PLS2: Early February
February 73 started off with a quick failure. In short succession, we had a number of plague cubes around the world, soon totaling the 8 plagues cubes needed to end the game. We did not achieve building the 3 supply centers, nor any of the additional objectives.
If you lose in the first game in a month, you get a chance to retry it. If you lose again, you still move on to the next month. So, without further bemoaning of our loss, I’ll move on to explain more of the game mechanics.
Player Actions
There are two types of actions – free actions and actions that cost an action. Each player gets four actions on their turn. Following are the initial actions that are available to players at the beginning of the game.
Drive/Ferry – Moving between locations. This is the standard, but also the slowest way to get around.
Sail – Discarding a city card to sail to the city via a sea route.
Charter – Discarding a city card of the city that you are in to sail to another city via a sea route. At the start of the game, all 12 of the cities were connected by sea routes. As we recon the continents and build supply routes, many of these are over land, so the usefulness of these two actions lessens.
Share Knowledge – Transferring cards between players are difficult as both players need to be in the same city as the card in question.
Build Supply Center – Collecting five cards of the same color takes some work, particularly with the difficult of transferring cards and the hand limit of 8 cards.
Recon – The recon action requires a set of cards, but also that a supply center be built in the city in question, so for most recons this requires two collections of cards of the same color.
Make Supplies – The make supplies option is a slow way to acquire supplies, however sometimes it is the only way to do so.
Deliver Supplies – It also costs an action to deliver supplies to a location. This means that moving to an adjacent city, making a supply cube, delivering it, and then leaving (preferable if there is a plague cube in the city) and then leaving takes up an entire turn.
Free actions
There are free actions that can be taken, given the presence of the necessary supply cubes.
Pickup Supplies – This is often done after the Create Supplies card action, shown below. Once in a while we’ve used it to pickup cubes at one city that hasn’t had any infections to drop off elsewhere.
Transfer Supplies – handing supplies to another player can be useful, but being in the same location is sometimes difficult. As seen previously, the player Smith is able to use his Radio Operator ability to move cubes around quickly, so this action has not been used much.
Produce Supply cards
The Produce Supplies cards allow for the quick creation of (usually) three cubes at haven or supply center as an action. However, with the nature of the legacy game, a conundrum is introduced for the players. Rather than producing cards at just one haven or supply center, you can produce supplies at all current supply centers and havens. However, this requires checking off one of the boxes on the card being used – and once all boxes have been checked off the card is destroyed.
I also want to introduce another of the player characters. Wren was only played once, by Davison in the first month , January. After the game ended, he felt that he wasn’t able to really use her special ability so moved on to play Smith thereafter.
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