How to Play

The goal of Twilight Inscription is to have the most points at game end, you add them up from each of the 4 sheets. Each sheet has 2 main ways to get points, from its objective everyone is trying to accomplish, then by just circling the victory point symbols on each planet.

Roll-and-write style: It’s all about circling and crossing out things. If you circle something, that means you have it- circle VP or an asset? To spend an asset, cross it out.

At the start of each round, you’ll flip over the event deck, which will usually tell you what resources you get to spend. Core idea of marking stuff on sheets: you spend a resource, to cross out the matching icon on a sheet. But you get to choose which sheet you want to mark every round, so let’s get into them.

1. Navigation: Explore and claim stuff. Explore by extending an orange line, and claiming is circling assets (namely planets)

2. Expansion: Cross out claimed planets (probably from Navigation) to unlock planets, where you unlock assets by spending resources to cross out their exact symbol on planets.

3. Industry: Circle assets… as long as they’re next to something that’s next to a crossed out (AKA scrapped) area

4. Warfare: Deploy war units by spending resources.

Oh yeah, Warfare is important, because 4 times in the game you’ll flip over a war event card, where you fight your neighbors from troops you’ve deployed into your warfare sheet! Once the 4th warfare card resolves, the game is over.

Also remember the objectives everyone wants? Well, if you’re the first to get it, you get the big number, then flip it over, everyone else can get the small one. Same goes for claiming Mecatol Rex, if you’re the first to get it, you write your name down, that’s points.

There’s also a voting phase, where an event card will be flipped, and everyone has to vote on a random agenda, through votes they’ve acquired throughout the game. You vote to pass or fail it, and if there’s more total yeses, you get the top part of the agenda. If more total no’s, you get the bottom.

One more thing to mention- on the resource giving events, once everyone has spent the resources from the card, then you roll additional dice, and the grey dice are additional resources everyone gets.

This is the BARE BONES of the game.

Pros

Twilight Inscription really lives up to the Twilight Imperium mantle.. by not only stealing a lot of its art, but also providing some new art on all the event cards. Also, there’s a TON of flavor text throughout the game.

And its also really impressive how they managed to cram SO many symbols into each of the sheets, without making hunting for symbols confusing.

The chunky dice are nice to roll, and the included “chalk markers” are extremely functional in not being smudgable via wrist, and all of them are still working after 4 games!

And the dice, man these are really well made, though they are so big you might want to roll them separately or have 2 people roll them.

Rulebook wise this is also really smooth to go through, with examples and visuals EVERYWHERE!

Now for gameplay pros, and we have to start with how Twilight Inscription gives you cool puzzling by making each of your 4 sheets a mini-game that all play off each other. You can’t blindly pick a single sheet every round because of how the unlocks work. Very frequently you’ll have to go to 1 sheet as a prerequisite to do another, or do another more efficiently.

Need to cross stuff off of the Expansion sheet? Well, you’ll have to have planets to get that, need to get them via Navigation. Do you want tech unlocks? Well you need to get those Tech assets from mostly Expansion.

And we finally gotta get to the TI goodness of the TWENTY-FOUR faction cards! That’s right, 24 freaking faction abilities in a single base box. Now these are decently similar to their usage in the Twilight Imperium games, so here we go:

• Space Lion Hacan, which are all about trade goods, starting with some, and having their usage doubled!

• Embers of Muuat, who never get blocked by red dots on Warfare deployment. Plus they get the equivalent of 3 trade goods by surrounding these red dots! They can also get a prototype War Sun through their Faction Ability, which helps you surround a red dot!

• The funky Nomads, who draw their own symbols on sheets to get trade goods. Then they can look at the top of the event deck at anytime, which is brilliant to plan for warfare.

Let’s talk about the progression of Twilight Inscription though, as you’ll see your economy ramping as the rounds go on. There’s 3 colored, or focus die are guaranteed resources for the sheets you want, so you get to last longer per round as the game goes on.

Then there’s the 8 technology unlocks we teased a little, 2 for each sheet. Like, Wormholes let you explore on Navigation with shortcuts, or how both Expansion techs let you tick off tons of planet icons.

When you add up trade goods and focus die, its not surprising that mid-late game you can have 8+ resources to spend on a sheet if you want, that’s so much crossing out of stuff!

Then we gotta talk about replayability, because each of these sheets… have 2 different sides! So you can have slightly different boards to play on every game, with technically 9 different types of sheets for each category. And you can mix and match the numbers in a bunch of ways. Combine that with the 16 relics and 24 factions, and there’s even more interest.

The last pro is that Twilight Inscription runs true to time of about 90-120 minutes! Like, the game tells you when it ends on some of the last card flips, so its impossible for the game to drag. Plus, since everyone is marking their sheets simutaleusly, it doesn’t really increase the playtime by much if you add more players.

Cons

You know how we said the rulebook is good? Well the additional sheet, called the learn as you play, is not, where it tends to not give an overarching reason of why you’re doing anything. We recommend THOROUGHLY reading the normal rulebook if you choose to use this tutorial. Then the 1-2 player in the rulebook could have used a lot more examples of how each of its rounds work, because gone are the thorough examples from the normal part of the rulebook.

The next con is the markers, yep they’re just inherently going to add annoyance. They’re not smudgable during gameplay, so it takes a good amount of work to clean them up afterwards. It really feels like: ‘cleanup time’ as you wipe down a lot of player boards together.

The included tiny eraser is for spot-cleaning, so eventually you’ll want to use alternatives, like a proper dry-eraser. Water does help reduce elbow grease.

This cleaning is just what’s going to happen in a roll and write system without throwaway sheets… so not really a clean way around this, but maybe an included microfiber would have been nice?

