I had high hopes that Twilight Imperium v3 would be the game I've yet to find: the sweeping science fiction epic that works. Stuffing a lot of desirable elements (exploration, colonization, aliens, intrigue, space battles, etc.) into a single game, while still keeping it playable, is a challenge that past games valiantly tried, and failed, to meet.

The first, disastrous mission into space
Imagine my disappointment when our first game of TI3 was a disaster. We played the "standard game," with public objective cards flipped one at a time whenever someone chose the Imperial strategy. We applied only one suggested variant, dropping the value of choosing Imperial from two victory points to one.

After seven hours, the leading player had only a few victory points, and many of us were frustrated. Through a combination of bad luck and my own experience, I was stuck in a corner of the galaxy with few resources. Other players got tired of building up fleets that were quickly blown out of space (often by the out-of-control Jol-Nar player).

We all scratched our heads and wondered, "What do people see in this game that we don't?" TI3 went back on the shelf for several months, since plenty of other games, with less risk of hours of frusttration, commanded our attention.

Mission two--success!
Still, I held on to a fragment of hope that TI3 might work. When Dave Peters suggested we try again, I enthusiastically agreed. Having been burned once, we had some idea what not to do this time.

I summarized our approach, as newbies, in this thread. The short version:

* Reveal all public objectives, using the Age of Empires variant.
* Use the "fixed set-up" maps, available on the FFG web site. (But should have been in the original game, methinks.)
* Set up in advance.
* Skip any other variants.
* Focus, focus, focus on the victory points. Age of Empires helps you do that, since you can see how to score. However, it still takes a little extra discipline to avoid other distractions.

I've never seen as complete a turnaround in game play as we experienced. In quick succession, I played three games in one week:

* A three-player game at our normal Tuesday night get-together. We started at 6 PM, and ended early enough for us to squeeze a few games of Race for the Galaxy before midnight.
* A four-player game at the monthly game club meeting. We finished that game in about 5 hours, so we were able to play Manoeuvre and Race for the Galaxy before calling it a day.
* A four-player game the following Tuesday. This session went longer than the first, finishing around 1 AM. However, we started almost an hour later, and we had objectives that were a bit harder to achieve. We added a couple of variants

I'm a convert. I'd play TI3 again, at practically any opportunity. We learned how to keep the game shorter, and more importantly, on track towards someone winning.

The variants we chose made all the difference. We're a pretty intelligent, mature group of people, yet TI3 remained a mystery to us until we dropped a lot of the random elements in the "standard game," such as player-built maps and initially unrevealed public objectives. I'd be glad to try these elements, now that I have a firmer grasp of the game--but no one should learn the game that way.

The road to the future
I've seen a lot of people not even try TI3, since they've heard the stories about the long, long games. As we've discovered, the game does not have to burn as many hours as some fear.

FFG may have done itself a major disservice by not putting more thought into what new players need to learn the game. Reading the designer's notes, it's clear a lot of thought went into solving other problems, such as how to prevent "turtling." I'm betting, however, that most or all of the playtesters were veterans of earlier editions of Twilight Imperium--and therein might lie the source of the problem.

Enthusiastic fans of a game can be both a blessing and a curse--especially if the game is relatively complex. An especially vocal part of Starfleet Battles' fans drove the game far, far away from the simple, relatively easy to learn game that resembled the original Star Trek TV series and fit into a ziplock bag. That game won a lot of converts, in its day. Fast forward several years, and SFB had clearly evolved into a niche game.

Gestures towards new players, such as the Advanced Squad Leader starter kits, and the lighter-weight Federation Commander, make all the difference. If I were FFG, I'd think hard about how to make future editions of TI more accessible to new players.

Having to go to the company web site is, obviously, a less effective way to find out how to learn a game that you expect to be complete and accessible as soon as you open the box. (In all honesty, some TI3 enthusiasts here on BGG don't help.) FFG might also think how to "get the word out" directly, through game retailers, for the current version of the game. If my local game store and put a "quick start" summary of TI3 in the same bag as the game itself, that first session might have been a lot less painful.