Our group played through Pandemic Legacy with five players - we had our normal group of four, but whenever one player couldn't make a session, we had a dedicated "filler" player who would rotate in and out. It was with this dedicated group of five that we are playing Seafall.
Note this is a continuation of our playthrough. Links to the prior session report are
first session
second/third session
fourth session
We had unlocked the third chest during our fourth game. This report will contain spoilers, but I will try to tag anything that would affect a first-time playthrough. Having said that, all of the milestones now in play are from unlock boxes. Any discussion of milestones and strategy to get them is going to venture into spoiler territory. There is less and less to report that isn’t spoilerific each game session.
Our players, in order from lowest to highest scores at the outset of the game:
- The “efficient” Lord, who always seems to be one step behind everyone else. (And falling further behind every game.)
- The Baron, who is a clear contender, but seems to have been crippled by his uncanny ability for desperately poor rolls. (At one point, he rolled seven dice with only a single success.)
- The Count (me). I’m not really developing any single strategy, and I suspect this may either be a great boon, or a horrible mistake. At the start of this session I was only one point behind the Duke.
- The Duke, who seems to be forming a kinda-sorta alliance with the Merchant. (We’ll see how long that lasts.)
- The Merchant, who, despite his honorific, will be known by this title. He was playing as the Prince in this game, having sprung up from the lowly Lord role to a lead of 5+ points above every other player in only two games! Having said that, I expect his lead to evaporate as he basically took advantage of several merchant-flavored milestones to rocket to the front. With those gone, he will be forced to change strategies to remain in contention.
[o]The Lord was the only player with a Colony at the start of the game. Two of milestones in play are “get three colonies” and “have five structures” (which requires a minimum of two colonies).[/o] Aside from that, almost all of the milestones in play seem to be very difficult for every player. I expected this to be more of a “development” session, where we all just work on gathering strength and nothing really gets accomplished. As it turned out, I was only partly right.
First “year” (six turns), each player was working on a different strategy. The Lord was gathering materials and using them to build various upgrades and working towards the aforementioned milestones. The Baron seemed content to continue his strategy of exploration, mostly staying out of the action. The Duke seemed extremely focused on hit-and-run tactics, attacking other players whenever they seemed to have an advantage, and utilizing his Advisors and Appellation to remove enmity whenever possible. The Merchant was busy setting up his arbitrage empire, by buying goods, reselling them gold and focusing on setting up two Marketplaces (+8 gold for each good sold after initial investment cost of 48 gold). Since the Duke and the Merchant had non-competitive goals, they started working together very early on.
My strategy was to [o]build my first colony. Unfortunately for me, I had not upgraded any of my ships Holds so gathering six resources was going to be extremely difficult. My initial plan was to buy a Hold upgrade as quickly as possible and start working towards a Colony. I sailed my fastest ship to a nearby island and bought 2 wood, intending to use it for the -8 cost for a Hold upgrade. My second (slower) ship started heading towards my intended colony target. But then on my second turn, fate smiled on me! The Event card for the round gave a +2 gold advantage for selling! Perfect! Even better, one of the advisors up for grab on my turn was a Woodseller who gave a +3 gold bump if I sold only wood. His cost was 4 gold, or one reputation. I happily spent my “free”, “extra” reputation. Suddenly, the wood in my hold was no longer worth 8 gold (the discount for buying an upgrade or structure) but had skyrocketed to 11 gold each! (Raw cost of 6, plus 2 for the event, plus another 3 for the advisor bump.) I sold both of my wood. On my next turn, rather than getting a +1 Hold upgrade as intended, I bought the most expensive +2 Hold upgrade (for 18 gold). My plan was coming together!! (Mostly due to extremely good luck.)[/o]
[o]The Lord quickly had enough materials to found another colony and it was looking like he was going to do just that in a turn or two.[/o] Seeing this coming, the Duke attacked the Lord’s fleet, stealing a major portion of his goods. The Baron took advantage of heretofore unknown ocean currents to get even further from the home provinces, and discovered a brand new island in the distant sea. Unfortunately, the newly discovered lands were dangerous during Winter, so the Baron elected not to explore further and quickly weighed anchor and started for home.
