Thanks for modding.
Yeah, my game plan worked. I planned to focus on few resources and in the end I have only 7 cubes placed that didn't win a king's favor.
It's a nice game, but I'm missing the one thing that highlights it from the dozens of other nice games.
There are a few design decisions that I don't understand
1) Essentially all players get the same amount of money (more or less). In this game we got 139, 141, and 140 coins. So the game would play almost the same if you would just give out a income (increasing with time) to every player at the beginning of the round. The added complexity of selecting the actions doesn't do anything spectacular for the game.
2) The tie breaker rules are strange. Most games combine first and second place and give half of these points to both players. Here, you get only the bonus of the second place, i.e. adding a marker to a district to have a shared first place only harms the other player and doesn't help you. As a result, competing for a district is discouraged. Furthermore, you end up with dead districts (e.g. #12 in our game) in which no player wants to invest any more.
A few strategy considerations I noticed during the game
1) As all players get nearly the same amount of money and money is converted at a 1:1 ratio to points for most buildings, you can subtract the price of the building from its victory points. E.g., effectively the stall gives 1pp, the troupe 2pp, all other simple buildings no pp. This also reveals the importance of the district and king's favor ratings more clearly.
2) 2x Tax & build is almost always superior to levy+build. In particular late in the game, the income value increases with every action, so it is better to split it in parts. These are possible exceptions: At the beginning of the game, when the income value is odd. Close to a district favor, to tune your position such that you trigger the rating.
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Topic: F.DS Canterbury ghostofmars wins! (Read 14357 times)