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I am playing this game and have been for a while. I'm about ready to be done. We played two games last night. We normally only do one. I think I would've dropped out if the night concluded with the first game, because it's been about three weekends where we unlocked nothing, and the same thing happened there. Luckily though we had time to get a second game in, and we unlocked boxes four and five. Things are happening! Yay! We're doing a four player game and three of us have zero chance to catch the player in first, aside from us dedicating several actions to sinking his ships over and over and making the game a boring slog that would never reach the end. The catch-up mechanics fail utterly because they forget that the player who wins the game and gets a permanent upgrade almost assuredly won by completing a milestone (or two), which further gives them a permanent upgrade. The most egregious of these is probably the bonus glory for building/ship upgrades, which further propels them to front of the pack at the start of the next game. A bonus to a ship upgrade slot can potentially net them +3 glory from raiding a low-difficulty dock to get an upgrade. This is dumb. I'll be interested to see how Charterstone does. I haven't played Risk Legacy, but Seafall has me questioning how well the legacy mechanic works for competitive games.
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Jan 23, 2017 16:48
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:24 |
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Off the top of my head, the things I'd change about this game (don't ask me how, I am not a game designer and I realize that it's super easy to say "take this out, I don't like it!" and another thing to actually implement it) would be: - Pretty much entirely remove all economy (buying and selling) from the game. The game's strengths are when you get to interact with the captain's book, not when you use an entire turn to buy two blocks and then another turn to sell them for a profit of 6. This is obviously easier said than done, but there are a million other pick up and deliver games that I'd rather be doing this in. - Decrease the amount of turns before winter comes to 4 or so. Increase the VP end-game mark to account for increased gold pool sizes. Advisors are fun. We get to see maybe two sets, and often we've already seen them. Alternatively, just have advisors refresh when the last one is taken or make a building that does it (not talking about the guild hall) or something. - Drastically reduce the glory reward of most milestones. The permanent upgrade is enough. - Let you do three actions standard. Or make researching a free action that costs the gold? Japanese Dating Sim fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Jan 23, 2017 |
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Jan 23, 2017 18:12
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jng2058 posted: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. Right. And I would argue that basic out-of-the-box Seafall is a dry pick-up-and-deliver/4X-ish game supplemented by the semi-interesting "Choose Your Own Adventure" aspects of exploring that needs additional mechanics (that are unlocked later) to be much of a game at all. But that gets to arguing over tastes and is a waste of time. I'm glad your group's liking it. I'm probably the odd man out in mine (and my distaste is pretty recent), aside from basically everyone agreeing that the catch-up balance mechanics aren't effective to counterbalance snowballing effect of the permanent upgrades.
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Jan 23, 2017 19:07
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Clanpot Shake posted:So you're not that into the game, do you have to keep playing? Does the legacy thing work if players drop out? I think they have some mechanics for players leaving (and even players joining late). I am not quite at the point to where I need to consult them, especially with the end game in sight, so I don't know what they are. Actually, here they are, from the Rulebook (which is accessible here, without spoilers): quote:Permanently removing a player So while I wouldn't recommend this to other people, I'm nonetheless wanting to finish it. Sunk-cost fallacy, ahoy!
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Jan 23, 2017 19:42
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jng2058 posted: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. That's good to hear. Those are actually the two unlocks we both accomplished in the same game, which was... interesting. Neat stuff happens. And yeah, I'd say you guys are pretty lucky to have such an even spread, but that's good to hear. I'm guessing you guys have done a little bit of player-versus-player raiding? We've done very little, and that's probably the biggest source of our problems. Basically, we didn't really take advantage of the enmity tokens that the first-place player has to hand out by raiding him. We haven't gotten as many games in as I'd like but we're nearing the end. Maybe 4 more games? We're pretty much just playing for 2nd place now; the guy in first place can more or less passively generate 10 VP or so by activating colonies and placing buildings that he can afford without much trouble, so it's kind of a slog. But, eh. The last game was fun, most of us accomplished a lot, I discovered an island, discovered, explored, and closed a tomb, someone else did a significant milestone, and then the guy in first place won. Like I said, playing for second place. Japanese Dating Sim fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Feb 21, 2017 16:39
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twig1919 posted:So after playing the intro with my group. It took u's 1.5 hours. gently caress this game, the intro bored us to tears and left is feeling like we got nothing done. Moreover, it cause tons of arguments in our otherwise rarely arguing group over rules. The loving rulebook contradicts itself within 1 page constantly. The pace of Seafall is basically a (boring) rollercoaster. The intro is the worst part. You just finished the slow, upward-moving part. It's not a wild ride from thereon, but even as someone who doesn't like the game I can say that it gets better than the intro.
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Mar 7, 2017 19:41
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The 12th (13th maybe, forget if that counts the intro) game of Seafall shall be our last. At the end of today's game, one guy said "I think we have one, maybe two more games until it's over" and another guy said "... I think you guys should play it without me, I think I'm done." I felt roughly the same, and after some discussion we decided we're going to just go through the actions we'd take, read the last few exploration entries, etc., and then play something else for our next meeting. Honestly, I think it'd be more like 3 or 4 if we were still playing competitively, as a few things more or less require some level of cooperation to happen. We've more or less done away with all pretense of competition though and are just trying to complete milestones and uncover the few remaining sites that we had left. I'm very relieved. But, I have to note that had I been playing most any game that's this long as [i]often/i] as I've played Seafall (roughly weekly), it'd have probably overstayed its welcome, too. We got our money's worth, I'd say, and I'm still not sour on Rob Daviau or legacy games in general, though I'll have a few things to watch for in the future. Japanese Dating Sim fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Mar 13, 2017 |
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Mar 13, 2017 00:27
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:24 |
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Sinteres posted:That's kind of sad to get so close to the end before giving up, but if it's not fun anymore, it's obviously perfectly reasonable. I feel like the bad reviews and impracticality of finding a group willing to play anything short of amazing that consistently means that I'll never play it, but I'm still reluctant to read spoilers just in case. I'm happy for the experience. The very first, intro game, is pretty bad. The next several (5,6?) games are significantly better as the game opens up and the novelty of the game and its mechanics / legacy aspects are still fresh. Things start to drag though, and, in our case, one player (the one who won a couple of games in a row early on) started to run away with things. It started to get to where whoever was about to win kinda felt bad about doing so, because fairly often it'd mean another player didn't accomplish something they were building up to for the whole game. So things tended to end on a sour note for the last several games. Anyway, short answer I'm glad we played despite it not ending well. I listed a few things I'd change, and I'd add one more big one that a friend mentioned - as opposed to the game ending when a player reaches a VP threshold, they should've made it last a set number of turns, so players can plan to accomplish things that have a lasting effect instead of racing to get VPs and possibly not affecting anything permanently and progressing the game. It'd also prevent the case of a player setting a lot of stuff up and then seeing the game end before they can do what they were working toward. That got longer than I meant it too and I'm on my phone so I'll just cut it off here. Happy to answer other questions later though. Japanese Dating Sim fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Mar 13, 2017 |
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Mar 13, 2017 02:51
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