This game was an instant love. We bought Earth right after and loved it too. Im shocked you didnt love this! Seems right up your alley with the multi use cards.
In our case (playing with two), it just didn't work for us: 1. There are so many trees in the deck that you never really make exciting decisions about what to put in the display. There were almost always trees there. 2. Many of the combos triggered when paying with the correct colours are either too difficult to play (adding another predator) or rather weak (drawing another card). The latter often doesn't make much sense when, ultimately, you need to draw more cards to get the right colors for the bonus. 3. As a result, it's much easier to simply not play the cards with correct colours and instead play as many of them as possible, the normal way. In our opinion, the combos don't really pay off. 4. Due to the luck of draw and the lack of balance, it requires players to know the game inside and out and all the combos it contains. Because if you're playing the predator, deer combo against the butterfly collection, you should know which one really earns a lot of points. However, this contradicts the game's marketing, which is more aimed at family players or casual gamers. 5. Even if you play with people who know the game well, when you have 3 or 4 players, there's so much material on the table that it's very tiring to read and figure out what combos are being attempted. The iconography (or lack thereof) doesn't really help in this regard. 6. Due to the points mentioned above, not much happens during the turn. You draw cards, quickly play them all, pay with trees 80% of the time, don't care about the display, and just hope to draw the right cards to win with 400 to 100 points in the end... Supposedly, it's best with two players. I don't know...
here's a history of the development of rftg written by designer tom lehmann: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/1931/designer-diary-race-for-the-galaxy where he mentioned that he and fellow designer richard borg came up with the idea of discarding cards to play other cards while they were developing the card game version of puerto rico for PRs publisher alea. they submitted their design to alea, who liked it, but some time after, alea told them they were going to have PR's original designer andreas seyfarth continue with their ideas, and that would go on to become san juan. since lehmann and borg were so instrumental in the initial development of the game, they still to this day get royalties on SJ. they then went on to further develop their original ideas and push them in different directions to make rtfg, which came out a few years later. so while SJ did ship first, the pay cards to play cards idea seemed to come from lehmann and borg, and since rftg is one of the most influential modern games of the last 20 years, i'm usually inclined to give the credit there :)
@rahdo since San Juan has a classic look to it and RFTG look like a modern game, I assumed SJ influenced RFTG, their similarities are numerous, I could not have imagine such a scenario ! Thanks for the history course
I was also a bit surprised by this, thinking you liked multi-use cards (as do I)! I see that's not what let you down here, and heard you say it's the issue of managing your hand. I'm curious how that's different than other multi-use card games, maybe I don't know your favourites as well as I should... a quick search didn't yield a 'top 10 multi-use card game' list for you, but I feel there is one? I can see that Fleet (original card version) is easier to track, but games like La Granja and Captain of the Gulf would be equally difficult as they have uses described on all four sides.
Not sure I agree with the issue of seeing the cards in hand given the fact that it’s a hard 10 card limit. Anytime I have 10 cards in my hand, to flip through all of them takes about a total of 4 to 5 seconds? In earth, for example there’s no hand limit. You might have 20 cards in hand that you have to go back through sometimes to try to remember what’s there. I totally get the point though if you just want to look down as you hold the cards in the traditional poker style manner and see everything at a glance but to make this game work I don’t think it’s unreasonable to just flip the cards from one hand to another (sorting style) when at most it would be only 10 cards.
10 cards in hand in this game is literally the same as 20 cards in earth, and in earth i can fan them in one direct and see everything, but not so in forest shuffle because of the vertical and horizontal divide on each card. in both games, when i've got that many cards in hand with all different sorts of ways to combo them and more cards i'm considering drafting and having to think about new cards in relation to old cards, i found it incredibly tiresome to constantly have to re-look through every single card in hand, over and over throughout the game, in a way that wouldn't be a problem in a "normal" game with 20 cards in hand. but different strokes for different folks. glad you like it! :)
@@rahdo Ha Ha, more or less. It's just a normal holder with about 45 centimeters, respectively 18 inches. Works great for 10 cards. My little problem with the game is rather the aspect of Un-Balancing! Thanks for your Video!
