by ftl_ftw
Yeah, the difficulty was weird.Before our first real game it seemed like it would be really hard. But we got the hang of it and didn't actually lose any games for the first 10 months.
Really I'd say about a quarter to a third of the time we spent in those 10 months we were spending not on trying to win but on preparing for future games - [o]connecting more cities, making sure we would put supply centers in cities we would need in later games, doing searches,[/o] etc. But it really did feel like we had a lot of spare actions to do just explore and do legacy actions, not just frantically try to maintain the board. Then again, perhaps that's why it remained easy, because we were always setting up future games.
November...[o]we lost the first game, but again because we spent time doing things other than trying to win. We did the recon out of Jakarta and then the Australia haven, figuring that there was no way we would be able to get 5 red card for the Plan anyway. We were wrong; if we hadn't done those two recons, we could have won November in the first half.[/o]
December...[o]We built a supply center in JBurg and then went to Lake Baikal. As it turned out, again we needed lots of red cards to get to one character, and neither of the characters we had could pick up cards from the discard. So it was pretty hopeless, basically impossible. For the second half of December we picked the sanitation worker, who we had never played yet and who had no upgrades, and again won relatively easily.
That felt pretty lame. December felt impossible without a pick-cards-from-discard character, easy with one, and of course we had no idea before the middle of the first December game. [/o]
In Season 1 which we played two player, we had avoided using much upgrades because we figured we'd be switching characters a lot. In this game we played two player (which makes it easier) AND we put boatloads of upgrades on the same characters we used all year.