by bluesheep
WARNING: Do not read if you haven't finished the legacy mode yet, no spoiler masks are used in this post!So we finished our campaign yesterday and my overall impression was that it was a great ride. All of us (3 people) thoroughly enjoyed the experience but after sleeping a night over it and thinking about what we encountered I have found a few points were I feel the game wasn't polished enough and could have easily been made more exciting.
My main complaint was that the game was overall too easy, we had ~860 points at the end and could have easily gotten way over 900 if the game had given us any clue that it wanted all the military bases to be wiped off the board (had enough time in december left for that). The lack of difficulty directly ties into my other complaints: the game has a lot of content that I never got to use, because I simply didn't have to. What I mean by this in particular are the characters and subventions. Once we had identified our dream team, there was no point in changing it, especially since a good team kind of reinforces itself on its further use via the relationships and character upgrades. In my opinion this game dearly lacks a fatigue mechanism, that requires the player to change their team between months. Just by doing some quick brainstorming I came up with these two concepts:
a) A character that is in play can't be picked for the following month. Since this might lead to a simple division of the character pool in team 1 and team 2 a better version of this might be:
b) Half of the team isn't available for two months. This means that there is no clear separation into team 1 and 2 an you will encounter a lot of different combinations.
Either of these mechanisms should probably be combined with a deep fatigue option. If you desperately want to use a character despite him being fatigued, you can do so, but he gets a burnout afterward, which nets him a scar. This would also make the scars more interesting by bringing them into play more frequently. For our game group the scars almost went unnoticed. I really would have appreciated if the game required me to change characters, as such I was really glad that our most powerful character (quarantine specialist) turned out to be the traitor, since we finally had to rethink our team's composition.
While I feel that the sliding variation of difficulty via the subventions is an elegant solution, I think it hurt the game variety. I would have much more preferred to keep the subvention at a fixed amount depending on player count (which would help even out the problems some people report with 4p) and combining them with an exhaustion mechanism that works similarly to the fatigue of characters, thus insuring that you will see all of the different subventions in the game. What probably could have been left in, would be the bump in subventions when you loose a game, but the decision to reduce them to zero meant my game group basically never got to use the whole set of cool cards that is in there. I think basic pandemic does a much better (though probably not so gradually adjusted) way of controlling the difficulty by increasing the amount of epedemics cards. It would have been better to include a sixth epedemic card if the game was too easy or reduce to 4 epedemics if you kept loosing.
The search mechanism also felt very underdeveloped and dull. In all months except for December, we were able to complete the search in the first round, so basically all it amounted to was slowing us down by 1 turn for each player and getting rid of some cards. The same result could have been achieved in a much more interesting way, where you actually feel like you are on a hunt for clues, and whats best: all the components for it are actually already in the box. While the exact numbers here would be a question of playtesting, if thought the search should be changed in the following way:
1. when seeding the game with diseases, draw an additional 3 (number subject to testing) cities from the infection deck and put the tokens showing the magnifying glass onto these "clue" cities
2. depending on which month you are in, the search could be played in different modes. For example when introducing the search for the first time, the "clue" cities will remain static, so you simply shuffle the respective infection cards back into the draw deck. If it is the second time a search is introduced (or if you are for example hunting for patient zero) a lot more interesting stuff can be done:
2a) whenever a city with the same colour as the "clue" city is drawn from the infection deck, the clues moves or
2b) you put stickers onto the infection cards of the clues cities during setup. don't shuffle the clue cities into the draw deck, but leave them in the discard, meaning that the clue cities will be put back on top of the draw deck during an epedemic. Ideally the infection cards would receive custom clue stickers (a magnifying glass or something like that), but since those aren't in the game
3. In order to search you have to reacht a city where a clue token is and spend an action by searching for the clue. This could also require you to discard a card in the colour of the city you are in in order to pick the clue up
4. when all clues are found the search goal is completed
So simply by putting what already is in the box to a different use, you create the same result of requiring the players to waste turns/cards on search actions, or getting to clue cities but all of it in a more dynamic way. This would also allow to introduce new characters like a detective, that are especially good at going after clues.
Roadblocks were also entirely neglected by our group, maybe I am wrong on this, but why would you ever sacrifice a city (completely roadblocking it and letting the panic rise in the now isolated city) if you could simply be using prophylactic quarantines or simply treat diseases. Maybe their use is just so situational that we never encountered that narrow use case in our campaign, but I feel like we were given a tool that was completely useless. I feel like this could have been put to great use if the ground zero of C0dA (St. Petersburg in our case), would have been of any greater importance. I haven't thought of anything in particular here, but ground zero for example could have been in every game (just add the infection card to the discard at setup) and whenever it is drawn a zombie leaves the city. If a zombie hits a road block, discard the roadblock and the zombie. Probably quarantines shouldn't work at ground zero then too. I admit that my ideas here are lacking, but I simply haven't put much thought into this aspect (yet).
Even worse was the option to sacrifice a character, we never even considered that one. While the idea is excellent, there simply weren't any situation that required this dramatic step (which benefits can also be hard to judge whether it would be worth it). I would have liked to see this tied in with the story in some way. For example discovering the cure could have required you to test it on one of the characters, which would have meant to sacrifice him, or you could have made the sacrifice as some other part of the story. There is a great dramatic element to the sacrifice, but I feel it is put to ill use as a game mechanic and should rather serve as a plot device. I have no actual data on this, but I would like to hear how many people even used the sacrifce? I am sure that most gamers out there tried to prevent this at all cost, which is why it probably didn't see a lot of use.
I know that I am late to the party and hope the interest in this game didn't vanish entirely, so if you like the changes I proposed here or have any further suggestions, please post your thoughts here, as I am eager to discuss.