by Kuildeous
Just finished tonight. Wow, that was pretty fun. I never played S1, but I'm familiar with the original, along with Iberia and Cthulhu.I was impressed with how they turned the game around so that you are removing cubes instead of adding them. It still felt like Pandemic, though the chaos going into March and April as we lost cubes and didn't have the surpluses yet was a bit overwhelming.
Then I realized that we just need to keep track of what cards we already saw. I don't know why this didn't really occur to me considering that helps with other flavors of Pandemic. So I went ahead and created a spreadsheet to track our cards when Box 6 opened up:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1orqV-rH60_ImQ1rb4hbj...
The contents of that spreadsheet don't reflect the end of December.
I feel pretty good about how we did. We only got a C, but when I heard the numbers required for the higher ranks, I'm okay with what we got. We never did lose 4 in a row, though we came close with 3. Now that I know what you get, I almost wish we did lose 4 in a row, but such is life. We made it without that boon.
And we really only fell behind once. The game unlocked South America for us, and we paid the price for it. We stayed ahead of the game for all other unlocks. After we peeked at all the past cards, it's a good thing. The South American penalty turned out to be really minor in comparison.
So I know that some people weren't thrilled with S2, but I liked it. It was a fresh take on a classic game, and I felt that the unlocks were pretty reasonable. You start to wonder how you can reach all these cities you're discovering, but then you learn how to fly between supply centers and havens. And then you make supply centers permanent, which helps with the recons in future games.
Our final gambit worked pretty well. We had been playing with the Administrator up until July when we realized the strength of the Radio Operator and cycled that through. But come December, we decided to finally retire the Laborer and bring the Administrator back in because he had the skill to drive/ferry for free. We still had to work on getting him the cards to complete the route, but at least he could move 5 times per turn while we fed him cards and built supply centers along the way. It's just the luck of the draw, but the hollow men really did seem to be responding to our tactic and gather in New Mumbai and other cities on the route. How serendipitous. We never had to move a shelter, but we came close.
Still did not connect Riyadh and New Delhi. It didn't occur to me until afterward that we shut ourselves out of Riyadh by letting Baghdad fall forsaken. There was no other way to connect that city. Oops.
Our core group was mostly the Farmer, Laborer, Radio Operator, and a mix of the Instructor and the Administrator. After we searched Buenos Aires, we used that doctor that pulled cubes out of the reserve. Pretty much used him full-time to replace the Instructor/Administrator.
Nobody died (well, the speedy Administrator of course). We had uncovered three scars through the course of the game. We really didn't want to jack with injury.
And finally here's the map:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gt8zqzy94ObGdZrYOJtVUc6IBAq...
I'm not sure if uploading it as a new image is a bad idea since everyone would be able to see it, right? So to be safe, I am posting a link to it instead.
But overall, it was a satisfying game even though we got thoroughly spanked sometimes. Yet, it still felt manageable.