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Clanpot Shake posted:I look forward to reading the spoilers in this thread as I have no intention of buying this game. I can barely keep a consistent RPG group together, let alone a boardgame with a multi-week story. Eh, depends on your definition. I don't have Seafall and I dunno how many games it supports, but let's look at Pandemic: Legacy which has the same component destruction. If you play a single box set of P:L all the way through perfectly, you'll play twelve games. if you get punched in the face all the time, you'll play twenty four. True, at that point your set is pretty much unusable except for replaying the final game over again, but let's consider. How many games in your collection can you honestly say you've played 12-24 times? Especially big box multi-hour games, not quickfire games like Codenames or Love Letter. Maybe you've got more gaming time than I do, but most of my big games get maybe half a dozen plays before something newer and shinier shows up to take its place? So in that regard, trading away the long term replayability past 12-24 playthroughs for a unique experience? Seems like a decent deal to me.
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Oct 11, 2016 20:28
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 04:00 |
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A number of my friends have bought this so I don't have to. One of said friends started a new game and I'm at the table. We've only played the Prologue so far, which introduced the basic mechanics but was otherwise nothing special. We'll see how things progress going forward I suppose.
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Dec 4, 2016 01:27
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Spoilers through Game Three Okay, so we've just completed game three (or four if you count the prologue but no one else does, so why should we?) and it's going okay. The fact that we're pretty rabid about jumping on the milestones as soon as we can has added a new game mechanics pretty regularly. After game two we added exploration and after three we're adding colonization. You can already see hints of some kind of Cthulhu style overplot going on. The lost civilizations, ancients, tombs, statues, and panicky natives are all pretty much in that genre. We did have a funny turn of events, though. There's a milestone for first ship sunk by another player, which spawns a ghost ship as an event card that attacks the nearest player ship. Thing is, our first ship got sunk in the frikkin' coastal area adjacent to everyone's home ports! That's pretty drat inconvenient, I must say. On the other hand because we all were exploring in and around the center of the map for the first go we've got a whirlpool surrounded by three currents, an island, two atolls, and the gate! It's a busy patch of sea. Ultimately Seafall is a weird combination of a little exploration, a little economy, and a smidge combat. It's a mix that seems to work okay for our group, but I can see how it wouldn't necessarily work for every group.
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Jan 5, 2017 01:27
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Spoilers through Game Four On our biweekly schedule we just completed game four. And so far, we've scored at least one milestone every single game. In fact the fourth game was the first time we didn't wipe the board of milestones. I won this round because I managed to score the "sell 30 gold of goods in one action" milestone which isn't as hard as it sounds. Get a Marketplace (or get lucky with the right event) to get a bonus on how much you sell goods for, get one of the +2 Sell advisers, acquire four goods. Take them home and sell 'em. There are a bunch of +2 Sell advisers floating around the deck now, so it was a pretty easy score. Similarly, three of the five players now have a colony each so I'd be shocked if someone didn't get the Have Three Active Colonies milestone by next game. For that matter, once someone gets a second colony the "Have Five Buildings" milestone could fall in the same game. Meanwhile, the two players who don't have colones have been buffing their exploration and I'd expect one or both of the exploration milestones to go in the next couple of games as well. In short, we've made progress in every game so far. Granted, we're less than a third of the way through the full game, but if it continues at this pace with every game being at least a little different than the one before it? I think we'll be well satisfied. FISHMANPET posted: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. I think I see the problem. Seafall isn't a story game. It's an economic/exploration game that has a story in it. If, as in my group, you enjoy the base game, then the story is just a little frosting on top of what we already enjoy. If, on the other hand, you don't care for the base cake and only want the frosting, you're not going to go away particularly fulfilled.
