I’ve been playing some Lost Kingdoms: Pangea in Pieces solo, and while my first game was pretty engaging, it’s gone downhill from there. I’ve had about a half dozen games, and I don’t think more than a couple of those felt like I had interesting decisions to make throughout the game, which isn’t a good enough hit rate.
The set-up has a bunch of random elements, and I suspect that one could cherry-pick the most interesting options and get a decent game each time. In particular, it seemed there were only a couple of Cataclysm cards which really required you to slide tiles around and worry about population levels, and if you’re not doing that then there’s just not much to think about. However I’m not sure that even my best game of this was good enough to make me want to put effort into doing that vs playing something I like more.
It’s a bit fiddly to prepare the tiles for each game too, while the game duration is very short (~30 tiles to play and you’re done); so even though it only takes a matter of minutes to re/start a game, it feels like a few minutes too many for what’s on offer. The tiles are categorised (identified by the tile back) and must be grouped into the seven categories which are then individually shuffled before blindly removing around half the tiles from each, and then adding an asteroid tile to three of the categories and reshuffling those. A good insert would help to speed things up a bit – the zip-lock bags provided for each category of tile are useful on the one hand, but on the other they add an extra level of fiddly which an insert could largely eliminate. I think if I could just open the box and go then I might be inclined to keep it on hand for a very quick game from time to time, but as it is it’s a slight hassle.
I’d guess that the multi-player game is probably a better proposition (and would divide-and-conquer the set-up as well), but I’ve not played it with others so I can’t comment.
The components and artwork are really attractive, and I think the theme is well integrated, so I’m a bit sad that I didn’t like it better.
