by AgentSabik
MAJOR SPOILERS up through the beginning of AUGUST.I’m reasonable sure we are playing correctly but I want to double check, because the game seems to be getting absurdly difficult, and the measly 5 upgrade points don’t seem to be keeping up with the increasingly annoying nuisances that keep getting introduced.
We are about to BEGIN AUGUST. Please do not spoil anything that happens during or after AUGUST.
MAJOR SPOILERS for everything up through the beginning of AUGUST. do not read further if you haven’t gotten this far.
Okay, so, as I was saying, things are getting intense and I want to make sure we haven’t missed anything.
We have 3 restrictions. Any one of them alone would be a hassle. Combined, they are really frustrating, especially since it seems somewhat arbitrary that we were given them in the first place. Was there some way we could have gotten rid of any of these? (We already used that checkbox card that allowed us to temporarily ignore one restriction).
Changing to a different alias seems very important, especially as new upgrades get placed on the new aliases. But, it takes entirely too much work to switch. Getting to a safe house and then spending an action doesn’t leave that character much else to do, and actions seem very limited. Is there some better way to change aliases that we are missing?
Also, what’s with these Soviet aliases that we just got for the beginning of August? We still can’t do a commercial flight even with the Soviet aliases?? Seems odd. Am I missing something?
The objectives require too many actions and cards, which makes it frustratingly difficult to assemble teams. In previous games, doing the action that required 4-5 cards usually was the end goal. Curing a disease or reconning the map. Now, in season 0, we need to assemble (often) 3 teams (or more, depending on the month) and then have these teams do all sorts of things.
With funding now at zero, it just seems like there’s too much going on. No event cards, combined with 1-6 cards being removed to set up the objectives , results in a very thin deck, causing escalations to occur once every 4 turns, and severely limiting the number of overall turns we get. On top of that, the objectives require so many cards to be discarded, it takes forever to get teams assembled.
The pursuit objectives, for example. Are we doing this right? We have to burn city cards to block off the escape route, and then assemble one or more teams (depending how far the pursuit tokens have spread), and then have the team(s) pass by every city with a pursuit token? This is very annoying and costs numerous cards and precious actions, while agents and disease cubes are getting out of control around the map. Especially if we draw an escalation card before isolating the first pursuit token. I assume we are playing this objective properly but I want to make sure we aren’t missing anything.
Disrupting the trials - if we want to disrupt all of them, does it have to be done with one action (and thus 4 teams, which is pretty much impossible)? Meaning, we can’t assemble one team, put it on a city having a trial, disrupt it, and then move the same team to the next city and disrupt it, right? It seems like the game is designed to have some infected cities, but it’s brutal now that some of them start with 1 or 2 disease cubes. And the infection cards are all guaranteed to get mixed in after the first escalation? Are we doing this correctly?
The infiltrate objectives - do I understand these correctly? We need to have someone (using a specific alias) do the infiltration, and while doing so, that character is useless for everything else, since only rate actions are allowed while in an infiltrate site? That’s a lot of actions and cards lost, and if the character doesn’t have 5e cards matching those little circular discs that block each door, then we’re just out of luck?
All of this just seems overwhelming, especially with no events, with increasingly spreading surveillance (and these ridiculous satellites that have cost us several blown covers already), and with increasing severity of disease cubes and those annoying green symptom cards.
On top of that, incidents (which are unavoidable, especially with no event cards) are a disaster - one single incident can be game-ruining if it causes us to lose or move a crucial safe house or team just as we are about to complete an objective we structured an entire sequence of turns around.
I want to make sure we are doing our upgrades properly - for completing all three objectives, all we get is one bonus point for upgrades? That’s lame, unless I’m misunderstanding how it works.
Overall, the difficulty just seems greater than previous pandemic games (which weren’t exactly easy), which led us to wonder if we were missing something.