Winter was far off (it was only turn three!) so I sailed to [o] the only available Tomb on the map, one with a value of 7. This tomb had been attempted once prior (by someone other than me), with the attempt resulting in a complete disaster and the flagship sinking. I activated my Archeologist Advisor, Doctor Scott, who gave me +4 to explore and +2 to Tombs, and made the second attempt. Quickly scanning the list of Tombs I chose the “fortune” tomb. As luck would have it, this tomb was an Explore endeavor! Between my Advisor bonuses and ship upgrades, I was going in with nine dice. (NESTED SPOILERS FOR TOMB SECRET!!) [o]This particular Tomb allowed me to spend Fortune tokens to add additional dice to my attempt. This raised my total dice count to 11 for a 7 goal.[/o] I rolled extremely well with only one failure out of my dice total. Clearly a success! And with no damage, this netted me a 4-point milestone, and the first Relic of the game![/o]
Between the Lord gathering good for his plans and the Merchant buying everything that wasn’t nailed down and quickly selling it for gold that he rolled into the two Marketplace upgrades, easily available resources were getting extremely rare. Even though we were only in Turn 4, I kept asking “How much longer until Winter?” (I was looking forward to the restock.) There was no way to gain more goods without raiding, and having seen the long term detrimental effects of that strategy, I was a bit hesitant to start down that path. Besides, raiding only netted a single good each turn and that was far too slow for my plans.
My favorite Advisor, Geronimo the Wind Master, became available. With his help, I raided [o]a distant (wood) Dock on Paradise Island and gained a “free” upgrade, and two more Glory – one for the successful Raid endeavor and one for the upgrade. (I chose the upgrade that would give an additional Glory each Winter – a decision that would ultimately change the outcome of the entire session!)[/o]
Unfortunately, that [o]‘gain a glory’ upgrade[/o] was apparently threatening to the Duke. On turn five, he sailed out to meet my ships and attacked my flagship. Between Advisor bonuses and ship upgrades, he was rolling something like 9 to 11 dice against my Sail of 4, and Hold of 4. He ended up getting more than enough successes, but then tried to convince me to not take the damage to my upgrades in order to preserve enmity. My ship was going to sink and I was going to lose two points of Glory no matter what (the ship being sunk had two upgrades that would be destroyed) so I elected to make him pay with as much enmity as possible! I spent my next turn repairing my sunken flagship and moving my surviving ship back to Paradise Island.
As we approached our first Winter, our Merchant had just started to get his money machine rolling, his early investments in Marketplaces was going to pay off, but it took him the entire first year to set it up. The Duke used the first Winter season to activate his Appellation ability and reclaim one enmity from me, but his total enmity supply was now down to only three tokens. The Baron was regrouping and the Lord appeared poised to [o]found his second colony.[/o]
At this point, it was clear to me that my initial plan was completely impossible to accomplish. My unexpected successes in prior endeavors had put me in the lead and I entered end-game mode and started looking for quick, short-term Glory gains.
I used the initial turn to move my newly repaired flagship to Spice Island (one of the first islands we had explored had five or six spice producing locations), and activated my friend Geronimo to raid the Docks on Paradise Island once again. As an act of pure spite, I chose the exact same upgrade as before [o](“Gain one Glory every Winter” - I had no intention of ever using the bonus as I did not expect the game to last through another Winter)[/o] even though it had already caused the Duke to attack me once. Not only did I now have a small stack of his enmity already, making me a much more difficult target, but he no longer had enough enmity in supply to successfully attack me again! I regained one of my two lost Glory, plus another for the successful endeavor.
The Merchant/Duke alliance was kicking into high gear at this point, with the two players actively and unabashedly colluding at this point. They were openly discussing strategy about who would do what and how it would affect the other player. Basically, they were getting out of each other’s way and leveraging each other’s strengths to bolster their own position. And since they were pursuing non-competitive goals at this point, there was little disagreement between them... aside from them each trying to convince the other to shoulder the majority of the burden of their collective.
