Woohooo!
So, November was pretty brutal. We found out what we needed for The Plan, and it was actually a whole lot tougher than a normal month - getting together 4 sets of cards (including 5 uniques, 4 uniques, and 2 lots of 3 uniques) is actually much tougher than the normal 3 sets of 3 (because Labourer/Architect) and side missions.
We brought Sophia, Esteban, Gaga, and Bowie (the Sanitation Engineer).
So suffice it to say, we lost our third early month, here. We got lucky with our draws in early November, getting a bunch of our special reds (the counts-as-two one and one of the counts-as-red stickers), and were able to resonably quickly get both the 5-red and the 4-black goal done, but spent so much effort on those that the world quickly fell to Plague and we lost.
We never actually used the Sanitation Engineer's power as he drew a bunch of non-cities and discarded to block Plague several times.
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Fortunately it was still early enough in the evening that we could finish off late November. We swapped Bowie out for Alara I think? and were quickly able to finish off the last two elements with minimal losses. With most of the good abilities taken and no more recons to do (the only really outstanding one left) we spent all of our upgrade points in both games just maintaining and improving the board state.
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It was at this point that we also finally worked out that we could just mark off on the board all the cities whose cards we'd ripped up entirely, which we wished we'd thought of much earlier.
So yeah, we found Utopia (EIGHT cards WTF) and proceeded to December, just yesterday.
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December was fascinating. We knew we'd need to get to Baikal and get a sample from there to Jo-burg (and a Supply Centre in Jo'burg too, but fortunately we'd long since built one there to give Sophia a jumping-off point, because it's a pain in the butt to get to thanks to being landlocked).
We brought Maq along, purely to get them out to Utopia and then Baikal quickly, and discovered that a Heroic Sacrifice would be necessary - and that all of the movement to Jade would need to be on foot, and would require a card of the relevant colour. Esteban fought fires in North America, as the rest of the team juggled cards to get Maq the colours they needed to make the trek, and we spent a lot of time debating several moves which could have reinforced the route for a second try if necessary - particularly, building a bunker (shelter, but bunker would have been a better name as Shelter and Supply Center kept getting confused by everyone) on Shanghai.
Which we ended up doing as Utopia (only one card ever came out) spawned a hollow man who we funneled out of there to avoid Maq taking another exposure, and then down into Shanghai.
We were also fortunate in only having to draw a single road (from New Mumbai to Kolkata) to complete the route. Though our attempt to make Hong Kong a hub cost as at least a round as it needed two more red cards to do the journey than if we'd planned perfectly efficiently.
The world was teetering as Maq landed in Themiscyra to take the last leg of the journey - 3 or 4 cities were completely full of Hollow Men, and we managed to bunker (or misdirect) a couple of them JUST before they spilled over, and we were I think only two plagues short of losing. But with only two moves left to go and the right cards in hand, Maq burned one of I think our only two production cards for the whole game, in Themiscyra, to bring a giant pile of supplies home for a last party before they - ever the atoner for their ancestor the Soldier from season 1's misdeeds - sacrificed themself heroically to cure the world.
And we won.
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We then spent nearly ten minutes debating how to apply our final upgrades (would Recovering be worth more points than Struggling, would Falling be worth fewer?) only to discover that Forsaken was the only material breakpoint, which felt a little disappointing, given how tough getting Recovering cities was - they only appeared in our permanent supply centres, with one exception, and it turned out that there was no point in doing anything other than just spending the points on cities regardless of where, with the exception of Forsaken ones.
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Having only lost three months, and only ever had two cities go forsaken, once each, both of which we immediately rescued, we managed to get 882 points which put us really not that far short of the maximum possible, and it was over.
We then proceeded to scratch off and open up all of the cards and windows we'd missed, finding out when scars and deaths would occur (noone died without at least one scar, and noone died earlier than 4 exposures, so we'd been possibly unnecessarily conservative), and we only had 5 or 6 Searches left, some of which would have been VERY helpful if we'd found them.
But overall, we were very successful.
