Twilight Imperium: Prophecy of Kings - Long Live The King?

[Music] greetings we are the empyrean travelers of the void all right well i'm just gonna put you in his void people okay interest in mkhitaryan we do not know of this which you speak great that is that's great and when would you be looking to enter our universe whenever the fates have willed it i can do next tuesday by the way i've got six mates with me birdman robot big cat big cat oh we've got names mate listen it's already pretty busy best i can say at this point is uh i'll see what i i can do that's the punchline for this whole that's the punchline are you serious it's been a tough year so this is twilight imperium fourth edition a game so big that the box itself requires its own tiny table and today we've got the expansion that makes it even bigger and so big in fact that on the table i'm filming this on i can only set the game up for about one and a half players if you don't know what twilight imperium is then you're in the wrong place but that's cool don't worry about it my friend quinn's with the review of the original version of this game we'll have you covered far better than me i'm going to be diving straight in to some of the deeper murkier stuff so does this gigantic new expansion to this gigantic superb game make it even better no not today not doing it sorry to be rude you've invited me into your house you've asked me kindly to take off my shoes and i have and i've put those shoes on the table but listen it's okay let me just soothe you with a gigantic caveat if you're watching this because you want to know whether or not you should buy prophecy of kings then the answer is probably not no but that is only because i can almost guarantee that anybody who might want this already definitely has it and that's partly because we intended to make this video a long time ago and my plans got slowed down by a deadly virus which is so ti thinking about it but it's also partly because this feels like it has been made for a specific type of player and i don't know if it pleases that kind of player but it certainly isn't for me and so now pushing forwards onto this lightly scorched earth this is prophecy of kings kindly provided to us by fantasy flight games and with a level of boldness here that i genuinely deeply respect this isn't just a box of modular toys to add into the game as you will no this is something that you are intended to fold into the game completely the manual starts off by telling you hey take these things out of twilight imperium and put these new things in in order to make this whole box become one uber joined box that then all works together in a new harmony but that's kind of frightening it's sort of cyberman-style transformation that there's no coming back from unless you put all the bits you take out in a little baggie and then you go through and fish out all these new bits again afterwards frankly to me though that seems unfathomable either way this isn't intended as some holiday destination that you just pop into as and when you want no this wants to be your new house that you live in and this house has some pretty exciting rooms we've got a brand new unit in the form of these wonderfully tuki fruity mechs you can see here piled up unceremoniously you've got artefacts that you can uncover by finding different shards on different planets artifact shards powerful artifacts already music to my ears seven brand new factions you've got a second little slidy bit that comes out of your main board on the other side how much table space do these people think i have onto these boards go leaders there's three different types of leaders agents commanders and heroes adding further depth to each of the original factions within the game so you've got loads of new planets to explore including weird planets that do weird things you've got a mini exploration deck for finding weird stuff on the edge of space two new action things one of which is slightly tweaked and the other one is exactly the same but just written in a slightly more clear way thanks for that i suppose two new colors of ships genuinely exciting hot pink my favorite color hot orange my second favorite color camouflaged on this tablecloth eight new research cards for each player eight new things to add to your resistor new objectives that get popped in there's definitely stuff i've missed any aspect of the game that already existed it's adding or tweaking new things to and then it's adding four or five brand new mechanics there's an awful lot going on twilight imperium holds a very special place and the collective hearts of sharpens it down to the extent that we made a documentary on it and yeah quinn's may have decided to give me his copy of the game because he decided he maybe preferred eclipse but i think he's already starting to regret that no backs he's sorry quinn's it's it's fine now and yeah i don't think there's anything like it it's this colorful box of space magic that conjures up an event you know block a day off in the diary tell your loved ones you're not going to be home too late and you're going to be naked and you might come home changed a different person it's not you it's me i developed the tech to go through asteroid fields and i just want to go and see what's over there and in terms of how i play it ti is almost more like a mega game than a traditional board game each of these aliens in the game come with a comedically chunky set of boots for players to fill and each of these factions have a really memorably silhouetted archetype horrid bugs do good fighting robot virus steal your brain why is lion make hot deals creepy plant wants to chat creepy plants in your area right now right now and sadly right off the bat with prophecy of kings there's very little of the clean and simple fun of the characters that we've seen in the base game marvel robot bird man space face billy no mate but out of these seven only two of these factions meet that bill of being immediately evocative and memorable crunchy space dinosaurs that will temporarily eat your ships and weird alien friend that can jump through nebulas our people have traveled through the very absence of time and space i brought some fancy crisps i thought we could put them in a bowl those two generally kind of pop off anything i remember them they do that now admittedly not all of the original cast of 4th edition was solid gold humans as you'd expect pretty boring like i mean they're very enjoyable for everyone else to hate which is which is a plus the pirates are kind of just on the line of being thematically a bit boring but i think they're just okay but even then you know the base game came with 17 different factions to play us and almost all of them you can flick through that deck and you go yep yep oh yeah oh yeah space fish do science and these two-dimensional factoids that you really easily absorb are important not just for keeping the game tight and flowing but also just to encourage a little