The surface of the table is no longer visible. Over 100 plastic ships, 37 cardboard planet tiles, a litany of cards and information sheets. In the skies above the simulated galaxy, there are conversations taking place. Two players that, a few short turns ago considered each other allies, are arguing over control of a planet that would help either of them score an objective. On the other side of the board a player is crushed because he fuelled the war machine of his neighbour, hoping to sic him on others, only to have the mad dog turn and crash through the ships and defences he’d spent 3 hours assembling.
This is Twilight Imperium.
If you’re reading this because you’re; Looking at buying Twilight Imperium; Waiting for it to arrive or; It’s sitting on your shelf because you can’t convince your friends to play a 10-hour game. You’re in the right place.
Twilight Imperium 4th Edition is a game of obscene scope. It consumes an entire day, takes up more table space than a Christmas dinner and even once it’s packed away, the box weighs that of a small dog. Prophecy of Kings then, is a massive expansion to a massive game. Is it worth it?
I’ll preface this with a simple answer, and get to the details later: Prophecy of Kings is worth it even if you’ve never played the base game before. It expands and rebalances the base game in so many ways that you’ll struggle to list them once you’ve played it. It does all of this with minimal rules overhead, and little further setup.
What is Twilight Imperium Fourth Edition and how do I play it?
Twilight Imperium is, to quote the box, “An Epic Board Game of Conquest, Politics and Trade”. You and 2-5 others will be assigned one of the 17 factions and assemble a galaxy map board from the hexagonal tiles. The rulebook has some ready-made maps and a system for drafting them but there’s nothing stopping you from designing your own board and letting everyone choose their own faction. However you do it, when all’s said and done, you will end up with a table-wide board made up of planets, movement-altering ‘anomalies’ and wormholes that connect otherwise far away areas, all of this is stamped in each corner by each player’s selected faction’s unique home system and starting fleet of ships.
TI4 is a game of victory points, first to 10 wins. Player turns are part of rounds. Usually 5-6, with a hard limit of 10. Victory Points are scored primarily through “Public Objectives”, starting the game with 2 and revealing a new one each round until someone has scored 10 points.
It’s this objective system that creates the politics that the game is famous for. If there is an objective to ‘Control 4 Hazardous Planets’ your opponent may ask to invade a planet of yours, pay you off to ensure there is no recourse.
“I’ll let you have it back next turn” they promise. You know better, you have taken the deal regardless.
This will inevitably trigger a war that will prevent either of you winning.
On your turn, once you have gone round choosing ‘Strategy Cards’ to determine turn order, you will be activating abilities, building ships, starting fights and trading resources. Combat is deceptively simple with each ship having a combat value and rolling 1 10-sided die to try and meet it. All ships fire at the same time so combat is a few hands of dice and then choosing which of your ships will be destroyed by your opponent’s successful hits. Repeated until someone is obliterated or chooses to retreat.
The above ideas all work together to create a cohesive experience that will have you competing with the table to achieve these Public Objectives. Forming alliances to share some wealth, or split a territory. Only for that to fall apart when someone else offers a better deal or crashes an inexplicably large fleet into your home and decimates your plans, all so they can score a ‘Secret Objective’ they’ve held for 4 hours.
How does Prophecy of Kings change TI4?
As much as a TI4-sized game deserves a TI4-sized blog and write-up, that’s about as in-depth as one can get without losing the audience. I’ve skipped over quite a few elements; The game’s famous ‘agenda phase’ where players use their controlled planets to vote on new rules; or perhaps I should’ve mentioned the promissory notes, the contracts that can be traded with other players to make specific agreements enforceable; Maybe I’ve skipped the 35 card deck of ‘Technologies’ each player has to upgrade their abilities and fleets.
Sadly, TI4 contains too much game to cover in a short piece. Why then, does the title of this blog suggest that the game should be made even bigger, and for a first-time player at that? Prophecy of Kings is a big box of more. 7 more factions to play, 22 more system tiles to add map diversity, 2 more colours of plastic (providing support for 7-8 players), 9 ‘hyperlane’ tiles that let you get creative with map layouts, 40 more objectives, 20 action cards. None of these things though, significantly alter the game in any way. And in a vacuum they would simply be additions to provide variety to players who have become bored with the base game.
