SeaFall is receiving very mellow reactions

dontbecruel wrote:

JEM wrote: I'd hope so. That's the main criterion for a reviewer.

Yup. Glad I'm not the only disinterested vs uninterested language pedant.

Well, actually less/fewer is pedantry, these are different words.

I realize this joke has gone very meta now.

JEM wrote:
Well, actually less/fewer is pedantry, these are different words.

I realize this joke has gone very meta now.

I'll stay meta for a bit longer because, like Barnes, I am not interested in Seafall.

I vote the other way on which of JEM's bugbears is the more pedantic. Consensus view appears to be that the traditional usage of disinterested is nearing extinction e.g.
grammarist.com/usage/disinterested-uninterested
Whereas I agree with the view here that correct usage of fewer is a relatively subtle thing:
www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/fewer-vs-less

Is there anyone who pays any attention to "paragraphs" in any game? When we playtested, we read them aloud in dramatic voices, but I don't think anyone was looking at them to give us narrative direction. I'm trying to imagine looking at a blob of text on a card or in a booklet, written by a game designer, and going, "well this story is lacking".

I'm not necessarily going to bat for Seafall here. I'd just as soon the discovery booklet ditch the paragraphs altogether and just tell you what you found. For me the point is, flavor text is just flavor text. It's not story, and it doesn't make a game "drip with theme". Nor should it be expected to do the heavy lifting of narrative. In a game, that's done by the actions of the players.

It's like when someone criticizes the "lore" books in some video game. My reaction isn't "you're right" or "I disagree; I found them fascinating". It's "you READ those?"

I'd say the issue here isn't the quality of the writing so much as the fact that the parts of the game that use the text paragraphs feels inconsequential. For something like this to work it has to have a sense of narrative stakes and if that boils down to "random thing happens" those stakes are never going to emerge. Honestly, I'd just as soon remove the flavor text but create a game effect that feels like a result of the player's choices.

It sounded like the paragraphs we both generic and not terribly well written. Contrast that with something like Tales of the Arabian Nights, where the paragraphs have a certain amount of randomness to them, but are generally well written. Random I can live with. Blandly written and random and inconsequential means forget it. Which is lame because the exploring and paragraph bit is the thing that I'd probably prefer to do.

Michael Barnes wrote: I'm not covering it, I've got a couple of my guys at MM doing it there. I think we are going to do a H2H or a round table with it.

I'm totally disinterested in it.

*Raises hand* One of those guys is me.

I tend to not catch wind of how games like these are doing, especially if I know I'll be reviewing it. The early notices are disappointing, though. I think any sort of "campaign" style game, which legacy games are, really require short individual sessions or else it's too big a commitment. It's been hard enough to complete Pandemic Legacy with our group, and we actually like that.

I played the first game of my group's copy of Seafall. It was labeled as the Prologue, which is basically just a shortened learning game. It is just to get you familiar with the basic mechanics. Nothing is permanent for this, except the changes made via explorations, which serves as kind of a base seed for the rest of the campaign.

It seemed pretty basic, but obviously it will get more complex over time. I actually enjoyed the exploration text where you get to make a decision from two choices and flip to a different entry to find out the result. It kind of reminded me of the encounters in Arkham Horror, of which I am a big fan. However the text for the milestones was just generic blah blah blah that didn't matter.

We're supposed to play the first real game next week, we'll see how that goes.

Played Game 1 this evening. It was basically the same as the Prologue, but longer and with actual milestones to try and go for. It was mostly just people going about their own business exploring and raiding the islands, with no interaction. Until the end when one player triggered the final round by getting the required number of VPs. As my last turn, I raided his homeland to try and steal the treasure he just bought worth two VPs (which he loses and I gain). I rolled exactly what I needed to steal it, putting me tied for first place with him. Then the next player raided me but didn't come close to stealing any of my stuff. Then, at the urging of the player I was tied with, the final player raided me as well but needed a perfect roll to steal the treasure for another big VP swing. He failed badly which sent his ship to rest at the bottom of my harbor. Because of certain priorities, I won the tie breaker and won the game.

It took us about 3.5 hours. I could see how some people would find it boring, but I thought it was fine. And opening the first chest at the conclusion of this game gave us a bunch of new rules, like looking for new islands and raiding other ships (not a spoiler), which will open up the game considerably. I also didn't find the downtime to be an issue; turns go pretty quick. But I can see it possibly getting worse for some AP prone people when they have more options to agonize over.

Overall, I'm really looking forward to the next game.

Disgustipater wrote: Overall, I'm really looking forward to the next game.

If I counted correctly, this is a 4-player campaign? Four players is supposed to be the sweet spot in terms of player interaction and downtime.

From what I hear, 3 players = insufficient interaction and 5 players = too much downtime. To be honest, I'm surprised that the SeaFall board doesn't scale based on the number of players (fewer players = smaller board). Games like Ingenious and Nexus Ops do this with great success, and games like Warrior Knights *should* do this, but don't.

Probably they couldn't do this without screwing up the Legacy aspects of the game, though.

Keep posting about this when you play, please!

wkover wrote: If I counted correctly, this is a 4-player campaign? Four players is supposed to be the sweet spot in terms of player interaction and downtime.

We have 5 players, I left out the first player to act in that final round since it didn't really affect anything. One of our players is very prone to thinking too much about his turn on his turn, and to top it off, he loves to try and browbeat other players to do the "best" move on their turn. This gets tiresome just from a time wasted standpoint, which draws out the time it takes to play the game. Like I mentioned before, I didn't find the downtime to be a problem, but I generally never have an issue with downtime. I'm usually pretty concentrated on what my plan is. I also find it entertaining to listen to the other players' exploration narratives, like the guy who kept picking the "nice guy" path with his lazy crew and kept getting fucked over. However, we'll see if it gets longer and longer as the campaign progresses.

Some other stuff I thought worth mentioning that I forgot to include earlier:

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While I'm fine with the game length, I do have to agree with the comment earlier that Legacy games benefit from shorter play times. When I played through Pandemic Legacy, we could play through 3 or 4 games in a single session. Seafall is going to take forever. Our plan is to play every other week, and even if we stick to that, that's a long time.
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This game prominently uses a catch-up mechanic throughout the game. Turn order goes from the player doing the worst to the best. The order for choosing upgrades at the end of the game is also from the worst of the best, which can potentially lock out the winning player from carrying over an Advisor to the next game. And all tiebreakers are decided by the lower of the tied players. I don't have a problem with this. The player who went first and the player who went last both ended up with the most points, so it seems to be working fine?
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The rulebook isn't very good. It can be vague and poorly worded. We've had several questions about some basic stuff that is hard to determine through the rulebook.

The rules issue is my #1 reason for not starting a SeaFall campaign yet. Messing up the rules in a non-legacy game is OK. You learn from your mistakes and move on. Messing up the rules in a legacy game can be disastrous, as we learned late in our Pandemic Legacy campaign. Still great fun, but really frustrating.

Anyway, there is a BGG thread dedicated to SeaFall FAQs, though it isn't necessarily easy to find:

boardgamegeek.com/thread/1606358/captain...l-faq-and-compilatio