Robinson Crusoe

My copy should be in todays mail. I wanted it since reading about it last year and nobody here was talking about it until recently. Glad its getting such positive feedback here now. Can't wait to try it out solo (something I rarely do) as my next gameday with friends isn't for a couple weeks.

Played again tonight. Lost one, finally won one in the Castaways scenario. The solo game is really an odd duck, though, I wouldn't say it compares to the management that goes on with a 2 player game. 3 player sounds like a lot of fun, since you'd really have to be on top of gathering food constantly.

It is hard to overemphasize how important the shovel is. And there are a lot of occasions where it may seem like building is the only smart thing to do, but it's not---the event card deck is brutal compared to the exploration and gather decks and the dice are also much rougher.

I really want this. But price is extremely prohibitive... $100+ to get it here.

mikecl wrote: I dug out my initial impressions of this game a day after getting it back in February. Thought you guys might find it interesting in light of everything that's being written about it now. Click here

I must be doing something wrong because this links to posts from 2009

Ok, played Crusoe correctly for the first time last night. A much better and much harder game than what we played at WBC. The WBC game was fun but it was not R.C.

ThirstyMan wrote:

mikecl wrote: I dug out my initial impressions of this game a day after getting it back in February. Thought you guys might find it interesting in light of everything that's being written about it now. Click here

I must be doing something wrong because this links to posts from 2009

Yeah, I had to dig it out using the forum search.

Gary Sax wrote:

ThirstyMan wrote:

mikecl wrote: I dug out my initial impressions of this game a day after getting it back in February. Thought you guys might find it interesting in light of everything that's being written about it now. Click here

I must be doing something wrong because this links to posts from 2009

Yeah, I had to dig it out using the forum search.

Must be a bug. I click on it and it takes me right there. Weird.

Ignacy Trzewiczek has posted on his blog about his planned expansion to this game, He was updating fans about his upcoming trip to the U.S. for GenCon. It's also his first trip to the States. He plans on spending most of his time at Z-Man's booth.

Here's the link to the thread but I've lifted out the relevant bit about the expansion:

Ignacy Trzewiczek writes:

"Thanks!

We are staying at Crowne Plaza.

UPS to Poland would kill my budget.

Star Wars sounds great. I am not die hard SW fan, but as a sci-fi in general... Star Wars exhibition sounds super cool.

Expansion for Robinson will be called Voyage of the Beagle, it is campaign - series of scenarios that tell one epic story. I will be posting about it as soon as I finish with posting about The Legacy"

There's a little bit of this on BGG---I think it started as a fan expansion but he liked it and got involved. Darwin's expedition and all that.

Gary Sax wrote: There's a little bit of this on BGG---I think it started as a fan expansion but he liked it and got involved. Darwin's expedition and all that.

That was a user created scenario. I actually contributed to some of the playtesting. But he seems to be talking about a full on expansion that puts several scenarios together into a campaign. I've been away from the site for months so it could be the inspiration for what he's talking about now I don't know.

He did host some kind of online game event where everyone was to play it simultaneously but I'm not sure how that went.

Played 3 two player games in a row with my wife this evening. All using the Castaways scenario. Two losses (one brutally bad) and then a triumphant win. It's still solidly in the terrific category, any coop that elicits a audible cheer on multiple occasions falls in terrific. Thus far Pandemic, Arkham Horror and this meet that criteria.

I'm curious to play with 3 or 4 players. There is some scaling that could be quite interesting. Specifically, as far as I can tell, more players doesn't just scale the game in terms of number of things required. It actually changes how you play the game. Hunting suddenly really matters. It's got to be one of the only ways to get enough food every turn, as you're very unlikely to have enough food gathering spots to get 4 food every turn. I can't quite tell what it would be like. Hunting is a rare decision in a 2 player game and non-existent decision solo.

Just played a game with the second scenario, with the cursed island and the fog. The fog is BRUTAL, particularly that it just cancels out the terrain in the place you explore. Losing resources, not being able to build a cross, etc sucks, but even worse it's incredibly easy to lose a terrain type and be unable to build key items (the rope, in particular). Trying it again with two players today.

Edit:
Volcano is soooo hard

I played not once, but twice on Saturday night. I went to a game night with my family and played the first scenario with two other new players, and then I went home and solo'd the Cursed Island.

The first scenario is really not very tough, but we lost anyone. Specifically, at one point we were hard up for food and one of us went hunting. Turns out it was a bear, and it put a big hurt on him. He was forced to fight another animal through an event card, and it was an iguana. Well, that just about killed him, after the loss of life bumped our morale way down and he despaired and died.

In the second scenario, I came very close to being able to building all five crosses, but I was unable to get the last one up. It didn't help that Friday died literally in the second turn, through some rotten luck. Also, I wasn't able to explore the proper terrain (or keep the fog away long enough) to build the rope, which I really needed to build. Oh well. Next time I guess.

You have to be able to ring that bell and clear the fog so the priority is exploring enough to get the right terrain type for I think the Rope (Is it Hills?) and then build it before the fog rolls in. That scenario is definitely a bitch but they're all tough in one way or another.

You can't win the game without the bell.

Gary Sax wrote: Just played a game with the second scenario, with the cursed island and the fog. The fog is BRUTAL, particularly that it just cancels out the terrain in the place you explore. Losing resources, not being able to build a cross, etc sucks, but even worse it's incredibly easy to lose a terrain type and be unable to build key items (the rope, in particular). Trying it again with two players today.

Edit:
Volcano is soooo hard

mikecl wrote: You have to be able to ring that bell and clear the fog so the priority is exploring enough to get the right terrain type for I think the Rope (Is it Hills?) and then build it before the fog rolls in. That scenario is definitely a bitch but they're all tough in one way or another.

You can't win the game without the bell.

That's what I figured. I was exploring as much as I could, but with Friday gone it made it really hard to keep up with it.