There are three reasons I did not sell Hadrian’s Wall after playing Twilight Inscription. I managed to get a picture of all twenty four Factions in Twilight Inscription – they would never be this close together without a war breaking out in Twilight Imperium. The first half of our demo was spent simply wrapping my head around its remoulding of Twilight Imperium into four sheets and some dice, with the second half spent excited to see what I could do with the basics under my belt. I have always wanted to play Twilight Imperium, but the high player count, complexity, and most importantly, game length, prevented me from doing so. Well, at least until Fantasy Flight Games announced a new game premiering at Gen Con 2022. A much more streamlined version of their flagship IP called Twilight Inscription? Sign me up!! Wait… it’s a roll and write? And it still takes two hours? Seriously?? In a similar vein, if a council event occurs, such as Convene the Council Technology Embargo and Corporate Tax Breaks

You may have caught it earlier when we mentioned the player count, but you can play this game solo as well! There are a lot of things to spend resources on across all four sheets, and figuring out the best place to do so is part of the core strategy in Twilight Inscription. Maybe you want to discover new systems or race to Mecatol Rex on Navigation; perhaps you’d rather develop some planets on Expansion; you could always generate commodities to amass your wealth on Industry; or maybe you just want to build up your fleet on Warfare. You’ll gradually gain victory points no matter which sheet you invest in, but take care not to neglect any of them; otherwise, unexpected events could throw you off your game! Twilight Inscription uses the same story and set dressing as Imperium. The Lazax empire, who once ruled the galaxy, have fallen and created a power vacuum. It is now up to the many factions of the known galaxy to try and prove themselves worthy of the throne. You do this by the only real metric that matters, victory points.

How Does It Feel To Play Twilight Inscription?

Additionally, each player will get four different sheets to write on – Navigation, Expansion, Industry and Warfare. They are recommended to be arranged so that the titles of each sheet meet in the center of the player area – but in the end, you can put them however you want. Note that these sheets are double sided; the B side offers an identical layout while the A sides are different. As you play the game, you will try to gain Assets – things in circles. Things in dotted circles must be used immediately when gained. Things in dashed circles can be gained and then used later when the player wants to spend those things. Each player will get a chalk marker to use on their sheets. Much like how Twilight Imperium is a massive board game, Twilight Inscription is a massive roll-and-write. Where most roll-and-writes have each player filling out a single board (referred to as a “player sheet”) as they play, Twilight Inscription has you filling out four! It's not perfect, but Twilight Inscription is surprisingly interactive for a roll and write game (Image credit: Future) War – Here, you resolve two fights, one against your opponent on each side. You draw a new deployment line, then look below that line to calculate your strength to the left and the right side – i.e. the number of nodes filled in. Write the number for each side down and then compare against your neighbors. If you have the higher value, you win the positive asset (found above where you wrote your fighting value); and if you have the lower value, you take the negative asset (found below your recorded strength). In a tie, no one gets anything. Do this for both sides.

Wow. There’s a lot to process in this game. The original game, Twilight Imperium, has been described by some as “epic”, and this R&W version of it is just about the most “epic” in the R&W genre – both in scope of time as well as the number of possible marks you can and will make on the FOUR sheets in the game. Players will be trying to stake their claim on Mechatol Rex, the now vacant galactic throne once held by the Lazax Empire. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a new ruler will rise from the ashes to take their place. Each round players will resolve an event card. These could allow players to expand and develop their empire, vote on laws in the galactic senate or even plunge the whole galaxy into war.The largest difference in the two games is the absence of the board.In Twilight Imperium, you are all on the same board interacting with each other and the decisions of another player might severely hurt or help your strategy. In Twilight Inscription each of you are on your own individual boards. While this is common in roll-and-writes, this takes away from the communal aspect of the original game’s experience. If you are that type of player, Twilight Inscription may not be the game for you. The Takeaway Even in its most recent Fourth Edition, sessions of Twilight Imperium are infamous for stretching from a handful of hours - a fairly brisk playthrough - into the double digits, with some players dedicating an entire day to building up their spacefaring factions, battling over planets and the solar system’s political core in pursuit of galactic supremacy.