bit of light role play you know in the same way that you would do by having simple archetypes in a mega game you're a scientist you're a soldier you're the actual pope and i think to a degree everybody who plays ti loves that part of the game but it's just the cherry atop a pyramid of information that i think is dividing the types of people who play this game and oh my gosh there is so much information within this game all these different units to remember all these different things you can research in your own little private deck including faction specific stuff secret objectives secret action cards but the thing is based on how i play this game i'm not sure that familiarity with all of this is something you're ever supposed to actually have because for me the purpose of this dizzying web of potentials isn't to work it out to suss out how it all works no no the purpose is fuzziness the gentle obfuscation and i don't just mean like not knowing what's going on with other players i mean when i play twilight imperium quite often i don't know what's going on with me i don't exactly know what i'm doing in the early game all this information is very manageable but as the day stretches on and brains get gently slapped by the big wet rubber glove of fatigue you realize that that tech you researched to solve that one specific problem two hours ago you forgot to use it since also you've got this thing and that thing and that planet gets plus one to that and you forgot about all of that too but honestly that's fine because the only thing that matters now four hours into the game is that you crush that bastard lion and so here's the problem i like to play ti like it's a mega game but mega games are unknowable you know at the end of the day they're being constantly conjured up by a bunch of wobbling human brains you can't keep up with that this is something you can fully understand you can get to a point where every threat every inference you already kind of know which action card they're going to play because you've seen them all and you just have the gut feeling for it now that's interesting but i'm never going to get there and i don't want to get there for reasons that i'll come back to soon and the reason why i'm doing double backwards backflips here to try and conjure up an image of who might play this game in a way that i don't which is not a good practice for a critic i'm just going to put that out there it's because i am just desperately trying to understand who prophecy of kings is for and i can only presume that it's for people who really want ti to be expanded with more stuff down here that keeps you focused on what's happening on the table for me i've already got way too much of that and i don't want anything being taken away from the bit up here which for me is where the game lives and although yes i don't want loads more things to look at on the table some of the new ideas and this are really cool the way that leaders give you these different abilities that you can unlock during a game by achieving many achievements it tickles all of the little parts of my brain that go games but in reality it's just another thing that you have to remember and another thing that you're expecting other players to care about sufficiently to actively keep an eye on what you're doing we found that this had completely the opposite effect and we just weren't paying attention to what everyone else was doing there's too much to absorb to the point where you just create mental walls around yourself because it's like i've got three different sets of secret cards i've got three different types of objective i'm going for i've got potentially four different powers i might be able to unlock on my faction sheet i don't have the mental space to be thinking about what you might do with your commander power in two or three turns and so because i can't get into that headspace no just not doing any of it not thinking about it don't know what's going on and this is a really really really big problem because ti is all about having plans it's all about being like i've got this master plan it's gonna work because abc now look i've got this card as you go and explain to someone in the kitchen to get them involved in your fabulous conspiracy as soon as you start having turns in a game of ti where you go well i guess i'll just do this because you realize actually you can't think about everything so there's no point thinking i'll just do this that's death you can't have that you can't be playing a game of ti and not be invested in what's happening either thematically or mechanically and on a basic level i think when you add more cranial crunch to a game that will often see your plans being derailed by a bad roll of some dice or somebody having a quite unexpected card in their hands that is just a recipe for saltiness and sadness up until this point has just been personal differences right it's been like this is how i play the game this doesn't gel with it but there's some stuff in here that isn't great and there's some stuff in here that i think even if it's what people wanted it wasn't the right approach to take in expanding on this game because honestly the addition of all of these things that enhances the depth of the strategic part of the game well it just shines a light on something that was already true turning it up to be a little bit brighter revealing the fact that twilight imperium just isn't a great strategy game that's not to say it's a bad one it's just exactly as good as it needs to be for the rest of the experience to work so listen hear me out here what exactly is the game in ti well at the center of the table we've got the jewel in the crown of mechatol rex nobody dares to take it but somebody will and at that point everyone else will start talking grabbing that planet will get you points but winning the game really comes from achieving these objectives and the thing about these objectives is there's a bit of a disconnect here between what they want you to do during the game and what you as players probably want to be doing but it's one of those classic examples of the fact that design rules are useful but breaking them is sometimes the way you make things great you don't want to do this stuff particularly it doesn't it's nothing to do with being a space turtle why should i care but the fact is by forcing players to concentrate on doing these things in between doing all the things that they want to do it allows the game to ensure that there is constant exponential friction between allies and enemies and borders on the board it forces you to be constantly trying to negotiate for slightly more than seems fair to be pushing out into territories that it slightly doesn't seem reasonable ensuring that everything is constantly a little bit tense but crucially doing so in a way that always gives players that ability to say well it's not really my fault i was doing an objective if this game had objectives that only one player could achieve