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SeaFall is receiving very mellow reactions
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- It sounds like there is a lot of down time. This is the kind of thing that for our group generally means a game only gets played infrequently. It can make make the experience exhausting and we have to be willing to settle into something like this. One the best things about adapting the Pandemic engine is that it means each turn is fairly short and everyone has a stake in how everyone else's turn plays out.
- It also sounds like Seafall has a problem that a lot of long conquest/exploration type games have, which is each player starts working through one of the game's many interesting systems and before they can be fully explored someone wins. And it often feels like all of these great ideas are being dangled in front of you but you never get to see them play out because they are not the shortest path to victory.
-Critically,Quinns makes the story sound boring and I have feeling that will be a deal breaker for many people. One of the things that works great about Pandemic Legacy is that even without the Legacy element most games of Pandemic have a pretty tight and exciting story (the virus! and we have to cure it! or everybody dies!); The review gives the impression the events are just too generically written to be engaging.
This seems like problem that could well served by an app, a well designed piece of software could take advantage of tags that characters might receive from one game to a next and tailor the event to them.
Is your captain "Vicious?" When you encounter the natives it means it well almost certainly be a combat encounter. Is he or she "Charming" then odds are you will make friends. This might give the storytelling a sense of weight and seem more like the choices earlier in the game that lead to those tags have more consequence.
- I wonder if making the game competitive is another strike against it. The problem with competitive games, especially games with more than two players, is that they have to feel exciting and engaging for everybody. If you are the player who is consistently loosing it;s going to be harder and harder to mount the enthusiasm to come back for another multi-hour expedition, compound this with the sense that you have to keep playing so you friends can, it seem like this would expand the exhaustion factor.
God forbid if one one player just keeps running away with it every game.
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- Michael Barnes
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And nobody seems to want be the one to say "sorry, the game sucks".
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- metalface13
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If it turns out to be better than being reported, not like I can't pick one up later from an FOLGS for less then my direct pre-order...
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- Legomancer
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John Myers wrote: -Critically,Quinns makes the story sound boring and I have feeling that will be a deal breaker for many people. One of the things that works great about Pandemic Legacy is that even without the Legacy element most games of Pandemic have a pretty tight and exciting story (the virus! and we have to cure it! or everybody dies!); The review gives the impression the events are just too generically written to be engaging.
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?"
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- Michael Barnes
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I'm totally disinterested in it.
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Legomancer wrote: It went through at least one more round of editing and changes after I playtested, so I don't know how much changed at that point. I liked it (and pre-ordered) but didn't love it, but I also discovered I don't like playtesting and shouldn't do it.
Mr. White: from upthread
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I haven't read every comment about it, but this seems to be settling into the same problematic groove that I have seen and have with many games. It's fun to think of the experience and potential of the game, but at the moment it isn't really very satisfying. How many of us have bought games or systems with grand visions of the joy to be had, only to be ultimately disappointed? I can look at my collection of Battlestations for a prime example of this phenomenon.
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Yup. Glad I'm not the only disinterested vs uninterested language pedant.JEM wrote: I'd hope so. That's the main criterion for a reviewer.
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- Cranberries
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Count Orlok wrote: How many of us have bought games or systems with grand visions of the joy to be had, only to be ultimately disappointed? I can look at my collection of Battlestations for a prime example of this phenomenon.
Yes, this is the core question. I've talked myself into so many games that one or two people raved about, and then been disappointed, or, more commonly, unable to put together a group of players who enjoy the game. The last game I bought that exceeded my expectations was Pax Pamir. I need two more players for that gem and hope to play it many times. Assassins. Spies. Drenched in history. Heavy enough to leave you thinking for a few days afterwards.
With games like Seafall, I keep wishing there was a game doctor out there who could combine the most important house rules into something authoritative and coherent. Games are made of rules, and rules are elastic--they're just words.
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