Miami Dice: Twilight Imperium 4

[Music] welcome to the dice tower a series of video reviews about board and card games here are your hosts tom vessel and Sam Healy Healy welcome back folks this is a game that we've been talking about now for 10 years actually I think it's been 12 years yeah since the imperium third edition came out and for many years we were predicting ti4 yes and then we just gave up I was predicting ti4 Star Wars edition yeah they were gonna happen but you can keep hoping we did say this was never gonna happen - no no I figured this 11 at some point they said it never happened okay but like he said when twilight PM 3 came down he said it was perfect didn't need anything else then released an expansion then released another expansion and now ti4 so yeah whatever if you've never heard of this game before this is a big grandiose space epic game Eric it's what does the Box front does it even say like how many players on it anymore it is no I don't think it says on the actual box in the bottom of the box let's look here fourteen plus three six players four to eight hours but they're at least telling the truth now are you trying to hide it it is a 48 hour game although you got a three-player game in less than four hours you said 48 hours four to eight or to eight yes let's make sure that's clear so anyway if you're curious about the differences between this edition and the third edition Sam is doing in the video on that so you can see how they compare yep this one we're just talking about this game if you never played before this will give you an idea of what to think yeah here we go there's gonna be fun here's how to play kind of [Music] okay first of all I want to explain that I'm not going over every single rule the game you probably cannot learn how to play for this but I want to give you a basic idea of how the game feels there are 17 different races to pick from each race has a picture it shows you all the different ships which are basically the same for the different races although each player's a flagship it shows you their the cost of the ship how well it does it in combat and the number it needs to roll how far the ship can move if it can hold different units when it's moving them on the back of the sheet it tells you a little bit about that race it also tells you if you start with any technologies and what units you start with and so there's just all different races in here some are good at fighting this one here gets is good at trade goods this one here helps is really good at fighting there's a necro virus Federation of soul the humans the barony of letting have a mint at coalition and each one of these has a very specific special abilities that they have they have different amounts of commodities and they have a different flagship like and here's the University of jolinar they're good at technology each of these is also going to come with their own home planet this is the plan that you're going to start with home planets have a production value and they also have a political value on them so you're gonna find the planet that matches you so let's say I'm playing the universities of Joan our I would have these two starting home planets Joel and Nour you also get a bunch of tokens for your race and you're going to get cards that match the planets of your races at a show that you have the different though control those planets you get some technologies that are specific to your race and then you're going to choose a color doesn't need to correspond to your race put you'll take that color and you're going to get a bunch of units you're going to put those units on the board on your home planet at the beginning of the game you're going to build a big space board you can build it as a group of players together or you can use a preset board this is just a board I throw together to show you mekka tall Rex is always the middle there's going to be these areas here so that are sometimes like this one you can't go through until you have a certain technology sometimes you can never go through them sometimes it's empty space but there's also going to be other planets on the board these planets are gonna provide different resources if you take them there's also wormholes on the board and that's wormhole a which is next to that one wormhole B is next to that one and you are going to have your home planet and you can see I have the Joel on our planet here with their forces ready to go but they will not be the only people on the board there will be other people showing up so they have their forces and the game is ready to begin the game revolves around these eight strategy cards these cards are in every game and at the beginning of each round of play players are going to be taking turns choosing one of these cards or if you're playing with four or less players choosing two of these cards you're going to be taking this card and later on you're gonna have the ability to use the primary ability on it while other players will have the chance to use the secondary ability on it each of these is going to do something very different like technology will help you get more technology warfare helps you move around the board faster trade lets you trade goods with other players Construction lets you build things on your planets politics helps you out into politics phase and get more action card diplomacy helps stop other people from attacking you leadership gives you more command tokens and imperial is one of the main ways where you'll be able to score points if you control Mecca tall Rex that planet from the middle you'll get a point but also there's a way to work with victory objectives so winning the game is not necessarily conquering and crushing everyone else in fact that rarely happens it's about getting a victory point you can use this normal track or this insanely long one each player is going to put a token here and you're trying to get to ten victory points you're going to have these public objectives here and as the game goes by more and more of these cards will be revealed and if you ever during the phase so for example during this status phase if I can spend five trade goods then I'll put one of my markers on the show that I've done it you can only each do each one once and I will gain a point players also will start with a secret objective and have a chance to get more as the game goes by then like for example have one or more ships in six systems control for cultural planets have three space stocks on the game board