Pandemic Legacy Season 2: Won! The world is saved!
Final game and end scoring thoughts
Here is our score if you are interested. We tossed our copy, so I don't have the board to compare to yours. We lost twice in February and once in September.
We had 125 population, no forsaken cities, and ended with a score of 885. We blew most of our end of game points on character upgrades and population. There were only 3 cities on the board that we never attached to the grid. We didn't attach Denver, Bogota, and I think Tokyo. Not sure on the last one.
We would have lost June, July, and October if the Hollow men gathers cards didn't prevent us from placing a cube. The hollow men were the MVPs of our campaign!
We did much better in Season 2 then Season 1. Our mistake in season 1 was
not finishing the last fucking search. We should have lost whatever month that was on purpose, but that didn't seem thematic to me. The group was super pissed about it in retrospect. It was the only thing we didn't like about Season 1.
We had 4 players for Season 1, but only 3 for Season 2. That may have also made Season 2 easier. I have probably said it countless times, but Season 1 is the better game, Season 2 is the better experience. I would replay #1, but not #2.
Hearing your end game state and seeing all the boards on bgg makes me realize our biggest mistake through the game.
We should have considered using more game end upgrade points to bring cities up to 2 to keep them on the grid. Because forsaken don't count towards the game end production, we spent most of the game getting very little towards upgrades. Often around 5 points. Keeping them on the grid would provide more points and thus make keeping them populated even easier.
Hearing your end game state and seeing all the boards on bgg makes me realize our biggest mistake through the game.
Yup. That makes a hell of a difference.
Our biggest mistake was using a variety of characters. My son played with the Farmer throughout the campaign, but my wife and I kept swapping guys in and out. At the end the Farmer was OP and our characters were mediocre at best.
Our final game in Pandemic Legacy Season 2 felt like the game WANTED us to win, because we got the luckiest draws possible right off the bat. The last month was smooth sailing for us, and I kind of wish we had to struggle more, but I do realize that we got extremely lucky (especially after reading other people's playthroughs).
I really liked the:
Deck-thinning mechanic, as it gave you a decision to either reduce the frequency of the epidemic cards by thinning out the deck as much as possible (the epidemic frequency per X cards goes down as you thin down the deck), but you'd lose out on having potential turns (fewer cards = fewer turns before you run out of cards). Same with the "unfunded event cards" or whatever they were called... if you burned them, then you get a bonus, but you'd also be thinning the percentage of non-epidemic cards versus the epidemic cards... for us, they often became dead draws, but they were dead draws that didn't cause an epidemic, so it was risk mitigation. As a person who plays a lot of MTG drafts and knowing the importance of getting proper mana ratios and thinning a deck down to 40 to get the most use out of your best cards, this mechanic GREATLY appealed to me and was completely lost on my teammates. "Here's the math and ratios, just go with this chart." "Ooooookay."
I also really loved the exploration mechanic (into the unknoooooown) and drawing sea routes that both were versatile and didn't intersect. That was an interesting topology exercise. Our map had SO many more black lines drawn on it than yours.
As someone who recently replayed Season 1 of Pandemic Legacy, I'd actually be down for playing Pandemic Legacy Season 2 again. It's been long enough that some of it will still feel fresh to me.
Hearing your end game state and seeing all the boards on bgg makes me realize our biggest mistake through the game.
Yup. That makes a hell of a difference.
Our biggest mistake was using a variety of characters. My son played with the Farmer throughout the campaign, but my wife and I kept swapping guys in and out. At the end the Farmer was OP and our characters were mediocre at best.
Pandemic Legacy Season 1 and 2 spoilers:
Having played through Season 1 prior to Season 2, we were deathly afraid of a turncoat moment. So we distributed our upgrades and rotated around our character selections.
Our final game in Pandemic Legacy Season 2 felt like the game WANTED us to win, because we got the luckiest draws possible right off the bat. The last month was smooth sailing for us, and I kind of wish we had to struggle more, but I do realize that we got extremely lucky (especially after reading other people's playthroughs).
