by Tonesta78
Desonos wrote:
squegeeboo wrote:
Matt620 wrote:
Perhaps we were lucky to get 984. I have no idea, we played when it came out. We were pretty careful about protecting cities. We didn't do much in terms of character upgrades (we were worried characters would die). We were also pretty good about destroying the infection cards with the Scientist's ability: We removed Africa and the Middle East's cards with her abilities, as well as out of the way places like Mexico City. Not only did we never need to put Supply Cubes there, but we could avoid places entirely. That saved on a lot of trouble.
These are the parts that are lucky, you need those cards in the infection discard to be able to destroy. You need the cards to be in the discard, and you need the scientist to be in position to destroy them. It's doable, but things like an epidemic hitting (shuffling them out of the discard), or being in the wrong place, or larger issues that require you to move to help out, make wiping out entire sections very luck dependent.
This is also something that (if focused on early) snowballs - as you take things out, the chance that stuff you want to remove shows up increases. My wife and I were in the high 800's, and she played as the Scientist for as long as she was available. I'll tally some things later, but I think she destroyed almost as many cards as we Box 6'd. Was a tremendous help.
I can certainly see that - although we didn't use the Scientist, we did keep Box 6 at its 30 max most of the game....and we had a couple of games where we cycled through almost the entire (and once actually the entire) infection deck.
I'm thinking more about the opportunity cost - for the Scientist to remove a city card from an out-of-the-way city, she's got to go there. And that travel - even with perfectly positioned research stations - is going to take up most of her moves.
So that's one character who's minimally contributing to getting cubes back on the board and/or collecting cards for structures & recons. Means you're a bit more dependent on luck of the draw to get those player cards together.