control for hazardous planets and there's all different ones that you can get here and if you for example unveil your fly ship with win a space combat weather system it contains your fly ship and that happens boom I showed this card and I get a victory points and so that's the whole point of this game you can also get victory points by taking that one strategy card and controlling Mecca tall Rex and once one person gets a ten victory points the game is going to be over each person is going to have a display in front of them they have their board here they're going to have over here another display where they're going to keep their trade goods and there they have these command tokens that are going to be here and these command tokens are very important these command tokens here you're going to be spending these to activate a tile on the board when you activate a tile on the board each player can only activate each tile once you can move ships into that tile you can produce goods and from the planets that are there build more things so command tokens allow you to move and produce on the board where you will move in other ships and get in combats etc the fleet here is basically how big your fleet can be not counting fighters how many ships can be in their fleet you know here's my war son along with a carrier along with a cruiser you know that's a three I can't have a fleet bigger than that unless I put more tokens here and strategy tokens are gonna allow you often to use the secondary ability on someone else's card so the game is going to take place whoever took the strategy car with the lowest number each round will go first they'll take an action that action can be using one of these tokens may be playing a an action card if they have one and sometimes playing their strategy card you have to play your strategy card before you can pass and so you do the top thing so there's trade here for example gives me three trade goods which can be used to build things and stuff we punish your commodities choose any number of players those players use the secondary without spending a command token so you can other people do this for free but anybody here can then spend one of their strategy tokens to take this secondary one for free let's take a look here at technology for example research a technology or stand then you can also spend six research resources to research another technology but everyone else who's not you who took the number-7 can spend a token from your strategy pulling for resources to research a technology so players can be taking turns until everyone passes they no longer have one of these to play and they no longer wish to spend any of these tokens players are going to get some more of these tokens each round but but there's also some strategy cards that give you them or other ways to get them and you got to be careful because you only have somebody you need to spread him between these three areas so technologies is a very intriguing part of the game and technologies will often have to do with your board here when you some players will start with technologies and you can build them technologies might give you special abilities like for example this one here says during around a comment after you sign hits repair one of your damaged units that that not use sustained damage this one here says after you win a ground combat you may get placed in infantry from your reinforcements on that plate so you have different ones sometimes they will upgrade one of your ships like this is dreadnought - when I build this technology I simply place this on the board and now my dreadnought has a higher move on it so I just place it there to cover up my regular dreadknot now when you build a technology you need to meet the prerequisites to it so this one needs to blues and a yellow many of the technologies when you build them are going to give you what you need like this one here needs two Reds and gives a red so you'll have a chance to if I build the plasma scoring first then I can build maybe the Defense Grid second because that needs one red and I have one Reds and once I built both of those then I can build the one that needs two Reds to have it built and then later on I might be able to build one that needs three Reds so you don't worry about technology tree you're just going to look at the different colors and not forgetting each player also has some text for their race specifically that they can build and these texts are going to change how you go around the board and fight with other players I'm not gonna get too much into combat here but combat when you move into someone else you'll fight you're gonna mostly be rolling 10-sided dice and ships will have a certain number of dice that they can roll and they have a certain number that they need to roll higher than a zero being a ten and so some like the war son get massive amounts of damage and then once you've done a air combat if one team survives and they're going to attack they can drop ground troops off on the planet which will take the car to that planet from somebody else it can be collecting these cards of planets because you're going to be using these to build more things and also take actions in the political phase players will also have action cards and have ways to get more action cards these are cards you can play all the time that can cause unpredictable things that are going to happen like this will give you an extra move and a speed here when you're casting votes you get five extra votes here you can remove a token from someone else's tactic pool and put it back in there reinforcements destroy a space stack which is where you can build things a direct hit some ships can take more than one hit but no this one will stop it and you can blow it up there goodbye war Sun or dread not once mega tall wrecks has been captured by politics not by fighting there is it going to be chances for walls to come in to play players are going to use the political power in these planets to vote on laws and so there's a chance for two different laws to come into play and players will sometimes vote for or against a law that will stay in a play for the rest of the game since as all systems that contain an alpha-beta warm hor adjacent to each other so all wormholes now are connected or if you're against it you're not gonna be able to use wormholes that round directives are something that happened right now everyone who votes for gets two action cards and everyone who votes for discards their action cards