 So, uh, the game seasons season. So I heard about this game from his people on the internet. So I bought it. It's a pretty new hot new game. I wanted to talk about a hot new game on the show instead of, you know, because you're running out of old games we've all played. Uh, so what is the deal with seasons? Well, the first thing that gets you in this game that you notice is the artworks, which are crazy colorful and pretty cool. I really like the evil. Well, not evil, but the nervous looking rabbit wizard. I've played him every time. It's weird. Like the character designs, like a lot of them, especially those main characters, like I'm not too into them. Like I don't really like, I wouldn't, you know, want the weird freaky bunny on my wall or anything, you know, but, or as my desktop wallpaper, but the style, like the way they're drawn and the, the bright colors and the high contrast and the high resolution. It's like the quality of it is like, Oh, that is so nice. It's just not. It's like a really nice drawing of a thing. I don't want to see a drawing of, um, but it's fun. It's cute. Yeah. If you're someone who likes game artworks, this is, this is like, you know, a territory here. The game itself, you know, when I read about it, the thing that made me want to buy it was how this was a confluence of so many different game mechanics that we already knew sort of mashed into one in an interesting way. So here's how the game is the basic rundown, right? First you do a card draft, like seven wonders where everyone has nine cards and you take one and you pass the rest to the left. And you take one and you pass to the left and you take, and eventually you're left at nine cards in front of you. So you're constructing your deck based on an initial set and this drives the entire game. Everything beyond this deck construction is just moving the mice. Right. So you end to everyone ends up with nine cards through a draft, like seven wonders and those, you know, however many people are playing, this is going to be nine times. So if it's a three player game, there'll be 27 cards. The deck has a lot more than 27 cards. So we actually, we played it a few times now and we have probably not really experienced the depth of all the possible cards. I however have won every game I've played and I've used, I use different strategies. It just didn't matter. We'll get to my opinion in a minute, but I'm I'm still running down the game and you're jumping ahead. I'm just saying I'm increasingly sour on the game. The more times I win it. So anyway, you get these nine cards and here's the interesting part is you split them into three piles of three each. The first three cards are your starting hand. The second three are for part two and the third three are for part three. So this is this beginning setup of the game forces you to create a long term plan where you say these are the cards I'm going to have in the second part of the game and these are the cards I'm going to have in the third part of the game. You have to, you know, you really have to long term think right from the get go. What are you going to do in this game? And you can look at those cards later. You just can't pick them up until the time is right. So you really, you know, a lot of games, you just sort of get a starting hand and you make a decision based on what's going on on that turn. And you don't really have to think too much about the future or you maybe there's a game like chess where you have to look at the future, but you're looking at what's possible in the future. And this one, you already know a lot of the future right because you planned that future and now you have to make that happen. So if you set up a bad future for yourself from the beginning, it's going to be very hard to make it happen. No matter what you do now to balance that a good future, then you still have to be able to make it happen. Considering all the other things that other people players are going to in my opinion, the decisions as to what to put in 123 and also what cards to choose relatively obvious, trivial. Yeah. It's not too hard beat Moseley because it's not too many cards. Now more to the point, the real strategy, the game breaks down pretty quickly and that the real strategy is looking at the set of cards in the draft, anticipating what cards other players took remembering them and will take and constructing your deck such that you will mitigate the cards they have know they're coming, know the order they're going to put them in a win. The problem is that is a very high effort for relatively little return and I frankly don't bother with that and still win every time I play. So the next all two times you play. Yeah, I won by so much both times. So the next thing that happens is you start to play the actual game and it's what it does. You have a rondo that goes around in rondo. It goes around the seasons of the year and is three years in the game. So the second year is the second part in the third year is the third part. So four seasons per year, three years per game and each season has a set of dice and what you do is you roll those dice. You know, so if you're in winter, you roll blue dice. If you're in summer, you roll yellow dice. Everyone complains about this in their right to complain about it. The guy who made this game is the one thing you fucked up. He people confronted him on board Game Geek. He is wrong. Yes, he made summer and fire yellow and he made fall and autumn and air red. What the fuck? Why is the fire not red as a result? I refer to them purely as fires and feathers and I ignore the colors. I also ignore the colors, but anyway you roll the season dice associated with the season and then people each take one die. So it's sort of a Puerto Rico situation. I'll take the captain. I'll take the craftsman only instead of taking, you know, these cards that are always available every time you roll dice. So the thing you want might not be available. So everyone picks a die that came up on in different seasons. You're rolling different dice too. So, you know, thing you want might not be available that season at all and you got to get the game to go around. Now this ends up already in terms of review being it really influences the game too much. Every both times I've played. I have had no more useful actions to take long before the end of the game and the only chance I will have a being able to make a further decision of any kind is if there happens to come up the option to draw another card to then play. Yeah, one of the die. Some of the die will allow you to draw another card. So, you know, if you've already used all your cards, which