I have had Endless Winter: Paleoamericans setup on my table for, likely, a month now. But I’m not here to talk about that, because I haven’t played a game of it yet. (Ask me why I’m starting to not like Paul Grogan’s rules videos).
However, I stumbled across a list of Youtube videos that had hit my subscription inbox, but just weren’t, realistically, capable of being fit into my schedule at the time. I’m working back through those now, slowly.
A large number of them, seemingly completely coincidentally, are High Frontier 4 All videos. At the get-go (and even when I added HF4A to my pledge for Pax Viking), I suspected that HF4A was just too heavy to approach; it was an aspirational purchase and one I considered just offloading without playing.
But then I started watching videos; instructional videos, but also playthrough videos. It’s just as I suspected: the “highest”-“weight” strategy board game is really just a system of smaller parts that work together, mostly predictably. The most complex thing about the whole this is that the designer has very fluid “living” rules, where your printed rulebook may vary wildly from the intended rules; and if you go asking “Hey, what changed?” you’ll get a bunch of people on BGG laughing, and then telling you how to use open-source software to compare different print-to-pdf editions of the living rules (because they are hosted on a site where you can’t actually download them).
Well, since Endless Winter is still crowding my table, I popped open the Tabletop Simulator mod (the community one with the added UI components, which I saw featured in some of the videos I watched), and played through a few sun cycles… twice.
But here, again, I find TTS is partly rewarding, but ultimately frustrating. High Frontier is a large play area with sparse components (the map is big, but there’s not much on it; it demands most of the virtual table, but mostly serves to just get in the way).
On the first play, I eventually figured out a plan, but it was almost 40 turns into the 84 turn game I was playing (choosing Core+M0+M1+M2, with futures = 7 sun cycles = 84 turns), and my eventual plan ended up being “go to the moon, and do other things,” which, as it turns out, I could have done years prior, if I had just paid attention.
So, reset and start over. Great, my crew have a built-in dirt thruster that’ll make some things quite a bit easier; but then tragedy strikes and somehow I lose the refinery I had bought and boosted… not sure where it went; maybe the game put it back in the deck – or maybe I never actually bought it! Either way, it caused my plan to crumble. Tracking game-state in TTS can be made easier, but it’s still easy to lose track of things.
I gave up.
Long story short, I’m going to rush to get Endless Winter played and see if I want it to stick around, or if I can list it in the upcoming no-ship math trade; but then High Frontier 4 All will be on my table (possibly for another month before I can get around to playing it).