Charterstone Chronicle, Game 4

After over a month's hiatus for Daniel being in Japan, we finally resumed our Charterstone game last night. To that end, having this blog was super useful as I was able to remind myself of where I was and my general plans before we started the game. And, in a surprising turn of events, I was able to tie Daniel for the win at 55 points each. This allowed me to finish filling out the glory needed to start next game with an additional peril - which, I'm beginning to suspect may not be very strong because by the time you've finished seeding the map with them, there may not be any of the color you want left, but eh, c'est la vie.

At any rate, junkyard was super useful this game, and indeed, my opening robot placement (enabled by my saved resource and my free resource) netted me two guests - although only one of them granted VP. No worries, I already had one going into this game and was able to net another one soon after. Then I scored a coup and got the friend who helps me with gold generation within my charter, perfect for making the granary not suck. Between these four advancement cards, I netted somewhere in the neighborhood of 19 VP and ~15 Gold, a very respectable haul and the major factor contributing to my tied win. I was able to get the number up that high through using the Chalice of Immortality to get an extra income proc, which benefited me more than my competitors.

All in all, robots seem to be the best minion. The free market indicates so at least, as all six were taken up this game. I will say, having to constantly pass the advancement hand around the table does slow the game down dramatically though. The amount of each minion people bought this game (3 robots, 2 chefs, 1 golem), does seem to roughly correspond with my power ranking for them. I feel bad for Megan with her ghosts, but she's still doing okay. Megan's big achievement this game was not only unlocking all three of her final tier 20 point buildings, but then constructing them as well. Coalumbia has become an industrial hellscape, but it pushed her to win this game's guidepost. I think myself and Daniel had aspirations of beating her on the guidepost for this game, which we quickly discovered was to no avail.

Daniel got out to a big lead early by leveraging his persona that granted VP and automatic worker pick-ups for reds, then cashed those in at his armory. Combined with Booker, this put him in the lead for the entire game, and it was only the slow build up of my Guest VPs combined with 10 points from the Reputation track that allowed me to tie him at the end.

This week on the whole had a much narrower spread, with everyone really hitting their stride and finishing between 40-55 points. All but one slot in Dani's charter have now been constructed, and I think a total of 7 buildings have additionally been built over.

Megan clearly had the most point value in buildings at the conclusion of the game, and she chose to not expand into the sky islands without the increasingly sinister Forever King's permission. I think she passed up an opportunity to score herself about 70 points here, but we'll find out when the game ends. At any rate, we now have sky islands! The least well hidden "surprise" in the box. I think we've actually discovered all the game systems at this point, as there are no empty rule slots left so its likely the only changes coming will be rule changes.

Amanda discovered income associated buildings, but there is only one currently available for players in her charter. At the very end, Danielle discovered items, which seem good but hardly game breaking or paradigm shifting. This was all despite players charterstoning at just about the same rates as before. I'm secretly really glad the feature explosion is finally settling. We still really need the last two minions though, I really want to see what they do.

Caralee it seems has the "Charterstone" building equivalent that she can place in The Lab. Dani's Constructor was very popular this game, and the possibility of combining it with the treasure that allows you to skip a building's cost seems extremely strong. In the south, Megan has turned her charter into a treasure collecting and exploiting juggernaut. Amanda has the Grandstand replacement, but objectives and cloud port are both still being I think a tad underutilized. I also expected I would see people try to go for more private objectives (which we ruled this game you may keep hidden), but to date, it's a feature people aren't making much use of. We'll see how this changes as the building slots and charterstone boxes dry up.

One thing to sort for next game will be whether or not you need to place sky islands over your charter at the outset of the game to build on them, and whether this effects what buildings you get access to. For my part, I really like where my Charter is at currently (completed the Windmill this game in a vain attempt to win the guidepost), and am very content with my current raft of buildings.

For my part, next game I will be trying to utilize my Famine busting persona, as I finished the Pastry Shop on the second to last turn of this game for the possibility of mimicking Daniel's opening from this one. However, my first move from now until the end of this campaign will probably always be placing a robot on the Junkyard. Starting off with two extra advancements, especially two extra guests, is just amazing and promises to allow me to rake in a lot of free stuff in the games to come.

Final side-bar: Dani and I got to finally have our joke a few weeks in the making with this game. We went to a pumpkin patch over fall break, and spend $3 on a half dozen mini-pumpkins to use as the "pumpkins" in this game instead of the little wooden miniatures. Totally worth it, and the highlight of the night :)