I’ll gladly invade Hyderabad tomorrow for a promise cube today.
Extorting promise cubes just to “do your job” is very satisfying, especially when different people have different ideas about what your job is, and are all motivated to convince you.
I need to try John Company. The way you talk about it on the forum makes me really interested in it.
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I actually own the 3rd ed of that with all 3 expansions. It’s a bear but fun when you get a good group together. I don’t know what they changed for the 4th ed. but I can’t think that really offers something more than what Eclipse offers in less time.
I would highly recommend giving TI a go (particularly the streamlined fourth edition). There really isn’t anything quite like it and the addition of the politics phase every turn where you can use your planets influence to enact or reject two laws that affect the rest of the game is fantastic.
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While Eclipse is definitely faster than Twilight Imperium, the two games are different enough to me that Eclipse is a poor substitution (but quicker) than TI.
Twilight Imperium has much more depth, intrigue, and diplomacy than Eclipse. There’s also all kinds of begging and negotiating going on in all phases of the game, but especially in the politics phase, like @Slurmsmackenzie8 mentioned.
In general though, the scale of Eclipse is just so much smaller than TI, both in terms of the actual game and in terms of what’s going on. Eclipse plays much more like a pure Euro game, in that it provides an excellent framework for a lot of quite abstract and quite often independent choices that you can make. In TI, though, every race is different and offers you an identity to put on and roleplay as. Eclipse is like a puzzle you’re trying to solve. TI is a galactic-wide story you’re participating in.
No arguments here. My preference for eclipse is because it hits that particular itch without all that. And similarly if I want to go full storyteller I’d rather break out an RPG designed around it like a Dread or a Fiasco.
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I think they’re different enough games that both are worth playing.
That being said, I don’t think that Eclipse is a total substitution for Twilight Imperium though. That’s like saying because they both have roller coasters, that Six Flags is a substitution for Disney World.
Edited to add: Like I wrote above, other than maybe Twilight Struggle, there really isn’t a boardgame, other than Twilight Imperium, that combines the strategic and tactical depth of a good Euro boardgame with the roleplaying elements of an actual RPG. Sure, if you want a straight up Euro 4X, you could play Eclipse. Likewise, if you just want to roleplay, something like Dread or Fiasco is probably better. But if you want to do both at the same time, your only option is really Twilight Imperium.
I’ve spent more time biding as a vassal state to my neighbor in one game of TI that I have playing pretty much any single game of any other game. It’s fascinating that things can actually get lost in the web in TI in ways they can’t in other games. I actually ended up sliding under the radar and avoiding the bribe I was paying to stay alive the turn before I knew it would be impractical for my neighbor to devote many forces to keeping me under control.
You should look into John Company if you like this kind of thing (as if you needed me to tell you at this point!) A lot of Sierra Madre games are equally unusual, I have a copy of Bios: Megafauna 2e coming soon.
Multiplayer wargames, too. Here I Stand?
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6 games of Dream Home in 5 days so far. The kid has her hooks in.
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Sometimes out-of-context rules have a flavor all their own.
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I think they’re trying to present this kickstarter a little oddly. The first $100 is the board game, +18 to 65 for shipping. The second $50 adds on an “expansion” that… somehow maybe consists of all the stretch goals? Which they phrase as being “free”. I guess the “expansion” would be like Ship Pack 1 in size then (which is pretty small, but ships).
Seems like a good way to spend $115 on a game you can get a month after the kickstarters fulfill for $80.
Ah, the Queen Games approach.
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Pretty much exactly that, though they don’t quite want to come out and say it. To their credit no early bird bullshit and no crazy whale tiers.
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I’m really interested in these custom-made inserts they’re promising. Ever since the first plano-box-plus-custom-cube-trays, there have been numerous different ways to try and wrangle this game into something that can be set up within a baseline-human lifetime. This looks like they at least understand this frustration, and hopefully have solved it. Killing the last round (and tweaking costs so that’s balanced) is a really good idea, too.