Another short game, thanks to the fourth-place player discovering the next island out with a chart card, triggering the next unlock. It's the island where the Pirate King lives (for all he supposedly hates that name), called Patmos, with a colony called Ker already established. It's not all good by any means though... when Patmos is discovered, it gets pre-loaded with permanent enmity stickers from all the players based on things like how many islands they already have enmity with and how many colonies they have. Not so very bad on its own, but until somebody conquers and claims Ker (yes, rules for taking colonies outright have been added), it has a nasty side-effect of making your interactions with any of the islands depend on the higher enmity total of either that island or Patmos... which, for the remainder of this game and into the next game at least, will be a significant drain on most of the players being able to do anything glory-making.
Apart from that nuisance, there are some new advisors available, but with a twist. Basically, they're tied to Patmos, so you can only buy them if you have a ship at Patmos (unless you've built the new Tavern building), and their price increases with your enmity at Patmos. Also, these new advisors only have a gold cost, no reputation buy is available. In exchange for that, the perks on these new advisors tend to be really good, and the ones I've seen at least are also worth glory just for having them... so, a neat new twist to the advisor game over all.
One more item worth mentioning... there are stickers for some new Arches to add to the board in open waters spaces (with the appropriate card found, of course). Basically, these act as teleporters (any one arch to any other), but also have fairly hefty dangerous waters ratings. So, they have the potential to shrink the map significantly with the tradeoff of a bit of risk.
With that, current standings at the end of this game... I've moved back into first, thanks to the combination of my snagging the gold hoarding milestone and the previously-first-place player dropping out mid-game (helping his family with a medical matter, not ragequitting or anything like that... we expect he'll return after the next game). The player that discovered Patmos moved up into the lead pack at third... but the now-fourth-place player is still in good position points-wise, only has one enmity with Patmos, and (due to a fluke with a tomb this game) already has the chart for the next unlock, so I expect him to walk away with the next game handily.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
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