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In summary, we all felt that this was a good game, but despite feeling like there were a lot more options during it, that it was probably a lot more samey in replay than season 1 - a different disease being C0dA can make a huge difference there, especially if it's blue, whereas here, the order of operations is mostly linear, and mostly not going to change much. There's also a lot more room for just randomly getting screwed as we did in early March, having 6 plague before the end of the first turn.
I felt that the games were JUST long enough each time that we didn't feel we could fit in two in an evening unless we lost one, which was a little frustrating, and despite my earlier assertion that I felt the game really pushed you to drop roles and vary what you played, it was only in November that Jeremy (the architect) saw his first absence, and very few of the newer characters got played beyond the Scientist and Immunologist, simply because one ability was just not good enough to bring over 3, pretty much regardless of what the one was - Bowie was the only one we tried and we ended up not using his ability *at all*.
I wonder whether future versions might start later characters with correspondingly stronger powers or free upgrades - as it was we just never felt like we were better off with them than our core stable of Labourer, Radio Op, Administrator/Scientist, and Farmer/Immunologist.
And it definitely did start dragging a lot in the middle - once the Cairo recon was done, it felt like we were entering the endgame - but that was in June, and we still had 4 months to play before we really started doing much towards that endgame, and those months all felt a little samey - connect some cities, do some searches, build some Centres, don't die - and many fo the newer mechanics were pretty low-priority, especially Bunkers, which we actually used cards to build I think 4 of in the whole game, and two more with an event, and similarly Misdirecting which we used I think all of 4 times outside the story uses for it to get the defections.
In terms of story I kind of liked it, though I'd pegged pretty early the Big Twist that we were the Fades and the Hollow Men were just normal militiamen.
So yeah, my overall feeling was that I enjoyed it a lot, but I'm a little relieved to have finished.
And I felt like there could easily have been a much more satisfying conclusion. I would have liked to have seen multiple options available - maybe one focussing one getting the cure, and another focussing on taking down Utopia, with a branching ending available.
In short, good game, looking forward to season 3 - but probably wouldn't replay, unlike season 1.
So, November was pretty brutal. We found out what we needed for The Plan, and it was actually a whole lot tougher than a normal month - getting together 4 sets of cards (including 5 uniques, 4 uniques, and 2 lots of 3 uniques) is actually much tougher than the normal 3 sets of 3 (because Labourer/Architect) and side missions.
We brought Sophia, Esteban, Gaga, and Bowie (the Sanitation Engineer).
So suffice it to say, we lost our third early month, here. We got lucky with our draws in early November, getting a bunch of our special reds (the counts-as-two one and one of the counts-as-red stickers), and were able to resonably quickly get both the 5-red and the 4-black goal done, but spent so much effort on those that the world quickly fell to Plague and we lost.
We never actually used the Sanitation Engineer's power as he drew a bunch of non-cities and discarded to block Plague several times.
Fortunately it was still early enough in the evening that we could finish off late November. We swapped Bowie out for Alara I think? and were quickly able to finish off the last two elements with minimal losses. With most of the good abilities taken and no more recons to do (the only really outstanding one left) we spent all of our upgrade points in both games just maintaining and improving the board state.
It was at this point that we also finally worked out that we could just mark off on the board all the cities whose cards we'd ripped up entirely, which we wished we'd thought of much earlier.
So yeah, we found Utopia (EIGHT cards WTF) and proceeded to December, just yesterday.
December was fascinating. We knew we'd need to get to Baikal and get a sample from there to Jo-burg (and a Supply Centre in Jo'burg too, but fortunately we'd long since built one there to give Sophia a jumping-off point, because it's a pain in the butt to get to thanks to being landlocked).
We brought Maq along, purely to get them out to Utopia and then Baikal quickly, and discovered that a Heroic Sacrifice would be necessary - and that all of the movement to Jade would need to be on foot, and would require a card of the relevant colour. Esteban fought fires in North America, as the rest of the team juggled cards to get Maq the colours they needed to make the trek, and we spent a lot of time debating several moves which could have reinforced the route for a second try if necessary - particularly, building a bunker (shelter, but bunker would have been a better name as Shelter and Supply Center kept getting confused by everyone) on Shanghai.
