by CarlG
The Dave: Nice strategy! I had realized this earlier bud didn't include it in my strategy as stated above. My last play with my wife, however, reminded me of the importance of turn order.Update #2
Played another game of CoB to try out my new approach. This time a 2p with my wife. The Final Score was:
Kelsey: 199
Farms: 23
End Games Bonus Tiles: 28
Completion Tiles: 10
Carl: 183
Farms: 25
End Game Bonus Tiles: 22
Completion Bonus Tiles: 10
Analysis:
Kelsey used board 1 while I tried board 5. Besides what is mentioned above, Kelsey also shipped 13 goods and completed both 5 tile regions. I shipped 9 goods and my biggest region was a 3. We both had the same amount of tiles in our kingdoms.
I can pinpoint the errors I made and they have all helped to mold my strategy going forward. I will number my mistakes below:
1) I chose to start on the bottom left of the board when I should have started bottom right. Why do I say this? turn order is very important in this game, but especially in 2p where options are so limited.
2)I didn't grab the bonus 4 points for the Watchtower tile when it was available. If you notice above, I have it lower down on my priority list. I think this is because I have played more games 3p than 2p and in 3p quite a bit of the tiles come out and so you can usually wait a bit for these tiles and focus elsewhere. However in 2p CoB there are quite a few tiles that don't come in to play and so you need to grab these tiles when you can. In our game only 2 of these bonus tiles came up and one only in the last round.
3) I didn't play tighly enough to my strategy. What I mean is that I kind of went with the flow of the game instead of re-analysing the gamestate at the start of each round. This led to some shortsighted moves. In many games I play I can intuitively know what I should do, however not in CoB, I need to have a more intentional "mathy" approach in the future.
Aside from these there were a couple things that simply didn't go my way. Only two Cow tiles showed up the whole game so I couldn't complete my cow bonuses in the one field. Also, as mentioned before there was a lack of those bonus tiles in this game as well.
My main take aways from this game are that turn order is important and I need to set myself up ship wise, And also in 2p game bonus tiles are at a premium and I should grab them when I can.
Lastly, I think CoB for me will eventually come down to a set approach per playing board. For example, from now on I will start bottom right for board 5. That said I still think there should be plenty of tactical decisions to make even with pre set approaches per game board(but we will see with more plays).
After 11 plays my impression is that CoB is a solid game(currently I rate it 8.4) but no where near the brilliance of Feld's Macao.
Happy Gaming!
PS- I'll keep updating for 4 more plays at which time I plan to write a review.