by Tonesta78
chooi wrote:
In our 4-players game, we had it all sorted by November ready to do full plan for December. During first go, we set up Supply Centre in Johannesburg Jade station(making it permanent after of course) & found Pearl lab but died straight after. All red cities were connected. Rest of world well connected too.
So all planned route of 3 reds, 2 blacks, 1 Yellow and 1 red from Pearl to Jade. Setup began badly with 3 plaque cubes. Despite my character able to immediately move to Pearl on start, none of us started with any red cards. Our plan of another player's Sam supplying required cards (as his ability can freely pass a card) combined with my Frodo carrying the cure using extra free move & ability swap 2 cards for 1 in bag of removed cards seemed viable, especially as another player had drawn card to provide me 4 extra actions when needed.
Alas, we still only got fewer than 2 full rounds. I made it to Shanghai and we died from too many outbreaks. I did not think anything we could do to prevent the bad draw.
Final score 632. Disappointed we could not win despite clear plan and ability to if we had at least 3 rounds.
Seems quite a few winning it here, some first time (though one clearly played wrongly by flying directly to Johannesburg!). Was it just us who lost? I know two local groups who did. Wonder what ratio of win to lose is?
So all planned route of 3 reds, 2 blacks, 1 Yellow and 1 red from Pearl to Jade. Setup began badly with 3 plaque cubes. Despite my character able to immediately move to Pearl on start, none of us started with any red cards. Our plan of another player's Sam supplying required cards (as his ability can freely pass a card) combined with my Frodo carrying the cure using extra free move & ability swap 2 cards for 1 in bag of removed cards seemed viable, especially as another player had drawn card to provide me 4 extra actions when needed.
Alas, we still only got fewer than 2 full rounds. I made it to Shanghai and we died from too many outbreaks. I did not think anything we could do to prevent the bad draw.
Final score 632. Disappointed we could not win despite clear plan and ability to if we had at least 3 rounds.
Seems quite a few winning it here, some first time (though one clearly played wrongly by flying directly to Johannesburg!). Was it just us who lost? I know two local groups who did. Wonder what ratio of win to lose is?
So it sounds like you set up everything optimally for December (although maybe more radio towers would have saved Sam from having to hang around with Frodo?), but this one bolded sentence makes me wonder if the way you'd played the rest of the game upped your difficulty for the month.
By December, it's likely you've got 40-45 cities on the grid, with a total of about 80-85 infection cards, and only 30 supplies. But you could have up to 30 infection cards in Box 6, and you could have destroyed a bunch of other infection cards using a combo of the Scientist/Unrationed events/Infection Card Upgrades.
I know how we played the game we did have less infection cards than cubes but we were able to distribute our starting cubes so that we'd reduce our odds of having a plague cube on the board at the beginning
e.g. We only had two supplies on Tripoli but we'd need to be really unlucky and draw all three Tripoli cards to plague out in set-up.
We only had five supplies on Utopia, but we'd need almost the entire draw to be Utopia cards to plague out there either.
From what I've seen on here, the players with the highest scores all destroyed infection cards more liberally than we did - so I can imagine that they really did enter December with a supply cube for every infection card in the deck and therefore zero risk of starting plague cubes at all.
Once the game has started, then you know where the problem areas are going to be and react accordingly (including liberal use of the Topaz ability and Saboteur/Smuggler/Supplier where appropriate).
Obviously this analysis is of absolutely no use retrospectively.....but I am starting to see a theme in the posts on here.....