Twilight Imperium has had a rep for endurance almost since it was first introduced. A dense tabletop experience of spacebound strategy, it’s become the face of marathon-length board gaming as players spend hours after hours dictating their space operatic maneuvers through the medium of many, many, many little tokens and cards being shuffled and passed around the board. So, good news for people who’ve always been interested but daunted by those occasionally tall tales of just what an effort it even is to get the ball rolling on a session, let alone finish a game: the whole process is about to get a lot easier, with some caveats.
This week, Asmodee and Red Square Games announced that they would be working together on the first-ever official digital edition of Twilight Imperium, based off the fourth edition of the game introduced in 2017. Although community-created ways to play Twilight Imperium online have existed for many years through platforms like Tabletop Simulator, Twilight Imperium Digital will adapt the board game experience as faithfully as possible, fully implementing the fourth-edition ruleset and its expansions as players vie for control of the galaxy, giving the experience some gamified snazz while not sacrificing the depth of strategy the tabletop game is known for.
As well as including online multiplayer, the ability to play against AI opponents (who presumably can’t complain about how long it actually takes to play a full game of Twilight Imperium when you’re hankering), and even asynchronous multiplayer options to let you play the game at your own pace, Twilight Imperium digital will offer onboarding tutorials and interactive tooltips to teach newcomers to play the game, with no worries about having to remember the myriad rules.
But perhaps most important of all to some people is that, of course, the digital version of Twilight Imperium means no more having to set up oodles of tiles, tokens, little plastic ships, and cards to even get going—and putting it all away just means closing the game. It sounds silly to anyone who’s not actually played the board game, but it cannot be overstated what a barrier even the simple act of physically preparing to play Twilight Imperium can be sometimes.
That is part of the charm of Twilight Imperium, in some ways. Even beyond the physicality of moving your fleets from one planet to another, that almost ritualistic process of having to prepare and lay out the galaxy map and make sure all your pieces are in place before you get to Twilight Imperium‘s trademark back and forth of trade, diplomacy, and military strategy—the administrative aspect is almost just another layer of that, a commitment to the process that you’re about to undertake.
But even if you do lose that process by relinquishing administration over to a video game version… just think of all the more time you’ll have to actually play Twilight Imperium!
Twilight Imperium Digital will release on PC, but while it’s currently available to wishlist on Steam, its release date is unannounced.
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