so you have to use your political power sometimes you'll pick a planet something will happen to that planet sometimes you'll pick a player and something will happen that player this is a really bad card to play on someone else of public execution and so these law cards can change the rules of the game or can just have massive events in the game letting you use your political power to change things and that's pretty much it I mean there's a lot more than that you're gonna need to know how to use your there's trade goods if you're if you don't use all these strategy cards some of them get trade goods placed on them that you'll take there's planetary defense systems that can shoot about ships that come by them but you'll learn all that as time goes by that just gives you a feel the first one to get to the victory point number is the winner of the game okay so that was Twilight Imperium fourth edition did you go over everything ya know when it comes to the rulebook of a way to play they're doing a two row book thing and then a thing which is very useful for I like those two rulebook things that shows you how to play and then you go and look at more d tails this game is a big game it's easily the biggest game I think that either of us plays we we had a three player game going last Saturday at cool stuff and we had to use two tables for it that's how big it is right but I'm dumb it's a long game we don't think you're playing again it's longer right it's just it's big in every way right takes up a huge amount of table space it takes up a lot of time the question is is that worth it absolutely in my opinion totally worth it this is one of those games where you start playing it and you pick your head up four or five four to eight hours later and you're like where did all that time go I just stepped through a portal or something that effect you really don't it does not feel like you're playing that long while you're playing the game yeah one of the things about Twilight Imperium that's just been they added this in the third edition and they continued it here is just how you're always involved you take a turn I'll kind of move these ships here you take a turn I'll build some stuff you take a turn I'm gonna do this action card and we're like oh I would like to also take that action card secondary ability you're always involved and then everyone's done you're looking at public objectives you're fighting each other the only time the game would slow down is if two people get into combat and you're not involved correct that could be a little bit more of a lengthy time we're down time but other than that you're almost always there it also slows down during the agenda phase when people are taking votes and trying to make deals and all of that kind of stuff it'll slow down there a little bit but again you're involved in that you're not sitting out unless you choose to be out of it for one reason or another to try to use some of those maybe action cards that you can use during the agenda phase to get something good for sitting out of the out of the voting phase so there is downtime but usually the downtime is mainly by choice you're choosing you know you're passing and while everybody else is still doing actions or you're choosing to abstain from voting or something to that effect so it's not downtime that you have no control over it's usually good downtime now this game is fascinatingly cool because you have 17 different races they all have extremely different feels they have a special ability which is very different different starting setups different racial technologies different flag ships and you play them very differently you play Science Guy you're trying to get as much science as possible you're playing a war guy it's time to go fight some guys don't want to fight hardly at all right and other guys are like let's let's do this yeah so you don't have to mean it's a war game there's no question you're gonna shoot stuff up absolutely but at some point you have to almost but it's not a conquer game you could you could never go into your opponent's home systems and win the game there are actual there's actually a good number of objectives where you are actually trying to do that but I'm saying you don't have to you could win the game having never conquered your opponent's home system right now you'll probably want to take mecha tall Rex and go in there and fight a little bit you could even win the game maybe without ever getting into a battle I think that's possible but if you're gonna do that well your people are gonna get into battle with you I've never won a game that way but it is definitely a possibility of playing the game that way and having fun and doing well but I'm number one not having gotten to at least one battle throughout the course of the game another thing I like is just the diversity of strategies I love tech the technology that you always can sit there and I mean you have this big deck of technology cards you're like who do I want upgrade my ships yes do I want to be able to move through asteroid fields yes don't want to build a war son you can some most races can't build those big Death Star things right off of me right off the bat so I want to do that or do I want to build migration and you're like there's so many options and each time you put you're never you can't bill all your tech impossible no you definitely have to go that's where a lot of strategy comes in - what do you want to do this game what are the special abilities that you want your ships and your ground troops to have that's where you come into that and I really enjoy how they have done the technology aspect of this game in the fourth edition they've completely done away with that tech tree you don't have to follow in and this all these convoluted lines and all that kind of stuff they've completely done away with that and there they have just a prerequisite system I guess you could call it rather than a tech tree it basically accomplishes the same thing as a tech tree it just does it in a more streamlined easier to understand way so I really like that about the new text that's a good segue we should take a brief moment of time to talk about this compared to the third edition yeah we're both fans at a third edition Sam much more than I am but we both like it we came into this one played it and I've been telling most people I met that this is essentially Twilight Imperium 3.5 I don't think that if you know how to play Twilight Imperium third edition you know how