Terra Mystica

JS - Approved. CS - N/A. DH - Approved.

NOMADI: Puntare subito sulla fortificazione che da un ottimo bonus relativo alla terraformazione.

5P

There is plenty of depth in this game and a big learning curve to go through to work out how to play well and. It’s not that the mechanisms themselves are particularly complicated – all you have to do is choose one fairly simple action (from a choice of 8) each turn – but a couple of the concepts are not the easiest to grasp and the way things knit together combined with the wide variety of strategies and scoring options available make it all a bit bewildering and difficult to get your head round at first. But if you stick through it, it's a very rewarding experience as you start to see how you have to play each faction very differently. And there are 14 of them! Excellent stuff

We have been playing this much more regularly and can finish a 3 player game in under 90 minutes. This game is slowly creeping up my top 10 list...In my books it's a solid 8 right now, but I don't see it going anywhere but up!

I understand and appreciate that a lot of time and energy went into the design, there are just some aspects of the game that are crippling to me. I find that the critical nature of my decisions are decreasing as the game wears on to the point that after the first round is over, I'm already past the half-way point on that decline. What faction you pick, and where you start your settlements will have a bigger effect on your success rate than any other factor in our experience (related to how likely it is that someone can effectively steal a spot from you, how effectively you can expand and exploit your faction's specialty, etc). This goes hand in hand with the static setup of the board, so the variable powers have favored setup locations and strategy already defined for them during that critical decision making period. As such, there are only a few spots that are of particular value for each faction, and outside of that, it's not worth it. So the net effect here is that all of my super important choices occur before the first turn, and as the game progresses, each choice I make is less likely to create any serious swing or effect on the end game, to the point where the final 2 rounds are largely auto-pilot in terms of game play.

Second, I find that I have 8 or 10 choices each turn, but really only 1 or 2 of those will do anything other than cause a backslide (similar to the opening setup choices), so I don't spend my time debating choices so much as taking the obvious choice and planning multiple turns of obvious choices in advance. It's a very tight game in that regard where the potential to "catch up" or make breakthroughs to put pressure on opponents in the second half of the game just doesn't exist. I like wide choices where no one choice sinks you and they are largely opportunistic in their timing and accordance with your strategy. Terra Mystica seems to favor a "deep" approach where you don't have as many choices, but you plan for multiple turns in concert.

Last, it takes about four times as long to play a 4p game as I'm realistically interested in investing in said design. A large reason for this is that the late game decisions are all sort of meh. I actually enjoy the game when I can bang out a session online on lodev in 30 minutes.

It's not a bad game, it's just not a game for me. My 7 plays in person (3-4p) and 10+ on lodev have helped me learn my preferences in games, so it's not time wasted, but I won't play it again.

A perfect game. perfect planning and perfect execution are always lead you victory. The game demands me to be perfect, very tired when a game ends.