Recap: Brass #3 and Star Wars LCG First Impressions
The ships could not save me
The Brass 20 Challenge continued this week with play number three. Initially, I was planning to play it every other week but the opportunity came up and it got played. I also had a chance to try the new Star Wars LCG and see what they came up with for the star wars license.
Brass. So I always use a cotton mill strategy. Always. But, since the whole point of repeated plays is to explore the game fully, I thought I’d see how the port game went. No sir, I did not like it.
I got my ports flipped in the canal phase. Yellow and I were doing ports; Purple and Green went cotton mills. Unfortunately, my strategy ran into trouble when Purple basically lost everything in the canal phase. He was so far behind, and unable to realistically build more cotton mills, that he just abandoned it. That meant only one person was doing mills and two ports. With only one person doing mills, he was able to ship just about everything he wanted to the foreign markets and not flip any ports.
I think I’ll return to the port strategy at some point. With 20 plays, I’d like to experience more of it. But, I very much disliked it because I felt like I wasn’t in control. I had to hope other people flipped my ports for me. And, with the combination of Purple ceding the cotton mill market and the foreign market flipping some -1 and -2s, I felt like it was mostly out of my hands.
I also tried going for ships early again, which was probably a bad move. I was able to resist and opportunistically build the ship in the canal phase. But, I lost patience in the rail phase (especially after I lost faith in ports). I bought two ships early in the rail phase to lock them down. But, by the time I had them done (about 2-3 turns in), I was so far behind in rail building that I think it may have been only a marginal gain in points.
All in all, not a stellar performance on my part. But I’ve got seventeen games in which to improve.
Image via BGG User W Eric Martin
Star Wars. A friend of mine brought Star Wars to game night. He explained the rules and I was eager to give it a shot. I’d read good things about it, and the edge battle system gave each card multiple uses.
In my game, I played the light side and concentrated on just obliterating the dark side objectives with the lowest health. Light side wins when three dark side objectives are destroyed. For that reason, I was typically willing to sacrifice units in order to deal damage to the objectives and it turned out to be a pretty strong strategy. I also committed Luke to the force early on in order to win the balance challenge and put even more damage each turn.
After my first play, I enjoyed it and would play again. But, having fallen in love with Netrunner, I don’t feel the need to jump ship. The edge battles provided some needed variability and second-guessing, but otherwise the game felt very straight forward. It was rare that I worried whether I was making the right decision. I feel like I got what I needed with just that one play.
Also Played. Android: Netrunner, Love Letter (x3), Shadow Hunters (x2), 7 Wonders, Bohnanza, Tzolk’in, and Sentinels of the Multiverse.