I really liked the:
Deck-thinning mechanic, as it gave you a decision to either reduce the frequency of the epidemic cards by thinning out the deck as much as possible (the epidemic frequency per X cards goes down as you thin down the deck), but you'd lose out on having potential turns (fewer cards = fewer turns before you run out of cards). Same with the "unfunded event cards" or whatever they were called... if you burned them, then you get a bonus, but you'd also be thinning the percentage of non-epidemic cards versus the epidemic cards... for us, they often became dead draws, but they were dead draws that didn't cause an epidemic, so it was risk mitigation. As a person who plays a lot of MTG drafts and knowing the importance of getting proper mana ratios and thinning a deck down to 40 to get the most use out of your best cards, this mechanic GREATLY appealed to me and was completely lost on my teammates. "Here's the math and ratios, just go with this chart." "Ooooookay."
I also really loved the exploration mechanic (into the unknoooooown) and drawing sea routes that both were versatile and didn't intersect. That was an interesting topology exercise. Our map had SO many more black lines drawn on it than yours.
As someone who recently replayed Season 1 of Pandemic Legacy, I'd actually be down for playing Pandemic Legacy Season 2 again. It's been long enough that some of it will still feel fresh to me.
That was really cool, and we used that a lot for the infection deck (28 of 30 before they started coming back into the deck), but less so for the player deck because we often weren't in those cities or they hadn't been played yet. I think we only tossed 10-15 player cards in total. It was one of those things where we wanted to do it more often, but taking the actions to move to those locations would have resulted in a loss.
My only desire to play season 2 again is to absolutely attempt to munchkin it and see how much better we could do now that we know where and when everything happens.
I backed the new Level 99 Kickstarter Bullet . It's a shmup themed real time puzzle game that looks like kind of a cross between Quacks of Quedlinberg and Puyo Puyo/Puzzle Fighter. It looks really fun, and also like something that will actually see the table a lot unlike many other Level 99 games in my experience.
I backed the new Level 99 Kickstarter Bullet . It's a shmup themed real time puzzle game that looks like kind of a cross between Quacks of Quedlinberg and Puyo Puyo/Puzzle Fighter. It looks really fun, and also like something that will actually see the table a lot unlike many other Level 99 games in my experience.
Man, this hit so many "Uh huh!" notes for me, it's disappointing to learn they went with the way-over-the-top magical girls theme of bullet hell. Really puts me on the fence with that, but I'll try and give the rules a read through before I make too hard a judgement.
Yea i meanTouhou is a popular thing and Lvl99 is Weeb: The Boardgame Company so its not really a surprising direction for them to have gone. Not my favorite, but yknow.
Bullet♥︎ is playable officially on Tabletop Simulator and I quite enjoyed it - obviously a far cry from the physical game given the realtime element, but still super fun. I backed it right after.
I played some TTS Spirit Island to learn the rules and I loved it so much I ordered a physical copy. What a great game.
I kept bringing my physical copy to boardgame nights and it always got skipped over. Go the group to play in on TTS. We've now played a few dozen games and everyone is saying how much they regret not playing it before. I did miss out on the last KS since I was having issues bringing it to the table.
Spirit Island RULES!! There's a mod on TTS that includes the print at home and preview versions of the new Jagged Earth spirits and they're really fun. Lure of the Deep Wilderness is my new favorite spirit. Its theme is the mysterious allure of the unknown that draws explorers in... and then they're never heard from again. And like the other spirits, its theme is wonderfully represented by its mechanics.
Thanks for the heads up about the Steam app — it's great for solo play. I'm eager for it to get the expansion and promo content.
I've only played difficulty 1 so far, but I'm seeing the ways spirits combine now, and it's pretty delightful. My favourite may be the ocean spirit — very limited but very powerful, and synergizes so well with pushy spirits.
