Nocturne has arrived in the UK. I got my copy last week, and took it along to play with friends this evening.
Often, I just pull out whichever cards seem cool, but not really knowing how the cogs would turn with Nocturne, I started with the first recommended kingdom in the rulebook.
The (four-player) game took two hours! )-8
The chief culprit was Fool. Once one player bought a Fool, another did; once two had done so, the other two did as well. And we were seeing those Fools pretty often!
Every time somebody plays Fool, they need to take Lost in the Woods, take three Boons, digest what they are, choose an order, receive them, keep track of which should be discarded at once v. which should be kept until Clean-up, and finally re-evaluate their strategy for the turn.
For added fun, sooner or later somebody takes the Earth's Gift and decides they would have preferred a different Boon. So in the middle of resolving Fool, they gain a Blessed Village. And try to work out whether to receive that Boon at once, or keep it until next turn. And then figure out how to represent in terms of table layout which Boons they've not yet received, which are being held until clean-up, and which are being held to receive at the start of next turn.
Meanwhile, with Fool in the kingdom, the Boons deck needs shuffling very frequently and every time that happens people need to stop and double-check the correct subset of the Boons has been discarded.
People also struggled, albeit to a lesser extent, with the inconsistency where some Night cards are gained to hand and others are not. And most of the players both in that game and a subsequent one where I picked the kingdom myself to go light on the Boons felt pretty strongly that Night was an unnecessary complication compared with Actions that had +1 Action and a deferred effect. Especially, they seemed to destroy the rhythm of the game because you can no longer begin playing as soon as the previous player has made their final purchase. A lot of turns had false starts, further adding to the confusion.
None of us found it our most enjoyable game of Dominion ever. Some of the players are soured to Nocturne entirely; most are at least vowing never to play another game with Fool.
This is somewhat startling and dispiriting. I assume that if playtesters had had this experience something would have been done about it, so why were things different for us. We're all experienced gamers, not especially slow, and everyone was already at least somewhat familiar with Dominion.
I'd be really interested to hear anyone else's experiences. /-8