My copy of Oceans arrived tonight and we got a couple of games in with 3 and 4 players. If you liked Evolution, I feel like you'll need to try this one. There's a lot of refinement of those systems in place. It's simpler and more streamlined in some places, less restrictive in others, and access to food becomes a more involved thing that players each have more direct control over. I was a little disappointed that the game doesn't really support the simultaneous play that was possible in Evolution, though. It's tough to say if Oceans straight up overrides Evolution as a game; it's definitely a sequel, and while the two games do different things, at least right now I'm not sure if there's space for both. I'll have to think about it.
One thing that may be contentious is that Oceans feels much heavier on player conflict than Evolution. It makes sense thematically, as there's simply a hell of a lot of carnivory in the ocean, but that may keep some people from enjoying it as much.
What's particularly interesting in comparing the two games is that feeding is now a step removed from scoring, the latter happening at a pretty tightly controlled rate. This allows for some absolutely bonkers cards whose abilities are nevertheless pretty tough to capitalize on. One species may be able to feed like 9+ food a turn, but if they only get to score one of those food tokens a turn, it pretty much just makes them a meat-filled pinata for the rest of the players.
I played a few games of Firefly ages ago and it was quite good and flavourful but seemed a bit slow, I think. Maybe the expansions sped things up, I dunno.
I've almost never liked a digitized board game. It removes most of the point, at least for me, of playing a board game in the first place.
For me, it's mostly a way to satisfy my craving for a particular game even when we can't get a group together, and a way to have more time to learn and think about the game.
Basically, yes it's not as good as the 'real' game but it's infinitely more convenient and gives you more time with a version of the game at least.
My copy of Oceans arrived tonight and we got a couple of games in with 3 and 4 players. If you liked Evolution, I feel like you'll need to try this one. There's a lot of refinement of those systems in place. It's simpler and more streamlined in some places, less restrictive in others, and access to food becomes a more involved thing that players each have more direct control over. I was a little disappointed that the game doesn't really support the simultaneous play that was possible in Evolution, though. It's tough to say if Oceans straight up overrides Evolution as a game; it's definitely a sequel, and while the two games do different things, at least right now I'm not sure if there's space for both. I'll have to think about it.
One thing that may be contentious is that Oceans feels much heavier on player conflict than Evolution. It makes sense thematically, as there's simply a hell of a lot of carnivory in the ocean, but that may keep some people from enjoying it as much.
What's particularly interesting in comparing the two games is that feeding is now a step removed from scoring, the latter happening at a pretty tightly controlled rate. This allows for some absolutely bonkers cards whose abilities are nevertheless pretty tough to capitalize on. One species may be able to feed like 9+ food a turn, but if they only get to score one of those food tokens a turn, it pretty much just makes them a meat-filled pinata for the rest of the players.
Also got my first run of Oceans last night and can second pretty much all of this. After a single play, I already prefer it to Evolution. The enhanced conflict is offset by the fact that it is harder for species to actually go extinct; you don't get wiped out for being reduced to 0 population, just if you can't age the maximum amount on your own turn. The overpopulation mechanic is also interesting and keeps any one species from relative safety.
I've almost never liked a digitized board game. It removes most of the point, at least for me, of playing a board game in the first place.
The only digital board game I've gotten into is Through The Ages, which is a game that actively supports and benefits from hundreds of plays but that is basically impossible to play that many times in person. Async multiplayer is a huge boon in that case. But generally I agree.
My copy of Oceans arrived tonight and we got a couple of games in with 3 and 4 players. If you liked Evolution, I feel like you'll need to try this one. There's a lot of refinement of those systems in place. It's simpler and more streamlined in some places, less restrictive in others, and access to food becomes a more involved thing that players each have more direct control over. I was a little disappointed that the game doesn't really support the simultaneous play that was possible in Evolution, though. It's tough to say if Oceans straight up overrides Evolution as a game; it's definitely a sequel, and while the two games do different things, at least right now I'm not sure if there's space for both. I'll have to think about it.
One thing that may be contentious is that Oceans feels much heavier on player conflict than Evolution. It makes sense thematically, as there's simply a hell of a lot of carnivory in the ocean, but that may keep some people from enjoying it as much.
What's particularly interesting in comparing the two games is that feeding is now a step removed from scoring, the latter happening at a pretty tightly controlled rate. This allows for some absolutely bonkers cards whose abilities are nevertheless pretty tough to capitalize on. One species may be able to feed like 9+ food a turn, but if they only get to score one of those food tokens a turn, it pretty much just makes them a meat-filled pinata for the rest of the players.
