This’ll teach me to post a photo without any accompanying text indicating the game title. It took me ages to locate my Land vs Sea post in the Last game you bought? thread. You can see some of the game tiles there.
I played a two-hander this evening to learn it. (I didn’t think to take a photo of the end state before I packed it up, so here is someone else’s.)
I like it (as I’d expected), however I fear for my chances of getting to play this with my partner. The game is superficially a bit like the city-building part of Carcassonne, but each (hex) tile contains both land and sea areas, and one player is trying to enclose areas of Sea while the other is trying to enclose areas of Land. So you’re wanting to play tiles that help to close off areas for you, while ideally expanding the extent of your opponent’s areas to make it harder for them to close them. Closed areas score 1 point per tile involved for the associated player, plus possible bonus points for whichever player actually closed it. (In the above BGG link, Sea has had rather a bad time of it – most of that is one huge incomplete area which has scored them no points. As a rule you want to make lots of small areas, but my first impressions are that this is much easier said than done…)
I think my biggest problem will be that whereas in Carcassonne you can be mean, I think in this game it’s absolutely inevitable. Because every tile you play affects both types of areas, messing with their borders to make things harder/impossible is a certainty; You can also finish an area for them (if you think they’ll do it themselves otherwise) and steal the bonus points (marked on some tiles) which they would have gotten for finishing it; Some tiles cause you to steal one of your opponents two tiles from them, meaning they only have one option on their next turn (but drawing back to the normal hand of 2 afterwards).
As often happens with Carcassonne as well, I found the last few turns took me into A.P. mode as I tried to figure out whether/where I could get any points with my final tiles.
I played the basic rules, but there are three sets of optional advanced rules built into the system which could easily be very A.P. triggering. Some tiles have mountain/forests on some land edges or corral reefs on some sea edges, and there are points to be had for matching those things together (with escalating points if you can connect more of those tiles in a sequence). Then there are tiles with ships or caravans which introduces some area-majority scoring at the end of the game: if a group of connected tiles have a total of 5 ships and 4 caravans, then the Sea player wins the majority and gets 5+4 points (tbh I think this would be extremely tough to keep tabs on – the ship/caravan areas can arbitrarily overlap multiple land/sea areas, and that just seems like it’s going to be hard to track visually). Lastly each player optionally starts the game with a token they can place on unfinished areas, and if the area is later finished there are bonus points and they get their token back (but they only get it back if that area is finished – much like having a single meeple to place in any city-in-progress in Carcassonne). I can envisage it getting pretty tricky to figure out the best use of your tiles once you start adding in these additions. (Also, I really like the detailed artwork on the tiles, but I hadn’t realised how many of those details were gameplay-related until going through these extra rules.)
Finally, while you can see which 2 tiles each player has, all tiles are double-sided with different things on each side, and only the player with a given tile knows what the hidden side has. So you could figure out half of their options on their next turn, but not the other half. Maybe they’re about to finish an area that they can’t finish with their visible tiles, etc. This also affects your choice of tile when drawing back to 2 – you don’t know what’s on the other side of the tiles you’re choosing between.
All in all it felt like a pretty neat design. I just hope I actually get to play it with another human! : )
If you’re in the market for a very interactive tile layer which is easy to learn and kinda cut-throat to play, I’d say this one is worth looking at.