I have been playing A Feast for Odin at the Meet Up I go to and I was surprise that once you get over initial shock of looking at all the actions you can take, the game actually was not hard to teach. The stumbling block always seem to be getting people to understand the income and the placement limitation. I think we might get it to the table even more often. Everyone seem to really enjoy it and we even rope in a newbie and he pick up the game real quick and came in 2nd.
I'm always happy to see new people experience A Feast for Odin.
Yes, once you get past the basic mechanics (income blocking, surrounding all 8 spaces for bonus, no green adjacent) and the overwhelming board, it's a very nicely flowing game.
I played only 2 games tonight.
Salt Lands
We tried Salt Lands for the first time, which is basically Mad Max in a hex grid layout. We had 5 players and it took probably 3 hours. It wasn't as obnoxious as Firefly, but it did feel kind of similar with everyone moving around a big hex grid world and avoiding or attacking enemies.
We played on classic mode with easy difficulty and it was surpringly non-punishing compared to games like Robinson Crusoe which can grind players into a fine paste even with the easiest options. I'm not sure we played all the rules correctly since someone else was teaching the game and reading the rules basically for the first time, though. The basic idea is that everyone has a character with one unique starting card and one unique power. You have to get 6 rumor cards which move some goal markers around, and once the final rumor has been drawn the goal markers are known. At that point, as many people as possible can escape to win the game, but those players collectively need to have a bunch of cards in their hands that partially match the goal color.
Each turn you can move and take some other actions, like drawing more cards, getting an extra crew member, or attacking an enemy. You can move through enemies, and basic movement is affected by some wind direction and speed stuff that changes. At the end of almost every turn, one type of enemy unit activates to either move or attack.
What ended up happening was that 3 players didn't have much to do besides possibly collect some goal cards or move around (I had 4 as the healer and only ever got to use my unique starting card once). The other 2 took extremely long turns instead, killing 2-3 enemy units per turn while we sat around waiting. I think the final round of the game, those players were taking like 10 minutes combined to kill a bunch of units that were basically meaningless since we were going to win if we got around the table to my turn, and finally I just asked if we could move on to end the game since it was so late at night (we promptly won).
This basically happened because of the way the game snowballs. If you have even 1 permanent armor you become extremely difficult to damage since the enemy damage seemed to ramp up very slowly even in the final levels of enemy cards (we had just gotten to the level 5 cards when we won, but even level 6 cards mostly had a lot of spawns instead of doing punishing damage). If you have armor and you can damage enemies, you can take vehicles and have a much higher chance of drawing weapons I believe. Drawing weapons means you can kill more enemies etc. In my case I never drew a damage-enemy card besides my basic starter spear. That plus only getting to use the unique starter card once meant my powers were very limited and a fair bit of the game felt walled off for me.
I also felt the enemies were a little lacklustre. There are a lot of them, up to 30 simultaneously of 5 different types, but mostly all each did was beeline for a player on their supported terrain and then possibly do a hit of damage. I'd rather have the Gloomhaven approach of fewer enemies but more interesting mechanics instead of scouring the board for almost-identical-looking brown enemy pieces. Speaking of which, there were 3 different card backs that all look very similar which is a bit obnoxious for sorting.
Lastly the weather mechanic seemed to have little use. A sandstorm happened one round but didn't affect much, I had a weather change power which I used a few times, but overall it was just sort of there.
Tortuga 1667
We also played Tortuga 1667 which I was very excited about trying. It was hard to convince people to join in and I only got 4 plus a reluctant 5th player instead of a full 8-9.
One player was unfortunately the player in the group who makes it their goal to screw with whatever game is being played as much as possible, so they promptly drew a bunch of cards blindly instead of being strategic. This resulted in them getting 3 albatross cards which turns them into a walking bomb that maroons everyone on any ship they board, as well as losing all but one voting card. This in turn hurt their own teammates because they were essentially useless and couldn't do participate in normal ship activities.
Despite that, and despite another player also doing some blind draws instead of attempting to look at cards, the game was reasonably entertaining and lasted maybe an hour. There were some funny moments with people getting marooned, or players getting around the destroyed rowboat restriction. That's one thing I do want to change next game -- I want to play without the "destroy a rowboat" card, since even with 5 players the game becomes very claustrophobic in terms of what you can do once a rowboat is destroyed. Even without a rowboat being destroyed players can sit in rowboats to block anyone else from changing ships unless someone can snipe-maroon them.
I was the Dutch pirate and won by camping a rowboat, jumping onto a ship at the last minute, and shifting one piece of treasure to tie the game. That was neat.
