by gameon3948
steveg700 wrote:
I do hope this doesn't ultimately fall prey to "Puerto Rico Syndrome", where winning the game is very procedural.
It's quite the opposite of procedural since the building and resource order changes every game and you only have 6 special buildings out of countless ones in the box. You will see soon when you play it. Leather really isn't like the other goods, it's just something you get when you convert cattle to food. You can't get it from the harbor offers.
steveg700 wrote:
"So, what is the point of all this hide? What is it good for?"
"Well, from what I've gathered and from what the pros on BGG tell me, it's a waste. But that's okay!"
"So there's an entire path of this game that's pointless? Why have it in the first place?"
"Well, I guess it's to trick naïve people who assume that every resource in a game should have its use. Buildings and resources don't have to have a point."
"Well, from what I've gathered and from what the pros on BGG tell me, it's a waste. But that's okay!"
"So there's an entire path of this game that's pointless? Why have it in the first place?"
"Well, I guess it's to trick naïve people who assume that every resource in a game should have its use. Buildings and resources don't have to have a point."
When I was playing our first few games with my wife she quickly realized it had little point and asked me a similar question.
"Leather doesn't really have much point, does it?"
"Not really, except for a few rare special buildings, or to tan it and fill out a shipment."
"Ok!"
She was more concerned she wasn't missing anything, and she wasn't. No one said the goods were equally important. When goods are equally important they are boring, there's no reason to have one and not the other. So if your opponent takes one, you take the other and you're both happy. In this game, when you need WOOD, only WOOD will suffice. If your opponent takes the wood, you are in trouble! And the value of goods change throughout the game. 2 or 3 wood on a offer is a grab at the beginning, but at the end 10+ will accumulate. It's about knowing when to take and offer, when to let it accumulate and hope your opponent doesn't take it, when you can overpay because you don't have other options, when you can afford to wait because your backup plan isn't that much worse. It might not be the game for everyone, but I've played it probably 300 times at least and it never gets old. If anything, it makes me like *other* games less.