The two fear spirits seem kinda weak. I imagine the one that can't do damage pairs well with the ocean guy, though.
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
edited May 2020
Yeah Bodan's damaged based pushes synergize well with Ocean's drowning tech. You basically can prioritize a Terror win with Bodan in your team
Shadow is a beginner spirit but apparently falls behind the others, but it's still a good support, with its far range (decent to pair with Dahan movers like River and TSpeaker)
EDIT: Weird note: except for BoDaN, I see the Spirit nicknames reduced to one part of their whole title: Wildfire, Serpent, ASoRG / Green, Lightning, Ocean, etc, but Vital Strength of the Earth doesn't lend itself to an easy nickname. VSotE is unwieldy.
I backed the new Level 99 Kickstarter Bullet . It's a shmup themed real time puzzle game that looks like kind of a cross between Quacks of Quedlinberg and Puyo Puyo/Puzzle Fighter. It looks really fun, and also like something that will actually see the table a lot unlike many other Level 99 games in my experience.
Man, this hit so many "Uh huh!" notes for me, it's disappointing to learn they went with the way-over-the-top magical girls theme of bullet hell. Really puts me on the fence with that, but I'll try and give the rules a read through before I make too hard a judgement.
Yeah the sexy little girls theme made it an easy and hard pass for me.
I'm not huge into the Touhou anime theme either but calling it sexy little girls theme is misrepresenting things
i'm not talking about touhou i'm talking about the game. it's not touhou at all. it's a lot of tight clothes, athletic physiques and showing skin. just because that's the default for girls in any media these days doesn't mean it's not sexualizing them. i can't misrepresent what i'm 100% seeing.
I'm not huge into the Touhou anime theme either but calling it sexy little girls theme is misrepresenting things
i'm not talking about touhou i'm talking about the game. it's not touhou at all. it's a lot of tight clothes, athletic physiques and showing skin. just because that's the default for girls in any media these days doesn't mean it's not sexualizing them. i can't misrepresent what i'm 100% seeing.
You're not wrong.
For my part, the bar has been set so low that I'm just happy to see art of girls who look confident, capable, and like they're genuinely having a blast. But I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Veilwraith, where half the women look "innocent" in a weirdly fetishized way, and the other half look like they're all but eyefucking the viewer :mad:
I'm not huge into the Touhou anime theme either but calling it sexy little girls theme is misrepresenting things
i'm not talking about touhou i'm talking about the game. it's not touhou at all. it's a lot of tight clothes, athletic physiques and showing skin. just because that's the default for girls in any media these days doesn't mean it's not sexualizing them. i can't misrepresent what i'm 100% seeing.
I'm not huge into the Touhou anime theme either but calling it sexy little girls theme is misrepresenting things
i'm not talking about touhou i'm talking about the game. it's not touhou at all. it's a lot of tight clothes, athletic physiques and showing skin. just because that's the default for girls in any media these days doesn't mean it's not sexualizing them. i can't misrepresent what i'm 100% seeing.
Psst you're defending the wrong part
I AIN'T
unless i don't know what touhou is which is certainly possible but i always thought it was the super frilly little girls aimed at the extremely large pedophile minority in japan
(Partially typed this post before Ah_Pook's went up and I got caught by a meeting, but finishing it up and posting just to have it on the record.)
Certainly, the Touhou series of games is filled with characters who are girls dressed in frilly or intricately-designed clothes, but at least for the games in the mainline series, they don't really have a sexy or provocative bent to their character designs. Of course, your mileage may vary once you get to the fandom and unofficial fangames. But to a certain extent, that's to be expected when you have a wide and vast fanbase: it isn't always going to be clean.
But we're not talking about Touhou, we're talking about Bullet♥︎ and whether or not it has a "sexy little girls" theme. I don't really think the "little girls" can be fully denied, though much like Touhou it's more "young" than "little". (It's still valid to criticize that the characters don't have a lot of variety in body types, though.) The "sexy" part is the most contentious component, however. Certainly, there's a little bit more of that kind of appeal built into some of Bullet♥︎'s characters compared to Touhou, but for the most part I think it's really quite tame. Individual tastes can differ, though, and different people will have different levels of prudence to call something sexy or not; how tight is too tight, how much skin is too much skin.
