Bunker Project Log

For whatever reason, the four of us (excluding Princess NotCool, AKA, Mrs. G) who played TI last time, all had this romantic notion that we would have a great time playing it again.

For me it was the white whale. I was bound and determined to make it through this damned game, whether we enjoyed it or not.

So, did we enjoy it? I’m not sure. Did we finish it? Almost. Z thinks Red5 was headed for a win, but I had managed to Diplomacy Markus into the boredom zone, and he was breaking off… which could have led me to Mecatol Rex, which my Secret Objective was all about.

In the Friday game of TI?there were lots of rules questions, but I had an answer for all of them (that I remember…) except one. For some reason, I had interpreted the rules for production of units to mean that any Tactical or Transfer Action could be followed by Production… anywhere. So, we would activate a system, move junk around, then activate the system with our spacedock, then build there. This did not sit well with Mrred5.

Mrs. G suggested calling it Midnight Imperium, but the game went until almost 2am.

Markus O’Reallyus was the first to arrive, followed soon by MrRed5. Turbo Taxi ensued. ‘Twas okay, but not as rockin as it usually is. Once VitaminZ appeared, Mrs. G had to be roused from her ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep. We began at 8:30pm.

The beginning

A Turn in Twilight Imperium is broken up into three phases:

1) Strategy
2) Action
3) Status

This post will go over the basics of the Strategy Phase.

There are eight strategy cards, numbered 1 through 8. Each has a Primary and a Secondary Ability. The player holding the card when it is invoked takes the effects of the Primary ability, and each of the remaining players may take the effect of the Secondary ability.

Click on the images of the cards to get a more legible view. As I haven’t played the game yet, I can’t really comment on why you would choose a given strategy over another.

Yesterday I went through the setup, but I broke my rule dictating that I must describe victory conditions first, so I am backtracking.

The only scoring metric for the game is the “victory point”. (Some day, I am going to try to find one of these, and describe what they look like. They must be pretty awesome because it seems that every friggin game is based on collecting them.)

The main game is played to 10, although there are ways to short-circuit this and finish the game sooner. There is also a variant called “The Long War” that plays to 14. I won’t be playing that one for… a while. Victory points are counted on the victory point track.

In one of the recent great Tangapacolypses, I pulled the trigger on Twilight Imperium. On paper, this is exactly not my type of game. Complex, massive, and epically long.

However, it is currently #22 on Boardgamegeek, and my previous Tanga policy was, buy anything in the top 50.

So, when all 10 pounds of it arrived on my doorstep, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. I let it perk for a week in the analog room before I moved it closer. Then it started talking to me. Open me up and check out all my bits… there’s lots of them, and they are pretty!