Twilight Imperium 4 - 2019 Game!

So on Saturday the collective headed down to Kernow for the annual Twilight Imperium game-a-thon.

Due to the lack of trophy last year Sylon made an excellent Lego one for the winner of the event. He had already put his name on it for last years victory - so we were playing for whose name would adore it this year. 

Snake-eyes had decided to run the set up like Risk - Legacy (which worked rather well I think). A dice roll deciding the order of of picking faction, starting place, trade goods and something else I can't recall. TR shows starting places. We had the following functions:

Snake-eyes - The Nekro Virus 

DK - The_Universities_of_Jol-Nar (bullied into not having the Hacan - I think we agreed at the end of the evening that next time no one should play the same faction more than once!). 

Steedo - The_Barony_of_Letnev

Sylon - The_L1Z1X_Mindnet

Morts - The_Federation_of_Sol

Snake-eyes also decided that we were going to play to 14 victory points. 

Bottom pictures showing early moves to gain planets and resources. They also show off the rather nice  movement stands that Sylon had made to make movement easier ... I think that we had played at least 2 hours by this point. Highlight from the early game was an attack by Snake-eyes with 2 cruisers on a fighter and carrier to steel some of my tech by winning a combat - however some quality dice rolling by Snake-eyes meant that his ships were despatched easily. 

Late game pictures - I had lfallen behind a bit at this point and devious strategy card picking had stopped Sylon picking up victory points from holding Mecatol Rex - the capital. This move effectively prevented Sylon defending his title. Steedo and Sylon's early occupation on Mecatol Rex cause the agenda phase to be added to the game early on - this caused the game to become much longer. 

The agenda caused a major incident in the game - A directive had to be voted on which would cause all fleets to reduce the compliment of Dreadnoughts down to 2 and the number of cruisers down to 4. Snake-eyes couldn't vote and inexplicably DK chose to try and predict it. This allowed Sttedo and Sylon (with virtually none of those types of ships) to pass it! Massively reducing Snake-eyes and  my fleets - I lost 18 points worth of ships and had to spend a couple of turns rebuilding!

The bottom 2 pictures show the massive fleet build up for the battles to take - and hold Mecatol Rex, with 2 Victory points attached to it. During the afternoon and evening Snake-eyes and DK had been building up quite a lot of points from tech and Steedo had been quietly getting points as well - leaving Sylon and myself trailing the pack. 

End of turn 7 I sent in a softening up attack on Sylon's forces holding Mecatol Rex. Then in the final turn Steedo sent in everyship he had and took the capital system. Snake-eyes waded in with his fleet and destroyed the remains of Steedo's fleet - but with no group troops could not to take the system. All the while DK was confident of a win - he'd have 15 at the end of the scoring phase.

The result was that with cunning use of a strategy card - Steedo was the speaker and scored points first. This meant that with a secret agenda card Steedo scored the magic 14 points first thus ending the game and Winning! .... Before DK had a chance to score! 

Final positions, score track and smug Steedo. 

This was an epic game - 14 hours and 2.30am get home .... Mental! 

It was good time and I think we all enjoyed it - although on the last turn I ended up passing as I couldn't get enough points in the last turn to win (10 points was my total and even if I could have taken and held Mecatol Rex I still wouldn't have been able to catch DK - Slyon was in a similar situation. 

Perhaps after 3 years we are getting better at the game and this one was certainly the most aggressive and tactical we have played. I need to think about how Steedo plays as he has been the most successful player (3 wins out of the last 4 games). I also think that next time we should play to 10 points - it might not make the game significantly shorter (we didn't make 10 points in 11 hours of play).  Also in previous games we didn't get to Mecatol Rex as early so we didn't have as many agenda phases to go through.

A great day - thanks to Snake-eyes for hosting (provider of pizza and pulled pork) and a well done to Steedo for winning.....

Morts