Cabin Con 2021 - Part V

 Cabin Con 2021 - Part V

Ok. Bear with me, friends; this will be a rough one.

Yep. That game. Twilight Imperium, fourth edition, complete with the Prophecy of Kings expansion. Which, admittedly, I think is terrible for teaching, but we had 7 players and the core game maxes out at 6.

I wasn't entirely certain as to how I wanted to approach this post for two reasons. The first is, how damn long will this be if I write about ALL TWELVE HOURS OF GAME? The second is, there's SO much I don't remember about this game because a) it happened weeks ago, now, b) there was a lot of game to recall even if I hadn't waited to write it up, and c) I was teaching it to all of the other 6 players and the game is enough brain drain without also teaching it concurrent to playing it.

My friend Clayton writes up narrative recaps after his sessions of TI and they sound so great! But his mind is a steel trap and he also knows this game far better than I do. I keep post-it pads in my office, kitchen, and bedside because I write things down the moment I think of them because I regularly try to hold too much in my head and lose a decent amount of it if I'm not actively working on it. All of that to say that this isn't a recap so much as an exploration of the game with a couple of specific, memorable (to me, anyway) interactions.

Before continuing on, it behooves me to thank my friends for their patience during this particular game. I say that because while I was very happy to teach this game, there's a lot there. And between 6 new players, there were a lot of questions. AND it was a LONG DAY. Anyway. All of that to say that everyone was ridiculously patient and understanding if I ever seemed impatient or at all frustrated. Especially given that I promised them it wasn't a twelve hour game. But. More on that later.

Anyway! My friend Josh, being the ridiculously helpful guy that he is, wrote up this brief summary of the game and I'd like to include it here. His words are in blue; enjoy!

Blue guy (Josh; The Universities of Jol-Nar): stayed in his corner and did science; tried to recruit as many new students and visiting professors to the university as possible. Felt pressured to eventually turn their vast technological understanding to war...I mean, home defense, yeah.

Orange guy (Johnny; The Emirates of Hacan): shipyards were poppin’; eventually jumped through some wormholes and started some shit.

Purple guy (Suf; The Naalu Collective): not sure what he wanted aside from being friends with everyone?

Red guy (Ryan; The Nekro Virus): vaguely threatening and unsettling, sat looking into that wormhole daring anyone to step to him.

Yellow guy (Mike; The Federation of Sol): all dressed up in a big military with nowhere to go.

Green guy (Chris; The Arborec): really wanted to be in charge of the government? Good luck ruling space my dude.

Black guy (Drew; The Naaz-Rohka Alliance): that dude loved him some ancient relics.

Basically what I remember is Johnny, Suf and I were basically peaceful, and I trusted them not to just roll me (they probably could have). You (he means me!) pushed for Mecatol, but didn't overextend too badly to reach it, Mike had a huge military pushed forward and was sort of stretching towards the middle, Ryan laid back and made it real dangerous with that wormhole in front of him (and late game started pushing out), Drew sent some dudes to die to keep Ryan happy while he dug for relics and built stuff, and I tried to build up tech while staying mostly defensive and waiting to see who made a move towards me. Johnny had a good fleet of ships to start pushing around the board later, and Suf had a solid power base of planets so he could build up and be ready for whatever happened.

As I recall it, anyway.

Thank you, Josh, for your concise and accurate representation of our Twilight Imperium endeavor! It's damn funny to me, because his recounting of it really does it justice and jogged a lot of my memory of this game. But rather than slog through all of it and just spend words while I'm trying to put together a coherent narrative, I'm going to lean on Josh's, because it really does make the game sound like what it was - a ton of fun as everyone sort of figured out what they wanted and how to pursue it. Several things I wanna note here:

