As I sit in twilight, late, alone
Here’s a tip for playing Twilight Imperium:
Start at noon. Especially if you’re playing with seven people.
As I will reveal in subsequent posts, I love fabulously-complex strategy board games. I have a small group of friends in which we collect them - I’m not talking about Snakes & Ladders or Monopoly, I’m talking about the kind of games you’ll find on boardgamegeek.com.
We tend to fit games into tiers, based on complexity. Settlers of Catan is on a lower tier, being simple enough that you could teach it to the average (non-complex-systems-devouring-geek) person pretty quickly. Twilight Imperium, on the other hand, is at the top of the list: I have yet to encounter a more-complicated game, both in terms of pieces and information to track, and the number of concepts involved.
This is space conquest with diplomacy, trade, warfare, and objectives - both public and secret - that move you closer to victory. Basically like playing Master of Orion on a table.
Let me put this in perspective:
We began at four-thirty this afternoon. We called the game at midnight. That’s about 7.5 hours. The game ends when a player earns ten victory points, and when we quit the lead player had five. So the game could have gone to 10-12 hours, easily.
Hence why I say start at noon. I was eager to keep the game going, but even I was done once the clock struck midnight.
It didn’t help that I wasn’t in a position to win, either (unless perhaps we did have another five hours to go). I was playing a militaristic race, and making peace with my neighbors turned out to be a mistake - I should have slaughtered them right away, because by the time I had the military force to strike further across the board, I was too far behind for it to win me the game.
But enough about me. Here’s one thing I’ve noticed while playing these complex games:
The difficult part of playing a complicated game with five or more people, one of those games where a lot of thought, choice, and strategy go into each player’s turn, is that the period between each of your turns is so long that all but the most-focused players’ minds wander. You end up with half the players chattering while one person is cogitating, and those people end up uncertain about how the game’s state has changed, and as a result the game takes even longer.
I encounter this in Dungeons & Dragons, too. Especially when battles wear into an hour or longer, people stop paying attention to turns other than their own, and it makes team cohesion pretty difficult. I’m not sure what the answer is, but we did note one interesting exception:
Arkham Horror. This is a rare game that’s completely co-operative: it’s every player together versus the game itself, and either we all win, or we all lose (and are devoured, along with the city of Arkham, by sanity-shattering horrors from beyond space and time). In Arkham, everybody advises each other on what to do on their turn, and strategies are devised as a group. To put it another way, every player’s turn is, to some extent, your turn also - it’s hard to stop paying attention. This means that, even though the game can run up to six hours, it doesn’t seem to drag as much (or at least not as quickly) as games where you’re waiting fifteen minutes for a chance to act.
More on games later. Probably on Good Friday, when I get to take off my Dungeon Master hat and roll some twenties….
Tags: gaming
March 29th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Have you ever tried the Vampire: the eternal struggle card game?
It can easily take over 2 hours for a game, especially with 5+ players, but timed games are also an option for shorter rounds. I find the different deck styles add unpredictability, and the ability to join with others or backstab them to also be fun.
TOTALLY get the whole losing-track-during-long-DnD games thing - I usually fall asleep or get bored, but I’m also a huge plot-driven person, so any battle that doesn’t end in 5 min or less annoys me.