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 Much like the Pandemic Legacy thread, this is where we can safely discuss the Legacy game Seafall. What is Seafall? Designed by Rob Daviau of Risk: Legacy and Pandemic: Legacy fame, Seafall is the first legacy game designed by Rob that isn't based on existing game system. This means Rob had full control. That may or may not have been a good thing. It's still a Legacy game, so that means the decisions you make in one game will impact the future game state. You'll write on the board, apply stickers to everything, and sometimes even rip up cards! The Basics of Seafall The world is emerging from a dark age where history and knowledge were lost. The great provinces have just begun re-establishing seafaring technology. Wealth and fame await leaders who are cunning and brave. Explore the coastal islands. Discover lost civilizations. Sail the open sea in search of new lands. Uncover long buried secrets. Sail until the sea falls off the edge of the world! Without getting into it too much, you sail around in your ships and explore, raid, trade with, and build on islands. Unlike the secret deck that let the story unfold in Pandemic, Seafall comes with a "Captain's Booke" with over 400 numbered entries. Various actions in the game will instruct you to read these entries, which will then instruct you take certain actions that will change the state of the game. Thread Rules Please Spoiler all your takes, and label your spoilers with how far into the game you are. I'm not sure if there's a good way to succinctly state how far you are into the game like Pandemic has months, but maybe somebody that's played beyond the Prologue can explain better. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Oct 10, 2016 |
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Oct 10, 2016 22:23
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 20:51 |
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Some people have expressed interested in hate reading an account of the game play, so they don't have to suffer through it themselves. I played my first game, the Prologue last week. The Prologue itself doesn't have any major choices, it just gives you an opportunity to practice the mechanics of the game without your decisions having negative impacts on future games. The objective of the Prologue is to name the four starting islands on the board. Every time someone reaches a multiple of 3 (3,6,9,12) Glory they get to name an island, and once all 4 islands are named the game is over. A little bit of the story is revealed as well. When you start, you pick your province and your leader. All leaders are identical mechanically, but have different portraits. You name your province and your leader. Each time an island is named, an entry is read from the Captains Booke, explaining how the leaders of the provinces all sailed into the unknown, only to eventually all be lost. The final act of the game is to rip up your leader's portraits and throw them away! After a certain event in Pandemic Legacy, my group was not keen on this. Since there are 10 leader cards and only 5 players, I can only assume that we will get to pick new leaders. My group decided that since the leaders are all mechanically identical, that when the time came to pick new leaders, we would retcon so the leaders we picked would be the new leaders and our old dead leaders would be the 5 we didn't pick the first time. And with that we were off to the races.
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Oct 10, 2016 22:36
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I dropped the $80 plus shipping (preordered from Plaid Hat to get the sweet sweet metal coins, I love metal coins) all by myself. I figure always having an answer for "what game do we play this week" for 15 or so weeks is worth the price of admission alone. When my group played Pandemic Legacy me and another person split the cost. And for Risk Legacy, I think it was a gift from one member of our group to the other (the two happen to be married). The same person that received Risk Legacy as a gift also once paid for 8 or so of us to do a puzzle room together. We also bring food for each other etc etc. Your
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Oct 11, 2016 20:40
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Anybody have a suggestion for a good pen to use to write on stuff? We had this same problem with Pandemic where everything would just smudge off. Gel Pens would smudge, regular cheap ball points just couldn't write. I'm thinking of picking up some permanent marker pens for tonight. Any other suggestions?
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Oct 11, 2016 21:56
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GAME ONE TRIP REPORT This game opened with, as I expected, picking new leaders. We also got to formally "start" our province by each reading an entry in the Captains Booke and making a choice that resulted in a bonus for each of our provinces. This game also had really objectives, known as Milestones. Milestones give victory points and some unlock new boxes that will change the state of the game. We managed to get all four Milestones in our game: have 3 glory of treasure at once, explore the highest value spot on an island, have 3 buildings, and raid a location with a defense of 6 or more. The last one unlocked our first box! The activities unlocked pirates. There's an event deck and one of the cards is active round. To start with it was simple stuff like "ships sail farther this round" or "goods can be bought more cheaply" or "goods can be sold for more money." A pirate card got added to the event deck, where pirates will "attack" the province of the leader if that card shows up in the event deck. If you defeat the pirates the card gets destroyed. The box opens up the ability to explore new islands, so the first major rules change in this legacy game. There also seems to be a developing theme when interacting with the "natives" on islands that generally helping them seems to be better than not helping them, or at least that's our experience so so far.
