Anyone played CO2 or Archipelago yet?

One follow up...

Really interesting reaction on BGG to this game, the semi-coop part. It seems pretty intuitive to me, you need to win, but if you're winning by too much or perceived to be the future winner somebody can end the game and make you all lose (unless the winner shoulders the burden of paying the "not lose" tax).

Then I read a post by the designer, who said this and had me nodding my head:

"In Archipelago you need to win discreetely and not outrageously. You need to finally tune your victory, not being too obvious, not smash down your opponent under your feet with a huge gap of difference, let the others think they are still well in the game. At least This is what I think and discovered after quite some games."

I didn't think this idea was too hard to understand, but it appears that some of the BGG crowd can't get onboard with this sort of nuanced player interaction. Maybe this is strange, but this feels natural to me. It's the sort of thing that I (and everyone else) does in social situations every single day at work, etc. I find it second nature; I havent' played the game, don't know if I'd enjoy it, but....

My usual gaming partner and I logged two more plays of this on Saturday, one full four player short game (with two of the four players being randoms at the FLGS who were learners) and then another 3-4 turns of a five player short game before the store closed with three other randoms. It's interesting how much more you pick up about the ins and outs of a game when teaching it several times vs learning it.

This is an excellent game. It's not for everyone, but I think the AT crowd will love it. The game definitely has "heavy euro feel" to it, and the fact that the rules are densely written and the components lavishly produced certainly adds to this. It's a bit ironic, then, that the game doesn't really shine till it's subtitles come out. Jockeying for turn order is SO important, and sometimes it's best just to go last. If you know the crisis is a resource you don't have, and you're out of the discovery tokens, (resource wild cards) and the domestic market is empty, go last! If the rest of the table is worried about the separatist crisis they may just stand your meeples up to prevent the rest of the table from imploding.

Furthermore, since every cube spent has to stand up the requisite number of meeples called for on the card, whether they belong to the player spending the resource or not, there will almost always be spill over from other players. If you're viewed as weak, you can use this to your benefit.

I'm not sure there's ever been a more Euro-y game that has this much negotiation, bluffing, backstabbing and general skullduggery, and the amazing thing is I'm not sure any genre of game could have pulled this off better than worker placement.

Archipelago, by all rights, shouldn't exist. I know this is going to sound hyperbolic, but it's making me rethink so much of what I think of and expect from the hobby. It's a game about shipping crap from the new world back to Europe and yet we've yet to have a game that hasn't had at least one

"FUCK YOU, YOU'RE WINNING, YOU'RE GOING LAST"

"NO I'M NOT, SHE IS AND SHE ISN'T GIVING YOU CRAP, TAKE MY THREE FLORINS AND PUT ME THIRD, ASSHOLE" exchange.

Isn't that really an esoteric truth that we as experienced gamers acknowledge most of the time through our game play?

Get too far ahead, at least in games where player interaction is possible, and you paint yourself a target for the rest to bash the leader.

This game just gives a concrete way for exacting the toll we all charge normally for a person in front.

Yes, I like Archipelago very much. It plays like a euro but there is much more going on. Negotiation is very important also.

repoman wrote: Isn't that really an esoteric truth that we as experienced gamers acknowledge most of the time through our game play?

Get too far ahead, at least in games where player interaction is possible, and you paint yourself a target for the rest to bash the leader.

This game just gives a concrete way for exacting the toll we all charge normally for a person in front.

What you say *should* be true, but it so often isn't. If it was always, or even mostly, the case, no one on this site would have ever heard the phrases "runaway leader problem" or "issues with kingmaking" before outside of Papal conclaves and NCAA Division I football ranking systems. Too many folks are willing to take a passive role, cloaked in smug expectations that a "proper" game should "take care of the problem" for them. It sounds like Archipelago is designed to acknowledge those complaints and then grab the complainers by the collars and shake them until they do something about it themselves. If they fail to do something about, the game calls 'em all losers and laughs in their collective face.

That's just Punk as Fuck, in my opinion.

*And* it plays solo (well, for an extra $9 anyway), which I think is interesting. I suspect that it's very different sort of game (kind of like 2-player Here I Stand is a good game but is radically different from the 6-player experience), but it demonstrates a kind of nimbleness of design (or designer, anyway--Chris B. seems to go out of his way to design games that will work out for the cat who buys it even if all his/her friends hate it ) that is hard for me not to both admire and respect.

Locally, I'm the only one who cares for Archipelago, no one else seems to even know about it. But then I decided it's too big.

Thanks for more food for thought.

How rules heavy/dense is Archipelago? I don't mean word count, but is it intuitive enough that new players can pick up on it without a lot of fuss?

Explaining the actions is easy, explaining the turn order auction is easy, explaining the upgrade cards is pretty easy. The "balance of the archipelago" phase which is where you play out approximately 2/3rds of the crisis cards and adjust the population track to account for market statuses is a bit confusing. The other players don't really have to DO anything with adjustment, but if they don't know why it's moving it's hard to grasp the game.

What I've done in my teaching games is the following: Go first for all of the "Turn 0" stuff, and if anyone else has played before, have them go second (the rules say you do this randomly, but I ignore that) then, don't even explain balance of the archipelago till it becomes an issue, which is turn 2 (it's skipped in turn 1) and don't explain crisis cards till they come up at the end of turn 1 during the purchasing advancement phase, that way, players can take an entire round of actions (which are really easy to explain) and learn the basic mechanics of the game. It may not be the most "fair" game ever, but that really isn't the point.

Seems that nobody has anything to say about CO2. Its got the most interesting cover art Ive seen in a long while. I am intrigued. ANYBODY?

I'm interested too Al. It's got a cool theme. But I know next to nothing about it either except it's about building green energy plants to stop pollution.