can happen if you play pretty well or if you picked a bunch of cards that were easy to play at the beginning, then you really need that draw more card thing to happen because there's really not much you can do in the game to score points besides transmute other than play cards. It's really all about getting resources to be able to play the cards. You roll dice and you need summoning gay. You need stars. You need all these different elements. You basically need to collect resources from dice and other things in order to be able to put cards on the table. And then the what the cards do is sort of the whole game and as getting you victory points either in the forms of the cards themselves or crystals are also worth points and you basically go around three times doing this. I find that cards worth a lot of victory points are way more useful than cards that do fucking anything. Yeah, and whoever gets the gauntlet that lets gives you a one discount and everything is pretty much guaranteed to win that card is ridiculously powerful because it basically makes everything easier to every card easier to play and being able to play all your cards is pretty much the hard thing to do in the game. That's that's what you have to do to win. So and you lose at the end of the game negative five points for every card you didn't play and you've got nine cards minimum to play. No, what's interesting is the game may make you force you to draw more. So that's even which for me is great because I play them immediately. You've got the freaking glove which I always do. You've had twice right. So the thing is that this is where the game is interesting because it breaks a few of the sort of standard assumptions of games and standard limitations, especially of card games, kind of like how Dominion got rid of the I have a hand of cards and I kind of play one card at a time or you know I have a limited number of actions. Dominion you play your whole fucking hand every turn. Yep. And when I first played Dominion, that was a big deal. That was like, that was like doing something. First played Dominion in Boston. We were like, fuck this shit. The second time you played Dominion. Yeah, but it was like this forbidden thing. It was it was refreshing because there's always the thing you want to do in games that games never let you do because the mechanics tend to break down. This game does that in the sense you can play as many goddamn cards as you can possibly spend mana on or energy tokens or yeah. It's the vocabulary. This game is a little weird crystals energy tokens. Yeah, and some of them are gauges, but some of them are meters. By the way, the story of this game is that you're a bunch of wizards and you're all competing to see who's going to become the archmage. Three year wizards dual. Good thing. Good thing. Both didn't show up. That's another thing. There's two different kinds of cards as purple and orange. Purple cards are magic items. So when you play those, they're generally just boosts to you. Those are the cards you really want to play a lot of, but there's also these orange cards which are all familiars and they all have creature themes, you know, that's like so and so the destroyer or whatever. All those cards sort of damage everybody else at the table and they usually damage everybody else to the table relatively equally. So you can't sort of target the guy in the lead to do any king making. If you want to fuck people over, you fuck over everyone but yourself with the orange familiar cards. So the game has no direct fucking as we call it or as Richard Garfield calls it politics. Yes, but it does have that sort of interaction, right? So I mean, you saw most of the cards during the draft, not all of them obviously, but most of them, whether you took them or not. So you know that someone has, you know, whatever card you passed to the left. So you know that, you know, that's going to come around at some point, like the air elemental, which no one, it was the end of the game. I only had a couple cards left in my hand. None of you expected me to do that. I knew the was coming eventually. It just came in a really bad time. I didn't even care about the attack. I only played it because it's worth a bunch of victory points. Exactly. My strategy to win this game is simple. I get cards that help me play more cards or that are worth a bunch of victory points and are easy to play and I otherwise I just move my mice. Yep. There really isn't too much to think about once. Well, no, there are things you can do to you can spend a lot of mental effort. That is not terribly fun to have a slight edge. For example, Scott played a card. Fuck you that went around the table for the whole rest. When I played it, when I played it, I see two of those went around the table at the same time. The problem is that card is only effective if you count out the modulus math of when it's going to hit different people and what resources will be available. Usually it hits anyone who a doesn't have water, right? So you can play it after everyone has used their water or there won't be water for another couple seasons or B it hits the first player because even if the first player has water when it'll get to them, their turn has already passed. So they can't do anything to get rid of it again because they've already done their stuff this turn. So they get hit. They pass it to the left the next turn with their water and then the next player to the left of them is obviously the new first player. So they're stuck with it now. So you could count it out and figure out and plan and make that card be fairly effective. But for example, Phil passed it to me and then a card came out that we were forced to give up, you know, take back a card, discard or sacrifice a card we had out. So I sacrificed the fucking monster and kept all my real cards. Yep. And in a way that card to be beneficial. It's also a very beneficial card. There is no way to plan beneficial effect unless you spend an unreasonable amount of unfun brain effort. Yep. It's also that card just to add to it. Right? If you're the person who plays the card, not only can you, you know, easily immediately pass it off at the beginning, but it gives you a huge bonus when you immediately play it in the form of I think it might put your summoning gauge up one, but I know it gives you 10 crystals. So it's not a bad if you just play it. It's already helping you and hurting everyone else. Yeah, except it's almost guaranteed to come around and hurt you very soon. Even if it comes around and hurts you, you're still better off than everyone else. The other thing that makes the game interesting, but