then it wouldn't work it's the fact that you're all trying to do the same thing that allows this to be a shared pool of solidarity for basically poor behavior you can get away with stretching things a little bit further than you should have done because people understand why and they'll probably be doing the same thing next turn as long as nobody pushes their luck and tries to snag more of these than they should at a pace which is kind of silently agreed upon there's never any rules about it but if you've got five points in the first two turns frankly that's gauche i think we should annihilate them and prophecy of kings undermines this communal sense of empathy by having players not just focusing on this during the game but also focusing on their own set of mini objectives to achieve in order to unlock new powers on that faction sheet creating pinch points in the game where i've just been a bit of a dick to somebody else for a reason that they can't directly relate to and that in itself is a tiny pair of poison and listen that's a really understandable misstep of the design but there's some stuff in here that just seems a bit sloppy one of the new factions their whole thing is that they hate another one of the new factions which doesn't seem like the ideal setup for an afternoon of politics and negotiation and the folks that they hate well they've every reason to their entire thing is just they're bastards that's it and this flatness as i mentioned earlier just gets in the way of you feeling thematically engaged with the game but also it causes issues in terms of having that diminished sense of responsibility that you need in a game where sometimes you have to be mean if i'm playing as the necro virus and i start to play and behave in a way which maybe isn't terribly nice that's not going to come as a shock to anybody whereas when i played as the mahatma gene sorcerers during a game four or five times i had to kind of apologize to people around the table and say i'm sorry these folks they're just dicks which is something that the faction design should have done for me and again so many of these issues might be dampened over time by familiarity with the game and the systems if you are that person and you've got this and you love it i am happy for you but i think for most people who play and love t.i prophecy of kings is just going to make the game wilder less predictable and harder to pass in ways which aren't fun and the wildness thing is an odd one for me to be complaining about i developed technology via this artifact that allowed me to destroy a planet as a lifelong fan of cosmic encounter that should have been a really exciting thing to do but in reality i was so bamboozled by all the new systems i couldn't think of a good reason to do it i honestly thought that i want to play around with more stuff that was wild and wacky but actually the balance was already perfect and that stuff just distracted me from keeping an eye on the objectives and the only thing that should distract me from keeping an eye on the objectives in a game of ti is social interactions with other players that is the tug of war of the whole game and it felt like this box of things just in my mind failed to kind of understand that if core tie is a great pretzel dotted with chunks of salt but ultimately pleasant and slightly squishy then prophecy of kings is maybe one that's gone a bit stale very chewy and stays around for such a length of time that the salt really does start to stick around longer than you wanted to but fundamentally at the end of the day eating a stale pretzel just makes you think carr wouldn't it be great if i was eating a fresh pretzel right now and that is that's really what it boils down to for me this is not a bad box of things this is not a terrible expansion yeah it's just that in asking me to play this you're asking me to not play this and i don't want to do that i want to play this if your life has got another flip knows how many games of ti in it then hey fill your boots but maybe i've only got 15 20 games of ti left in my whole life and that's probably a high estimate do i really want to take the chance of playing something that's not going to be as enjoyable as this and for me the answer is just a cold hard no it's just it's too there's too much risk that things get derailed and become not fun in a way which frankly is already a risk with ti if we're being honest so that's the thing now finally what about if you already have this here's the tricky part what about if you've bought this and maybe you haven't played it much yet because of pandemics what's the scenario now is there anything in here that makes this redeemable well this is where it gets tricky because it isn't modular you you take it all or you leave it but there is stuff in here that you can take first of all the pink pieces and the orange pieces honestly i'm having these these are great and with them all of the cards and tiny bits and bobs that you forget about that you're gonna need in order to play an eight player game including just the tiles that let you make massive galaxies with special highways that let you nip around them more easily some of the factions you might be able to use in the main game i really like the idea of bringing in the big dinosaurs don't know if they'd be massively unbalanced or not don't know how much that matters i'm sure that people on the internet will work out which bits of this you can strip out and use effectively in the base game without causing too much chaos but yeah there's there's a bunch of stuff that you're just gonna have to forget about if you don't want this whole new experience including a bag of multi-colored mechs but don't get too sour about that because actually they've done a pretty rubbish job on the production of this and the colors of the plastic don't even match for any of the original factions which is kind of not a big deal but in a game which is so crisp and glossy and nice it's very disappointing and as a final note it is truly rare at shut up and sit down that we make videos like this i don't like to sit here and be pretty wholly negative for an entire video but in this case it really does come from a place of love i love twilight imperium and that's nice so i hope you appreciate why i've had to be mean about this expansion because i love this if you want to watch if you want to feel the love as well and you're not feeling it right now for whatever reason do go and check out either our twilight imperium documentary which i edited it was hellish but it came together really nicely it's a fun thing to watch quince's original review get hype and possibly if you're looking for something of this scale but there is more strategic and you're not interested in all of this talking to people around the table guff that i keep going on about then do check out our review of eclipse eclipse it's just a nice word to say that's all we have time for today so keep on being in space pretend style

