by fredd13
My wife and I have finished Season 2, and enjoyed it. But one thing that I felt didn't work well, as a mechanism, was Rationing. I wondered what other people's experiences were, and how you felt?My big problem was simple; the mechanism felt increasingly "broken" and irrelevant as the year progressed.
In Season 1, the same mechanism very clearly and directly addressed the problem of tuning game difficulty to player abilities. If you were struggling, you'd get extra Event cards to add to the deck, almost all of which you'd see at some point during the game - and they'd usually make at least some difference. Very clever; I liked it a lot.
In Season 2, though? As we reconned deeper into the board, and more cities joined the Grid, the Player deck positively ballooned - and the cards we drew each game grew more random. In the back half of the year, I doubt that we ever got much more than a third of the way through the deck before the game ended. Two event cards here or there were unlikely to have remotely as much effect as in Season 1, where we'd normally come close to exhausting the deck. And we'd been winning most games, so our Rationing quickly dropped to 0 - so when we actually lost one, and were awarded a whole 2 Event Cards of our choice to add to the deck, my immediate reaction was... ...muted. If we only ran through about a third of the deck, as usual, there was nearly a 50% chance that we'd never even see either of them. As for potentially useful Event cards awarded near the end of the game - sure, we could choose to add them, if we had the Rationing, but we'd quite likely never get to use them. I mean - yes, it's nice to know that they might be in there somewhere - but it increasingly felt like something largely irrelevant and tacked on. And as a mechanism for tuning game difficulty, it was about as much use at that point as a chocolate fire guard.
All of which raised the question - why repeat the mechanism? Other than because it worked in Season 1? I felt quite strongly that it needed a tweak - maybe boost the +/- numbers later in the game. Or boost the minimum number. Or even link it somehow to the number of epidemics seen in the previous game as well as the result. Anything to bring it back into play as a balance mechanism. Or if that wasn't needed - drop it, and drip-feed us more Unrationed Events.
(That's not to say that we didn't have some lucky draws, or moments when we we able to exploit what cards we saw. We did and were. But it didn't honestly feel like a significant part of the game.)