Also got my first run of Oceans last night and can second pretty much all of this. After a single play, I already prefer it to Evolution. The enhanced conflict is offset by the fact that it is harder for species to actually go extinct; you don't get wiped out for being reduced to 0 population, just if you can't age the maximum amount on your own turn. The overpopulation mechanic is also interesting and keeps any one species from relative safety.
I take it you guys were backers? Having gotten a run in at Unplugged I'll have to keep an eye out for when it hits retail. It seems like a huge step up from regular Evolution.
I was a backer, yeah. I will say while I absolutely do not regret backing the game this time, this was North Star's (I think) 7th Kickstarter campaign and I was surprised at how much the last couple of months of it have felt like a company's first Kickstarter campaign. Fulfillment is months late and international backers have had to seek out their own information from fulfillment companies, with many expressing that they have felt left out in the cold.
Anyway that has nothing to do with the game itself which is wonderful. If you're very familiar with Evolution you may also be familiar with the issue of deck bloat; Evolution had this unfortunate tug-of-war issue where draw chance for different basic traits was a really important point to nail for a balanced experience, but also one of the chiefly fun things in the game was seeing all the diversity possible with different weird traits released through expansions and promotional packs.
That issue has now been solved by making two decks; one Surface Deck with all the basic traits in it in even proportions, and one Deep Deck filled with more complex and wild cards that you actually have to spend points to play. The Deep Deck has 89 one-off cards, each illustrated by a guest artist, and during a game you may see 10-15 of them total. This is also where all the bonus cards from the Deluxe Edition and promo cards for the campaign are shuffled. It's meant to constantly provide players with new and weird possibilities and problems to overcome. This leaves the door wide open for them to continue issuing strange and intense new cards without disrupting the basic machine of the game. Even using the Deep Deck at all is optional (though we completely ignored the manual's suggestion to skip it for our first learning game).
BloodySloth on
+1
Options
AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
I definitely got seduced into building an extremely rude carnivore by the Deep Deck at unplugged and probably ultimately lost out in part because of the cost of said critter.
Yeah the fact that evolving Deep traits costs you points is a great balancing act. I also liked the tension of the scenario cards and utilizing migration to both keep the Reef stocked and to (de)activate scenarios.
My favorite creature so far used a couple of cheap Deep cards and some basics to become immune to leeching, overpopulating, and extinction, who parasitized the creature to its left and symbiotically gained food from the creature to its right, and couldn't be attacked by a creature with 2 or more attack. Just a complete set-and-forget animal who peacefully collected points the entire game while I was doing other stuff. Lovely.
Kinda wanna create a thread for folk interested in learning eurogames on yucata.de
Not sure I could find time to maintain or update it.
Maybe a different game started every week?
An idea to be deployed when I got the energy
0
Options
AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
Our local KS serial backer texted me an hour ago to ask about getting out Oceans tonight, so way to go thread for mentally preparing me.
Ascension is really great as a digital game because fuck organizing all those cards.
My wife beats me on tabletop Ascension every time, spending 10 minutes per turn mumbling under hear breath, moving cards around in inscrutable piles, and somehow affording great cards every time they turn up.
I absolutely smoke her every time we play the digital version.
I like the digital version better.
I bought Coup Rebellion and it easilly takes the cake for biggest box to smallest game in my collection. It could probably fit in the original Coup box but instead it is in a box 4 times the size. I guess they expected to make a lot more expansions than the one.
I saw the new? edition of Jaipur and sadly its real ugly. Which is such as shame as the original is so beautiful.
Gvzbgul on
0
Options
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
Ascension is really great as a digital game because fuck organizing all those cards.
My wife beats me on tabletop Ascension every time, spending 10 minutes per turn mumbling under hear breath, moving cards around in inscrutable piles, and somehow affording great cards every time they turn up.
I absolutely smoke her every time we play the digital version.
I like the digital version better.
all i know about evolution is one of us makes a carnivore that doesn't have enough of us to eat to sustain itself, one of us makes an herbivore that takes extra food any time any player takes food from the supply eating the entire ecosystem out of food super fast, and also i was there.
that's like the only game i've ever had a group get 3/4 of the way through and say "ya know what, I'm done with this"
How does Oceans handle carnivores? I remember they seemed very difficult to pull off in the previous games. You needed intelligence to have a good chance at making them successful.
How does Oceans handle carnivores? I remember they seemed very difficult to pull off in the previous games. You needed intelligence to have a good chance at making them successful.
You no longer need any particular trait at all in order to feed on another species. There are a lot of traits that remove your ability to feed in one way or the other, so if you intend to do really well with predation or foraging, you'll typically be locking that species out of doing the other (but not necessarily).
