Spoilerriffic! Seafall, game 5

Not a lot of new mechanics to reveal this time or anything... frankly, this will mainly be a sort of "victory lap" post, since I managed to not only win my first game, but also managed to take the overall lead in the standings.  There is one minor bit of mechanics and schadenfreude to enjoy, but we'll get to that.

We started the game with two partially-explored islands in play, so a fair deal of energy was devoted to further exploring those.  Personally, I intended to limit my militaristic exploits, in the interest of minimizing my fortune token expenditures, the better to buy down my on-board enmity at game end... but I also started out with a Pirate as my carry-over adviser, and being able to basically do a raid each year without generating enmity does help somewhat with that.  Beyond that, I fully intended to start collecting goods, the better to get a colony started, but turn order and finances effectively put that out of reach long enough that, by the time one of my opponents succeeded in building one (the only one this game), we were in a tight-knit pack midway to the target glory score.  From past experience, I knew the odds of succeeding at building a colony this time were very slim, so I cast about for something else useful to do.

...and there it was.  One of the milestones in play was set to trigger at getting 30+ gold from selling goods in one turn, and between different advisors and buildings, I worked out how to use my meager finances to get 10 gold each out of the three goods I had collected so far.  From reactions at the table, I'm pretty sure nobody even saw it coming until it was done, and I was launched ahead of the pack, two glory shy of the target.  There was some talk about trying to sink one of my ships to drag me back, but everybody pretty well shifted to "get some glory while the getting's good" mode.  Just as well for them... I spent most of the gold I got the turn prior on a 2-glory treasure, then padded my score by discovering an island (now officially named 'Overkill').  One of my competitors discovered another island that same turn, so next game is just going to be exploration mad.

Not everyone's final round plans went as well, though... the leader since the first game went for the seeming sure bet of exploring a tomb of the ancients (both prior successes had resulted in a tablet and glory equivalent to a milestone).  On his last turn, he succeeded flawlessly in his endeavor, and received... 45 gold, and no way to do anything with it this game, doubly painful since there's a "have 60+ gold in your treasury" milestone waiting to be claimed as well.  On the plus side (?), that result also didn't call for the closing of the tomb afterwards, so it will still be a draw as well.

So, yeah, loads of fun this time around (the more so for me, since I won and finally got an appellation for my leader, making her Princess Kitty the Vengeful).  On to the next game!