Space Cats Peace Turtles

Let's travel back in time to the year 2000! FFG was still a young company and Christian T. Petersen decided to take another stab at the design of our favorite game. At times, Second Edition almost feels like the version lost to time. It's quite simple in it's approach to the game and it chooses to add very little over the course of it's life. It's mostly just a refinement of the rules of First Edi...

We've both been in the process of trying to find new homes in Minnesota, which means it's time for a beach episode where we dip into our mailbag! Our patrons submitted these questions for our Agenda Phase segments, but this is a collection of, generally, more off topic questions than usual. That just means it's a good time to hang out with your friends Matt and Hunter. And no criticism! Music prov...

More Arcs! It's getting incredibly fun starting to dig into the meat of this game. You can refer back to episode 333 to hear our Learn to Learn guide about the game, but now we're going to start getting more specific! We wanted to kick things off with a component episode where we cover the Actions in the game as well as the Ambitions you'll be using to score points and win. There's a lot to chew o...

Despite the chaos in both our lives, Matt's ready with another Super Faction Guide! Due to the wonders of Async, Matt's found a lot more opportunity to work on guides and this is one that definitely benefited from that since he got to play big meaty games with Clan of Saar legends TheDeftPiper and Imsen. This is a powerful faction whose strategy is more about pumping the breaks a bit so you aren't...

The Prelims are already a couple of weeks underway and we're learning a LOT. This definitely feels like a new, distinct year for the tournament given the outcome of the majority of these games. So what does that mean for folks testing their mettle in the prelims or for people wanting to adapt to the newest waves in the meta? Let's take a closer look at what makes the Prelims of our tournament uniq...

The topic of "winmaking" is constantly evolving and changing. Every year we see tournament play handle shenanigans at the end of the game differently and it's nice to check in from time to time and evaluate the community. Today, we have two very special guests to help us in that endeavor! The designer of Twilight Imperium 4th Edition, Dane Beltrami, and rules guru and creator of Miltydraft, Milty!...

New Year, New Us, New Job, New Game, New Lease on Life. This is the beginning of hopefully a long series of episode covering Arcs by Leder Games! They made a game so enticing to us that Matt went and got a job with them. Today, we're just starting out by offering up advice to those interested in checking out the game and how to go into it with the right mindset. What kind of game does Arcs feel li...

New year and there are some big plans and changes in the works. Today we'll do our best to reveal and talk about what we can but also expect more updates in the future. 2024 is going to be a very cool year for Space Cats Peace Turtles and we hope you'll all be along for the ride. Music provided by Ben Prunty. Find more at benpruntymusic.com or benprunty.bandcamp.com Additional Music and Sounds by...

This episode is a particularly stupid energy coming right off the back of our Holiday Spectacular stream that featured hot "wings" and cool kids. Thanks for a wonderful year everyone, we love each of you individually. Music provided by Ben Prunty. Find more at benpruntymusic.com or benprunty.bandcamp.com Additional Music and Sounds by Brian Kupillas. https://wanderinglake.bandcamp.com/   To learn...

It's that time of year again! These Twilight Imperium factions have been out here all year running amok and making us look stupid because last year we did a really good faction ranking but you all played wrong. So we've adjusted some numbers and let you all contribute as little as we could possibly allow and now we have the true Definitive Ranking of all faction in the game. This time we mean it!...

Hunter has been playing in this year's Patreon Tournament Qualifiers since October. He's had about a half dozen games and he's finally made it through to the Prelims! It's good timing, because we always had this week's episode slated as his chance to talk about his experience, whether he'd made it or not! So what is it like to play in your own tournament? Do people treat you differently? Probably...

Who needs this? Well hopefully, you're someone relatively new to Twilight Imperium and a friend of yours has suggested you play Federation of Sol and you're looking to jumpstart your winrate. If so, welcome. You've made an excellent choice of faction because Sol is really good and we're here to explain why. Hopefully, you come out of this with ways to consistently do well! Also we love you. Music...

A new series of Twilight Imperium books is right around the corner! Empire Falling, the first of the new trilogy by Robbie MacNiven releases December 5th and we were lucky enough to get Robbie on to discuss writing for established universes, historical fiction, and which TI faction is the most Scottish! Interview starts at 22:30 Music provided by Ben Prunty. Find more at benpruntymusic.com or benp...