Let’s talk about visuals now, where even though we praised the sheet efficiency, the way its set up can lead to some confusion. Like, if you set the sheets up in the recommended 2x2, the layouts being swapped allows for focus die unlocks on 2 different sheets to be right next to each other. In the heat of a round, its entirely possible to see the wrong focus die unlock for your current sheet and think you have it.

Speaking of cheating, they give you a resource tracker as an optional way to manage resources you’ve gotten or spent for the round… but its really small, and is only on one sheet, making it annoying to use if you’re on a separate sheet. Some type of spin-down dial would be ideal to keep track of resources.

And what the heck for the dice- why aren’t the symbols on grey ones color coded- they are for literally every other part of the game? It’s all too often we would be playing and get confused about what symbol was what when you threw in the focus die- same symbol, different colors.

All these visuals annoyances add up to a feeling of ‘maybe accidentally cheating’ during rounds, especially when the game gets more complicated. After all, once you start marking a lot of stuff, boards do look like a bunch of orange.

Our first gameplay con is to do with how Twilight Inscription has a weird approach to emergent randomness for a Euro that ends up hurting its fairly rigid gameplay. We mean tight by saying how the game has very low politics, and its only emergent randomness manifests itself in weird ways.

The first emergent randomness is one of the main resource engines: random dice rolling for each round to give 3 more resources- could be any of the symbols that you don’t want to beholden to, right? So to get guaranteed resources, you want to get a focus die as soon as possible to get a resource that you want.

It makes sense why focus dice are guaranteed resources- it is a way to offset the big randomness from the grey dice, which while adding some tension to each round, can bite you in the butt if you REALLY need to circle ONE thing on a sheet and you just can’t because of a weird dice roll.

So what if the grey dice had guaranteed resources and the focus dice were random instead? That would lend to more decision making in letting you plan in how to use the grey dice, and then getting to react to what bonuses are rolled, IF you unlocked them. This would better embrace this game’s rigid nature, where currently its designed where you just always rush focus dice, otherwise you lose.

The second emergent randomness is the relics, which you only get through Navigation, and feel out of place in this rigid euro, with their power levels and varied abilities. One, called Tyrant’s Lament, gives good VP and a way to boost warfare values AFTER combat is flipped. Another called Stellar Converter, can end up giving up to 8 free assets to spend across 3 sheets, while also being worth 5 points.

Conversely, something like Crown of Thalnos is one of the worst ones to draw, since it gives a low VP payout, and only gives you an additional +1 strength in all wars… that’s equivalent to a single extra infantry in each war.

Relics are just very one dimensional cards, that if you draw a good one, that’s freaking efficient; if your draw is ehh, it can feel like a buzzkill. There’s no way to get a new relic, there’s no counterplay against an opponent’s relic, you can’t fight over it… relics just do the thing when explored.

After talking about that randomness, let’s talk about two main mechanics that feel to not quite hit their goals in the game: Warfare and Voting. So the idea behind these two mechanics are to add player interaction that makes you interested outside of your bubble of the 4 sheets you’re marking, but they usually don’t.

Warfare can initially seem like an arms race between you and your 2 neighbors- but the payouts from winning aren’t that spectacular. Dragging down someone by 1 VP isn’t that impactful, and the maximum you can get from winning is 3 points, and there are minimal benefits to getting population or points by covering them up with deployed troops. Rather, the best way to get points in warfare is to simply build things. If you spend for a War Sun, that’s 4 points! Dreadnaught is 2 points!

This lends to end game fights not really being as much of a mind game fight between you and your neighbors, rather a push to deploy the most ships possible to get points there. Doesn’t help that the 2 out of the 3 Warfare objectives are all about just filling up as many boxes as possible- its more efficient to place the biggest ships.

Warfare prioritization is still a valid strategy, but just has to be done with specific factions that give additional benefits for winning fights, like the L1Z1X. But just don’t expect interesting fighting from this game, and you’ll find most of the time you want to save your attention to your 3 other mini-games, and not neighbor’s combat strength.

Voting is the other weird one, where its really hard to have sway during that phase… because there’s practically nothing to use for politics! You can’t really convince people to not vote on a thing, by promising to not attack them, or promising to give them trade goods, or promising to send them troops… all stuff in TI4… you just don’t have any means to politic in this efficiency race!

So yes, while some agendas, like a Technology Embargo sounds really cool to prevent players from building certain ships for the rest of the game, its execution can be wonky. Sure, you can add up everyone’s votes and guess what their intentions are… I mean by looking at all their boards carefully… but the payoff from that work still doesn’t necessarily give you a solid ground to cast votes well.

And yes again, some factions, like the Naalu where you get to vote last or have your votes become resources, or the Space Turtles to spend votes to win a war, do allow a little more nuance with the voting phase: especially if you’re creative about diplomacy. You can say, oh how about we both agree not to fight each other, and then we BOTH win the war with my XXCHA ability- win win eh and we don’t have to dedicate time to warfare. But these diplomacy factions are more the exception to how voting is normally handled.

Also, for the 3rd agenda, there’s even less nuance because votes aren’t worth anything at the end of the game, so you usually mindlessly all the votes into pass or fail.

To make this worse, voting in 1-2 player is just kind of a joke. See, the robot gets a baseline amount of votes, then you just have to vote higher than it + some number based off a symbol on a die roll. Well, this gives you a very expected range of at most +2 on the vote, so you generally just dump in more votes to beat it if you can- and you’ll always want to beat it because there’s slightly modified agendas in this mode. If you don’t have enough votes, then you just save your votes, then the next time around you probably beat it.