Thunkd wrote:
carbon_dragon wrote:
All that said, it DOES seem like the obvious (and incorrect) assumption is that when you got to level 5 you get the advanced tech tile free. You don’t but that’s what the presentation makes you believe.
It’s always easiest to learn a game if someone is teaching it to you.
Presentation on the board is important in this game as well as others. The board presentation can be used to give players useful insight into how the game works. Your presentation can make it easier or harder for a player to learn the game (especially if they are doing it from the rules). In this case the presentation works against the player’s understanding, at least in a small way.
It’s similar to games which develop their own terminology to refer to the same concept as other games use. There’s nothing fatal about that, but if you call a common mechanic by the common name, people will probably understand what you mean faster than if you give them a whole new set of terminology to learn. When games like netrunner give you TWO new sets of terminology, it’s even worse.
This isn’t a big deal in this game. The manual does explain the rule. But when you put something on a track in a game, typically something is meant to happen when you get there or go past that point in the track. Here it merely means the player has the option to take the tile, IF he does something like fielding an Academy, which is just a little counterintuitive (to me at least).
It’s a great game, and this minor flaw doesn’t change that, but it doesn’t hurt to observe occasional places where there might be room for improvement.