by Ioan76_TM
You probably made your decision but as a ( possible ) answer :Bearhug78 wrote:
However, what I want to really know is does everyone actually think this is the best game out there?
should consider first of all the following aspects :
1. It's just a 2-player game - so this probably cut somehow the audience/situations when it's likely to play;
2. It's really thematic - which could be either a hug plus or a big minus but anyway this will model further the response;
3. It involves luck due to dice rolling and card distribution - which may be annoying for certain players ( OK - it can be mitigated in most of cases but as an idea ;) ).
... and based on this if you are still in this game target I'd say that "Yes, it is the best game" despite few ( quite serious ) draw-backs, which is better to be known :
1. ( usually tolerable ) Few components/tokens are missing/hard to identify : for example it happens to us twice to miss Flower Power effect when US played a "war-card". And lack of a NORAD-dedicated token sucks too. :(
2. ( more serious ) Despite the fact that luck-impact is expected to be possible to mitigate - designers fails to prevent/still allowed a "luck-impact" at strategic level which ... could became annoying ( especially between advanced player, when an additional favorable Scoring Card in T10 - for example - easily make the difference between victory and defeat :devil: because it's usually quite impossible to deal with it effectively and also try to have a better board-position for Final Scoring ). This aspect was somehow further mitigated in "1989" but I cannot say if it was "fixed" or not due to lack of enough experience.
3. ( damn seriously for thematic-audience ) The game is full with rich strategic & ( even ) tactic choices and depth but ... didn't actually offer a real "what-if" experience - which could be considered really bad for some players : no matter how you played until T4 or T8 you end up adding the same events-cards in the deck ... :whistle:
I hope that these point helped you/will help somebody in the future.