kind of bad is that you have crystals are victory points and you can spend crystals to do stuff and a lot of attacks remove crystals from you. So you can remove victory and other people will take crystals from you. The problem is I tend to play decks where well strategies and it seems very effective where I hover around zero and these attacks don't hurt me at all. So basically at every round, there was a thing happening where everyone was losing four victory points, except me because I had zero victory points on the board. My victory points were all in cards. As a result, I was effectively gaining four victory points on everyone except the person doing that action every round. Yeah, there are very few cards that and I think this is actually a problem with the cards. At least when I've played, there are very few cards that attack the cards of other players, right? And when they do, they're always like everyone picks a card to take back into their hand. There's no counter spells. There's no randomly, you know, I mean the worst thing that you can do is make everyone draw and it only hurts people who are having a hard time playing who are already losing. If somebody's winning, drawing a card for them is great. So it's like it's not necessarily a negative. There's no, you know, there's nothing that's like you choose a card from everyone else's pile or everyone must sacrifice a card that is, you know, there's some cards that are negative like the one we just talked about that are negative victory points. So forcing everyone to sacrifice a card could be good or bad for opponents. There is no universal way that I've found. There might be one I haven't seen that hurts everyone other than you in the cards as opposed to in the crystals. Now my real kind of core problem with the game is just that you have so few options. It is likely as in I'd say there's about a 30 percent chance on any given time it is your turn that there is literally no action you can take and you just pass. I pass easily a third of the turns I take in this game because there's just nothing you can do you take some crystals you don't have the little transmute icons you can't do that and you don't want to use your superpower to because you lose victory points you don't have your summoning gauges at max you can't play any cards so you take your energy tokens and your turns over just fucking sit there a lot of times I have no cards in my hand at least at least makes the game go around quickly no it doesn't people take for fucking ever on the turn well that's the thing right is that on the one hand it's quick to decide what to do on your turn but it's slow because you eventually have a lot of cards in front of you and everyone has cards in front of them that are always doing stuff like this card does this whenever this happens so even though you quickly decided on my turn I'm going to take two forests and past that's it someone else is like wait a minute when this happens this card does this and this card does that and that ends up being where all the time gets taken up is all this management and remembering of cards that do things. So while the game is relatively simple and should be relatively quick to play and it does have interesting mechanics that other games do not have and has a light strategic depth because complex strategy is difficult to enact and not terribly fun to enact the problem is the nature of this game with all the proper noun cards with tons of text on them in different effects means that the majority of the people you would ever play this game with will take for fucking ever on their turn. Yeah you really if you want to play you cannot play this with people who take time on their time I played a nerd in my seat and it took longer than any game I've ever played it nerd in my seat and the one other smart guy was playing with said the same thing and we were playing with the two other people just like didn't really get it and the game took so long it says on the box one hour I think it really one hour game they really only play tested this I think with people who knew how to fucking play card games like you know ccg's and things well and here's what I think is going on the people who take too long on their turn it's a fairly simple problem that's it's not specific to this game is universal in my experience anyone who takes a long time on their turn in board games typically does not have the sort of generic aptitude for discarding clearly bad decisions or clearly bad choices they have very poor to use a garfield term they have personally very poor directional heuristics right and he said computing all the different possibilities exactly because he said a beginner in a game is very likely to not notice a lot of the options they'll only know about a few things they can do so their turn is quick because they only can see three ways to go and they pick one of them a really advanced player can see all the different ways to go but knows that 90 percent of the ways to go are completely meaningless so also has pretty much like a two or three choices and picks one quickly like in chess i know not to start with the polish open right as much as i like it it's the intermediate players they can see all the choices but they don't know that most of those choices are completely stupid and useless they're considering each and every one even though you know they're not able to just quickly and swiftly say yeah none of those are good ideas there's really only two good ones so they take for fucking ever and that's the kind of person you're going to find at board game night now it's funny because if you go to a convention like packs there's fewer of those people because most of the people in tabletop are either before that point in their board gaming career or after that point it's like that point only exists in quantity in like local board gaming groups that meet up somewhere yeah but it's an intractable problem which is why this game fails in the sense that the strategy level is perfect for people at that level but because of all the text and all the fiddliness those are the people who take the longest on their turns thus making it an unbearable game to play i think this game could do well right if uh there were you know they sort of changed it up a little bit you know mathematically right like if you had more cards if there were if there were different cards of more variety right and if you know uh you didn't you weren't penalized so heavily for not playing every single freaking card uh you know then the game would be more dynamic as you went around as opposed to just sort of after you plan the game it's a