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Oct 19, 2016 06:50
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Well we played a game this Tuesday, honestly not sure if we're going to keep going or not. It really feels like nobody blind playtested this. There's so many stupid little things. Hell, nobody proofread it for typos. There are two stickers for each island you discover, one is the island on the hex grid, the other is the closeup of the island that shows all the sites. The closeup says it has a rough seas value of 4, the sticker on the hex grid says it has a value of 3. There's no errata of any kind for this game, the closest we have is the designer posting on board game geek saying "I think that was supposed to be 3..." I spent literally the entire game to explore a new island on the edge of the map, 4 turns to sail there, a turn to explore, and because my ships took heavy damage, I spent the rest of the time sailing back home to repair. Meanwhile another player just faffed around and did little raids and ended up winning (again). Opening the first box got us two new kinds of cards, each with their own unique symbol. There's no definition of which card is which, you just have to make an educated guess about what they are. The two types are "uncharted waters" and "research." One set of cards has a question mark, the other set has a compass rose. You could reasonably assume that the question mark is research and the compass rose is "uncharted waters" but you'd actually be wrong. Pretty much every action you do to roll dice is called an "endeavor." When you start the game there are two distinct kinds of endeavors, explore and raid. You can explore an island site or you can raid an island site. Then they expand raiding so you can raid a player's home base, or their ship, and the just keep tacking rules onto it. To raid a player's ship, treat hold as garrison, treat sail or raid as defense. Then they add a "sail" endeavor and I have no idea what that is. The rule book is just really poor in this area, you start out with two distinct types of endeavor's and mentally you treat them as two different things, but as time goes on there are more and more endeavors and it would have made much more sense to have generic "endeavor" rules and keep adding new types of endeavors instead of having everything be a modification of the explore site or raid site endeavor. Speaking of stickers, in adding a new sticker I had to put it over a fold in the board. The way the board folds at this point, the "top" of the board would be on the outside of the board, not folded inside facing each other. So the board is cut at that point with just the bottom backing holding it together. This sticker joins those two sides of the board together, so we had to get a sharp knife and cut the sticker in half so the board would actually fold. Terrible design. A couple of encounters with the Captains Booke have lead to weird things being done to the board. In this last game you could put a sticker on your province board and it would do a thing. But that thing is not in the rules anywhere, it's only described in the Captains Booke. If you don't write down the entry in the captains booke next to that sticker you may not ever know what it does. There are player aid cards, and an action let a player actually upgrade her player aid card because the Tax Action would get her 4 gold instead of 3 gold. That is fine and good, but we opened a new box that introduced a new step in the turn, so it includes new player aid cards and says to tear up and get rid of the old ones. Does that mean she loses her upgrade? Who knows? I haven't read any of the reviews on this game, so all I know is that they're less than positive, but I'm slowly coming away with the conclusion that Rob was more concerned with telling a story here than he was making any kind of playable game. Playing Pandemic Legacy I felt like the rules were really well written from the start so that every new thing that got introduced wouldn't require a million errata for every other rule. The Seafall rules are the exact opposite. They're just an abomination, to the point where I don't think anyone blind playtested this. It's the kind of thing where if you've been with it from the start, and had Rob and Co explaining things to you as you go, you might just miss some of the stuff. But when you play it with no knowledge there's so much ambiguity. And the poor physical design of the board is really getting to me. And the fact that a player won by not really furthering the game at all is pretty frustrating. It's just like, man, what are we doing. Sounds like my play group is gonna try and play it drunk on election night because how much worse could it get? Sorry for no spoilers, but I didn't really spoil any "story" and also just gently caress this game.
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Nov 4, 2016 18:01
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Part of the problem is that a full game takes slightly longer than we really have time for on game night, and requires slightly more concentration than most players are ready to give. For example someone got a new puppy and they bring the puppy and it's great because it's a cute puppy but when you're too busy with a sleepy puppy in your lap to interact with the game things just kind of snowball. I just watched the SUSD review and I kind of agree with the conclusion, is that it's interesting to see what's unveiled but the slog of the game isn't fun enough to make it worth it. And with a game as complicated with this, player apathy can really spiral out of control. We have a player who's just not into the game at all, but won't just come out and say it, so he just suffers silently. So at the beggining of the last session I read off the rules for exploring ocean spaces to find islands. He just didn't hear me, and then later on when he sailed out into the open ocean and wanted to discover an island, but didn't even know there were rules for it, he just assumed it was something in the uncharted waters deck then got a little annoyed when I explored to find an island after I'd apparently told him that wasn't possible. Well look, pay attention when I read the rules, or don't complain when you don't know the rules. I wanna play to the end! I just don't entirely know how that will work out. It may very well be that two of us sit down some weekend and just fake play through it as all the players and see what develops.