• Josh and I had a race: he made marinara and meatballs to prep for dinner while I set up Twilight Imperium to see which one of us could finish first. We agreed that people choosing their races didn't count as part of set-up. Admittedly, I had not opened this copy of the game other than to punch everything at home, so I didn't have a system or anything, but I was confident in my ability to get it going. Especially because I was using a pre-constructed map for 7 players to keep things simple and avoid drafting when 6 of the 7 of us had never played the game before.
• I beat Josh by maybe 25 seconds or a minute. It was...tighter than it should have been. At this point, I think the gang was beginning to doubt me when I kept asserting this game didn't *have to* take all day...
• Suf never passes up an opportunity to roleplay in a game, and this was no exception. Whenever he dealt with anyone in this game, he did it with his own impression of the Naalu. His pitch was inconsistent, but he gets points for staying in character throughout!
• Alliances are part of the game, and oftentimes, they're sort of incidental. They may sort of be a mirage, but if other players are on the outside looking in and buy it as real, they sometimes act as though it's real. In doing so, the way they deal sort of actualizes the alliance they thought was there, but wasn't. To that end, somehow, we ended up with two sides.
• Mike (Sol), Ryan (Nekro), and myself (Arborec) were on one side of the map and ended up as a triumvirate of sorts. Ryan and I were on good terms, and Mike and I hadn't messed with each other, but also hadn't formalized anything.
• Suf (Naalu), Josh (Jol-Nar), and Johnny (Hacan) were on the other side of the map and ended up aligned with one another when they decided that Mike, Ryan, and myself had an alliance.
• Drew (Naaz-Rokha) somehow ended up caught in the middle of this and ended up in a really weird place wherein people decided he was definitely a threat and had to be dealt with, but only sort of poked at him or cut him off, but never really dealt with him as he explored a lot of planets using his Distant Suns ability, collected a bunch of relic fragments, and assembled an ungodly number of Relics. He eventually sort of landed with me, Mike, and Ryan because he did some dealing with Ryan for technological advances. So it was sort of 4v3, but sort of not? Not everyone was that interested in combat, and a lot of the alliances were never actually formalized!
• I pushed into Mecatol Rex to get the ball rolling on agendas, but also mainly so I could grab the victory point token and use Mecatol to get command tokens. But once I had it and lost it, it occurred to me that it was likely the only way I was going to win. I ended up relying heavily on my Secret Objectives, scoring all three of them and still worrying I wouldn't make it to 10.
• I'm pretty sure I decided I couldn't achieve Control the Region and discarded it for something else. Once I snagged Mecatol Rex, scoring Establish Hegemony was easy. I can't remember my other two secret objectives, though.
• I'm pretty sure I'm missing two public objectives, but I'm fairly confident that the following were on the board: Sway the Council, Discover Lost Outposts, Engineer a Marvel, Raise a Fleet, Corner the Market, Push Boundaries.
• The fact that the Engineer a Marvel objective came out early meant that there was one round wherein 6 of the 7 of us built our respective flagships, and there was a lot of tension when those hit the table. We weren't quite saying it out loud, but there was an escalation of an arms race in which we were quietly engaging. The downside of no combat is that armies and navies continue to grow until even a "small" battle over territory risks catastrophe. But honestly, with this particular group, having the Sword of Damacles hanging over our collective heads made things that much more fun rather than adversarial.
• So many of the objectives were ones we could sort of score while staying out of each other's way, and very little was executed in the way of cutthroat tactics. I think there were opportunities that some of us just didn't really want to take because we worried about what would happen with dice, as well as what might happen with our tenuous alliances. As Josh points out, we were pretty sure our neighbors wouldn't roll us, but there were definitely opportunities. Especially once we decided we were ready to end the game and so started just hurling fleets at one another.
• It was at this point that everyone suddenly developed an interest in Mecatol Rex and things started getting messy/interesting. But it was also around the time that we were winding down so we never really learned who would've come out on top.
• We finally hit 2 am or some such and decided that it was time to end the round and whoever had the most victory points would win. A couple of players got to 6, I got to 7, and was declared the winner. That should come with a caveat, though, which is that if we had even played to 8, it's unlikely I would have won. By this time, I had basically exhausted all of my options, was unlikely to hold onto Mecatol again long enough to score, and would've been hard-pressed at that point to make it to 10 unless some new public objectives played into things I had already done.
• Probably one of my favorite moments in the whole game was after the lines had been drawn in the sand. The sides were set, and during a lull in my action, I asked Josh to step aside and chat for a moment while the rest of the table was sorting through some stuff. I had every intention of being mostly honest with Josh about what our little 4 player alliance had discussed while omitting one or two bits of information that I didn't really feel like sharing. I figured Josh was likely doing the same, though neither of us mentioned that. We talked about not really wanting to threaten one another from across the table, and we talked about our respective intentions. I don't know if it had an impact on any of the other players or not, but I do know that doing crap like that during a game of Twilight Imperium is something I really enjoy, and it's why I'm not really someone who wants to add a clock to the game to help move it along. But there are some people I've played with who I think would benefit from a clock because they take *too* much time. That's just my opinion, of course, but it drives me nuts when a player keeps trying to make a deal happen when the other players have already passed multiple times. At some point, MOVE ON. Without a clock, it can be tough to make that happen. So this just continues to be one of those games that I have to be playing with "the right people." Sometimes turns take longer than they strictly need to, and that's fine! But when it becomes a habit, you can be sure I won't be playing TI with that person again. My time is precious to me, and while I enjoy the game, I don't enjoy it enough to play it in an environment or manner that will lead me to, you know, not enjoy it. Luckily, this was very much a group in which it felt like all conversation and dealing arose in an organic way, and there was absolutely no bickering.