I moved out into the unexplored ocean and [o]pulled an atoll card. This ended up netting me another Glory point for discovering a shipwrecked crew. This result also pushed me to a new locale, where I discovered a new island. It turned out to be Island C, where simple success rolls (the dot) count as failures, meaning that this was going to be an exceptionally difficult island to deal with. Thus I named it Danger Isle. The Glory award for the successful exploration endeavor, plus the bonus Glory for filling in that row on the map, plus the aforementioned (and completely unexpected) Glory from the atoll pushed me over the winning mark for the game.[/o]
The game ended with the Merchant poised to start buying [o]3 or 4 point[/o] treasures every turn. He likely would have won the game again, had it gone on for another year. Unfortunately (for him) he had been lowest in game Glory the first winter so he was not going to be able to make a last-minute purchase to bolster his score. The Lord had gathered enough goods [o]to build his second colony[/o] on his final turn, giving him a nice score bump but not affecting the outcome. The Baron had used the Winter reset to buy the +2 Hold upgrade (the one from my sunk flagship) and was gathering resources to [o]build his first colony.[/o] He likely would have completed that in one or two more turns, but the game ended before he could realize that plan. The Duke was the only player left in the rotation after my surprise victory. (At the very least, it was a surprise to me!!) He used this final turn to [o]found his own first colony,[/o] also getting a nice score bump.
When the scores were tallied, I was back in the Prince position again with a nice score buffer. (I do not like this.) The Lord, despite his mid-game gains, was near the back of the pack in score. His 20+ point deficit behind the lead widened slightly, and his position is unchanged. The Baron, once again, fell victim to fate with a plan that was not able to come to fruition and also a relatively low score. His position also did not change. The Duke also did well enough that he maintains his 2nd place position and will be sitting in the same seat next game. The Merchant, on the other hand, spent the entire game in “setup” mode and only scored a few meager points. He moved down two positions to the Count slot. (I'm still calling him the Merchant, though.)
Our next game is not scheduled until after the Christmas holiday. Moving forward, I expect the Lord will easily cash in on the two milestones (both still in play!) in the next game, assuming he moves quickly and decisively towards that target. He will be starting the game with over 20 gold to start with and could easily leverage that for a quick win. I will likely be “soft pedaling” in the next game. I’d like to start exploring more Tombs, but I think it is important to not be playing last each round, and the healthy lead I’m developing will only benefit my adversaries. My strategy is going to be to get out of the Prince’s chair by scoring low, and hopefully controlling mt losses so I don't drop too far behind. If the other players allow the Merchant to ramp up his treasure buying machine, he could easily bury all of us.
Note this is a continuation of our playthrough. Links to the prior session report are
first session
second/third session
fourth session
We had unlocked the third chest during our fourth game. This report will contain spoilers, but I will try to tag anything that would affect a first-time playthrough. Having said that, all of the milestones now in play are from unlock boxes. Any discussion of milestones and strategy to get them is going to venture into spoiler territory. There is less and less to report that isn’t spoilerific each game session.
Our players, in order from lowest to highest scores at the outset of the game:
- The “efficient” Lord, who always seems to be one step behind everyone else. (And falling further behind every game.)
- The Baron, who is a clear contender, but seems to have been crippled by his uncanny ability for desperately poor rolls. (At one point, he rolled seven dice with only a single success.)
- The Count (me). I’m not really developing any single strategy, and I suspect this may either be a great boon, or a horrible mistake. At the start of this session I was only one point behind the Duke.
- The Duke, who seems to be forming a kinda-sorta alliance with the Merchant. (We’ll see how long that lasts.)
- The Merchant, who, despite his honorific, will be known by this title. He was playing as the Prince in this game, having sprung up from the lowly Lord role to a lead of 5+ points above every other player in only two games! Having said that, I expect his lead to evaporate as he basically took advantage of several merchant-flavored milestones to rocket to the front. With those gone, he will be forced to change strategies to remain in contention.
[o]The Lord was the only player with a Colony at the start of the game. Two of milestones in play are “get three colonies” and “have five structures” (which requires a minimum of two colonies).[/o] Aside from that, almost all of the milestones in play seem to be very difficult for every player. I expected this to be more of a “development” session, where we all just work on gathering strength and nothing really gets accomplished. As it turned out, I was only partly right.
First “year” (six turns), each player was working on a different strategy. The Lord was gathering materials and using them to build various upgrades and working towards the aforementioned milestones. The Baron seemed content to continue his strategy of exploration, mostly staying out of the action. The Duke seemed extremely focused on hit-and-run tactics, attacking other players whenever they seemed to have an advantage, and utilizing his Advisors and Appellation to remove enmity whenever possible. The Merchant was busy setting up his arbitrage empire, by buying goods, reselling them gold and focusing on setting up two Marketplaces (+8 gold for each good sold after initial investment cost of 48 gold). Since the Duke and the Merchant had non-competitive goals, they started working together very early on.
