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My group of 4 finished December last night. Brief spoilers of such to follow: Finished with an even 700 points, just shy of the second highest tier. The final mission to escort the carrier to Johannesburg was not easy since we didn't have a supply center there. We ended up getting stupid lucky with card draw and were able to transmit the necessary cards to the right person to win in the first half of the month. Not a one of us thought we could pull it off. The same thing happened in November. The objective looked impossible to do in the first half. But clever use of the sanitation officer saved the day repeatedly. In this month we also connected the rest of the world, another thing we thought we wouldn't be able to do. Some impressions of the game: Loved it. I've posted before that my group got super mad at the game in the middle months; we did badly and we didn't think it was entirely our fault. But the back few months were a complete turnaround. We made up ground we lost and more. After the final game we spent a lot of time going over strategy and what we did wrong, and we came out of that positively. The one real criticism I can level on the game is that at times the sticker quality sucks and were peeling in a lot of places. In all, I really want to play again and see if we can apply what we learned and do better. Maybe break the game over our knees like some groups I read about. For those interested, the following is the summary of the strategy discussion we had at the end of the game: -Connect cities more efficiently. Spidering out instead of the grid like Season 1 would probably worked a lot better for us. -Make permanent supply centers in such a way that most cities were only 1 space away. We were really bad about this and I think it was a factor in why we did worse than we could have. -Synergize character upgrades better. We picked by the seat of our pants mostly. Definitely room for improvement there. -Manage the infection and player deck with the scientist and box 6 more and sooner. We didn't keep these decks small and efficient at all. A big factor in our success in November and December was using the improvements like Broken Link, Rebirth, and Well Stocked. If the deck was smaller we could see these cards more and not worry about the board as much. Again, great game that I think was way better than Season 1.
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Jan 22, 2018 15:39
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| # ? May 6, 2024 05:07 |
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We also finished up December in the second try this past week. We never got a chance to explore Johannesburg, and had to drop a research center there in the first half of the month (a game we basically conceded at the onset in favor of focusing on improvements to help in the second half). So if you were wondering if it's possible to do just fine without finding that character, we did. The skill for finding New Zealand is absolutely bonkers. I used the "good at making sea lanes" guy to connect all the red in one game, but did so in a way that made marching out cost something like 5 reds, though we got lucky in the second half of the month and were able to use the "discard a city card to pick one back up" guy and the "drop a bubble as an action" guy to march out pretty much as a straight shot. We ended up in the mid-to-high 600s. Overall, I'd say the gameplay was slightly behind S1 but the legacy elements were much improved (more naming things, more drawing on the board, more discovery). The boxes were a mixed bag. It was fun having a game mechanic utilize a box, and it was nice not wasting an entire box on the "lose 4" condition, but it was a little bit of a drag having all the boxes be basically the same thing and having their opening triggering the same way. If I were to play a second game, I would spend upgrade points very differently, especially early on. I spent a lot of January points upping the populations of Havens, thinking the Produce Supplies cards were going to be integral to our success longer than they ended up being. I would have been a lot more willing to burn those early in the campaign. I would also do a LOT more exploring. I guess we only explored a third to a half of the available cities and the game could have gone much more smoothly if we had been more aggressive. I think we only explored when we felt we needed to fulfil that objective, and were too cautious saving them. In the aftergame, I scratched them all and really liked the Atlanta one (which unless I misread it, says the entire second plague and fall of the continents was triggered by the players winning Season 1). We were pretty good about managing Box 6 to get us through the middle months, and using the radio towers to skip over Epidemic cards, though we saved the last Radio tower for December expecting it to be something special and powerful, and it turned out to be useless at that point. We also created megalopolis cities with permanent supply centers, radio towers, and bubbles. I kept waiting for something terrible to happen because of it, but nope, just turned out to be super effective. Great game! Would love to play it again.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:21
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Huxley posted:We also created megalopolis cities with permanent supply centers, radio towers, and bubbles. I kept waiting for something terrible to happen because of it, but nope, just turned out to be super effective. Interestingly, one thing I said at the very beginning of the campaign that there's no way something isn't going to happen to these havens. One's going to get destroyed or something. But no, at the end of the campaign they're all fine! A slight pop decrease from the Hollow Men defection but otherwise absolutely safe. In a way that was a little disappointing.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:35
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SettingSun posted:My group of 4 finished December last night. Brief spoilers of such to follow: Finished with an even 700 points, just shy of the second highest tier. The final mission to escort the carrier to Johannesburg was not easy since we didn't have a supply center there. We ended up getting stupid lucky with card draw and were able to transmit the necessary cards to the right person to win in the first half of the month. Not a one of us thought we could pull it off. The same thing happened in November. The objective looked impossible to do in the first half. But clever use of the sanitation officer saved the day repeatedly. In this month we also connected the rest of the world, another thing we thought we wouldn't be able to do. it very explicitly says you can only take the drive/ferry action, so flying is a no go
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Jan 22, 2018 20:58
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Sloober posted:december Sorry, I didn't mean to imply we did that. We realized that was the requirement which is why we thought it was impossible with what we had at the time-- to build a supply center at Johannesburg and also have enough cards to walk there. Basically, we got super lucky and got enough cards for the carrier to escape the far east. We made the Administrator the carrier. He also had the upgrade that let him drive/ferry once for free (and in this case he would need to pay the card cost for being the carrier), and we had the rationed event that gave +3 actions. Someone else was able to build the supply center and we funneled the necessary cards to the carrier via satellite towers and was able to walk all the way to Johannesburg in a single turn.
