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A bewildered American, trying to get his head around a game that regularly ends in a draw despite taking five days to finish, once called cricket “the only sport that incorporates meal breaks.” But the comment could also apply to the game many consider the white whale of board gaming: Twilight Imperium.

Game details Designer: Christian Petersen

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Players: 3-6

Age: 12+

Playing time: How much do you have?

Price: $90 (MSRP) / ~£80

“Twimp,” as my group calls it, has 300 plastic ship miniatures, more than 400 cards, and thousands of cardboard counters. It comes in a box you could bury the family pet in; its rulebook runs to 44 pages. Expansions each contain more new material than most midsize standalone games, while an online subculture argues about which fishing tackle box provides the most aesthetically pleasing storage solution for the components. Fully expanded, eight players can go for—well, 11.5 hours is as long as we’ve gone, but others like to stretch the festivities over two days.

Like cricket, a full play necessitates meal breaks both for the sake of your endurance and your sanity. Cricket, though, tends to result in considerably fewer rows between participants.

Twilight Imperium is now in its third edition, having grown mightily since its previous two iterations. While not the biggest or longest board game you can buy—some specialist wargames make its eight-hour playtime look like a children’s tea party—Twilight Imperium is probably the biggest board game you’re meant to play in one session. (Starcraft is considered nearly a match in size and duration, but it’s long since out of print. Campaign games like Descent or Kingdom Death will take longer, but no one suggests you finish one of those in a single sitting.)

The goal of the game is simple: you’re an alien race that wants to conquer the galaxy, more or less, though due to the elegant victory point system, you may not even have to do much in the way of actual conquest. A skilled player can avoid combat and still win by completing secret goals, pitting players against each other.

It would be impossible, without 10,000 words and a thick streak of masochism, to detail an entire eight-hour game. But I hope to capture the flavor of Twilight Imperium as I understand it now that I have two dozen plays and nearly 1,000 man-hours invested. First, though—how do you play this thing?

How to conquer the galaxy

Twilight Imperium synthesizes the two main schools of game design—it’s bursting with so-called “Ameritrash” theme but is built on smart, interlocking systems which are very “Eurogame” in spirit. Game complexity comes mostly by trying to balance these systems, which simulate everything a budding Ming the Merciless might need, from space combat to technological development to planetary exploration, espionage, and the galactic senate. Basically, this is a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) video game like Master of Orion or Stellaris, just simulated on a table and not sparing a detail.

Learning the rules to a competitive standard, in our experience, takes about three full games—but here are the basics. Before the game, each player picks a race and sets up the galaxy using a hand of hexagons dealt at random. Each turn—of which there are usually between six and 10 in a game—consists of three phases: strategy, action, and status.

In the strategy phase, each player picks one of eight special tiles, which provide a bonus in one area: mobilizing for war, researching technology, building up infrastructure, etc. Each tile is numbered, and in the action phase, players use that number to decide on turn order.

The action phase uses counters taken from your command pool, a highly limited resource, to activate systems, allowing you to move ships in, invade planets, and build. Each player must also use the primary ability on their chosen strategy tile. The action phase lasts as long people have counters to spend (usually 45-75 minutes).

Finally, there’s the status phase, where everything is reset, damaged ships are repaired, and planetary resources are refreshed. Most importantly, players can score victory points from completed objectives—which can either be their personal, secret ones or public ones that are left face-up on the table for all to see.

This summary is of course like describing Ulysses as a story about a man having a wank on a beach, but seeing as my group still barely understands the two pages in the rulebook detailing how to perform a “transfer action,” I won't bore you with more detail.

Twilight Imperium is very hard to win, and no one who does so wins by luck. You can certainly lose by luck from a winning position, but you only win through graft, planning, and strategy. The winner is the person who can still see their path to victory points despite having to handle the secret plans of four to seven other players, any one of whom might have a killer action card that can undo the best-laid plans.

A big fleet will probably win against a smaller one, but bad dice and a well-played “Direct Hit” card—which can take out a durable battleship in one hit rather than two—can send everything awry. The best players have nests of contingencies if Plans A, B, and C are ruined at first contact with someone whose tasty-looking space docks are actually “Experimental Battlestations.”