Bioautomaton
09-15-2012, 03:06 PM
Hi there! Let me start off by saying I've had a chance to play 3012 a grand total of 1½ times since picking it up at PAX, so I won't claim to be an expert here. Love the art, enjoy the quality components and I think there's a good game lurking in here. We ran into a few things on our first full play session that raised some concerns, though.
First off, the card The Enemy's Friend caused a short heated debate. If a person somehow has no cards in hand, can they reveal a hand of zero cards or are they unable to reveal a hand, thereby granting a 2 card draw to their opponent?
Secondly, the marketplace feels stagnant in a three player game, though this might change with a higher player count. Granted, there is always a set of two actions that show up for each turn - we liked that, despite the fact it could feel a little random sometimes there was usually something interesting in there. The weapons and ally sections didn't see much movement, though, and we were wondering if we missed a rule to refresh those somehow or if they're intended to sit there, static, until someone buys something from them.
For my own part, I won by focusing on picking up card draw and Crude Explosions. The way I looked at it, having to match together two cards to do decent damage was inefficient when I could work with just one (roughly halving deck clutter) and card draw cards, especially since the market was not giving me any Jaguar-clan allies or swords to work with, though I did pick up a high cost enemy clan ally for denial. Also, people never quite knew what I had for combat value. Is it always a viable strategy? I'm not sure - my experience with the game is obviously so far very limited, but it seemed to do the job nicely there.
One final note I have is a mild criticism - for setup the board lists encounters separated by defense value for stacks while the manual lists encounters separated by renown value. I'm probably not the first person to run into this, but let's just say Owl Wraiths lurking in your earliest encounter stack will ruin your day. We figured out why we were getting our rears handed to us so harshly after consulting the manual again on the setup section, but there was a bit of grumbling regarding the contention between board and manual for reference, even if we do now understand that the Owl Wraith is 5x2 defense for interests of board placement (which might have been a good way to put it on the card).
First off, the card The Enemy's Friend caused a short heated debate. If a person somehow has no cards in hand, can they reveal a hand of zero cards or are they unable to reveal a hand, thereby granting a 2 card draw to their opponent?
Secondly, the marketplace feels stagnant in a three player game, though this might change with a higher player count. Granted, there is always a set of two actions that show up for each turn - we liked that, despite the fact it could feel a little random sometimes there was usually something interesting in there. The weapons and ally sections didn't see much movement, though, and we were wondering if we missed a rule to refresh those somehow or if they're intended to sit there, static, until someone buys something from them.
For my own part, I won by focusing on picking up card draw and Crude Explosions. The way I looked at it, having to match together two cards to do decent damage was inefficient when I could work with just one (roughly halving deck clutter) and card draw cards, especially since the market was not giving me any Jaguar-clan allies or swords to work with, though I did pick up a high cost enemy clan ally for denial. Also, people never quite knew what I had for combat value. Is it always a viable strategy? I'm not sure - my experience with the game is obviously so far very limited, but it seemed to do the job nicely there.
One final note I have is a mild criticism - for setup the board lists encounters separated by defense value for stacks while the manual lists encounters separated by renown value. I'm probably not the first person to run into this, but let's just say Owl Wraiths lurking in your earliest encounter stack will ruin your day. We figured out why we were getting our rears handed to us so harshly after consulting the manual again on the setup section, but there was a bit of grumbling regarding the contention between board and manual for reference, even if we do now understand that the Owl Wraith is 5x2 defense for interests of board placement (which might have been a good way to put it on the card).