For my part, I think Bullet♥︎'s mechanics and character design go well together. Perhaps it is a bit too conventional to play to the genre by making every character a young woman or girl, but I don't really find the character design to be done in a deliberately sexy way. (Though I'm not buying in for a different reason - it's not a game style that I think would hit my table often enough to make the purchase worth it.)
I haven't had much luck with digital versions of games. Simple games like Potion Explosion and Splendor work great. Anything more advanced has been absolute garbage. Also, the licenses expire and developers change. I think there have been at least 3 version of Carcassonne on IOS and Android and none of them get passed the 3rd expansion before it changes hands.
My friends and I have started using BoardGameArena every couple of weeks. Their implementation of 7 Wonders is fantastic and does away with a ton of the bookkeeping hassle (scoring, telling you how much a card costs you and offering you all the options of how to pay for it).
GNU Terry Pratchett
PSN: Wstfgl | GamerTag: An Evil Plan | Battle.net: FallenIdle#1970
Hit me up on BoardGameArena! User: Loaded D1
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
The Tokaido app is bad with online multi with friends. BGArena's Tokaido is better functionally. It's not as pretty, but you do get to play.
Twilight struggle and sentinels of the multiverse and Through The Ages are all pretty flawless.
Scythe is still pretty bad
I am lousy at TtA but it is definitely not the app's fault. It's about as transparent and friendly as can be.
I blame not having played it in person at all - a big part of learning games comes from table-talk.
The Evolution app is pretty solid too.
Msg me if you want to play some TTA some time, we can chat strats. I fell of playing online through quarantine, lacking the mental bandwidth, but I could probably do some games.
I canceled my Hel pledge last minute and went with something even more expensive, Arena: The Contest and its new campaign expansion. I don't think I'm doing this right.
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
I canceled my Hel pledge last minute and went with something even more expensive, Arena: The Contest and its new campaign expansion. I don't think I'm doing this right.
I think you are fine. I think there is something wrong with me. I see 100+ stretch goals and immediately close the window. It could be the greatest game ever made, but those shenanigans are a big "nope" in my mind. I like to back things where I don't care about the stretch goals. I often wonder if there has ever been a domino effect of pledge pulling. Say most folks wanted all the way up to goal 87 (an amazing hand painted miniature made out of Spotted Owl bones). The campaign makes it to 84 and fearing it won't make it, enough people back out. It drops to goal 77 and more people drop out and like Bear Stearns stock in early 2008, the entire backing plummets and all stretch goals are lost.
I would back $1 to see that happen. That would probably be more amazing than the game had it hit goal 87.
I canceled my Hel pledge last minute and went with something even more expensive, Arena: The Contest and its new campaign expansion. I don't think I'm doing this right.
I think you are fine. I think there is something wrong with me. I see 100+ stretch goals and immediately close the window. It could be the greatest game ever made, but those shenanigans are a big "nope" in my mind. I like to back things where I don't care about the stretch goals. I often wonder if there has ever been a domino effect of pledge pulling. Say most folks wanted all the way up to goal 87 (an amazing hand painted miniature made out of Spotted Owl bones). The campaign makes it to 84 and fearing it won't make it, enough people back out. It drops to goal 77 and more people drop out and like Bear Stearns stock in early 2008, the entire backing plummets and all stretch goals are lost.
I would back $1 to see that happen. That would probably be more amazing than the game had it hit goal 87.
It didn't help that Mythic doesn't have the most stellar reputation in terms of delivery, balance, translations, writing, etc. Some of their featured story blurbs were embarrassingly bad. They threw hundreds of miniatures, the Kickstarter-exclusive label, and FOMO at people and it worked. Hell (no pun intended), I almost dove right in, too.