to play this yes there are some changes the most notable changes are detect tree which is like okay simple the trade thing which is actually pretty different on how trade works now yeah it's a little bit more thematic though because you you get a certain number of commodities that you can have and those commodities don't do anything for you unless you trade with one of your neighbors and then the commodities they give you and the ones that they give that you give them turn into trade goods so it's more thematic but it's it's not as simple as the third edition was right but I mean it's that's that that would be a change and then the other changes politics which is not really that I mean it's different but it's just first of all the politics pace doesn't happen until my catarrh ex has been taken but that one politics comes into play you're doing two each time so there's more stuff happening the politics phase you know I sometimes at ti3 I would turn over politics can I go wow what a boring is agenda right now it's like oh there's a boring agenda you guys vote Annette I'm waiting for that next agenda and hoping it's a bigger thing I don't know yeah so I guess we got answered a question if someone owns ti3 let's say they onto a three where the expansion's whatever should they get rid of that and get ti4 really it depends on what you like from ti3 and the expansions if you're using a lot of the different things that come in the expansions and you might want to wait to see if they come out with expansions 40i4 I think that's almost a shoo-in at this point we're talking about fantasies like we're talking about their flagship game for this universe it's probably gonna happen so maybe maybe you want to wait and see if some of those other things that you'd like in the expansions that are already present ti3 are going to be made available for this one some of the things in the expansions are already in this base box so that's something you have to take into effect take into account as well really though it's ultimately up to you whether or not you're gonna make the switch now or later but with that being said I think you're going to want to make the switch at some point yeah for me they add it most of the stuff I really like flagships and I really like the racial technologies because I like being different than other people those are my two favorite things from the expansions and they're in this right I don't know that I play TI for enough if I I don't even know NCI through you because you have a why should I have it yeah I don't own it enough I don't play it enough to for me to justify upgrading but the pieces are definitely better ships are better way there the cars are better the player boards having the stats printed there with the cards it's just a way better production yep I would say you should upgrade if you play more than once every two years like if you play at least once a year then I would upgrade I think but maybe maybe or that way if you play more than once a year you should upgrade here's another thing I've always heard people with ti3 say that if this is such a hard game to get to the table and I'll say this now I last Saturday we we I took it to cool stuff and I was going to play it didn't care really who was going to play with me Vernon sat down with me we were gonna play and then we were gonna get a couple more people ended up we only played a three-hour I mean a three-player game and it only lasted three and a half hours and the third player that played was the first time he had ever played Twilight Imperium anything so and he he actually got more points than Vernon did by the end of the game which which is kind of surprising for any first time player I say all that to say this I think ti4 is going to make it easier for you to get the game to the table because of the streamlined and the refining that it has gone through so that might be something you take into account as well in this question of do I upgrade or not it's still what to ingest yeah I mean ok that's wrong I mean there's a lot going on I I like it I'm giving it two thumbs up but there's a couple caveats there one I'm probably not gonna play more than once a year probably yeah I played once this year I'm feeling pretty good but I still look at it and go wow this is a game when I when I play it I'm never not having fun the whole time yes but what my fleets are getting blown up or whatever and I don't care you know it's like open my fleets are blowing up what is but at the same time I have other things I'm okay well I'm going to build this I'll make a deal with this person now let's the negotiation and I love the politics more than you do you know and I like the action cards the action cards you never know what action card someone has in their pocket and normally I sort of think would tick me off but after you play a while you know the action cards you know what to expect you know what to expect or what what possibly could happen just it's a really cool experience it's still the definitive space game there's other ones that I might play more often like Exodus and other things that are because they're shorter mm-hmm but nothing rivals this when it comes to the big granddaddy of it as part of that I played so far nope what's your thumbs like I need to ask okay well I'm gonna actually give one and a half moon mmm right it's two thumbs way up from me Twilight Imperium 3 was as far as I could reckon before this came out a perfect system it was great it had you know I guess it wouldn't wasn't a perfect system it had its hangups I guess you could say but it was everything I could ask for for an epic space game and now ti4 has taken that and refined it and made it even better and it feels like a game that came out this year rather than what was it originally 20 years ago yeah it's the first one this is an amazing refining of an amazing game to last things it has a plastic insert oh yes no trenches anymore Thank You Fantasy Flight and and don't step on the war zones yeah because they're old and they're something that was bad to step on and made it worse so that's that's something huge yeah until next time I'm Tom Basso and I'm saying Healy see you on the flipside well the galaxy it's played us right now I mean see ya thanks for watching our review today for more information about our games as well as the number one board game audio podcast checkout diced our comm for reviews interviews and more I'm Eric summer and you've been watching the dice tower [Music] [Applause]

