by clarbri85
(Note: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR YOUR GAME. DON'T READ THIS UNTIL YOU ARE FINISHED)"Sweet, so would I.
Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.
Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good night till it be morrow." - Juliet, Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare
Our Cast:
Pretty Boy Floyd - Administrator - Brockway, Age 32
Duke Cletus - Farmer - Brockway, Age 17
Joe Dirt - Laborer - Ogdenville, Age 24
W0FU - Radio Operator - Ogdenville, Age 33
Axe Smasher - Instructor - North Haverbrook, Age 21
[o]
Husbando - Immunologist - Buenos Aires, Age 37
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Yolandi Visser - Scientist - Johannesburg - Age 35
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Morgan - Captain - Kali Center, Age 27
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"Scruffy" - Sanitation Officer - Doomhaven, Age 70
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Victor Rogers - Vector Control Expert
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November - Game 1
Characters Played
Pretty Boy Floyd - Administrator
Joe Dirt - Laborer
W0FU - Radio Operator
[o]Yolandi Visser - Scientist[/o]
From the Journal of Pretty Boy Floyd, Brockway Administrator, November 10th, AF 71
(WARNING: Journal entry contains spoilers for everything up to this month and possibly into the next month or so)
[o]
We've done it - the way to Utopia is open. Thanks to the secrets the Hollow men shared, we were able to devise a way in and infiltrate during the two day window. I'm a little disappointed in how smoothly it went, absurdly. We found our leaders in Shanghai - they had been dead for months, riddled with bullets. Utopia had refused to let them in. I spit on their faces as we passed them.
[/o]
Spoilers for this month
[o]We've only got one objective - Complete the Plan[/o]
After the initial infection
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Continued Spoilers for the objective
[o]
The plan is "simple" - do four recons from Shanghai (5 red cards, 4 black, 3 yellow, 3 blue, all unique). The good news is that we start with most of red and all of blue ready to go. Because we drew the "Put down 3 shelters" Unrationed Event, we decided to go with Yolandi (we put shelters in Denver, Chicago and Shanghai). ...and the game is over in all of 10 minutes. We monitor, mill through some cards, and end up doing all the recons in virtually no time at all. We search in Shanghai to find one of the more satisfying cards in the game.
Spoilers for the Search
[o]
Take that, former leaders!
[/o]
Apart from that, we make the shelter in Shanghai permanent, add the Soldier upgrade to Husbando, whom we're taking along next game, and then raise populations.
We also find out Utopia's sinister secret:
Motive Spoilers, if you care
[o]They're trying to kill everyone, Faded and normal humans alike, except for their elite few! They're sitting on the cure, waiting until all of us die, and then they're going to repopulate the Earth themselves! The Hollow Men are males let out, to control the population rate, and they're told they can't get back in unless they kill enough people. Those evil...[/o]
[/o]
December - Game 1
Characters Played
Pretty Boy Floyd - Administrator
Joe Dirt - Laborer
[o]"Scruffy" - Sanitation Officer[/o]
[o]Husbando - Immunologist[/o]
From the Journal of Pretty Boy Floyd, Brockway Administrator, December 1st, AF 71
(WARNING: Journal entry contains spoilers for everything up to this month and possibly into the next month or so)
[o]
We're heading out now - to find a cure and bring it to Jade and end this. Everyone came to see us out - even poor Duke, who we pushed so hard, came to see us off. Husbando insisted on coming - his life work, he said, was as an Immunologist. If there was even a chance that the plague could be cured, he demanded to be allowed to come. He even threatened violence if we left him. What else could we do? He accompanied myself, "Scruffy", and Joe Dirt on our mission. Our last mission. If this is to be my last journal entry, please know that we tried. We tried to leave the world in the best shape that we could. I think we did as good of a job as anyone could have. Certainly better than our former leadership.
[/o]
Spoilers for absolutely everything ahead
[o]
So, we add eight Utopia cards to the infection deck, and four more Hollow Men Gather cards to the discard pile. That's...unpleasant. We stock up Utopia with six cubes, which means that we're bringing Husbando, a character we never played, but HAD put the Lookout upgrade on.
Initial Infection
Well, besides starting with a plague cube in Shanghai, we're not in awful shape. We connect up Lake Baikal and...
We find out that in order to get the cure to Jade, we're going to have to suffer for it. We have to smuggle out enough doses...which means that one person is going to inject themselves with x1000 the safe amount of the cure, and then walk back to Johannesburg. They can only use the Drive/Ferry action...and they have to discard a card that matches a city's color to move into it. And you die at the end of the game, win or lose, once you take the injection - you have to scratch off exposure until a scar (or death) is revealed. If you get a scar, you get to take the Carrier Scar, which takes up two slots and has the above restrictions on it.
That's a problem, as we don't have any red cards. We scramble to get red cities connected and get the proper cards in hand...and we decide that Husbando is the best choice to take the shot, since he has an extra movement a turn. We then spend the next several rounds monitoring (we skip a double Epidemic), transmitting cards, finishing the route to Jade, moving Hollow Men around, and using Topaz's ability to keep disaster at bay. We're all extremely, extremely tense; this is our absolute best shot at this. Husbando is the best character to do it with. And we miscalculated - it will actually take Husbando three of his turns to get there instead of two.
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But the stubborn son of a bitch does it, while the rest of us try to keep the world from going up in flames! It's over. It's over! We got the cure to Jade, who can begin mass producing a cure.
We go through the scoring process...and end up a heart-breaking 19 points away from the best possible victory. Our double-loss in March came back to haunt us. Having said that, we've left the world in a much better place. We've cured the plague, and now the world will be able to get back to some sense of normalcy. I want the weekend before I formulate a final review, which will be going up on this site, but I have really, really enjoyed my playthrough of this. And I hope you've enjoyed the Session Reports!
From the Journal of Pretty Boy Floyd, Brockway Administrator, January 1st, Rebirth Year 0
I am writing this from Buenos Aires. From the foot of Husbando's grave, actually. We're commissioning a statue of him - I never got to know him well enough to know if he'd like that, but he deserves to be remembered. "El hombre que salvó el Mundo" - that's the inscription. Should it have been me instead? I'm not sure - I would have certainly sacrificed my life for the world. I had sacrificed so much already, what was one more thing?
Duke is looking better - some of the light is coming back into her eyes. She didn't believe me when I told her that we'd found the cure. She was sure that she was hallucinating me, that we had all died in Mongolia. I had to hug her before she would accept that I was real. We both cried for a long while after that. She is still farming, still sending out supplies to the rest of the world. Plague or not, people have to eat, and there is nobody better at making sure people get fed than her. It's good that she's so young - she's got of work to do.
We're holding our first summit in two weeks - The Faded, the Hollow Men...even the surviving people from the remaining cities are sending representatives. We're holding it in London. All of us who had a hand in this last year will be there...even Duke is making a rare appearance outside of Brockway. I'm giving a talk on the logistics of city repair and supply distribution. Joe Dirt, hero that he is, is giving a live demonstration on how to build supply centers and supply routes. W0FU says he's rigged up the most powerful transmitter on the planet - assuming it doesn't explode, we ought to be able to talk to quite a lot of people with it.
Should it have been me? I suppose not - there's still too much work to be done.
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