Which we ended up doing as Utopia (only one card ever came out) spawned a hollow man who we funneled out of there to avoid Maq taking another exposure, and then down into Shanghai.
We were also fortunate in only having to draw a single road (from New Mumbai to Kolkata) to complete the route. Though our attempt to make Hong Kong a hub cost as at least a round as it needed two more red cards to do the journey than if we'd planned perfectly efficiently.
The world was teetering as Maq landed in Themiscyra to take the last leg of the journey - 3 or 4 cities were completely full of Hollow Men, and we managed to bunker (or misdirect) a couple of them JUST before they spilled over, and we were I think only two plagues short of losing. But with only two moves left to go and the right cards in hand, Maq burned one of I think our only two production cards for the whole game, in Themiscyra, to bring a giant pile of supplies home for a last party before they - ever the atoner for their ancestor the Soldier from season 1's misdeeds - sacrificed themself heroically to cure the world.
And we won.
We then spent nearly ten minutes debating how to apply our final upgrades (would Recovering be worth more points than Struggling, would Falling be worth fewer?) only to discover that Forsaken was the only material breakpoint, which felt a little disappointing, given how tough getting Recovering cities was - they only appeared in our permanent supply centres, with one exception, and it turned out that there was no point in doing anything other than just spending the points on cities regardless of where, with the exception of Forsaken ones.
Having only lost three months, and only ever had two cities go forsaken, once each, both of which we immediately rescued, we managed to get 882 points which put us really not that far short of the maximum possible, and it was over.
We then proceeded to scratch off and open up all of the cards and windows we'd missed, finding out when scars and deaths would occur (noone died without at least one scar, and noone died earlier than 4 exposures, so we'd been possibly unnecessarily conservative), and we only had 5 or 6 Searches left, some of which would have been VERY helpful if we'd found them.
But overall, we were very successful.
In summary, we all felt that this was a good game, but despite feeling like there were a lot more options during it, that it was probably a lot more samey in replay than season 1 - a different disease being C0dA can make a huge difference there, especially if it's blue, whereas here, the order of operations is mostly linear, and mostly not going to change much. There's also a lot more room for just randomly getting screwed as we did in early March, having 6 plague before the end of the first turn.
I felt that the games were JUST long enough each time that we didn't feel we could fit in two in an evening unless we lost one, which was a little frustrating, and despite my earlier assertion that I felt the game really pushed you to drop roles and vary what you played, it was only in November that Jeremy (the architect) saw his first absence, and very few of the newer characters got played beyond the Scientist and Immunologist, simply because one ability was just not good enough to bring over 3, pretty much regardless of what the one was - Bowie was the only one we tried and we ended up not using his ability *at all*.
I wonder whether future versions might start later characters with correspondingly stronger powers or free upgrades - as it was we just never felt like we were better off with them than our core stable of Labourer, Radio Op, Administrator/Scientist, and Farmer/Immunologist.
And it definitely did start dragging a lot in the middle - once the Cairo recon was done, it felt like we were entering the endgame - but that was in June, and we still had 4 months to play before we really started doing much towards that endgame, and those months all felt a little samey - connect some cities, do some searches, build some Centres, don't die - and many fo the newer mechanics were pretty low-priority, especially Bunkers, which we actually used cards to build I think 4 of in the whole game, and two more with an event, and similarly Misdirecting which we used I think all of 4 times outside the story uses for it to get the defections.
In terms of story I kind of liked it, though I'd pegged pretty early the Big Twist that we were the Fades and the Hollow Men were just normal militiamen.
So yeah, my overall feeling was that I enjoyed it a lot, but I'm a little relieved to have finished.
And I felt like there could easily have been a much more satisfying conclusion. I would have liked to have seen multiple options available - maybe one focussing one getting the cure, and another focussing on taking down Utopia, with a branching ending available.
In short, good game, looking forward to season 3 - but probably wouldn't replay, unlike season 1.