Cyclades: Titans - Bad First Impression

Posted this on BGG but wanted to get people's thoughts here:

We played this for the first time this past weekend, 3 experienced Cyclades players and 2 players new to Cyclades.

The issue was mainly the new map with 5 players. There is enough distance and land that players can start relatively isolated and far away. We had three players on one large island fighting to grab the small middle island with three cornucopias. Myself and another player were on the other island.

I deployed near the end by winning Ares in the opening bid. I deployed near the edge of the island on a cornucopia space with my stronghold, placing my fleet in between a two cornucopia sea space and a 1 cornucopia sea space. I won Poseidon on maybe the second round and moved fleets to the two cornucopia spaces and I was now solidly pulling in money.

I ended up winning by grabbing the special Metropolis that lets you trade in 3 philosophers for a metropolis. It felt hollow and the end game approached very quickly. I'm fine with speeding up the game but we really didn't like that the new layout, allowing people to spread out, forced players to perform certain actions. Players should have immediately put pressure on me right away after I secured the sea spaces (getting boats to me would have been a huge pain but by land could have been done).

We had a discussion afterwards and a couple of players really were worried this expansion was going to put emphasis on forcing players to do certain things to keep others from winning. Our view is that forcing specific actions means the game inherently has less strategy. It's kind of like the standard end game but it seems like it could be more protracted/emphasized here.

You make some valid points.

charlest wrote: We had a discussion afterwards and a couple of players really were worried this expansion was going to put emphasis on forcing players to do certain things to keep others from winning. Our view is that forcing specific actions means the game inherently has less strategy. It's kind of like the standard end game but it seems like it could be more protracted/emphasized here.

I like this in a game. So many games put everyone on equal footing and that gets boring to me. I've always thought that games with asymmetric setups get better with experience and give more weight to diplomacy/negotiation.

I never felt that Cyclades had a lot of strategy in the first place; I've always played it with more of an eye towards tactics. I really like Titans so far; I feel it builds better on the Cyclades formula than the Hades modules did. We'll see what happens over time, but right now Cyclades+Titans is my favorite flavour.

I think Cyclades has only 3 "win condition" strategies but a ton of tactics on how to get there. Spreading out the players is a bad thing, IMO, because that's what made Cyclades the pinnacle "knife fight in a phone booth" war game - confrontation was forced due to space constraints (Lebensraum in Greek). I'd have a hard time thinking that anything changing that formula would be good, but I have yet to see Hades or Titans so what the fuck do I know?

wadenels wrote: You make some valid points.

charlest wrote: We had a discussion afterwards and a couple of players really were worried this expansion was going to put emphasis on forcing players to do certain things to keep others from winning. Our view is that forcing specific actions means the game inherently has less strategy. It's kind of like the standard end game but it seems like it could be more protracted/emphasized here.

I like this in a game. So many games put everyone on equal footing and that gets boring to me. I've always thought that games with asymmetric setups get better with experience and give more weight to diplomacy/negotiation.

I never felt that Cyclades had a lot of strategy in the first place; I've always played it with more of an eye towards tactics. I really like Titans so far; I feel it builds better on the Cyclades formula than the Hades modules did. We'll see what happens over time, but right now Cyclades+Titans is my favorite flavour.

Well maybe strategy wasn't the right word but because we were more spread out we were unmolested and could build up (or rather, I could). This puts the onus on other players of having to win Kronos/Ares and commit to multiple turns of moving towards me. This takes tactical choice out of the other players hands and forces their decision.

This is just one play though, maybe future playthroughs will result differently. I know this group won't let someone slink away in a corner again.

A couple of months back we played the 6p triple team option, there was nowhere to hide in an isolated corner on that board let me tell you.