Is anyone following Phil Eklund's new game Greenland?

I was listening to the newest episode of The Long View today and they had the designers of this game on and it sounds REALLY cool.

boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/156501/greenland

You play as one of three peoples who try to survive in Greenland, I'm not sure I understand enough to describe it, but it kind of sounded like it was similar to Robinson Crusoe in theme. I could be totally wrong. Just check it out or share what you think.

I'm aware of it but sort of waiting to hear if it's good enough without a third player.

Not sure about the game yet, but i'll have a box of them for BGG.CON if someone needs a copy there.

I have it preordered. It looks like it uses a similar tableau mechanic to Pax Porfiriana (which I think is great), is a small box, and will play well with a lower player count. And I'm a sucker for new Eklund stuff. Whether you're a fan of Eklund or not, he nails his themes and settings.

So fuck man, if you want Greenland, you better get it now. He has like less than 100 copies in Germany, and it's not entirely clear if there's going to be enough stock to honor preorders at big OLGS.

And as someone else said, even if you don't end up liking it, just mark it up by 40 dollars and resell it when it's between printings.

If you're a fan of Bios Megafauna and Pax Porfiriana then you'd probably like Greenland. It takes a bit of both and creates something mostly new.

There are card effects to keep track of and placing of your people onto other players' tableaus, like Pax. But there's much less tableau-building than Pax. This is more of an experience game than a timing & card combo game. You'll be rolling a lot of dice, you'll fail in your hunts and raids, migration events will cause the land to shift (like Bios:M), and a lot of bad things are going to happen via events.

It's slightly less chaotic than Bios Megafauna, and has more player interaction. It's less complex than Pax Porfiriana, but has a lot more luck. There are ways to mitigate the die rolls, but it's difficult to balance all the different ways to keep the dice at bay. I love it.

When I teach people the game I tell them it's more of a simulation than a game, and mostly in their first few games they're just along for the ride. This isn't necessarily true, but it's a good way to approach the game when you're trying to learn it. As you learn what's in the deck, how to mitigate bad luck, how to negotiate to your advantage, and the ins & outs of surviving in Greenland, then you can start to be a good player and really get into what makes it a good game.

I haven't played the solo game, and I greatly prefer 3p to 2p, for what that's worth.

I've played two games.

Imagine a worker placement game, where the places are cards either in a central tableu or your own and your workers (hunters) only succeed in getting the resource you want on a roll of a 1 or 2 and if the task is dangerous they die on maybe a 3 or 4. Add in an event card at the start of each round that kills your stuff. That's the basics, there's some pvp combat, auctions, and ways of changing the card tableu and you can assign some works to special elder slots that buff your rolls etc.

I enjoyed it, i'm not buying as a friend has a copy but otherwise i probably would. Like Eklunds other games it doesn't compromise on its narrative a great deal. So you get a rich engaging story but its not a clean mechanical design by any stretch. It is Eklunds shortest and simplest game to date, but probably the most chaotic. A string of bad events and die rolls will knock you out regardless of smart decisions but you do need to make smart decisions to win.

And yeah, Eklund himself has like 80 copies left. Some online retailers in the UK have a few but this will be gone by January at the latest.

any truth to the talk that maybe its not got a lot of legs though, that it feels pretty samey quickly and theres not a lot of long term replay value?

Though I own Pax Porfiriana and Bios Megafauna, and enjoy both, nothing about this one caught my eye enough to purchase it--the topic didn't interest me. I'd like to play it though. I'm eagerly waiting for Pax Renaissance and a reprint of High Frontier.

ldsdbomber wrote: any truth to the talk that maybe its not got a lot of legs though, that it feels pretty samey quickly and theres not a lot of long term replay value?

There aren't a lot of cards in the game, so you begin to have an idea what to expect. You don't see all the cards in any individual game, but you'll see most of them in the course of maybe 10 games. It would get samey if you treat it as a mechanical/optimization exercise, but there's a reasonable amount of player interaction and negotiation that can keep it fresh. There's rarely an truly optimal move, so a big part of the game is making the most out what you can when you can, and that can vary quite a bit from game to game depending on how successful your hunts, raids, and negotiation are.

It's not as deep and doesn't reward experience as well as a game like Twilight Struggle does, but the narrative that develops is always interesting. Like Duke said, sometimes your best laid plans go right out the window and you just have to roll with the punches. There are times when I can really enjoy that in a game, and Bios Megafauana and Greenland are games where I do.

I would recommend it if you have 3 players who enjoy interaction to make it work well, but if those same players always pursue the same strategies then I could see it wearing thin.

He ships via DHL and keeps the weight under 500 grams so it's only $33 USD shipped all the way out here to Qatar. Like someone mentioned, it will sell out in a week or two and then command absurd Pax Porfiriana prices, so it it doesn't appeal to my gaming friends I'll trade it when I get back to the states for Twilight Struggle or something similar.

High Frontier prices:

I'd agree with Wadenels on replay. It doesn't have the depth or variability of pax, but theres a good 10 plays plus in that box but perhaps not 40. For a small card game it still punches above its weight especially in the boardgame world where many people play a game twice and move on. One advantage of Eklunds low print runs is that you can easily sell or trade it on after those 10-20 games in a year or so.

Fingers crossed my CSI pre-order comes through. I'm pretty sure I pre-ordered within a few days of it being offered (which was pre-essen), so feeling optimistic.

Eklund is one of those guys I just like to support as I think his games are both smart and kind of absurd all at once. Plus, so much of his stuff can be played solo. That said, I rather completely *forgot* I pre-ordered this game; so, uh, color me surprised when it landed just before we were heading out to the Dominican Republic for a friend's wedding a couple of weeks ago. Just back and hoping to get a play or two in in the coming weeks.

I sold all 20 of the copies I brought to BGG.CON's flea market in 5 minutes flat. Phil told me I probably had the last case in existence, and he is not sure if all the olgs orders will be fulfilled.