A fellow Winnipeger! Right on! Game purchased.
I hope you sell a bunch, Brett.
I love when your guests are so articulate. This was such an enjoyable interview to which to listen.
Tom, didn’t you just get your Race for the Galaxy game out and count all the cards before you played the digital game?
I would do that if I owned it as well: @CaseyRobinson is making a short work of me because he has access to some secret document that let him know which cards are going to produce their goods instantly when he plays them, and which ones won’t.
I’d love for the Race for the Galaxy digital version to teach itself properly to the players who can’t access the physical one.
Meanwhile, Brain Good Games has made tons of progress on the way they tutorialize their games, Solar Settlers was very easy to learn. The game itself felt a bit unfair to me on some luck aspect with the Humans, but not so much with the other races.
@marquac Rock on buddy! Thanks for the support!
@Brooski D’awww. I think YOU’RE so articulate :D
Left_Empty Thank goodness. People had a beast of a time learning Axes and Acres to begin with!
I may have to suspend my desire to wait and save money. I mean, I may save like $5 is I wait a year but based on Axes and Acres I want this game now. Makes much more sense to wait when waiting means I save $30-$50.
You are saving money: it’s one buck off! No excuse to not buy it on release!
Despite being pathologically cheap, there are a few developers whose games I buy immediately on release, without questionning it - David Galindo, Nerdook and Miles Tilmann - and Brain Good G… sorry, I mean, Brett Lowey, is one of them.
This description was designed to attack the addiction centers of my brain:
Yeah, for a while I was all like, “No, I’m not going to buy this right away”. But then I realized that I was really only lying to myself. It’s $8.50 you cheapskate! Plus I’d actually made the effort to sell some of my steam trading cards, so it was under $5 out of my pocket. If I play it half as much as I played Axis and Acres it’s a ludicrous bargain.
Exactly. I mean at $8+ there isn’t much point in waiting and Axes and Acres is so good. I think I even got Axes and Acres in a bundle or a monthly or something, so I think I owe him a purchase at release.
I guess I’m off to go get it now.
I’m still at the stage where I feel slightly lost - not about the rules of the game, just effective strategies. I think I wasn’t discarding enough cards to take advantage of the resource gains from it.
I just played the weekly challenge and only managed to get 10 settlers, which is a lot less than the ones on the leaderboard. I wish the leaderboard could be filtered by friends.
I think I’ll be quite happy with this purchase. It’s a little harder to grok than Axes and Acres, but not terribly so.
It would also be helpful if the game screen had a production summary to show what resources are automatically produced each turn.
That’s not really some kind of secret info hidden in a card manifest, it’s one of the core bits of iconography. Cards with a goods color filled in circle in the top left are production worlds: they won’t start with a card, but will produce in phase 5. Cards where the top left is filled with white but that have a colored halo are windfall worlds. They’ll start with a good, but won’t produce in phase 5 unless you activate a “produce on windfall world” power somehow. (There are also powers that only work on type of world; the filled in circle vs. halo differentiation is used there as well).
The question of how digital boardgame conversions should teach the player is an interesting one. The structure of the games is often not well suited for video game style tutorials, but you also won’t be able to convince the players to actually read through the rules. Not even if they’re fairly short as in RftG. Teaching physical boardgames really only works because it’s a dialogue between the teacher and the other players.
Awesome podcast! Listened to it at 10,334 feet while fishing for cutbow trout. Just bought it to get me through the dreary ends of shoulder season.
So is this the Solar Settlers thread? Or is this the podcast thread?
'Cause I just got onto the weekly challenge high score chart, #7. Just wanted to say. Of course, the week is still young…
I have no idea how people are getting 50+ settlers. I cannot produce nearly that many people or that many habitats no matter what I do. And if I did, they’d probably all suffocate.
Joined you there, albeit probably briefly as I’m at number 10.
Wow, I found this week’s challenge difficult. I settled a whopping 8 for a global rank of 20.
The 3rd race changes things up quite a bit with …
losing all oxygen each turn.
It changes up how you need to take each turn.
I managed 15 (after several tries), which puts me at… 12th. Somebody got 67. I literally don’t know how that’s possible. I think maybe there’s some rules I don’t know or something?
Things can cascade either way pretty quickly with that race. I think there is a possibility of “booming” by saving up the approriate cards, and then going for a mass reproduction + exploration + unexplore madness. It always ended poorly here (i.e, running out of gas, “oops”)
Finally got around to picking this up and played a couple of games. Rather liking it so far.