The Tao of Gaming

Two more games, some thoughts. My gut feelings:

• There's no instant path. Reaction and 'path not taken' matters. (As "Frunk" pointed out).
• I like the expert setup, but I prefer that the council 'move' action should only move yourself. In my last game I got pushed out of an area (that I was second in) so that the winner could buy multiple times.
• As per Chris Farrell's comments, winning unopposed (vs opposed) matters. There's some psychology (and card counting) involved, but sometimes its basically a guess.
• And the luck of the invention order matters a fair amount.

I'm keeping the rating a seven, but I think that the combination of the last two points makes that a ceiling, and I could easily see dropping this to a six after a few more plays. So far all my games have been with four, I wouldn't mind trying another number.

I've seen a number of strategies (setups) work, and I've seen reasonable looking positions lose. The winner in our last game took a worker, lab and cards and then started manually running two factories on the first turn. Given my "Build infrastructure early, points later" bias, I thought it would fail, but it didn't. He got two early inventions which helped him diversify and provided reasonable cash flow.

One item that has turned up is that in the council we're often fighting to look and order the deck, which we ignored the first few games. (The council on the 7th turn really matters for tiebreaks and setting the deck for the final two turns.

Anyway, I've played it three times. It will certainly hit 5+, but 10 plays? Perhaps.

I also played Ave Caesar, and managed to come in 3rd place in several races! Woo! (Of course, we had a robot chariot come in last all four races).

And Frank's Zoo was nice enough, for a climbing game.