by nottom
So my wife and I just started playing this past weekend after finally finding the time to finish S1, and realized in March that we had made a significant mistake in February (or Jan depending on how you count).Details in spoiler below:
[o]Essentially, when we reconned NA that triggered the end game. We excitedly opened all our boxes and tabs and somehow missed that cities stay in the reserve until connected to the grid. Thus for February, we had all the new NA cards in both decks already despite them not being on the grid.
This lead to games that played out way different than they should with us feeling the need to quickly push westward across America in order to keep cities like San Francisco and Mexico City from piling up plague cubes, or as it turned out, just ignoring some of them and conceding that they be forsaken in exchange for making infections beyond the 3rd a "free" draw. In the end, we lost both games in Feb, first by 1 turn and getting run over completely int he 2nd
In March, we regrouped, decided to only play 2 Characters (We went with Laborer and Instructor each with an upgrade or two) instead of our typical 4 and managed to roll to an easy win, getting some lucky early draws to help get 3 quick supply centers built, then Reconning SA, which would enable easy access to a new Haven off the coast of Uraguay for the win the following turn.
Of course this time after reconning SA, we noticed the language about adding Buenos Aires cards to the End Game and Player Discard, while adding the rest to the reserve. Which begged the obvious question of "Were we supposed to have left all our new NA cards beyond Chicago initially in the reserve?" To which after furiously rereading every card and stick we finally stumbled across the line at the end of the creating land routes section about adding cards once connected to the grid.
At this point we looked at our board, and saw unconnected Mexico City Forsaken and Infested, San Fran down to Pop 1, and unconnected Denver currently sitting with 3 plague cubes (which likely helped our March game since we could safely ignore at the cost of 3 incidents with 2 Denvers in the starting 9). Obviously, our board shouldn't look like this. We lost at least one game in Feb as a direct result of not being able to deal with cubes in NA before they appeared and hitting 8 incidents, but possibly won March with that playing to our benefit.
In the end, we decided we would not degrade Denver for that game, but would live with the other consequences, namely an infested Mexico City we have never visited since they were already on the board.[/o]
Just wondering what other people would have done in this spot?