A roll & write of galactic proportions

Twilight Inscription. A spicy one. The new roll and write spin-off of Twilight Imperium had us really excited - and not just us 😅 There were only 55 copies for sale each day at GenCon, so people were literally running to buy it. We were lucky to get ahold of a copy by only shamefully power-walking. 🤣

So how does the game work? Each player gets 4 laminated sheets - these represent the 4 Xs: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. Every round an event card will be drawn. You play until you draw the special one that signals the end of the game. The player with the most points wins.🏆 The event can be one of four types: strategy, war, council or production:

🚩 Strategy: you choose an active board for the turn, then spend resources shown on the card to mark things. Dice are also rolled which give additional resources.

⚔️ War: you compare strength with your neighbors - winner gets a reward, loser gets a penalty. For 1-2p games there is an easy to manage AI.

⚖️ Council: an agenda card is drawn and you cast votes on which effect to activate.

🔨 Production: you produce trade goods which are wild resources.

What you do with the resources:
🧭 The navigation board allows you to move to new systems or take contol of them.
🪐 The expansion board shows planets, where you cross off resource icons to get bonuses from rows or columns.
🏗️ On the industry board you either circle rewards to get them or cross them off. The interesting mechanic is that you can only put circles next to crosses, so you have to sacrifice some things.
🚀 The warfare board allows you to spend resources to build ships. You draw them as tetris shapes in the deployment zone, where they give you combat strength.

Each board also has technologies 🧬 which you can unlock. You can unlock the special dice 🎲 for each of your boards too.

There are 4 objectives each game that correspond with the 4 boards. Whoever achieves it first gets more points. There are also a lot of factions with unique abilities and artifact cards you can find.

The game is pricey but it is not "just" a roll&write. 🤔 You get a bunch of stuff and it helps redefine the genre like Hadrian's Wall or Rome&Roll. 👆 It's great fun. 🙃