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Jan 22, 2018 21:09
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I finally had the chance to play through January with my group. Good poo poo, good poo poo. Lovely new art direction, cool spin on the old mechanics, and tons of spots for stickers all over the board and manual. I'm surprised they gave us ways to remove the plague cubes. I assume a new problem is going to show up in February, because I'm not seeing much to worry about anymore other than the time threat. Maybe the idea is to spend Feb expanding the grid and scratching off cards? We'll see.
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Jan 22, 2018 22:58
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Ragnar34 posted:I finally had the chance to play through January with my group. Good poo poo, good poo poo. Lovely new art direction, cool spin on the old mechanics, and tons of spots for stickers all over the board and manual. I'm surprised they gave us ways to remove the plague cubes. I assume a new problem is going to show up in February, because I'm not seeing much to worry about anymore other than the time threat. Maybe the idea is to spend Feb expanding the grid and scratching off cards? We'll see. Which ways to remove cubes are you talking about? There's only one available at all at the start of the game, and it's a Funded Event, if you win, it'll quickly go away.
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Jan 22, 2018 23:33
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thespaceinvader posted:Which ways to remove cubes are you talking about? There's only one available at all at the start of the game, and it's a Funded Event, if you win, it'll quickly go away. Well, yeah, but I was expecting that poo poo to be permanent until December. I guess the new central conflict this time around isn't the plague.
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Jan 23, 2018 01:20
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Ragnar34 posted:Well, yeah, but I was expecting that poo poo to be permanent until December. I guess the new central conflict this time around isn't the plague. I'm not quite sure why. It's not like any of the cubes and figures stayed put in the last season - and the effect IS permanent, it costs you a population on the city if it's still there at the end of the game. Which mostly isn't much, to be fair, but you might guess that 0 is not a good thing to hit, given there's a scratch-off card in the game end area that mentions it...
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Jan 23, 2018 22:10
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thespaceinvader posted:I'm not quite sure why. It's not like any of the cubes and figures stayed put in the last season - and the effect IS permanent, it costs you a population on the city if it's still there at the end of the game. Which mostly isn't much, to be fair, but you might guess that 0 is not a good thing to hit, given there's a scratch-off card in the game end area that mentions it... Also you have to spend game end points to counteract it if you're worried.
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Jan 23, 2018 22:58
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Cairo recon and June question and play report: Do you still get exposed when leaving a Hollow Man Space if the effect does not occur on your turn, eg the character ability that moves pawns to each other? We're pretty sure the answer is yes, but I figured I'd still ask just to make sure. We just lost our first June game in a completely crushing way after reconning Cairo in the second half of May and I have to say I'm not feeling confident about the next few games. I'm almost certain we're not going to get tools to counter the Hollow Men until August at the earliest and we've already been struggling to win games as it is. Even more demoralising, I'd been able to convince the rest of our 4-person group to engage in this wild scheme in the first May game that didn't pay off. We'd connected Antananarivo that game and one player had completed a search that let her draw a card from the discard. I was sure we'd be able to use this opportunity to recon Cairo previously horrendously unlikely given it required drawing the single Moscow card. We then spent the rest of what would have otherwise been a straightforwardly winnable game obtaining and moving black cards around to build a supply centre and do the recon, only to lose the turn before we could pull it off. And now it seems that all this wouldn't have worked in our favour anyway, with the aforementioned Hollow Men showing up and us not being able to do anything. We're still loving the game and overall the world is slowly but surely becoming a nicer and more stable place (Los Angeles became our first 8 city as of May and Cairo and Frankfurt are on their way there. We have plans to turn Tehran into a similar hub), but it does kind of suck that the game feels almost like it's punishing you for accomplishing its goals, something that didn't happen in Season 1.