Defensive traits that straight up make you immune to being attacked are less common and more situational; more frequently you'll see a card come with a Defense value that essentially acts as damage reduction, making your attacker take X less food from you. Attacks are usually much easier to pull off, but on the flipside, feeding on other species is typically less of the dramatic attack it was in Evolution and more part of a constant flow of resources from one species to another. The food that gets taken from you wouldn't all have gotten scored that turn anyway (most likely) and also will be hanging out on your attacker's card for a while, too, so who knows if they'll even be scoring it. Another mitigating factor is that extinction is way less of an imminent threat in Oceans compared to Evolution; species can't get driven to extinction from an attack or if they can't feed, necessarily. This can all get mixed up a bit due to rules-modifying cards.
I bought Coup Rebellion and it easilly takes the cake for biggest box to smallest game in my collection. It could probably fit in the original Coup box but instead it is in a box 4 times the size. I guess they expected to make a lot more expansions than the one.
I saw the new? edition of Jaipur and sadly its real ugly. Which is such as shame as the original is so beautiful.
Looked up Jaipur new ed. and I don’t get the ugly view, much more thinking they are so similar that I don’t understand why they bothered redoing it at all.
0
Options
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
The Android version of Tigris and Euphrates seems to have disappeared from existence
I paid for this fucking thing and it's been pulled
Wtf
Try going to "Apps & Games" in the menu, then check the Library tab. It shows everything you own, and you can click "install" beside each one.
That's what I mean, it isn't there. I had it installed on this phone a while back, then removed it, and now there's no trace of it. Googling the issue turned up some other folks with the same problem but no explanation. Super weird.
Yellow and Yangtze is still there, thankfully, which is largely the same
Edit: I even found my receipt in Gmail, and confirmed the name. This is very strange.
Oof! So, we lost both games in April, both games where our plan was to recon Europe and one of those games we were 1-2 turns from doing so. Just had horrible epidemic draws and lost due to plague cubes.
So now we start June to have it give us Europe, but now a city is immediately erased from the map and blemished by a huge skull sticker. Did not feel good.
However, we won! Did 2 searches (Atlanta and another city I can't remember) and reconned Western Asia (black). We won with 7 plague cubes on the board, and knew one of the cards drawn in the next two 3-card draws could have ended it.
We forgot again to try and trim down our player deck. 7 epidemics is a lot, and it's getting difficult to get cards you are looking for.
Atlanta search
The heart-wrenching guilt as you scratch off Atlanta's search and find out this new plague was the result of blowing up the CDC headquarters of the bad guys in Season 1. We caused this. Ouch.
Recon black (West Asia)
Now to have to deal with hollow men too! Which will draw through our infection deck even faster! We've been trimming it down, but perhaps too far. This is likely going to get ugly before it gets better, and it already has felt like we're barely getting by.
Oof! So, we lost both games in April, both games where our plan was to recon Europe and one of those games we were 1-2 turns from doing so. Just had horrible epidemic draws and lost due to plague cubes.
So now we start June to have it give us Europe, but now a city is immediately erased from the map and blemished by a huge skull sticker. Did not feel good.
However, we won! Did 2 searches (Atlanta and another city I can't remember) and reconned Western Asia (black). We won with 7 plague cubes on the board, and knew one of the cards drawn in the next two 3-card draws could have ended it.
We forgot again to try and trim down our player deck. 7 epidemics is a lot, and it's getting difficult to get cards you are looking for.
Atlanta search
The heart-wrenching guilt as you scratch off Atlanta's search and find out this new plague was the result of blowing up the CDC headquarters of the bad guys in Season 1. We caused this. Ouch.
Recon black (West Asia)
Now to have to deal with hollow men too! Which will draw through our infection deck even faster! We've been trimming it down, but perhaps too far. This is likely going to get ugly before it gets better, and it already has felt like we're barely getting by.
Oof! So, we lost both games in April, both games where our plan was to recon Europe and one of those games we were 1-2 turns from doing so. Just had horrible epidemic draws and lost due to plague cubes.
So now we start June to have it give us Europe, but now a city is immediately erased from the map and blemished by a huge skull sticker. Did not feel good.
However, we won! Did 2 searches (Atlanta and another city I can't remember) and reconned Western Asia (black). We won with 7 plague cubes on the board, and knew one of the cards drawn in the next two 3-card draws could have ended it.
We forgot again to try and trim down our player deck. 7 epidemics is a lot, and it's getting difficult to get cards you are looking for.