So how did this become a 12 hour game? Well, quite simply, there was no way it was going to be shorter than that with a total of 7 players, and with 6 of us having never played before.

Now, I was playing with a bunch of gamers, so that definitely helped. There are some conventions that span all games. And after awhile, players were able to start looking up the answers to their own questions. But for awhile there, I was the only one who could teach the game, run the game, and find answers to people's questions. Also, I clearly low-balled just how long the game was going to take. Part of this was player count, no doubt. But I also didn't want anyone to be scared off by the length of the game and not play. Especially because if only one or two people did not play the game, there was little they could do but watch for quite some time while the game was going. So I probably talked too much about how the game "doesn't have to take all day." I still stand by that assessment! But I should've been more realistic with the player count (I've never played with more than 5 people) and the learning curve (especially with the addition of the expansion meaning that there were even more things for people to do - use leaders, explore, make Relics, blah blah blah). Luckily, nobody equivocated much about their factions because nobody was really looking to powerhouse the game. Everyone sort of picked a race that sounded interesting and fun to them, and that's how we got started. It's one of the reasons I picked Arborec - I know they're "a bad faction," but I have fun with them, and while I was playing to win, I also didn't care if I won or lost. I knew my focus would be split between what I was doing and what other people were doing.

Also, I did ban certain races to make the game more easy-going (Gene-Sorcerers and the Vuil'Raith Cabal) while also warning against other races because it would be difficult to overcome the fact that they're not necessarily well-equipped for beginners who want to have a shot at winning (Winnu and Embers of Muaat). I think that helped accelerate the game, believe it or not.

At the end of the day, I'm not really able to get into the tactics much here because it was very much a teaching game and because in trying to track 7 different players (including myself), I was seeing a lot of the big picture and less of the small picture. I will say that I didn't come into this game with a solid plan for winning, which is why I hit the roadblock that I would've been unlikely to navigate through or around if we played to the full 10 points. This is a game that requires flexibility, but also some knowledge of build order. I had some ideas, but didn't know what tech tree I was going to pursue. I didn't really walk in with any idea of what strategy cards I wanted to nab in the first several turns. And both of those are things one really needs to do in order to be successful in this game, I think. By the end of 12 hours, we were all pretty tired and ready to pack it in, but overall, everyone said they had a good time, and Josh was already brainstorming ideas of how to speed the game up next time we play (which I can only imagine will be at Cabin Con 2022!). I guess there's not much more to say, except...

Don't feed the plants!

**Just a reminder: if anyone reading this is interested in this most excellent group of adventurers and their exploits, you should check out their Twitter! They're the Champions of Valinwood! 

https://mobile.twitter.com/ValinwoodHeroes/status/1417585561817260038