The World Of Twilight

I've seen a quantity of about 300 points for an army. I suspect that this would be a good size for a two person introductory game.

Two questions:
1) How many points for a moderate sized 2 player game?

2) How many points for a moderate 4 player game?

300pts works well for quick games and for multiplayer games. For the salute demo we did slightly smaller 200pt forces to keep things moving faster.

I tend to think that 500pts gives a reasonably large game and opens up all the different options (you can actually afford to take the likes of Roban, arak katain and Danomar). You can scale up further with commanders etc, but I get the impression that a lot of players prefer to have a couple of smaller forces rather than growing a single force to a huge size.

Paul should hopefully be along in a bit to give the expert opinion!  :)

Well, first up ignore the expert comment - I'm enthusiastic about many things, but rarely expert about anything!

I agree with Mike though. 300 is standard in our group, and we use that for multi player games too, but that doesn't allow for the use of a few of the real big guys who at that scale would be over half your force! Upping to 500 gives you far more options for varied formations and access to the full pantheon of living gods among Anyaral.

Sadly, despite having the collections to do so, I've only ever gone larger than 500 at Twilight events - the game fits the role of quick & casual for us and does so well :)

Good information. Thankyou
If you go up in points do you ever increase the number of initiative stones? Or does this remain constant?

No you don't but then you can effectively combine your Commander and Captain abilities.

I played most of my games in the 200-300 point range so far, but I think I could try a 500 pts game soon. And for a fast introduction, I was fine with 100-150 points.

As Slann says, initiative stones remain constant whatever scale of game you play.

Using higher points enables you to take the higher pointed commanders. These give you the ability to activate elites rather than just troops, which thus allows you to activate larger sections of your army than in a small game.

Of course, for character you can take the commanders in smaller games too, but their abilities are largely unneeded.

It was a very pleasant surprise to find how well it scales for us - it works really well!

I can see how that would still work very well.

I want to introduce Twilight to our gaming club. We typically have a dozen members show up on any given Saturday night. We also have an all day event about every quarter with 30 to 50 attending. There are some of us that are very keen on new game mechanics.

The Initiative Stones and the Combat Stones are very novel. The innitiative stones paired with the two combat stones were so novel that I had considerable trouble grasping the mechanic. It was only when I dismissed my paradigm and took the instructions at face value that I understood. It is very elegant and unique.

I play "Bolt Action" as well as other card or die driven activation methods but the initiative stones add very interesting tradeoffs. I really like the Combat Stone element as well. Once I studied a role playing game that had combatants 3 choose actions and put them into a sequence. The actions were evaluated vs a chart to determine their effectiveness.  I tried to improve this approach but was never quite satisfied. The secret choice regarding offence vs defence is simple while preserving the element of chance.  Please don't consider this to exaggerated but the only word that comes to mind is Brilliant.

I find that complexity can get in the way of an otherwise enjoyable gaming session.

Thank you all for these well thought through responses.