Atlanta search
The heart-wrenching guilt as you scratch off Atlanta's search and find out this new plague was the result of blowing up the CDC headquarters of the bad guys in Season 1. We caused this. Ouch.
Recon black (West Asia)
Now to have to deal with hollow men too! Which will draw through our infection deck even faster! We've been trimming it down, but perhaps too far. This is likely going to get ugly before it gets better, and it already has felt like we're barely getting by.
Erm. What happened to May?
Pandemic Season 2: May
This was before Christmas and post-PAX, so apologies for rusty memory and lack of update earlier. Busy time of year.
We reconned Africa (yellow), due to a fortunate card draw that despite wanting to do Europe for 3 games now, we couldn't pass up. We also had a double search city from the start (LA?), so doing that instead of connecting cities pretty much decided our optional objectives.
We won!
It got a bit tough to start, with a lot of cities running low on cubes, but we kept managing to scrape by, slowly passing cards needed to people who needed them as we moved to the next fire to be put out. I play the supply center builder, and kept drawing all the special cards. Not helpful. However, we we figured out we were 3 turns from winning, knew the top cards to be drawn next weren't going to hurt us, and held one quiet night and it worked the first time? Had it in the bag.
Really was a nice victory lap of doing our turns and smugly bypassing anything that could hurt or distract us from our goal. We needed it after April.
Opal
I think we found Opal the second half of April, but that's been a help. Getting double supplies when at our havens/supply centers is a huge action saver
Europe recon - I forgot to mention this earlier
The charter flight action?! Without a card discard? Game changer. Huge benefit we immediately made use of and allowed us to move all over the board. We've got 4 permanent supply centers, perhaps not in the best locations, but good enough to save entire turns of movement crossing the Atlantic. Would love one on the west coast, but - redacted because I realized this may still be unknown even if you've reconned Europe
In hindsight I should have taken a picture of the board after each month.
Katrina was the nicest person when I met her at the L5R Launch GenCon. She showed an amazing passion for the setting, and my spirits dropped when she left to become a freelancer/ work elsewhere. Her getting hired on at FFG also speaks about the future of the company, in a positive way.
It's hard to be too critical of Cosmic Encounter Duel when the original designer(s?) seem to be involved, but two player Cosmic Encounter seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of Cosmic Encounter.
Posts
One thing that may be contentious is that Oceans feels much heavier on player conflict than Evolution. It makes sense thematically, as there's simply a hell of a lot of carnivory in the ocean, but that may keep some people from enjoying it as much.
What's particularly interesting in comparing the two games is that feeding is now a step removed from scoring, the latter happening at a pretty tightly controlled rate. This allows for some absolutely bonkers cards whose abilities are nevertheless pretty tough to capitalize on. One species may be able to feed like 9+ food a turn, but if they only get to score one of those food tokens a turn, it pretty much just makes them a meat-filled pinata for the rest of the players.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
For me, it's mostly a way to satisfy my craving for a particular game even when we can't get a group together, and a way to have more time to learn and think about the game.
Basically, yes it's not as good as the 'real' game but it's infinitely more convenient and gives you more time with a version of the game at least.
Also got my first run of Oceans last night and can second pretty much all of this. After a single play, I already prefer it to Evolution. The enhanced conflict is offset by the fact that it is harder for species to actually go extinct; you don't get wiped out for being reduced to 0 population, just if you can't age the maximum amount on your own turn. The overpopulation mechanic is also interesting and keeps any one species from relative safety.
WHAD YA GET WHAD YA GET
check out the redemption packs if you can, they let you play as the villains and they're a blast
Folks.
I have too many games.
The only digital board game I've gotten into is Through The Ages, which is a game that actively supports and benefits from hundreds of plays but that is basically impossible to play that many times in person. Async multiplayer is a huge boon in that case. But generally I agree.
I take it you guys were backers? Having gotten a run in at Unplugged I'll have to keep an eye out for when it hits retail. It seems like a huge step up from regular Evolution.
Anyway that has nothing to do with the game itself which is wonderful. If you're very familiar with Evolution you may also be familiar with the issue of deck bloat; Evolution had this unfortunate tug-of-war issue where draw chance for different basic traits was a really important point to nail for a balanced experience, but also one of the chiefly fun things in the game was seeing all the diversity possible with different weird traits released through expansions and promotional packs.
That issue has now been solved by making two decks; one Surface Deck with all the basic traits in it in even proportions, and one Deep Deck filled with more complex and wild cards that you actually have to spend points to play. The Deep Deck has 89 one-off cards, each illustrated by a guest artist, and during a game you may see 10-15 of them total. This is also where all the bonus cards from the Deluxe Edition and promo cards for the campaign are shuffled. It's meant to constantly provide players with new and weird possibilities and problems to overcome. This leaves the door wide open for them to continue issuing strange and intense new cards without disrupting the basic machine of the game. Even using the Deep Deck at all is optional (though we completely ignored the manual's suggestion to skip it for our first learning game).