Arena: The Contest and its Tanares Adventure expansion pack? It already delivered a core box in a previous, well-run campaign. All the comments and reviews seem to praise its elegance and multitude of modes (PvP, PvE, campaign). And 3D walls! The kid in me is pretty excited about this one. If you want everything, though, it's bloody expensive.
This month needs to just stop, though. There are too many campaigns. Ankh, Guards of Atlantis 2, Nemesis: Lockdown, War of Whispers, Steampunk Rally Fusion, etc. I may have late pledged for a whole bunch of Trudvang Legends (they'll still give people access to the pledge manager, if requested) and ordered more content for Tainted Grail. I might have to walk away from all board game-related discussion boards, subreddits, and websites for awhile so as not to be tempted.
Dashui on
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
Dunno how new this is, but I just got an email from Asmodee promoting their free print & play site. Probably going to at least try their Unlock and Choose Your Own Adventure offerings.
This month needs to just stop, though. There are too many campaigns.
Agreed. I backed 3 games this month. I didn't back anything in 2019!
I thought most kickstarters would have been delayed because a lot of folks are short on cash. Then again a lot of folks are trapped at home with little to do.
Posts
Hearing your end game state and seeing all the boards on bgg makes me realize our biggest mistake through the game.
Yup. That makes a hell of a difference.
Our biggest mistake was using a variety of characters. My son played with the Farmer throughout the campaign, but my wife and I kept swapping guys in and out. At the end the Farmer was OP and our characters were mediocre at best.
I really liked the:
I also really loved the exploration mechanic (into the unknoooooown) and drawing sea routes that both were versatile and didn't intersect. That was an interesting topology exercise. Our map had SO many more black lines drawn on it than yours.
And then it never happened.
My only desire to play season 2 again is to absolutely attempt to munchkin it and see how much better we could do now that we know where and when everything happens.
Avengers, assemble!
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
It is.
There's a solid but still-in-beta app from Handelabra for it, too.
The screen's really information-dense solo but basically it works.
I kept bringing my physical copy to boardgame nights and it always got skipped over. Go the group to play in on TTS. We've now played a few dozen games and everyone is saying how much they regret not playing it before. I did miss out on the last KS since I was having issues bringing it to the table.
I've only played difficulty 1 so far, but I'm seeing the ways spirits combine now, and it's pretty delightful. My favourite may be the ocean spirit — very limited but very powerful, and synergizes so well with pushy spirits.
The two fear spirits seem kinda weak. I imagine the one that can't do damage pairs well with the ocean guy, though.
Shadow is a beginner spirit but apparently falls behind the others, but it's still a good support, with its far range (decent to pair with Dahan movers like River and TSpeaker)
EDIT: Weird note: except for BoDaN, I see the Spirit nicknames reduced to one part of their whole title: Wildfire, Serpent, ASoRG / Green, Lightning, Ocean, etc, but Vital Strength of the Earth doesn't lend itself to an easy nickname. VSotE is unwieldy.
Yeah the sexy little girls theme made it an easy and hard pass for me.
https://www.fowers.net/games/fugitive/
I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking for a fast-paced 1v1 game of bluffing and deduction.
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i'm not talking about touhou i'm talking about the game. it's not touhou at all. it's a lot of tight clothes, athletic physiques and showing skin. just because that's the default for girls in any media these days doesn't mean it's not sexualizing them. i can't misrepresent what i'm 100% seeing.
You're not wrong.
For my part, the bar has been set so low that I'm just happy to see art of girls who look confident, capable, and like they're genuinely having a blast. But I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Veilwraith, where half the women look "innocent" in a weirdly fetishized way, and the other half look like they're all but eyefucking the viewer :mad:
Psst you're defending the wrong part
I AIN'T
unless i don't know what touhou is which is certainly possible but i always thought it was the super frilly little girls aimed at the extremely large pedophile minority in japan
However you may feel about anime ladies as a theme, Bullet is not themed around sexy little girls and I take issue with your saying that it is.
