When we reconned South America in March, we gained a new objective card – access a lost haven.

We had no idea where the lost haven would be, but guessed that playing a search in Lima would be the key. Indeed, the “Search the Sea” action in Lima had us add the new map section in the Pacific Ocean.
One of the tasks was naming the lost haven (and building a sea route to it). We cast around for ideas, trying to come up with something interesting that had something to do with the area. Looking at a map indicated that it was sort of near the Galapagos Islands. This led to ideas such as “Galapagos” or something about Charles Darwin (i.e. “Beagle”, the name of his ship). Also off that coast of South America is Easter island – so “Easter” or “Maoi” also entered the discussion. The Incan empire had run through the far west backbone of South America – so we took a look at Incan mythology, but it was pretty depressing.
None of these were chosen. For the name of the new haven, we settled on “Weatherstone”, a name that has some family history. I will point out that I don’t think using it in this context was my idea (this comment will make more sense to non-family members in a later post).

Part of what has been added to the game is additional player actions, always added in at the time when that action becomes possible.
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Establish Supply Line – introduced when we did the first recon of North America. Allows for the connection of cities via land routes.
Search – also introduced with the N.A. recon, this introduces the action of scratching a box on a city card (if you are in the city in question and have the card in hand).
Chart Sea Lane – allows for the connection of ports and/or havens, but you are only allowed to cross one red line on the map.
Inoculate – allows for the retirement of infection and city cards from the game. We are trying to inoculate cities that are hard to get to (i.e. Chicago, Atlanta) by pulling their infection cards when possible. However in March, there was also a new mechanism introduced where the more city cards present in the player deck, the more Epidemics were added to it. Consequently, we are trying to also keep the number of city cards below 45, which allows six epidemic cards. We’ve had a couple of games where we had seven epidemic cards and it makes it that much tougher.

By the post title of “Early April”, you will have likely surmised that we lost this game. Indeed, once again we lost due to a quick proliferation of plagues. The one plague that really hurt was the one that hit Los Angeles, as it only had a population of one at the time. At the end of this game, L.A. dropped to a Forsaken status. I think that we had more than one supply cube in Los Angeles, but it was hit with an Epidemic (draw the bottom card from the infection deck and remove all supply cubes from the city), and then immediately with a plague.

You haven’t met all of the initial players yet, so we’d like to introduce you to Plinth, the character that Mikaela has been playing each game.

Plinth started off with just the Farmer action, which Mikaela has made good use of, in essence allowing the production of an extra cube while making supplies and dropping them off. We’ve since purchased the Runner capability as well.