Twilight Imperium’s setting: a galaxy-spanning empire has recently collapsed. In many cases, your faction is one of the many former members of this empire, now openly striking out for your own gain.

In all cases, your surest path to victory is to capture the now-dead empire’s former capital planet and set yourself up as the new galactic imperium.

Or is it?

Victory Points

Earlier I mentioned Risk, but make no mistake: this isn’t a territory game. This is a points game.

Can you capture territory? Yes. And doing so is useful: some territories increase your faction’s production (i.e. how much it can spend on building fleets/stations/defenses each round). Others increase influence, which we’ll touch on again just now.

In some cases, it may even be impossible to research new technologies without the right territories. And then others still have unique features such as wormholes.

However, all the above is merely a means to an end. That end is to obtain enough victory points to win the game before anyone else does.

There are a few ways of doing this:

• Every round, a public objective is revealed. Anyone who meets the requirements of that objective by the end of the round gains a victory point. Multiple people can complete each objective, and there’s no deadline on when it can be completed (until someone achieves absolute victory of course), but each player can only score a single victory point off of any one objective.
• You may also have a few private objectives. Only you can complete these. If you satisfy their conditions at the end of the round, reveal the objective and gain a leg up over your rivals with a victory point.
• Finally, you can take and hold the former empire’s former capital world. This world always starts at the center of the playable map and starts the game “neutral”, unaligned to any player faction. However, the people who live on this world still possess all the pomp, elitism, and general self-importance you’d expect the inhabitants of a former colonial capital to have. For this reason, unlike other planets in the game, it’s impossible to capture this world with military might alone: you also need several other star systems’ worth of influence in order to be seen as the legitimate new ruler.

The third option, if you achieve it, grants you a victory point for every single round you manage to hold the planet. As such, it can be a relatively quick and easy way to achieve victory… so long as none of the other players try to contest you. Which they will.

Because being at the center of the playable map basically guarantees you’re going to have a lot of…

Border Tension & Diplomatic Issues

This is a big one. In Twilight Imperium, the default game state seems to be “war”. As in, so long as you have the movement speed and tactical tokens (more on that later), you can move into any territory occupied by any other player at any time and contest them for ownership without any prior warning, declaration, or other diplomatic proceedings.

As such, if one of your territories touches one of your opponent’s, there is going to be tension.

Mistrust.

Paranoia.

They say they’re going to move their fleet elsewhere on their next turn, so you should be free to move yours closer to the capital… but can you trust them?

Machiavelli would have a field day with this game.

Trust can be built purely as a social exercise but, despite the game being set in space, you’ll quickly find the playable map is a claustrophobic arena: very few territories are desirable, everyone always needs more, and at least one of your neighbours knows they’ll be much better off if they can sneakily swoop in and take one of yours.

Thankfully, you have a few ways of easing these tensions:

• Trade. Most players can only trade with their neighbours as per the rules. If you are someone else’s most valuable or reliable trading partner, they’re less inclined to upset you by taking your stuff. They’ll probably still try to at some point, just later rather than sooner.
• Agreements. Certain cards let you make deals with other players. Some of them allow you to call for ceasefires. Others will grant a player a single victory point that they’ll then lose if they attack you: in other words, maintaining peace with you for the rest of the game becomes like a new private objective for that player. This can be a great way to discourage aggression without having to spread your military too thin.
• Finally, military. While having ships right on another player’s border can easily raise tension, they can also act as a deterrent. Stationing planetary defense cannons and ground troops on your worlds can be another way of deterring aggression without raising tension.

Of course, while having a strong military is important in this game, be careful: every combat encounter is a literal roll of the dice, and it’s not uncommon for the scariest player on the board to get laid low after one or two battles, leaving them vulnerable to their neighbours.

Troops and ships are expensive. Use them wisely.

Honourable Mentions (& a Few Dishonourable Ones Too)

Perhaps the biggest feature I haven’t mentioned yet is this game’s command token system.

You get three kinds of tokens:

• Tactical tokens.
• Fleet tokens.
• Strategy tokens.

Let’s get the simple ones out of the way: you use strategy tokens to take specific powerful actions when another player plays their strategy card (a powerful card that enables a specific style of play, and gets swapped out/reassigned each round). So, if another player is focusing on technology, and plays a strategy card to advance their tech, you can spend a strategy token to reap some of the benefits. Nice!

Fleet tokens represent the maximum fleet size that any one of your systems can support without a space dock or similar to ease the logistical burden. Most players have three fleet tokens at the start of the game, meaning that each of their systems can sustain three “big” ships (fighters stored within carriers don’t count towards this limit).

The real interesting bit, however, is the tactical token. Managing an interstellar civilization is cumbersome. Tactical tokens represent your ability to unite your faction’s people behind a single interstellar goal, such as building a new fleet, colonizing a new system, or invading someone else’s.

You can read the rules for specifics, but overall the tactical tokens do a great job of acting as shorthand for the internal politics of your faction, making you feel like you’re really wrangling your civilization to achieve the goals you desire. It’s not for nothing that the strategy card that gives major boosts to your tactical tokens is called the “leadership” card.

That said, as much as I love this game, it does have a few weaknesses which I feel are worth mentioning before I conclude:

• In our playtesting, we had an agreement that we wouldn’t take a person’s last star system from them, and we’d generally leave their direct buffer systems alone too. However, it would be better if the rules had some innate way to vassalize another player if you’re able to beat them so completely: right now taking all of a player’s systems simply eliminates them, which is boring.
• Even after we became more familiar with the game (i.e. 2–3 games under our belts), play time was long. My first game of Catan took less time to complete than my first round of Twilight Imperium. This game is a great way to spend a weekend or holiday with any tabletop-loving friends. However, it can be tricky to play the game casually, and doing a weekly session of 1–2 hours isn’t practical unless you have a way to safely store the game state (along with everyone’s progress, resources, secret objectives, etc.) between sessions.

Will I Play This Game Again? Do I Recommend It?

As far as the first question goes—yes, absolutely, although my next game of Twilight Imperium is likely to only be in December.

As for the second question—it depends. This game is at its best if you have 4–6 people playing. Ideally, if you can find five other people who are willing to spare a full day to play this game with you, you could split the cost six ways to make it manageable; its base price in US dollars is $124.99, so in most cases you WILL want to split the costs unless you’re already a massive hobbyist for tabletop stuff.

But if you do feel tempted by this game, remember what you’re getting into: given how long a game can last, it’s best not to compare it too much to Risk or Catan outside of a few select mechanics. In the words of a fellow player, Twilight Imperium is more like an “experience in a box”. You plan days for playing this game the same way you’d plan a day of laser tag, paintball, airsoft, or an escape room.

And, as an experience, Twilight Imperium is a lot of fun. Just remember to set up the board in a comfortable space, plan a lunch break, and bring plenty of snacks.

Until then, have a blessed week.