More 'Small Fjords'.
Scored 41/47 in the first game, and things went downhill from there. The last game was a debacle, with the coast line split and only 3/4 of my longhouses played (I had the spot for it but didn’t get a tile to fit it, and I couldn’t bring myself to take the single consolation point I would have gotten for just placing it on the final tile I drew. In my mind this little world keeps going after the game, and my last longhouse eventually gets to go in the spot I’d prepared for it :).
More 'Desolate', this time with all of the expansion content added in.
I was Corporal Taylor, who has a variety of items for mitigating the risks of combat, but in the end the only item I used was the Mirror, and it never had an impact – every time I used it I just kept the card I’d peeked at (those cards were never great, but they weren’t terrible either, so I didn’t risk making things worse).
Almost everything went remarkably smoothly, as I didn’t miss a single power cell along the way; but in the second level I picked up a very nasty Affliction from a dead alien which meant I would consume 3 oxygen at the end of each level instead of 2, and this almost finished me off as it looked like I was going to be short by 1. Thankfully when I drew the final exploration card of that level as loot from combat, it contained oxygen!
(Rather annoyingly, the expansion cards fail to identify that they’re from an expansion, so I’ve slipped little “1” and “2” paper squares into the sleeves so that I can easily separate them if I want to, without having to look up a contents listing online.)
As a little 10-15 minute space drama, Desolate is pretty neat. The decisions aren’t “big”, but they’re frequent, and fast, and it’s a quick little sci-fi rollercoaster of luck each time. A shame it’s not cheaper, but it’s certainly a fun little solo diversion.