Twilight Inscription

After at least three failed attempts to get it to the table, dear Ioannis Prodromos's persistence finally brought Twilight Inscription before the full BLTG IKE board. It was not the ideal first game: some people already knew very well what they were doing, the rest of us were wrestling with a small flood of symbols, and in the end the CPO vetoed the session when we were about three quarters of the way through.

At its core, it is roll-and-write / bingo: you follow the available results and try to translate them correctly onto your own sheet. The issue for a newcomer is not a lack of things to do, but having far too many things to understand at once. The “seven thousand symbols” do not help at all when you are still trying to work out which box connects to which other one.

The interaction, at least as I experienced it, is hard to keep track of at a full table. The experienced players seemed to be building their plans while the rest of us were discovering things the hard way — such as the fact that war is something you would preferably understand before it finds you. With fewer players, I could probably watch what everyone else is doing more closely and make more sense of how we relate to one another.

I was not blown away, mainly because roll-and-write / bingo is not a mechanism that wins me over by itself. Even so, I can clearly see why people play it and why they consider it, by a wide margin, among the best in its genre. I might give it another chance, ideally with three players and a little less need to decipher the universe while playing.