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Jan 19, 2017 05:24
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It really isn't. When I take my turn, what am I thinking about? is it, "I've got to investigate the the silver statue. I can't wait to unearth the secrets of the ancients! Man, I hope the crew of the Sakura can make it through the whirlpool, I'd be gutted if those brave explorers perished!" No. What I'm thinking is "Well, I've got Amelia the Noble available in my council room. I can use her now to get a +7 to Tax, end my turn on Ronin Island, buy that ancient statue for two VP thanks to the Treasure Room bonus I got two games ago to start my next turn, hire the Merchant's Guild, do the Sell action back home to earn some more cash, then do a Buy as my second action to clean Ronin out of the Iron I need to found a colony on Tanto Island the turn after that." The fact that there was a little paragraph I read aloud that described the opulence of my throne room when I acquired that Treasure Room bonus doesn't make it a story game. The gameplay actions I take to reveal the story are what make it an economic/exploration game. To put it another way, you played the game, got bored because you weren't getting the story parts fast enough, and thus trashed the game to read the story without playing the game. Which, it seems to me, indicates that you wanted the story more than you wanted the base gameplay. Our group...or at least me, anyway...actually like playing the game. I like planning out the most efficient trade routes and calculating the best use for my gold income. I'm not particularly chuffed about the "big reveal" at the end of the game. I'm looking ahead to the game in two weeks and trying to figure out how to get to three colonies before the other two guys who are also in the colony founding business. Your definition may vary, probably does in fact, but to me a story game is one where the gameplay is about the story. Something like Tales of the Arabian Nights where the game mechanics are about giving you the structure and opportunity to tell a collaborative story. Like I said...the story in Seafall is the frosting layered on top of the mechanics of an economic game. You have to want to play that economic game and like it, because if you don't, you end up exactly where you are....with a pile of cards and pieces you tore apart so you could get to the story. What you did was scrape off all the frosting and licked it off the spoon, and now you're wondering what to do with the rest of the cake. My group is just eating the cake a piece at a time. 
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Jan 19, 2017 07:24
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Mister Sinewave posted:A lesson I'm getting from reading people's takes is that excitement over opening boxes & getting changes (or anticipating opening new boxes) isn't enough to carry a game long term. No. You have to enjoy the basic game as well. My group does and it's going great. Others don't, and they're having a less satisfactory experience.
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Jan 23, 2017 18:38
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Having now played through game six, I'm beginning to suspect our table has been fortunate in running pretty even. My victory in game six was the first time a player got a second victory. Through game five, each of the five players had a victory under his or her belt. Our scores to date are 68-66-58-58-57. Everyone's score at least one Milestones and a win bonuis/ No one's completely out of it, and the last place person should probably do pretty well in game seven since she spec'ed Exploration and the only Milestones left are two "Use the X Chart to find Y Island" types which her nation's great at and the rest of suck at. Of course both of those are Unlocks so we're expecting a new batch of Milestones as soon as one of them gets completed. So far, so good.
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Feb 17, 2017 06:40
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Through game seven. A different player won so two of us have two wins, three of us have one. No one's further than 7 points behind the leader. Everyone seems to still be having a good time. That is all.
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Mar 8, 2017 19:06
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 04:00 |
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So we're almost at the end after game sixteen. Last night I found the Island at the End of the World and now we know the next game will be the last. Our table was pretty even through much of the game, but I personally started to pull away at the end. Granted I was still only 15 points up over second place at the start of last night's game, but I'd been in first place for several games in a row, while second through fourth fluctuated wildly. Sadly, the player in fifth place had been stuck there for ages and had gone into "well I'm just gonna gently caress around now" mode. I'm way ahead now because of the bonus I got, and indeed I'm the Empress so I kind of don't think VP matter much anymore. In any case, there's been a ton of drama and player combat, especially in regards to grabbing the tablets and advisers needed to do what I just did. Pretty exciting, save for our fifth place Lord who's kind of been spinning her wheels for a few weeks. I'll give a final report when we finish the game next time, but for now 4/5 of our table is still have fun, and the last player keeps showing up so it's probably not TOO bad for her. I hope.
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Jul 13, 2017 00:59
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