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 121,723

Rating: 4.7556453 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Matt Lees, Twilight Imperium, TI4, Prophecy of Kings

Id: l0wChsWC118

Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/cretaceous_bob]

The "fuzziness" that Matt says he wants is, in my opinion, absolutely increased and preserved by POK over base game. More options means more combinations, which means it's much, much harder to completely solve the puzzle of what your enemies are doing or what you should be doing, which increases table interactions in my experience. The more I played base game, the less "fuzzy" the game was, because the options were relatively lower.

He says he wants to not know what even he's doing, and then he says he wants to understand everything enough to have a multi-turn master plan while simultaneously tracking what everyone else is doing. I don't... really get how those two mix.

He complains about the leaders add "mini-objectives" that distract from objective cards, but 50% of those unlockable leaders just point you at the main objectives.

I'm not saying his opinion is wrong; I'm totally sure he didn't enjoy his experience with the expansion and he's just saying that. I'm just trying to understand these reasons he's giving and I can't even start.

[u/pargmegarg]

Normally I can at least understand SUSD's point of view on reviews I disagree with, but I struggle to produce one bad thing to say about PoK while Matt seemed to struggle to produce one good thing to say.

[u/PartarioGoatlegs]

Interesting hints that Quinns is regretting giving Matt his base game though

[u/brandondash]

That was quite a long video to lead up to the obvious point "Don't buy it if you don't play the game a lot"

[u/MrKorasoff]

The only point that resonated with me was the leaders pulling focus away from common objectives. But then again, so do secrets, and they're fine.

The more I think about it, the more the negativity of the review seems based on the mental capacity required to keep track of the new mechanics.

[u/itsnoturday]

Yeah they should have had Quinns review this one. This review is all over the place.

[u/P8bEQ8AkQd]

I've probably played over 100 about 80 games of PoK, I like it, and I will continue to use it, but I completely get where he's coming from.

Twilight Imperium without the expansion is an excellent game and if you're only going to play a couple of games a year then you're not going to miss out on what makes TI great by not getting PoK.

PoK adds news rules and components that are fun and interesting, but the additional overhead they add to getting up to speed with the game probably isn't worth it if you're not playing regularly.

By this I do not mean that the new rules and components are difficult to learn. I mean that keeping track of every factions' abilities in a 6 player game requires a lot more mental effort. And if the next game has a completely different set of factions, then you have to do it all again.

Base game TI has reduced mental load and is still awesome.

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And I do have 2 negatives for PoK.

1) 10 point games aren't as fun now that they usually end by round 5. No, I don't usually have the time or opportunity to play 12 or 14 point games and want to continue doing single session games. But when I do get the opportunity, yes, it is better.

2) Darken the Skies and Become a Martyr are fine for me because I play it regularly, but it's pretty brutal when someone who rarely gets to play gets taken out of the game early because their neighbour had either of these.

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Matt lists a few PoK components that he'd still keep from the expansion such as the 7th and 8th faction colours. I'd add a lot of the new objectives to his list.

[u/Haen_]

Yeah, I think his initial point is the best. If you know you want this, you already own it. I still think its a very good expansion even for people who may be a little on the fence. I can see the criticisms where it may give you too much to focus on, but it definitely fixes a lot of problems with TI (like too many tech objectives). So while I very much enjoyed what this did and I think that it offered us some cool new races and I can at least keep a rough idea of what others are doing, I also love TI and I knew from the get go that I wanted more of it. So PoK was an instant buy for me.

[u/silverwyrm]

It feels like his main cut is roughly: PoK gives players more personal mini-game options which causes them to lose focus on the larger meta-game.

I think that's a fair criticism. I think, as he noted and others have noted, that's a bigger problem for some tables than it is for others.

I also think if I had any criticism of base TI:4 it's that it often felt like there wasn't much to do in the action phase. Move, take planets, build stuff. That's basically it. All of the extra action phase stuff in PoK makes the game feel much more dynamic and engaging, for me personally.