In addition to these ‘more’ elements, Prophecy of Kings has a number of replacements in its stock. Following the inserted sheet that tells you what to put where, various pieces will be improved and rebalanced by swaps. As an added bonus, PoK fits entirely into the original box for Twilight Imperium 4th Edition. It’s almost travel friendly, almost.
The real kicker though, in the Prophecy of Kings box is the addition of Mechs, Leaders and Exploration.
With the addition of PoK, your chosen faction’s sheet will now have an additional pull-out section that contains space for each faction’s 3 unique leaders and mech unit.
Each set of leaders contains 1 of each of the following
- Agent: Once per round abilities that can be used on yourself or another player, this adds another tool to everyone’s arsenal to barter with.
- Commander: Unlocked through unique criteria, adds a passive ability that will be useful to you but can also be shared with other players via the new Alliance promissory note.
- Hero: An incredibly powerful one-time ability such as teleporting a giant fleet across the map or swapping the positions of 2 entire system tiles.
Combine these with the mech unit, a new type of ground force that has a special ability unique to that faction, and each faction gains a new level of depth.
They have also been used to balance the factions. Previously underutilised factions like The Embers of Muaat, famous only for starting with the ‘War Sun’, the most powerful ship in the game, and hamstrung in just about every other way to compensate, now have their Mech, Agent and Commander intertwined with their base-game ability to trade a token for free units, to create a consistently usable value engine in and around their War Suns. Then their Hero adds further threat with its ability to destroy an entire planet system, killing all enemy units and replacing it with a ‘Supernova’, a kind of tile only useful to the Muaat.
Exploration is the other new mechanism added to TI4 with PoK. It is 5 small decks of cards, one for each of the 3 planet traits, a ‘Frontier’ deck for planetless systems and a set of powerful ‘Relics’.
Exploration takes place organically as players move ships around the board. The first time a planet is captured by a player, a card is drawn from the deck of the corresponding trait, the player reads it aloud and actions it immediately. The decks range from minor abilities like free ‘Trade Goods’ (currency) to permanently improving the resource value of that planet (This of course is marked with a nice bespoke token, TI4 being the component monster that it is). The frontier deck will have you finding new planets or wormholes that will change the board while the game is ongoing.
A Relic is drawn by trading in 3 ‘relic fragments’ or the same colour, these are found in the 3 main exploration decks with colourless fragments that can fill gaps being found in the Frontier deck. They can destroy planets, net you victory points or even let you break certain rules like the Secret Objective limit.
The exploration system makes every game feel different. They create new dynamics and scenarios that players can’t account for. Perhaps you explore an already valuable planet near your home and suddenly its resource value has risen, now it’s even better. Which would be good but now your neighbours are eyeing up that powerful planet and plotting to steal it from you.
A perceived negative here is that all of this adds mental load. That it becomes more difficult to negotiate when you must consider an adversary’s Hero ability on top of their visible fleets. And what about those Relic Fragments they have? They could draw the planet destruction Relic and that would threaten your position further.
Something else that can be construed as negative with Prophecy of Kings is the addition of these unpredictable elements. The big box of more, more tiles, factions, cards and powers ultimately means less consistency, less predictability. Every new planet gained will randomly improve or give something away, all players gain once-per-game abilities that can turn the tide of war, players sift through a deck of powerful artifacts that could push someone to victory unexpectedly.
Both of these though, in my eyes, are what makes it truly shine. These additional elements bring everything to life and add moments of deeper political intrigue while ensuring that no two games of this are ever comparable.
Twilight Imperium is not a tight competitive game where meticulous strategy and chess-like thinking will guarantee you a win against lesser players. It’s a game where you spend an hour negotiating for a planet, only to have a third-party take it from you out of spite because you didn’t give them a favourable deal in the opening minutes of the game. It has the elements of a grand strategy game, and it certainly does play like one, but it retains that almost party-game-esque insanity that will have you plotting, scheming and laughing for hours on end. Prophecy of Kings enhances this significantly, and I would never play without it.
If you are considering purchasing Twilight Imperium, do strongly consider picking up Prophecy of Kings. The additional rules overhead is about 3 sentences when explaining to a new player, and it integrates so well that an unfamiliar player would struggle to tell you which elements come from an expansion. The only time I would advise against this is if it is not financially feasible for you to do so. In which case, you will still absolutely enjoy Twilight Imperium while you save up for Prophecy of Kings.
