Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition

What you are doing, and what this guide covers

Each player runs an alien faction, expanding across the galaxy, negotiating, and fighting. Winning does not mean wiping everyone out — it means filling objective cards to reach 10 victory points first. War is only one of the tools you use to get there.

Components

You build a new galaxy every game

There is no fixed board. You lay hex system tiles into three rings around Mecatol Rex, and each player's home system attaches to the third ring. The same faction plays differently every time because the map is never the same.

1. 1Separate the tiles by the color of their backs into a blue pile and a red pile. Green home systems are not separated this way.
2. 2Shuffle each pile facedown and deal tiles according to the player count.
3. 3Each player puts their home system roughly where it will connect, near their seat.
4. 4Starting with the speaker and going clockwise, each player places one tile faceup, filling ring 1 around Mecatol Rex first. After the last player places a second tile, placement reverses and runs counterclockwise back to the speaker, who places two tiles, and then reverses again.
5. 5Each ring must be fully built before any tile goes into the next ring.
6. 6Anomaly tiles cannot be placed next to each other, and neither can tiles with the same type of wormhole — unless there is no other option.
7. 7Once all dealt tiles are down, attach the home systems to the rest of the galaxy.

Setup

1. 1Randomly determine the speaker. Whoever holds the speaker token chooses a strategy card first.
2. 2Each player chooses a faction sheet.
3. 3Take your faction components: 1 home system tile, 17 control tokens, 16 command tokens, 2 faction technology cards, 1 faction promissory note.
4. 4Choose a color and take its components: 59 plastic units, 1 command sheet, 25 technology cards, 4 promissory notes. Combine your faction and color technology cards into one deck, and do the same with promissory notes.
5. 5Take the planet cards for the planets in your home system and place them faceup in front of you.
6. 6Create the game board (see the previous section).
7. 7Place the custodians token on Mecatol Rex.
8. 8Shuffle the action, agenda, stage I objective, stage II objective and secret objective decks separately.
9. 9Create supply piles of trade good, fighter and infantry tokens.
10. 10Place all eight strategy cards faceup within reach of the speaker.
11. 11Take the starting technologies and starting units listed on the back of your faction sheet, putting the units in your home system. Split your command tokens three into the tactic pool, three into the fleet pool, two into the strategy pool.
12. 12Prepare objectives: each player draws two secret objectives and keeps one; each player puts a control token on "0" of the victory point track; the speaker deals five facedown stage I objectives and five facedown stage II objectives in two rows and reveals the first two stage I objectives.

A round is four phases

1. 1Strategy phase — starting with the speaker and going clockwise, each player takes one strategy card. The speaker then puts one trade good on every card nobody chose, and whoever picks that card in a later round gains those trade goods.
2. 2Action phase — turns run from the lowest chosen card number upward (initiative order), and each turn is one action. The phase ends when everyone has passed.
3. 3Status phase — work through the eight steps below in order.
4. 4Agenda phase — added once the custodians token is gone. Vote on two agendas, ready your planets, then start the next round.

The eight strategy cards — turn order and power in one

A strategy card does two jobs at once. Its number sets initiative order for the round, and the card itself has a primary ability only its owner uses and a secondary ability everyone else may use. Riding along on other people's cards is half of this game's economy.

The action phase — one thing at a time

On your turn you perform one action. Then the turn passes, and once everyone has had a turn, initiative order starts over. The phase keeps looping until every player has passed.

• If everyone else has passed, the remaining player can take several consecutive actions.
• A player who cannot perform an action must pass.
• When all players have passed, play moves to the status phase.

The tactical action — five steps

1. 1Activation — take a command token from your tactic pool and place it on a system. That is the active system. You cannot activate a system that already contains one of your own tokens; other players' tokens do not stop you.
2. 2Movement — bring ships in from any number of systems. Once ships have moved, Space Cannon Offense fires.
3. 3Space combat — if two players have ships in the active system, they fight.
4. 4Invasion — bombardment, then committing ground forces, Space Cannon Defense, ground combat and establishing control.
5. 5Production — use the Production ability of your units in the active system. You may do this even if you moved nothing and invaded nothing.

• A ship must end its movement in the active system.
• The number of systems a ship enters cannot exceed its move value. Cruisers and destroyers move 2; carriers and dreadnoughts move 1.
• You may move through a system holding your own command token, but you cannot start a move there. Activating a system also pins down what is in it.
• Ships with a capacity value pick up infantry and fighters along the way. They cannot pick up from a system holding one of their own command tokens (the active system excepted), and they can only drop off in the active system.
• The number of non-fighter ships you may have in a system equals the tokens in your fleet pool. Fighters are exempt from that, and count against capacity instead.

Combat and units — the dice are D10

Every unit has a combat value, and you roll a ten-sided die: a result equal to or greater than that value is one hit. Because the player who was hit chooses which of their own units dies, screening with cheap fighters is the basic tactic.

