I totally forgot the TSMF cards… it’s totally different than playing solo. If we do this again, I suggest putting the board state, market, conflict etc in the first post, for everybody to look up. And to update the first post.
Congrats to Dave VP Perkins…!
I almost took literally no actions this final round, not even a reveal to buy a Spice Must Flow, because I was sure that @newbrof would snatch the Bene Gesserit track from me, and I had no way to prevent that. Of my final five cards, three had no agent spots associated with them. The others were like, green, and green + purple. So I figured that I’d better not try for 10vp because I’d end up losing one and finish at 11vp, so maybe I should wait a round for my good cards to show up. Eventually, I figured that 11vp and a bunch of leftover spice was probably my best shot.
GG
Not sure the boring anti-guessing spoilers helped keep anyone honest, but I thought it could. Alas, even my activity didn’t keep me my attention too much on the goings on, but it looked fun. Although with a disturbing lack of knife-fighting.
thanks very much for the intrigues. I don’t know how to do that step without programming a script myself…
I mean, a dishonest person would just click them. :)
Just an expression, it might be easy to intuit based on length even when you’re not trying.
I was thinking to play Scythe as a forum game. I have the board game etc. Never played it. However, I need to check what hidden information there is…
Good game everyone! Thanks to @Perky_Goth for the intrigue cards, @Ginger_Yellow for the screenshots, and @newbrof for keeping track of @Dave_Perkins’s stuff. And thanks to @Dave_Perkins for, er … winning?
Super game. Thanks for playing.
Am I correct - were very few cards bought?
Dunno that that is true: I bought at least three—others bought as well. I’d say a fair number were bought overall.
EDIT: I bought Space Travel, Schpice Schmugglers, Imperial Spy, and Guild Ambassador. So that’s four. I think that’s a lot.
I bought too many and my Missionara strategy did not work. You need to play the Missionara after another BG card, harder to pull off actually. I always had better things to do.
I’ve played four or five games and have never seen so much not-buying.
Yeah, pity that. You got 3 BG cards, right? Did you manage to pick up a fourth? Though even with 3, you should have been able to pull it off at least once.
I did it once, and another time, I could have done it, but I needed to play something else and more often than not, I only had 1 Missionara and no other BG… and you need to play the other BG card in the agent phase. I think I wanted to use my fremen bond with my other BG card…
Ah, that’s alright, then. I thought you hadn’t gotten to use it at all. 2 is obviously better, but once is not unreasonable absent more strongly BG centered deck. But then the other players don’t always want to cooperate…
I enjoyed your playthrough, guys. If you play again, I might be interested, as I just received my copy of the game.
In the meantime, I’m about to embark on my first play, using the solo rules. Is there a separate thread for the game here? I can’t find one using the search function. Knowing me, I’ll have questions. :) I’ve read the rules and watched two how-toplay videos, and I plan to use the app for my first game, so maybe things will go smoothly.
you can drop your questions here or in the boardgame thread. I am up to a new forum game, maybe we can start one next week. However, the intrigue card situation is not optimal.
If called upon to defend my title, I will rise to the occasion.
BGG has a nice dice roller, but even BGG seems to struggle handling cards in play-by-forum games. As far as I can tell, they use spoiler tags too.
Anyway, my first game went very smoothly. I had hardly any rules lookups. I played solitaire as Paul Atreides, on the novice difficulty level, against Memnon Thorvald and the “Beast” Rabban. The AIs won all the early-game battles and were quicker to develop influence, and I was behind for most of the game. But in the last three turns, I managed to dominate combat, winning three straight 2-VP conflict cards to leapfrog over the competition to victory. It was pretty exciting!
The deckbuilding side of the game was a bit more robust than I was expecting, after having read many critiques of it. I reshuffled several times, and I did find it useful to cull bad cards and add good ones. I even invested in a seat on the Council to improve my deck. And indeed, buying the CHOAM Directorship was my first big step toward victory.
Still, my favorite mechanic is the interaction between the cards and the worker-placement spots on the board. I really like that the cards limit where you can place your agents. More than once I tried using Paul’s signet ring (which lets him draw 1) to search for a card that might let me visit the space guild, say, or the Fremen. I thought this was cool and at least somewhat thematic.
Theme-wise, I thought it was pretty good. As some have said, the board prioritizes functionality over eye-candy, and that’s fine with me, especially as the images on the board are plenty thematic as is. The game mechanics themselves, though, really made good use of the theme. Trading water for spice, or spice for money, felt right; jockeying for incluence felt right too.
Tomorrow I’ll give it another go, this time on Veteran difficulty.