Matt's back in action! His last guide was for a fast faction that doesn't always have a way to close out games. This time, to shake things up, he's going with a fast faction that doesn't always have a way to close out games! It's the Ghosts of Creuss and actually they're maybe a little bit better than Cabal but that's just because you get more blue tech, probably... Music provided by Ben Prunty. F...

We're about halfway through this years Qualifiers in the tournament and it seemed high time we celebrate the people that make the tournament a pleasurable viewing experience! Over the years, more and more amazing folks have taken on the task of streaming games of Twilight Imperium and it takes such an immense amount of effort that there's honestly not enough praise we could heap upon them. So for...

You are not prepared for this one. We have 82 system tiles in Twilight Imperium. In theory, the visuals matter quite a lot for this discussion or would at least make this go a lot faster...but then again why should it be easy? What follows is a 2 hour decent into madness to try and sort all of the system tiles into tiers. What do those tiers signify? Who knows? Is there any consistency to the sort...

We're back on that old grind. We've done "Super Guides" as our way of revisiting base game factions post-PoK, but up until this point it has also been a mark of a faction that received new components via a Codex. But from here on out, it's all faction untouched since the introduction of PoK. That doesn't mean there's nothing to say, of course! And one of the bigger factions to tackle when it comes...

The Homebrewer's Guild has been hard at work on a big project. The work has been largely philosophical up until this point and it was finally time to lay track down before we design this train. So today, we'd like to catch you all up to speed on the project known as Twilight Imperium Zero Edition. This is intended to be our fun modification to Twilight Imperium and act as a stripped down, simpler...

It's a crossover episode! Our video game podcast, Old Gamer's Almanac, is doing a big Starcraft blowout this month and we wanted to get this show in on the fun. What better way than attempting an exhaustive strategy overview of one of the game's factions!  Music provided by Ben Prunty. Find more at benpruntymusic.com or benprunty.bandcamp.com Old Gamer's Almanac music by nightcorey. https://soundc...

We spent a week hanging out with the fine folks over at Leder Games and learned more about their ongoing projects while we were there. Nick Brachmann joined us to walk through everything he's planning to add to Ahoy in its upcoming expansions and Cole Wehrle followed up with us to show us more of Arcs' development. 11:05 - The Ahoy additions add new complexity and richness to the strategy, which i...

We've been teasing it for WEEKS and it's finally here. After a huge hiatus, we're pleased to finally present another This Imperium Life, our show where we share YOUR stories of the best moments of Twilight Imperium Music provided by Ben Prunty. Find more at benpruntymusic.com or benprunty.bandcamp.com Additional Music and Sounds by Brian Kupillas. https://wanderinglake.bandcamp.com/   To learn mor...

It's the weekend before the tournament starts and in the madness we decided to answer all of your burning questions! That's right, after over 6 years, we're finally doing a mailbag episode. We cover a lot of TI topics, but also focus on tournament questions for a good amount of time. Music provided by Ben Prunty. Find more at benpruntymusic.com or benprunty.bandcamp.com Additional Music and Sounds...

Tournament 6 looms before us and in the build up to it we wanted to take a look back. We sat down with the 5 previous winners of the Patreon Tournament and got their take on the changes to the Qualifiers as well as any advice they could offer to people hoping to succeed in the tournament. You could basically ignore all of the advice from all other episodes of this show because these are the 5 peop...

The Space Cats are a domineering force when it comes to Twilight Imperium. They're the closest thing the game has to a mascot and when they're in game a lot of things seem to revolve around them. They've also often been accused of dramatically slowing the game down. Today we evaluate what it means to sit down at a table where the Hacan are playing, but not BY YOU. How can you utilize their wares t...

We did an episode about the Async Twilight Imperium discord ( https://discord.gg/vY3nBkegkn ) a while ago, but it's had a slew of major developments over recent months and it was well worth revisiting. Not to mention we wanted to have a conversation about our first Tournament Champion, The 9 of Spades, and it's his newest fascination. So it seemed best to wrap it all up in one episode together! 9...