race to play all your cards and whatever they do they do and also the drafting thing at the beginning i want to experiment with this it's everyone draws nine and everyone ends with nine why not draw 15 and end with nine sure you'll get more powerful everyone will maybe it'll be a dune situation then yeah or why not do something like you know uh you know everyone gets you know uh you know 12 and you know it's on you you can either take one and put it in front of you or you can take one and throw it out of the game or you know you can make if you mixed up that draft at the beginning then i think people would end up with a lot more interesting or maybe like everyone draws you know some number of cards you give one to yourself and you give one to someone else to start with and then and then you pass i think a lot of things we mixed up in that draft phase such that you know and then so someone gave you a card during the draft you look at the draft phase is basically 80 percent of the game right so now if you mixed up that draft phase a little bit and you had different cards or more of them or whatever someone gives you a card during the draft you it's going to be in your hand you've got to play it during the game so now when you get the next set to pick from you you see a really awesome card in there you would have picked otherwise but now you've got to pick a different one because it'll help you deal with the shitty card someone else gave you that you're stuck with so and then you end up handing that other really good card to the next guy and so on and so forth so i think if i had to recommend this game i would actually recommend you not buy it yeah i would i say generically because if you're you know the kind of people i would want to recommend this game to like i said are the people who you know the sort of novice board gamers it's like a light game you can play relatively quickly but odds are you're going to end up playing with people who will take so long on their turns that you will hate this game yeah and if you're an advanced board gamer the only time you should buy this game is if you are bored and you've played every game you already owned to death and you're looking for something novel that's really yeah that's really the biggest benefit of this game is the artwork and the novelty of this combination of mechanics that you know are some of which are in other games but really aren't all together in one place and you will learn something by playing it if you're big into games which we did learn something from it yes things the other one more thing i want to say about this game is that the the boxing of this game is the most wasted space of any game ever it's like a deck of cards a bag of chits and a few boards and it's in a giant full-size box that has got to be at least eighty ninety percent air right this needs reboxing so hard harder than any game i've ever owned so if you're the kind of person who wants a game that doesn't take up a lot of space this is a good game to get because you can rebox it but if you keep the original box man this game is going to eat up your whole freaking shell for no reason at all and i hate that and i wish people would stop that so yeah and as a result there are so few people i can recommend this game for that i actually despite relatively enjoying and have to say that i would not recommend anyone by this game i i'm trying to think of any group to recommend it to and the only one i can think of right is if you are someone border lettuce no if you are somebody who wants to sort of move over into the european board gaming situation right and you want to learn some of these mechanics like action taking and but you come from a ccg kind of background like that's your right then see where you're going if you're a i take back my right if you're a ccg person this could be a transition game into the euro board gaming world because it has both aspects combined right but what i would say to you there is harden the fuck up and just play al grande of course of course but you know that at least you know what other game does that really uh yeah that's that's the only thing i could recommend it to that prickle a little bit either that or if you're a board elitist in board games like us everyone wants a copy of seasons or i'm likely only to play it a few more times if i'm going to make another recommendation this is a good game if you are someone who really enjoys german board games or board games in general have played a lot of them have started to understand them and want to design your own games use this game to see some mechanics that don't really work that well and kind of follow through a game and try to identify like where it fails and see if you can come up with ways to fix it it's a game that is you know it has problems but it's not one of those games that's like oh so obviously broken right like mario card or or what was that board game we had with the greek guys uh well that was just poorly written rules yeah that wasn't i i think that game if you figured out the rules actually not so bad uh whatever but helis helis but this game is a game that's like just slightly problematic so if you really want to learn a lot about game design and a lot of the you know pros and cons of the all the different mechanics it uses they're all only slightly broken and only someone who's really learned a lot about games will be able to see the flaws in this i think a lot of people will play this game and who aren't like us and will think it's kind of pretty great and i can i can anticipate with it at all i i had entire discussion i would have with certain unnamed people about this game where they would tell me that one i haven't solved the game that i'm not i'm giving it a short i haven't solved it right well in the sense that i'm giving it a short shrift and they they would say that it's much more strategically complex than i give it credit for maybe if you added a fistful of extra cards well there is depth there the problem is it's dota depth it's it's depth that is not enjoyable to explore nor is it analogous to the game itself this has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to dj pretzel for the opening music cat lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes discussion news and more remember geek nights is not one but four different shows sci-tech mondays gaming tuesdays anime comic wednesdays and indiscriminate thursdays geek nights is distributed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 license geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience but unlike those other late shows it's actually recorded at night