Spoilerriffic! Seafall, game 2

OK, for starters, I really don't know where the folks at Plaid Hat Games come up with a 90-120 minute game time for this game.  Our group is taking about one 3-hour game session per "year" in the game, which, at 2 years per game so far, comes in closer to 5-6 hours per game.  Maybe things will speed up with time, but I don't see it going anywhere near as fast as stated.  Of course, that means that we're likely to get a full year of play sessions out of this game before we're done, so that's not a terrible thing.

But enough of that, you want to know about how the game went this time, right?  Well, the first thing was the effects of the new rank cards from the unlock box, which gives a boost to the underdogs (in the form of gold, luck, or influence) and a drag to the leaders (in the form of pre-distributed enmity tokens).  That helped me get off to a quick start, at least.  Second, most of the "easy" explore sites were taken, which seemed to prime the game for a more raid-centric play style.  That was mostly true, but it turns out exploring for islands is a fair bit easier than I expected, so we did manage to pick up our fifth island this go around... and likely, I'll be in hot pursuit of island #6 next game.

No unlocks to worry about this time, for all we did pull a couple more milestones (including one for sinking an opponent's ship, which we had to mark the site of for future reference)... the one thing that did bite a couple of us (myself included) was a misunderstanding about handling enmity end-game.  I was of the understanding that all you had to worry about in that regard was enmity with the islands, when it actually encompasses your enmity kept by the other players as well.  So, I've a fair bit of work to do to get some of that down... but nowhere near as much as the guy who won the last two games, so I'm actually feeling pretty good about my position, overall.

Another of life's little milestones

Today, my mother moved into an assisted living facility.  Thankfully, that's something she wanted to do, and not something being forced on her by the rest of the family, so that's a plus.  There's a whole lot of financial uncertainty involved (stuff that, in my opinion, should have been worked out before the move), but it's a nice enough place for what it is, and her area is definitely larger than the apartment she was living in before.  I guess we'll just see where things go from here.

Spoilerriffic! Seafall, game 1

We finally finished our first "real" game of Seafall last night, thanks to the imposition of Valentine's Day on our regularly scheduled night.  Unfortunately, that lapse also caused one of our players to forget the proper night entirely, so we had to make do... the rules have options for if a player is missing for one session, but not for an interrupted session like this one.  Our solution was to give the missing player either the standard missing player score (one less than the lowest score in the round) or their actual score, whichever is higher.

So, for round 1, the victory condition is 11 glory, with four milestones to pursue in aid of that:  fully explore an island, build 3 structures for your home province, obtain 3 treasures, and successfully raid a 6 defense site (which also gives you your first opportunity to open one of the sealed boxes).  Since I was fourth in the play order, I watched the first three players start pursuing the easier unexplored sites on the islands, and tried a slightly harder site on my first round, failing badly enough to sink a ship.  That was my first mistake.  The second mistake was taking that failure to heart and pursuing a mainly mercantile method thereafter, leaving my ship in a sunken state for entirely too long.  It may be possible to do something along those lines in later games with higher glory totals required to win, but there simply wasn't enough time to bring that to fruition this time around.

All that said, there's no significant new mechanics to worry about in the first game.  Your group is stuck with the same set of four islands, and exploration tends to be a little trickier than the prologue round, but still easy enough that a ship mod and/or the right adviser on tap will see you through handily.  We completed two of the four milestones (island exploration and the unlocking raid), each giving the person completing them a permanent boon and a healthy chunk of glory, while adding one card each to the conditions deck.  No great surprises score-wise this game - the two people who scored milestones came in first and second, the other two present eked out just enough score to tie with the person who missed out, so, per our prior decision, he ended up with one more point than he otherwise would have had.

Once the game was done, we got to open the appropriate box for the unlocking raid milestone.  Contents included rule stickers to cover research, exploration, and raiding other players' ships; islands to discover; a fair number of new advisors for the advisors deck; some new sealed condition cards, likely to go along with the new milestone cards; a few more retired advisor sticker sheets; and two all-new card decks, one for research, and one for exploration.  It should be fun to see how these changes affect the next game... oh, and two of the new milestones are unlocks for chests, so things could get increasingly crazy in short order.  The first unlock's story did say something about a pirate king, after all... we haven't seen anything concrete in-game about that yet, but I'm sure it'll come shortly.