Chapter 3 - Command Tokens and Race Sheet

Today we're going to talk about the alien races, and how they interact with the board.

There are 17 races in this game!

Each race has a Race Sheet.  This is the front of the Sardakk N'orr's sheet:

The game recommends that for our first game, we start with these six races:

- Sardakk N'orr
- The Xxcha Kingdom
- The Universities of Jol-Nar
- The Federation of Sol
- The Emirates of Hacan
- The Barony of Letnev

So, that's what we'll do.

I've emailed everyone in the group high-rez scans of these 6 races.

The front of the sheet illustrates each race's special abilities, commodities, and unit attributes.

The back of the sheet provides some back story on your race, as well as what technologies and units they start the game with.

In the interest of keeping things simple, I'm going to randomly assign one of these races to each player.  I'll notify the group on the outcome a couple weeks before game day.

Race Sheet: Unit Attributes

You'll notice that each unit on your race sheet has a few pieces of information:

- Cost: The amount of Production it costs to build this unit

- Combat: In battle, you roll a d10.  When the Destroyer attacks, a roll of 9 or higher hits.

Note the + symbol below the Combat icon.  this denotes the Sardak Norr's special racial abilty, "+1 to all combat rolls". 

- Move:  How many hexes it can move in a turn.

- Anti-Fighter Barrage.  Many units have special abilities.  We'll go over them in more depth later.  Note that special abilities are not considered "combat rolls", thus are unaffected by the Sardak Norr's bonus.

- Upgrade:  By using the Technology strategy card, you can spend 2 red technology to upgrade your Destroyer I into Destroyer II units (more details later).

Also note the little triangle next to the 9 in Combat.  This marker indicates that this stat improves when the unit is upgraded.

We'll discuss units in greater detail later, but since they take up so much real estate on the race sheet, I wanted to give a cursory overview.

Command Tokens

Command Tokens (formerly "Command Counters" in third edition) are the primary resource your race uses to interface with the board.

They are two-sided:  The top shows your race's logo, the bottom shows a silhouette of a ship.

Command Tokens are stored on your race's Command Sheet among one of three pools:

- Tactic

- Fleet

- Strategy

You begin the game with 3 tokens in your Tactic and Fleet pool, and 2 in your Strategy pool.

You will spend these tokens throughout the game to perform various actions.  You recover 2 tokens per turn, and there's a point during the game in which you're allowed to shift your tokens between the three pools.

What they do:

- Tactic:  You spend a token from your Tactic Pool to place it on a hex on the game board to perform a Tactical Action on that space (more detail on this action later).

- Fleet:  You cannot have more ships in any one system (hex) than you have tokens in your fleet pool.  If you exceed this limit, you must sacrifice ships in your system until you satisfy this limitation.  The tokens in this pool are kept "silhouette" side up.

Note:  Fighters (the small cannon-fodder ship of the game) are excepted from this limit.

- Strategy:  You spend tokens from this pool to activate the secondary ability on most strategy cards (again, more detail on this later).

For now, I'd say feel free to look over the scans I sent you at your leisure.  Questions are, as always, welcome.  More details over the coming weeks!

Chapter 2 - The Galaxy

The map of the galaxy consists of a series of hexagonal systems surrounding Mecatol Rex.

The shape of the map will be altered by the number of players (three through six).

Example of a 6-player map:

The green systems will be players' home systems, which would be specific to their race.

Systems generally contain some combination of the following:

- One or two planets

- Empty space

- Anomalies 

- Wormholes

Planets

Planets are the primary feature of a system.  You want to control as many as possible.

Planets have key attributes:

- Resources (the ability to produce units)

- Influence (the more planetary influence you control, the more votes you get when setting agendas)

- Tech Specialty (you get a bonus when researching a matching field of technology)

- Traits (Cultural, Industrial or Hazardous.  These don't mean anything on their own, but certain effects in the game will affect planets of certain traits).

Lazar has a Resource value of 1, an Influence value of zero, a Cybernetic tech specialty (yellow icon in the top left), and has the Industrial trait (green icon in the bottom right).

Empty Space

...

Anomalies

Asteroid Fields, Super Novas, Gravity Rifts, Nebulae.  Special Systems have a red border, and general affect how you can move through them.

Worm Holes

Systems with matching Worm Hole icons are considered to be adjacent, even when they're physically not.

Building the Galaxy

There is a process by which the galaxy is constructed.  Each player is randomly dealt a number of hex tiles, and take turns placing them onto the map.

However:  There is a recommended "default" map that is advised to be used on your first game.  For this game, we will be using this default map.

We will randomize the location of each player's starting system (randomly assigned to one of the green systems on the map).

Future posts will discuss how units move on the map.

And now, for a huge high rez version of the default map.  Assuming we do end up with all 6 players, this will be the map we use on Jan 19.

Chapter 1 - Getting Up To Speed

As we head towards our game day on Jan 19, I'm going to be periodically posting here with tidbits to help get everyone up to speed.

As I've stated before, I don't expect everyone to memorize every aspect of the rules, but that a little prep beforehand will go a long way.

I'll first reiterate the following video, as I frankly think it's one of the best learning tools for a complex board game that I've seen.  I really like Shea Parker's work on these (he does other games as well - I even help fund him through Patreon).

It's long, but I think it's about as concise an explanation as is possible.

That being said, this and future blog posts will be about very bite sized topics as we make our way towards Jan 19.

Today's topic:

The Phases

Despite being a complex game, the core of Twilight Imperium is very simple.

Each turn consists of a series of 3 or 4 phases (the 4th phase comes later in the game).

The game repeatedly cycles through the phases until a player scores 10 Victory Points to win.

- Strategy Phase

- Action Phase

- Status Phase

- Agenda Phase (once unlocked)

Strategy Phase

There is a pool of 8 "Strategy Cards"  Each card is different:

(PDS stands for "Planetary Defense System" - a type of unit).

Later posts will get into what they do, but for now it's enough to know that the Strategy Phase simply consists of each player (starting with the "Speaker" and moving clockwise) picking a Strategy Card.  That's it - everyone picks 1 card.  Phase: Over!

Action Phase

Shockingly, this is where the action happens.  90% of the game takes place in this phase.  

The Action Phase is where players move ships, play their cards, fight, trade, etc.  

There are a few different type of actions:

- Strategic Action (a player plays his/her Strategy Card).

- Tactical Action (move ships, battle, land on planets, build stuff)

- Component Action (use an action on a card or token that you own)

- Pass.

Players take turns performing 1 action each until all players pass.  Turn order is defined by the number on your chosen Strategy Card.

Once all players pass, this phase ends.  You cannot pass until you've performed your Strategic Action for the turn.

Status Phase

- Reset a bunch of stuff

- Score points

- See if anyone wins

Agenda Phase (once unlocked)

Once a player successfully lands on Mecatol Rex (the giant planet in the center of the galaxy), this unlocks the Agenda Phase.

Two "Agendas" will be introduced, which will alter the rules of the game.  Players will vote on the agendas, using whatever means they feel necessary to garner support from other players.

Afterwards, if no one has won the game, then the game resets to the Strategy Phase.  Simple.

The goal of these blog posts is to be short and sweet, so that's it for today!  Really looking forward to Jan 19!