Ok so I need to say up front, I have never finished a five player game of this in one sitting and I don’t think that’s a me problem. We did the math once, midgame, out of boredom during someone else’s turn, and at our table’s pace a full five player Twilight Imperium comes out to something like nine hours including the “quick” rules recap at the start that is never quick. I say this as someone who loves the game. Loved it enough to buy the insert organizer separately because the stock box is, and I say this with real affection, a crime scene the moment you open it for the first time.

The insert thing matters more than it should. There is a specific kind of dread that sets in when you’re 40 minutes from your table time being over and you still have to sort eleven bags of plastic ships back into their trays by faction, and I have genuinely skipped playing on a weeknight because I didn’t want to face teardown. That is not a small design flaw for a game this good, it’s a real one.

What keeps me coming back, even knowing the time cost, is that it does something I haven’t found anywhere else at two players, which is nothing, because it doesn’t really work at two, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend I’ve found a workaround. This is strictly a four-to-six player game for me, ideally six, ideally with people who already know the tech tree so we’re not relearning it from scratch every single time. The downtime between turns when someone’s deep in a trade negotiation with two other factions is real and I’ve learned to just bring a book.

Compared to the older Third Edition copy a friend still owns, the streamlining is obvious and mostly good, though something about the sprawl of the old ruleset had a certain lawless charm the new one has sanded down slightly. Still, when the table goes quiet because someone just flipped a secret objective that changes the whole endgame, there’s nothing else that hits like it. Worth the Sunday it eats.