• Bombardment hits ground forces only, Anti-Fighter Barrage hits fighters only, and Space Cannon hits ships on offense and committed ground forces on defense.
• "Bombardment 5" means one die; "Space Cannon 5 (x3)" means three dice.
• Effects that reroll or modify combat rolls do not affect bombardment, anti-fighter barrage or space cannon rolls.
• Sustain Damage cannot cancel an effect that destroys a unit outright, and cannot be used against a hit the unit was never eligible to take, such as anti-fighter barrage.
• Blockade — if your space dock is in a system holding another player's ships and none of yours, it cannot produce ships. It can still produce ground forces.

Resources, influence and technology — what one planet card is for

A planet card shows resources in a yellow border at the upper left and influence in a blue border at the lower right. Exhausting the card lets you spend only one of the two. That choice is the decision you make most often in this game.

• Technology cards show prerequisites as a column of colored symbols at the lower left. You must already own that many technologies of the matching color.
• There are four technology colors: biotic (green), warfare (red), propulsion (blue) and cybernetic (yellow).
• Unit upgrades have no color, so they never satisfy anyone's prerequisites. They go faceup on your faction sheet over the unit they share a name with.
• Some planets have a technology specialty. Exhaust such a planet while researching to ignore one prerequisite of the matching color. You cannot exhaust the same planet for its specialty and for its resources.

Objectives and victory points — ten ends it

• Each card states when it can be scored — status phase or action phase — just under its title.
• In a status phase you may score one public and one secret objective at most.
• In the action phase there is no overall limit, but only one objective per combat. You may score one during the space combat and one during the ground combat of the same tactical action.
• Each objective can be scored only once per game.
• Victory points also come from elsewhere: one point for removing the custodians token, one from the Imperial card while you control Mecatol Rex, and some agendas and promissory notes.

The agenda phase — the galactic council votes

Once the custodians token is off Mecatol Rex, an agenda phase is added to the end of every round starting with that round. You resolve two agendas, then everyone readies their planets.

1. 1Reveal agenda — the speaker draws one agenda card and reads it aloud, including every possible outcome.
2. 2Vote — starting with the player to the left of the speaker and going clockwise, each player exhausts planets and casts votes equal to their combined influence. The speaker votes last.
3. 3Resolve outcome — tally the votes and resolve the outcome with the most. On a tie the speaker decides.
4. 4Repeat all of that for a second agenda.
5. 5Ready planets — every player readies their exhausted planet cards, and the next round begins with the strategy phase.

• When you exhaust a planet to vote, you must cast its full amount of votes. You cannot split it.
• You may abstain simply by casting no votes.
• On an "elect player" agenda you may vote for yourself. On an "elect planet" agenda the planet must be controlled by some player.
• During each vote step you may transact once with each other player even if you are not neighbors. This is where votes get bought.
• An effect that asks you to predict an outcome must be declared after the agenda is revealed but before anyone has voted.

How the game ends

• Reaching 10 victory points (or 14 on the other side of the track) wins immediately and ends the game.
• If two players would reach 10 in the same status phase, the one earlier in initiative order wins, because they had the chance to score first.
• Imperium Rex — if the speaker must reveal a public objective and there are none left, the game ends at once and the player with the most victory points wins. Ties go to whoever is earliest in initiative order.
• Elimination — a player is out when all three are true at once: no ground forces on the board, no unit with Production, and no controlled planets.

Advice that falls straight out of the rules

• Never let your strategy pool hit zero. Almost every secondary ability costs one strategy token, and with none you watch everyone else profit from cards you could have ridden (Leadership's secondary is the one exception).
• Your tactic pool is literally "how many things you can do this round." Only two tokens come in each status phase, so without Leadership — yours or someone else's secondary — your turns shrink round by round.
• Activating is both an attack and a lock. Opponents cannot activate a system holding your command token, but neither can you move ships out of it. Spend those placements carefully.
• Mecatol Rex is not free. It costs six influence, and taking it opens the agenda phase so everyone starts voting on the game itself. One victory point, plus a second from the Imperial card, is what you are buying.
• Read the public objectives before you decide where to expand. Two stage I objectives are face up from the start. Shaping your expansion around a known requirement beats expanding first and hoping an objective fits.
• Do not strip your home system. Lose one planet there and public objectives stop scoring for you.
• Fighters are armor. Because the defender chooses which units die, a screen of cheap fighters keeps your dreadnoughts and cruisers alive.

Player counts and expansions

Rules people get wrong

History and editions

The series began in 1997, with a second edition in 2000, a third in 2005, and the fourth edition launched at Gen Con in August 2017. Each edition rebuilt the rules structure rather than just refreshing the art, so the fourth edition reads less like a revision of the third than like a new game.

• Design — Christian T. Petersen created the series, and the fourth edition also credits Dane Beltrami and Corey Konieczka.
• Publisher — Fantasy Flight Games, now part of Asmodee.
• Factions number 17 in the base game, 25 with Prophecy of Kings and 30 with Thunder's Edge.
• FFG splits the rules into two books: a Learn to Play for teaching and a Rules Reference organized alphabetically for rulings. The fourth edition's reference runs 32 pages across 89 entries plus an index.
• In Korea the fourth edition was published by Korea Boardgames and is commonly called "Yeomyeong-ui Jeguk", or simply by its English name.