by Kuildeous
I don't have a lot of gripes about this game, but I do have one regarding searching the cities. Given how delicate the action economy is, there really shouldn't be any wasted search actions. I note that Shanghai had a useless search. I think we found another one in the post-game, scratch-everything phase.But the biggest offender was that one city that not only wasted an action but put an infestation sticker on it. I uncovered that one, and luckily I had an extra action to get out of there so I wouldn't get exposed. I feel having this was a mistake. It made us wary of future searches, and I could see where another group would be turned off of searches entirely if this was their first discovery. They might only do the bare minimum and miss out on all that content.
Otherwise, I had no complaints. While I agree that some of the games felt really capricious, that didn't bother me. We lost to some really bad luck, but we also squeaked out some victories against the odds. What was interesting is that a loss didn't feel that bad to me as long as we made progress in the overall game. I was okay with spending 3 of our points to offset the population declines as long as we gained 5 points overall. And each game also unveiled some new lands to explore and strengthened our infrastructure (as evident by all the crazy sea lanes).
I didn't know how these losses were going to affect our final scoring, but mostly I'm just happy with delivering the cure. If we had focused on winning the first time in each month, we likely wouldn't have gotten as far as we did. For example, we had the chance to build a third supply center and end the game after opening Kolkata, but we would have started the next game with only two red cards, which would've made building a red supply center impossible. Instead, we pushed that envelope and connected a couple more red cities to improve our odds in the next game. That may have been a turn-off for some people, but I liked it.