Twilight Inscription

 

Twilight Inscription is a Roll & Write game from Fantasy Flight Games for 1-8 people. Set in the world of Twilight Imperium, you are using results from flipping cards and rolling dice to improve your empire and make the most powerful empire on the galaxy.

 

 

As in the original, you are building up a fleet of ships, expanding your territory to new planets, gaining new technologies and building up your commodities. Unlike the original, Twilight Inscription has full simultaneous play where everybody not only picks what they want to do, but also goes through the actions at the same time. On a turn of Twilight Inscription, you start by flipping over an event card. Most are strategy event cards, where you will choose one of your 4 sheets, utilize the icons on the event card, then the dice will get rolled and you'll use the results on the sheet you chose. War, council and production event cards will instead have you engage with the other players. The war event card has you compare your fleet against the players on your right and left, gaining bonuses for having a stronger fleet and losing points for having a weaker fleet. The council event card has you vote on an agenda with a variable outcome using as many or as few vote assets from your Industry sheet as you want. The production event card produces trade goods for all the +1 trade good assets you have on your Industry sheet. Once you've reached the final event, you'll add up your victory points from all your sheets and whoever has the most victory points is the winner!

 

 

The most obvious comparison to attempt to make is with Twilight Imperium, as it is a game set in the world of Twilight Imperium, trying to emulate a game of Twilight Imperium, but as a roll & write game. And in that sense, it is a simpler, faster game than Twilight Imperium with less downtime in between your actions. But if you want to play a game similar to Twilight Imperium, then Twilight Inscription won't quite fulfill that itch the same way other large space games like Eclipse or Xia will. That being said, it also is hard to compare Twilight Inscription to other roll & write games, as it is much deeper and longer than other roll & writes. The closest roll & write games to Twilight Inscription would be games like the Clever series or Rolling Realms, where you have multiple different locations to mark in different ways. The game I think might be closest though is the game Black Angel. Both are space games where the dice that get rolled get utilized to take various actions and while it may look like there's a lot that make the game super complicated, both have reasonably straight forward gameplay once you get a handle on it. With Twilight Inscription, while there are 4 different sheets, each with their own ways to utilize the dice icons, the question to ask is "what do I want to set up on this turn?" and then you figure out the best way to use the dice on that sheet. That isn't to say that it's simple, but I'd say it looks more daunting than it actually ends up being.

 

 

If you are looking for a decently long (~2 hours) game with a large decision space that has very little downtime, Twilight Inscription is a great game.

 

Twilight Inscription is available now from our webstore.