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 129,381

Rating: 4.9031849 out of 5

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, Sam Healey, Healy, Christian T. Petersen, Fantasy Flight Games, Miami Dice, Twilight Imperium 3, Twilight Imperium 4

Id: Kv5Tfc2moAs

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/OutlierJoe]

This is a game that I would love to play, but I doubt I'll ever get to play it in my life.

High cost, huge time commitment, huge player space required. I have a large table to play on.

[u/jshaunallen]

18:51 for those who want to hear the "I have TI3+exp, should I swap for TI4?

[u/wyattlib]

At work right now...what's the consensus?

[u/SirSexySteve]

I have to say that I own TI4 as well as TI3 and all the expansions. There are a few things that I miss, such as distant suns. However, I found it so refreshing to be able to expand so quickly without having to go back and get more ground forces, wasting tactical tokens.

I paid $150 for it, plus extra for shipping because I could not be at GenCon in person. It's completely worth it. Everything that they have changed has been for the best, particularly the strategy cards and the new racial promissory notes that you can use during the Agenda Phase.

[u/AmuseDeath]

It's a good game with a lot of depth and strategy, but like many others of its type, the question is if it will get played regularly. In my case, not so much. I've got a ton of heavy games such as Here I Stand and that has only been played once in 5 years or so.

[u/xEl33tistx]

My question (that the video did not answer) is:

Should I sell my unplayed copy of TI:3 at current prices and spend the $100 difference on this new version? I will never get the expansions for the third edition because I'm not spending several hundred dollars on them.

I got TI:3 for my birthday and have a large enough group to play it. I expect to have the game hit the table 2-3 times a year.

[u/TheVictoryHat]

Will this game be under 100 any time soon? 140 is just way too high for me for a board game they just streamlined from a previous version.

[u/riptydeco]

Lol at the call out to Zee at the end.

[u/Howdy_McGee]

I got to play this last weekend, guy in the group picked it up at Gencon. I played TI3 a couple week prior and everything they said in this video is spot on.

They took everything good about TI3, refined it, and made it better. TI4 is easily now on my top games I'll never not play.

I wish they kept political leaders and such though, that was fun/nice.