This was the Inaugural game for us with TI. I'd spent a good deal of time thinking about the game, and sounding out how the strategy worked, and had more or less memorized how the strategy cards worked.
No one else had.
I was thus anticipating that the game could easily work out to be a five player, five hour affair. WRONG.
I'd grossly underestimated the level of information overload that would occur in other's brains--the strategy phase in the midgame lasted inordinately long as people hemmed and hawed over their choices, not yet familiar with the cards and their interactions,
While elsewhere a myriad of vocabulary attacks assaulted folks. The strategy card executions, the comprehension delay of how secondary abilities executed, and the way that builds were spent and limited all served as horrendously underestimated timesinks.
The whole affair ended up netting twelve hours. Which left me to think harder on how better to establish a baseline vocabulary to help get the facts into people's brains. For minds that are accustomed to thinking that pieces on the board equal pieces that can be brought to the fight, the game is something of a new problem: I heard a thesis put out that 'the game is sluggish, you can't bring forces together.'
The truth is, in fact, that the game encourages smaller battles across wider fronts; that rendezvous of fleets must occur at their target, and that production is a pipeline--produced units are little able to defend existing ones.
Stardock capacities are a puzzlement to me still--how does one accumulate dozens of fighters when one build will often only net four, for the loss of a command counter and so many resources?
We mused in the end on how a disengaged and insular strategy might do well, by waiting to discover the important bottom objectives; and how this sort of strategy would do little to prolong the game, and in fact wouldn't hurt the atmosphere at all.
As with all initiative games, however, the go-go-go-go-pause pattern easily fails if people aren't truly 'with' the table, and their heart is elsewhere. With turn-based games, phones and facebooks don't neccessarily bomb the game out--sadly, the age of multitasking
Polemical Advocacy, Motivation and Advice for the original meaning of the word, Role Playing Game
