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.