I played my first game of Sol last night and came back to ask a question it looks like you already answered: you just pick the instability effects at random when setting up?
That’s what I assumed—that’s what we did. Since it was everyone’s first game I just drew four blue ones at random.
The two of us that have also played Photosynthesis (and love it too) couldn’t help but notice and appreciate some similarities. The ships slowly orbiting Sol and the Sun slowly circling the board in Photosynthesis both require some planning about how you position things with an eye toward the future, and in both cases that future is inevitable and predictable (I know exactly where the sun/motherships will be in X turns) but still surprisingly easy to forget about in the moment.
The player interactions with each other are a little different, but can still feel similar. Photosynthesis is just about positioning yourself to block others and not be blocked yourself. There’s no way to actually benefit from what another player has done in the way you can use everyone’s stuff in Sol, but there’s still a familiar vibe to the way that you’re not directly challenging others on the board, but you’re heavily affected by it. Even though you’re not disrupting or altering what they’ve placed—you can’t cut down their trees or blow up their forges—you also can’t ignore it and just concentrate on your own little engines and designs.
And ultimately, we made the same kind of errors. As soon as the game was over we all started talking about how we would change our approach next time, because we all had some level of regret about the balance between building our grand plans for generating momentum and actually getting around to executing on them. I suppose that’s true of a lot of genres, worker placement for example when pursuit of the most efficient combinations might not be as important as getting some production sooner out of what you’ve got.
Some of those similarities to Photosynthesis are superficial, and when it comes to executing our grand plans too late in the game to really benefit from them, Photosynthesis has an entirely predictable game length. There’s no excuse there but lack of practice; with time and experience that should be less and less of an issue. There’s nothing in Photosynthesis like the instability of Sol to surprise you, you always know exactly how many turns you’ll have left.
When our game ended, the first reaction from my friend was that he really liked Sol, but probably still liked Photosynthesis more. He could explain Photosynthesis a lot faster to a new player—probably true. But he didn’t see me set up Sol, so then I started showing him all the instability effects we didn’t use, and he got really excited, and started to see the added depth that I don’t think Photosynthesis has.
I didn’t mean to talk as much about Photosynthesis here as I did. I can imagine someone laughing off the entire comparison—“What, you think these games are the same because they both involve energy from the sun and things moving in a circle?” But anyway, everyone liked Sol and I’m eager to play it again soon.
Thanks for the recommendation Tom!