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Nov 4, 2016 20:06
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Honestly not sure yet, we ended up skipping two weeks of game night the week of thanksgiving and the week before, and also one of the players has been out of town, so I don't know what we're going to do. There seems to be some consensus that the legacy part is interesting, but the game is just so boring. I may very well just sit down one night and open up all the milestones in order and just zip through the story in an evening.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:46
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So, last night we just said "gently caress it" and opened all the boxes. We found the black light, which is part of a secret society. You can have an inquisition with an advisor where you shine the black light on them, if they have a number they're a part of the secret society and you read an entry in the captain's booke. There's also some junk about going through tombs and then a couple secret cities, one of them that's related to the society I think. The game ends with you sailing off the end of the world, your advisors turn to dust, and surprise you're in literally hell and now there's a complete new game where you fight hell or something? It's like he couldn't decide if he wanted to make an exploration game or a horror game so he just said gently caress it and did both. There's over 400 entries in the captain's booke, but only 10-20 actually push the story forward, so you've got piles of stupid entries that can't move the story forward because they could happen at the beginning of the game or the end of the game. There's 15-20 games worth of play in this apparently but only 6 boxes to open, which really makes it feel like this would be a real slog to get through. And I mentioned earlier that the game feels too long, well I get the feeling that as time goes on they get even longer. Each subsequent game you need more glory to win, and the milestones end up involving relatively huge sums of gold and other goods to advance. But the ability to acquire gold and goods doesn't seem to grow as quickly, so it gives the impression that games will just take longer and longer with less and less happening as time goes on. I was also just stunned at the sheer pile of extra cards we unboxed. It was just such an enormous pile of stuff that just kept adding more and more finicky poorly defined rules with very little payoff. This game is just bad. Bad bad bad. I'm not really sure what to do with this junk heap now. Burn it when it gets warmer? I don't really know.
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Jan 19, 2017 04:06
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The Malthusian posted:Wait, wait, wait--can you explain the end of game a little bit more? That sounds like a hard turn. No I think you've got it all. There was one event card where the crew of a ship tried to enter into a cave and some giant hell beast attacked them, and when they finally killed it, it turned into ash. Maybe a few of the non-consequential events elaborated on this a little more. The Society was there to warn you about some Ancient thing but it was never quite clear. But it still comes out of left field. You read about a crowning ceremony where whoever wins the campaign is crowned emperor and then it says "the seafall campaign is over, turn to entry whatever." And you go there and your advisors turn to dust and you're in literally hell fighting who knows what (I wasn't going to be bothered to read a whole new set of rules to understand it).
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Jan 19, 2017 05:08
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Also it's entirely possible that we missed huge parts of the story by skipping so much but I have no regrets. Three games in and I just didn't care at all what was going on. The writing was really bad. Whatever story was there, it was just too much. We played once a week which is probably on the fast side as far as things go and I felt like there was just too much stuff to remember from week to week. You don't know what's important and what's fluff. Maybe if you sat down with a case of red bull and blitzed through the whole thing in 48 hours with no naps you'd see something develop but this just isn't the place for nuanced story telling. When you don't know what order it's going to come out, you have to beat your players over the head with it. And between that and all the finicky little secret rules that are only in the captains booke, it's just too much mental work for so very little pay off.
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Jan 19, 2017 05:19
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Every action you take tries to infuse itself with story though. I mean, if you're playing this as an exploration game you're going to be shocked when you get to the ending. This is a story game.
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Jan 19, 2017 05:26
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You may be playing it that way, but when you get to the end it'll be clear that it's a story game first. But as long as you're enjoying it, that's all that matters. I think if I had a different group that was willing to play a relatively dry exploration game maybe things would go better. But I'm still left with the problem of not advancing the game is the best way to win. If you held a gun to my head I could play the game and enjoy it on some level, but there'd always be something in the back of my head saying "you could have way more fun playing a different game." And not just fun as in telling a story, but the mechanics just aren't that interesting. It's all about growing your pool of dice so you can do better at dice chucking. For the record, we opened a box after each game we'd played so we hadn't even gotten to the point where it would become a slog. It's just that the game was... boring. Mechanically and story wise.
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Jan 19, 2017 17:33
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Spotted at a local store: 
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Jan 22, 2017 19:55
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Risk Legacy worked because the majority of the changes were to the board, not a player's situation. In Seafall there's so much happening to individual players that it would be very difficult to balance (as evidenced by the poor balance).
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Jan 23, 2017 17:56
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 20:51 |
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I'd forgotten about the dumb intro, and thinking more about it, I have no idea what the point of that was. Seafall is not a game of destroying things so it's just an opening gently caress you that serves no other purpose.
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Mar 13, 2017 18:45
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