My strategy was to [o]build my first colony. Unfortunately for me, I had not upgraded any of my ships Holds so gathering six resources was going to be extremely difficult. My initial plan was to buy a Hold upgrade as quickly as possible and start working towards a Colony. I sailed my fastest ship to a nearby island and bought 2 wood, intending to use it for the -8 cost for a Hold upgrade. My second (slower) ship started heading towards my intended colony target. But then on my second turn, fate smiled on me! The Event card for the round gave a +2 gold advantage for selling! Perfect! Even better, one of the advisors up for grab on my turn was a Woodseller who gave a +3 gold bump if I sold only wood. His cost was 4 gold, or one reputation. I happily spent my “free”, “extra” reputation. Suddenly, the wood in my hold was no longer worth 8 gold (the discount for buying an upgrade or structure) but had skyrocketed to 11 gold each! (Raw cost of 6, plus 2 for the event, plus another 3 for the advisor bump.) I sold both of my wood. On my next turn, rather than getting a +1 Hold upgrade as intended, I bought the most expensive +2 Hold upgrade (for 18 gold). My plan was coming together!! (Mostly due to extremely good luck.)[/o]
[o]The Lord quickly had enough materials to found another colony and it was looking like he was going to do just that in a turn or two.[/o] Seeing this coming, the Duke attacked the Lord’s fleet, stealing a major portion of his goods. The Baron took advantage of heretofore unknown ocean currents to get even further from the home provinces, and discovered a brand new island in the distant sea. Unfortunately, the newly discovered lands were dangerous during Winter, so the Baron elected not to explore further and quickly weighed anchor and started for home.
Winter was far off (it was only turn three!) so I sailed to [o] the only available Tomb on the map, one with a value of 7. This tomb had been attempted once prior (by someone other than me), with the attempt resulting in a complete disaster and the flagship sinking. I activated my Archeologist Advisor, Doctor Scott, who gave me +4 to explore and +2 to Tombs, and made the second attempt. Quickly scanning the list of Tombs I chose the “fortune” tomb. As luck would have it, this tomb was an Explore endeavor! Between my Advisor bonuses and ship upgrades, I was going in with nine dice. (NESTED SPOILERS FOR TOMB SECRET!!) [o]This particular Tomb allowed me to spend Fortune tokens to add additional dice to my attempt. This raised my total dice count to 11 for a 7 goal.[/o] I rolled extremely well with only one failure out of my dice total. Clearly a success! And with no damage, this netted me a 4-point milestone, and the first Relic of the game![/o]
Between the Lord gathering good for his plans and the Merchant buying everything that wasn’t nailed down and quickly selling it for gold that he rolled into the two Marketplace upgrades, easily available resources were getting extremely rare. Even though we were only in Turn 4, I kept asking “How much longer until Winter?” (I was looking forward to the restock.) There was no way to gain more goods without raiding, and having seen the long term detrimental effects of that strategy, I was a bit hesitant to start down that path. Besides, raiding only netted a single good each turn and that was far too slow for my plans.
My favorite Advisor, Geronimo the Wind Master, became available. With his help, I raided [o]a distant (wood) Dock on Paradise Island and gained a “free” upgrade, and two more Glory – one for the successful Raid endeavor and one for the upgrade. (I chose the upgrade that would give an additional Glory each Winter – a decision that would ultimately change the outcome of the entire session!)[/o]
Unfortunately, that [o]‘gain a glory’ upgrade[/o] was apparently threatening to the Duke. On turn five, he sailed out to meet my ships and attacked my flagship. Between Advisor bonuses and ship upgrades, he was rolling something like 9 to 11 dice against my Sail of 4, and Hold of 4. He ended up getting more than enough successes, but then tried to convince me to not take the damage to my upgrades in order to preserve enmity. My ship was going to sink and I was going to lose two points of Glory no matter what (the ship being sunk had two upgrades that would be destroyed) so I elected to make him pay with as much enmity as possible! I spent my next turn repairing my sunken flagship and moving my surviving ship back to Paradise Island.