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Mar 26, 2018 09:11
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Saguaro PI posted:Cairo recon and June question and play report: Do you still get exposed when leaving a Hollow Man Space if the effect does not occur on your turn, eg the character ability that moves pawns to each other? We're pretty sure the answer is yes, but I figured I'd still ask just to make sure. You do, it doesn't matter how or when you move away from a Hollow Man space as long as you in fact do so. The game wants you to feel powerless at this point in the game. For me it really ties the whole theme of the game together. It does get better about it.
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Mar 26, 2018 14:37
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Lost two in a row in May, Jesus Christ. We removed like half of our infect deck into package 6, which seemed like a good idea, but now we have 18 cards in the infect deck... Oh geez.
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Apr 8, 2018 20:09
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We finished! Yay!
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Apr 9, 2018 18:25
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Me and the wife are in our second game of November, done all the recons and found all the labs, so we're pretty confident we can get everything the next play through. Really looking forward to seeing what December throws at us.
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Apr 9, 2018 19:55
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What's the best strategy for using Box 6?
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Apr 26, 2018 18:07
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Yoshimo posted:What's the best strategy for using Box 6? Without sliding deep into spoiler territory, our thinking after opening Box 6 was to completely box North America so we could ignore it.
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Apr 26, 2018 18:33
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Yoshimo posted:What's the best strategy for using Box 6? Try to clear a big area like North America, and make sure you stay on top of the player deck as well as the infection deck, because of the need to keep the epidemics under control. In particular, inoculating 1-population cities is very handy.
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Apr 26, 2018 18:34
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We finished the game by winning the first December tonight! Finished on around 790 points firmly in the second tier so we're pretty happy with how we did. I'll admit that while I pegged Utopia's entire deal the moment it was mentioned I was one of the folks that didn't get the "you guys are Faded" twist until they spell it out. It didn't help that we didn't find any labs until October and thus missed out on the normal people characters. We managed to put the Scientist to great use in the last few rounds to make up for it and she was the one who nobly gave her life for the cause and brought the cure to Johannesburg in a nail-bitingly close game. One thing I did find a bit weird is how the world map doesn't wrap around. I totally understand why that's the case from a gameplay perspective and I normally wouldn't have been too bothered by it except for the fact that Asia and the Americas do link up in both standard Pandemic and Season 1. And on an amusing non-gameplay note the couple my partner and I were playing with have a weeks-old baby. We were totally happy to take regular feeding/changing/attention breaks during these last few games, getting through maybe two over the course of a day and it's fun to hang out. But he decided he was hungry on the penultimate turn of the final game, where we had four infection cards to draw, a couple of potentially vulnerable cities and the possibility of Hollow Men placement that may have hosed everything. Little dude clearly has an ear for suspense. 
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May 12, 2018 13:22
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My group just finished February... are we supposed to have shelters yet? We’ve had the action available on our player cards since January but they haven’t appeared yet?
Jewmanji fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 00:40
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No, you're not, that mechanic is months away. You may have opened the wrong door. Do you have an entry in the rule book talking about that action? Whenever you get a new action, there are at least two opened doors: one sticker in the rule book, and one for each player's action card.
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Jul 16, 2018 01:50
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Krazyface posted:No, you're not, that mechanic is months away. You may have opened the wrong door. Do you have an entry in the rule book talking about that action? Whenever you get a new action, there are at least two opened doors: one sticker in the rule book, and one for each player's action card. I figured that was the case. Made it all the way through Season 1 without making an error like that, no idea how this one got screwed up. Thanks for confirming that I'm not crazy!
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Jul 16, 2018 23:27
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OK, who is the Scientist everyone's talking about? We've made it as far as just winning October and it's not ringing any bells.
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Oct 26, 2018 00:36
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Yoshimo posted:OK, who is the Scientist everyone's talking about? We've made it as far as just winning October and it's not ringing any bells. Search Johannesburg
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Oct 26, 2018 09:39
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December Spoilers How the hell do we get from there all the way to there? Looking for any and all tips to not crash and burn on the final stretch. Also we've yet to recon Australia, if we do that as soon as possible is it going to make it infinitely harder or easier?
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Dec 7, 2018 18:20
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Yoshimo posted:December Spoilers Australia won't hurt, but it won't help and you probably won't have time. In short, you need someone to walk. It's as simple as that. Your whole goal for the whole month is for one person to walk from there to there. It's tough, and you need a lot of cards to do it, even if your routes are optimal.
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Dec 7, 2018 18:27
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Yoshimo posted:December Spoilers Don't remember about Australia, but I do remember playing the first half of December as a planned loss just to set up being able to do it in the second half. I think we even decided our carrier up front and never even grabbed the antidote (or whatever it is, it's been a while) in early December. It's a long walk, but we planned both games out as best we could before we started and got it done. Good luck!
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Dec 7, 2018 18:29
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| # ? May 6, 2024 05:07 |
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This thread sure looks like certain court filings today...
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Dec 8, 2018 01:51
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