We held our much anticipated Twilight Imperium 3 session at CarcaSean on Monday, which was a Public Holiday in Malaysia. This is pretty much Fantasy Flight Games’ flagship product and its raison d’être. Chances are it’s one of the most visually impressive games at any store, what with the huge size of the box and the number and quality of the components inside. Equally impressive is the expected playing time for a session, ranging from four to six hours for experienced players.

With that mind, our group tried our best to arrange things to have as smooth and as quick a session as possible, with the players reading up on the rules beforehand or watching this excellent series of tutorial videos, going with a preset map and using the Age of Empire variant rules. I’m happy to report that with a total of five players, our session lasted about five and a half hours, not too bad for a bunch of newbies.

I don’t really have the time to write an in-depth review but I enjoyed it more than I expected. The mechanics are pretty neat and all players are constantly engaged with the game. I wish we had more time to play because personally I felt that I had barely gotten to grips with what the game was about and had just started carving out a piece of the galaxy when it ended. My biggest complaint is that combat is tedious, especially since there’s so little player input involved once it starts. Pretty much the only meaningful decisions the participants can make is whether or not to announce a retreat after each round.

I’m not familiar with the earlier editions of the game, so I run the risk of seeming like a fool when I state that winning through Victory Points feels a bit too gamey and Euro-fied. Instinctively, I’d like that it should be more or less obvious which player has won a game by looking at the map at the end of a session, but as it stands but that’s not the case here. I suppose, as one of the players mentioned, the biggest hurdle to jump is to understand that Twilight Imperium 3 is not a wargame. I’d been forewarned but I still got caught up in building up stuff rather than chasing points.

Finally, it’s a bit disappointing that our game ended due to hitting the End Game card rather than one player getting 10 points. It’s just feels so artificially constrained. Anyway, the shop owner won by a fair margin due in no small part to the intimidation factor of having a War Sun on the map. Personally I’m very much keen to have another session of this but arranging it will be difficult and I doubt my wife would be very enthusiastic. This experience has probably cemented her preference for Euro-style games rather than epic American ones.

Check out this thread on QT3 for some interesting discussion and insights on this game.