Certainly, the Touhou series of games is filled with characters who are girls dressed in frilly or intricately-designed clothes, but at least for the games in the mainline series, they don't really have a sexy or provocative bent to their character designs. Of course, your mileage may vary once you get to the fandom and unofficial fangames. But to a certain extent, that's to be expected when you have a wide and vast fanbase: it isn't always going to be clean.
But we're not talking about Touhou, we're talking about Bullet♥︎ and whether or not it has a "sexy little girls" theme. I don't really think the "little girls" can be fully denied, though much like Touhou it's more "young" than "little". (It's still valid to criticize that the characters don't have a lot of variety in body types, though.) The "sexy" part is the most contentious component, however. Certainly, there's a little bit more of that kind of appeal built into some of Bullet♥︎'s characters compared to Touhou, but for the most part I think it's really quite tame. Individual tastes can differ, though, and different people will have different levels of prudence to call something sexy or not; how tight is too tight, how much skin is too much skin.
For my part, I think Bullet♥︎'s mechanics and character design go well together. Perhaps it is a bit too conventional to play to the genre by making every character a young woman or girl, but I don't really find the character design to be done in a deliberately sexy way. (Though I'm not buying in for a different reason - it's not a game style that I think would hit my table often enough to make the purchase worth it.)
Unrelated but Blood Rage came out on Steam today.
PSN: Wstfgl | GamerTag: An Evil Plan | Battle.net: FallenIdle#1970
Hit me up on BoardGameArena! User: Loaded D1
Scythe is still pretty bad
I am lousy at TtA but it is definitely not the app's fault. It's about as transparent and friendly as can be.
I blame not having played it in person at all - a big part of learning games comes from table-talk.
The Evolution app is pretty solid too.
Msg me if you want to play some TTA some time, we can chat strats. I fell of playing online through quarantine, lacking the mental bandwidth, but I could probably do some games.
I think you are fine. I think there is something wrong with me. I see 100+ stretch goals and immediately close the window. It could be the greatest game ever made, but those shenanigans are a big "nope" in my mind. I like to back things where I don't care about the stretch goals. I often wonder if there has ever been a domino effect of pledge pulling. Say most folks wanted all the way up to goal 87 (an amazing hand painted miniature made out of Spotted Owl bones). The campaign makes it to 84 and fearing it won't make it, enough people back out. It drops to goal 77 and more people drop out and like Bear Stearns stock in early 2008, the entire backing plummets and all stretch goals are lost.
I would back $1 to see that happen. That would probably be more amazing than the game had it hit goal 87.
It didn't help that Mythic doesn't have the most stellar reputation in terms of delivery, balance, translations, writing, etc. Some of their featured story blurbs were embarrassingly bad. They threw hundreds of miniatures, the Kickstarter-exclusive label, and FOMO at people and it worked. Hell (no pun intended), I almost dove right in, too.
Arena: The Contest and its Tanares Adventure expansion pack? It already delivered a core box in a previous, well-run campaign. All the comments and reviews seem to praise its elegance and multitude of modes (PvP, PvE, campaign). And 3D walls! The kid in me is pretty excited about this one. If you want everything, though, it's bloody expensive.
This month needs to just stop, though. There are too many campaigns. Ankh, Guards of Atlantis 2, Nemesis: Lockdown, War of Whispers, Steampunk Rally Fusion, etc. I may have late pledged for a whole bunch of Trudvang Legends (they'll still give people access to the pledge manager, if requested) and ordered more content for Tainted Grail. I might have to walk away from all board game-related discussion boards, subreddits, and websites for awhile so as not to be tempted.
https://print-and-play.asmodee.fun/
Agreed. I backed 3 games this month. I didn't back anything in 2019!
I thought most kickstarters would have been delayed because a lot of folks are short on cash. Then again a lot of folks are trapped at home with little to do.