Age of Innovation

[LennyLen]

I picked this up this week, and we played it last night.

It's a Terra Mystica game, and plays pretty much the same as the original game, but with additional pathways to victory points, and a better balance between the factions.  The idea is to spread out as much as possible, but each player has their own terrain type, and can only build on that terrain, so you have to terraform hexes before you can build on them.

Victory points are awarded at the end of the game based on how many connected territories you control, and how far advanced you are along the four science tracks. There are also plenty of opportunities to gain victory point during the game.  There are six rounds, and each round has a specific action that can gain you victory points each time you perform it, and there can also be bonuses at the end of the round depending on your progress in a specific science track.  There are multiple bonuses that you can purchase during the game that can also give you victory points, provided you have the resources to buy them.

I chose to play a reactive game rather than work towards a specific strategy.  The faction I chose - The Psychics - had a special ability to gain 5 power for free each round.  Power is a resource that can be used to perform special actions. The way it works is that you have 3 bowls that contain your power (you start with 12 power tokens), starting with differing amount is bowls 1 and 2.  Whenever you gain power in the game, you move that many power tokens, first moving any tokens in bowl 1 to bowl 2, and then moving from bowl 2 to bowl 3.  You can only spend power that is bowl 3, and when you spend it, it is moved back to bowl 1.

There is a game mechanic that allows you to sacrifice power that you have in bowl 2 (by permanently removing it from the game) to move the same amount of power to bowl 3 that allows you to perform a move that you wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.  I exploited this mechanism early to sacrifice 5 power so that I only had 7 power left to work with. But with my faction bonus of being able to move 5 power for free each round, and by choosing bonuses that also added to my power income, I was able to recycle my entire limited compliment of power each round and perform 2 power actions per round where the other players were lucky if they could perform 1 power action each round.  There are multiple power actions, so I was able to choose different ones each round to adapt my gameplay to other people's actions and the specific round bonuses.

The strategy played out pretty well. Four of us played, and I came in second.  What let me down was forgetting a few times to use a special ability I picked up that would have allowed me to spread out faster.

I'm definitely looking forward to trying out more of the factions.

[Melbosa]

Played that one. I enjoyed it