Go figure

I played Twilight Imperium last night, and after several weeks of complaining about getting war races (which I'm not aggressive enough to play properly), I finally get the Yssaril, the political and action card race. Possibly my all-time favourite race to play.

And I proceed to have the worst game I've ever played.

I don't want to reveal the details, but everybody figured out my secret objective (despite my gambit of taking Mecatol Rex, the planet at the centre of the galaxy and the one that roughly 80% of the secret objectives revolve around) in the first round. My secret was to have a non-fighter ship in each system containing a wormhole. Usually that's a fairly tough one, but this time 3 of the 4 wormholes was close to my home, and the other one was right beside another guy's home system, so if I really wanted to I could have disguised it as an invasion.

Sadly, I messed up the order of operations and tried to be too aggressive with it. I had 2 of the 4 done, and I figured I could do the other 2 easily in the 3rd round. Until Phil (Eric's brother, first time player) moved a destroyer into the system that I needed and then called diplomacy on me, and after that everything went to hell.

I still finished 2nd, but Mat won. He had the technology race, and almost all the public objectives were technology-based. He pulled a power play at the end and could qualify for either of the 2-point public objectives, so there was no way to stop him.

My race's unique ability to not have an action card hand size limit (this is a noun stack), and the ability to get an extra card in each status phase (the end of a round) let me down. I got a very large pile of combat-related cards, but very few that could help me in other situations. I did mange to pull out the one that let me override the current political card, and used it when the law being proposed was crappy.

I chose Ancient Artifact, the law that either gives each player 2 free technologies, or destroys everything around Mecatol Rex. Mat wanted to vote against it, and he had more influence than I did, so I used Thugs on him (action card that makes a player unable to vote), and we all got free technology. The outcome of the law depends on a dice roll, 1-5 and the planet explodes, 6-10 and everybody benefits. I rolled a 10, so we succeeded in style.

High point of the game, really.