It's a very clever addition.
Not sure I could find time to maintain or update it.
Maybe a different game started every week?
An idea to be deployed when I got the energy
Just got core. I'll have to look out for those packs!
Selling Board Games for Medical Bills
I absolutely smoke her every time we play the digital version.
I like the digital version better.
I saw the new? edition of Jaipur and sadly its real ugly. Which is such as shame as the original is so beautiful.
She's got cards up her sleeve, man!
that's like the only game i've ever had a group get 3/4 of the way through and say "ya know what, I'm done with this"
You no longer need any particular trait at all in order to feed on another species. There are a lot of traits that remove your ability to feed in one way or the other, so if you intend to do really well with predation or foraging, you'll typically be locking that species out of doing the other (but not necessarily).
Defensive traits that straight up make you immune to being attacked are less common and more situational; more frequently you'll see a card come with a Defense value that essentially acts as damage reduction, making your attacker take X less food from you. Attacks are usually much easier to pull off, but on the flipside, feeding on other species is typically less of the dramatic attack it was in Evolution and more part of a constant flow of resources from one species to another. The food that gets taken from you wouldn't all have gotten scored that turn anyway (most likely) and also will be hanging out on your attacker's card for a while, too, so who knows if they'll even be scoring it. Another mitigating factor is that extinction is way less of an imminent threat in Oceans compared to Evolution; species can't get driven to extinction from an attack or if they can't feed, necessarily. This can all get mixed up a bit due to rules-modifying cards.
I paid for this fucking thing and it's been pulled
Wtf
Looked up Jaipur new ed. and I don’t get the ugly view, much more thinking they are so similar that I don’t understand why they bothered redoing it at all.
Try going to "Apps & Games" in the menu, then check the Library tab. It shows everything you own, and you can click "install" beside each one.
That's what I mean, it isn't there. I had it installed on this phone a while back, then removed it, and now there's no trace of it. Googling the issue turned up some other folks with the same problem but no explanation. Super weird.
Yellow and Yangtze is still there, thankfully, which is largely the same
Edit: I even found my receipt in Gmail, and confirmed the name. This is very strange.
So now we start June to have it give us Europe, but now a city is immediately erased from the map and blemished by a huge skull sticker. Did not feel good.
However, we won! Did 2 searches (Atlanta and another city I can't remember) and reconned Western Asia (black). We won with 7 plague cubes on the board, and knew one of the cards drawn in the next two 3-card draws could have ended it.
We forgot again to try and trim down our player deck. 7 epidemics is a lot, and it's getting difficult to get cards you are looking for.
Atlanta search
Recon black (West Asia)
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Erm. What happened to May?
Pandemic Season 2: May
We reconned Africa (yellow), due to a fortunate card draw that despite wanting to do Europe for 3 games now, we couldn't pass up. We also had a double search city from the start (LA?), so doing that instead of connecting cities pretty much decided our optional objectives.
We won!
It got a bit tough to start, with a lot of cities running low on cubes, but we kept managing to scrape by, slowly passing cards needed to people who needed them as we moved to the next fire to be put out. I play the supply center builder, and kept drawing all the special cards. Not helpful. However, we we figured out we were 3 turns from winning, knew the top cards to be drawn next weren't going to hurt us, and held one quiet night and it worked the first time? Had it in the bag.
Really was a nice victory lap of doing our turns and smugly bypassing anything that could hurt or distract us from our goal. We needed it after April.
Opal
Europe recon - I forgot to mention this earlier
In hindsight I should have taken a picture of the board after each month.
What?
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Lighting, the most mysterious and dangerous of all sciences, is key.
Yeah, I was just coming to post that.
So many duels games these days. I was not expecting this. I still haven't played Cosmic Encounter. The art looks wild though.
Katrina was the nicest person when I met her at the L5R Launch GenCon. She showed an amazing passion for the setting, and my spirits dropped when she left to become a freelancer/ work elsewhere. Her getting hired on at FFG also speaks about the future of the company, in a positive way.
@PMAvers
I may actually wait for retail depending on shipping
There was a breakdown that shows it has nearly twice as many pieces as Root for 30% more of the cost, so 90 doesn’t sound too nuts to me
Like, that’s what Scythe costs, and this seems a lot more elaborate than Scythe as far as what’s actually in the box