As we approached our first Winter, our Merchant had just started to get his money machine rolling, his early investments in Marketplaces was going to pay off, but it took him the entire first year to set it up. The Duke used the first Winter season to activate his Appellation ability and reclaim one enmity from me, but his total enmity supply was now down to only three tokens. The Baron was regrouping and the Lord appeared poised to [o]found his second colony.[/o]
At this point, it was clear to me that my initial plan was completely impossible to accomplish. My unexpected successes in prior endeavors had put me in the lead and I entered end-game mode and started looking for quick, short-term Glory gains.
I used the initial turn to move my newly repaired flagship to Spice Island (one of the first islands we had explored had five or six spice producing locations), and activated my friend Geronimo to raid the Docks on Paradise Island once again. As an act of pure spite, I chose the exact same upgrade as before [o](“Gain one Glory every Winter” - I had no intention of ever using the bonus as I did not expect the game to last through another Winter)[/o] even though it had already caused the Duke to attack me once. Not only did I now have a small stack of his enmity already, making me a much more difficult target, but he no longer had enough enmity in supply to successfully attack me again! I regained one of my two lost Glory, plus another for the successful endeavor.
The Merchant/Duke alliance was kicking into high gear at this point, with the two players actively and unabashedly colluding at this point. They were openly discussing strategy about who would do what and how it would affect the other player. Basically, they were getting out of each other’s way and leveraging each other’s strengths to bolster their own position. And since they were pursuing non-competitive goals at this point, there was little disagreement between them... aside from them each trying to convince the other to shoulder the majority of the burden of their collective.
I moved out into the unexplored ocean and [o]pulled an atoll card. This ended up netting me another Glory point for discovering a shipwrecked crew. This result also pushed me to a new locale, where I discovered a new island. It turned out to be Island C, where simple success rolls (the dot) count as failures, meaning that this was going to be an exceptionally difficult island to deal with. Thus I named it Danger Isle. The Glory award for the successful exploration endeavor, plus the bonus Glory for filling in that row on the map, plus the aforementioned (and completely unexpected) Glory from the atoll pushed me over the winning mark for the game.[/o]
The game ended with the Merchant poised to start buying [o]3 or 4 point[/o] treasures every turn. He likely would have won the game again, had it gone on for another year. Unfortunately (for him) he had been lowest in game Glory the first winter so he was not going to be able to make a last-minute purchase to bolster his score. The Lord had gathered enough goods [o]to build his second colony[/o] on his final turn, giving him a nice score bump but not affecting the outcome. The Baron had used the Winter reset to buy the +2 Hold upgrade (the one from my sunk flagship) and was gathering resources to [o]build his first colony.[/o] He likely would have completed that in one or two more turns, but the game ended before he could realize that plan. The Duke was the only player left in the rotation after my surprise victory. (At the very least, it was a surprise to me!!) He used this final turn to [o]found his own first colony,[/o] also getting a nice score bump.
When the scores were tallied, I was back in the Prince position again with a nice score buffer. (I do not like this.) The Lord, despite his mid-game gains, was near the back of the pack in score. His 20+ point deficit behind the lead widened slightly, and his position is unchanged. The Baron, once again, fell victim to fate with a plan that was not able to come to fruition and also a relatively low score. His position also did not change. The Duke also did well enough that he maintains his 2nd place position and will be sitting in the same seat next game. The Merchant, on the other hand, spent the entire game in “setup” mode and only scored a few meager points. He moved down two positions to the Count slot. (I'm still calling him the Merchant, though.)
Our next game is not scheduled until after the Christmas holiday. Moving forward, I expect the Lord will easily cash in on the two milestones (both still in play!) in the next game, assuming he moves quickly and decisively towards that target. He will be starting the game with over 20 gold to start with and could easily leverage that for a quick win. I will likely be “soft pedaling” in the next game. I’d like to start exploring more Tombs, but I think it is important to not be playing last each round, and the healthy lead I’m developing will only benefit my adversaries. My strategy is going to be to get out of the Prince’s chair by scoring low, and hopefully controlling mt losses so I don't drop too far behind. If the other players allow the Merchant to ramp up his treasure buying machine, he could easily bury all of us.