Teaching Dale Twilight Imperium Was a Mistake

Once a year I clear a whole Saturday and six people come over and we play Twilight Imperium start to finish. It’s the one game I treat like an event instead of a Tuesday-night thing, snacks planned in advance, everybody blocking off the day, no phones except to check on kids. This year my neighbor Dale, who I mostly know from opposite ends of the driveway during trash day, asked if he could sit in as a seventh, said he’d read a rulebook once for something similar and figured he could keep up.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have said yes. I did anyway, because it felt rude to turn down a guy who’d never seen the game and was excited about it, and also because I genuinely thought it’d be fine, we usually run a slower opening round anyway to shake off the rust from a year not playing.

It was not fine. Not in a way that ruined the day, but Dale spent the first ninety minutes just trying to parse what a strategy card even does, and every other player at the table has years of reps on this specific game, so there’s a real gap between “explain the rules once” and “actually understand what a good early move looks like.” I ended up basically playing his empire alongside my own for the first two rounds just to keep the table moving, which isn’t fair to him and isn’t really playing the game either.

By round four something clicked for him though, I watched it happen, he stopped asking “wait what does this do again” and started asking “if I do this, what does everyone else do in response,” which is the actual question this game wants you asking. He ended up not winning, obviously, first game against five veterans, but he held his own in the back half and got genuinely into the diplomacy layer, made one alliance that fell apart spectacularly two rounds later. He took it well, said he’d half expected it and laughed about it more than anyone at the table.

Here’s the part I keep chewing on though. My actual verdict on the day is mixed. The game is better with everyone at full speed, and having a true beginner in a once-a-year eight-hour session slows the whole table down in a way that’s a real cost, not just a minor inconvenience. But watching somebody get it, watching the moment the strategy layer actually opens up for a new player, is a genuinely good feeling that I don’t get to have very often anymore since everyone else in my group has been playing this as long as I have. Next year I think I teach him on a smaller game first. Save the big one for when he’s not starting from zero.