Charterstone Chronicle, Game 7

After another pro-longed hiatus, we're back!

Pro-tip, you should always write these things up the day after a game, as at this point much of the specific things that occurred in game 7 have slipped my mind. Danielle and I took a trip to Nashville this weekend and there simply wasn't time for me to record it before we left. With that in mind, here is an abbreviated record of the 7th game of our Charterstone Campaign.

The temporary rule made a big difference and dramatically accelerated the game, keeping a lot more money on the table. The big beneficiaries of this were Danielle (with her Constructor), Megan (with the OMFGHAX perfumery) and Daniel. Megan and Daniel both had amazing games, and had the first 100+ point games of our campaign. However, they somehow managed to tie and split the win.

Megan however got the guidepost by a large margin, and the game gave us the option to choose our own scoring criteria or take a standard one. Megan chose the former, and we passed around individualized score sheets that changed the multiplier you would get from capacity, wins, and personas. As the last person going clockwise around the table from Megan, I got to pick last, which bummed me out quite a bit. That being said, I'm of two minds on this game design choice. On the one hand, I love it because it gives players the opportunity to tailor their play-styles towards things that they score more highly on. On the other hand, doing some quick back of the envelope math indicated that barring edge cases, different scoring sheets would make a difference of less than 20 points in the final accounting. Not insignificant, but considering the leads Daniel and Megan have, it's unlikely to make too much of a difference in the final scoring. In that regard, it's a little bit of a false choice.

I'm so happy that we've finally passed the point where we aren't introducing five new mechanics every game, as it feels like I can actually play the game. But, I will say, Charterstone as a whole suffers from a little too much complexity creep, and the number of unique interaction  and factors to keep track of means that its often all-encompassing just to know what's going on in your own charter, let alone your opponent's. This feeds into the feeling of playing six games of solitaire that can unfortunately be said to sometimes characterize Charterstone.

For our part, Dani and I cannot figure out where Daniel is getting all his points, he sits across the table from us which means that by the time it gets to his turn we're not paying as close attention. So while we have a pretty good idea about how Megan was able to achieve her record setting score, Daniel remains a bit of a mystery (maybe he will be good enough to comment on this post :P).

In addition to Danniel and Megan's record-setting games, Amanda and Dani both had really solid games as well. The big ghost made an immediate and noticeable difference for Amanda. Combined with solid use of her objective scoring building (Circus?), she was able to have a respectable 4th place finish. Dani really began unlocking the power of her charter with items this game, and was able to leverage the gold she got from her constructor into resources from Megan's perfumery to complete 3 items.

For my part, it was a pretty lackluster game. Getting an extra minion every income phase from my income building is just not as good as one would think. While it did allow me to use exactly the minion I wanted at all points during the game and cash out quite a few of them for VP on the quota track at the end, it just feels weaker on the whole than the the other four income buildings on the board. Once Dani gets hers up I will make a ranking of all of them.

We have a quicker turnaround scheduled this time for this Sunday, so as we head into the final act of the campaign (and the machanations of the Forever King become more clear), I'll have more to say. Now over halfway done, I can say I definitely understand some of the critiques of this game I read online, and it definitely ranks below Pandemic Legacy 1 & 2 in terms of a legacy game experience, but is still solid and I think in many ways better suited for a lot of gaming groups than more PvP heavy ones like Seafall.