About the special edition's Yellow Tile 6:
I've never played with the special edition yellow tile 6, but I think it's new ability is greatly underpowered and super boring.
It's so sad to see the "Buy from anywhere with 2 silverlings ability" to leave the game entirely. It's such a shame.
I found this original ability of buying from anywhere for 2 silverlings to be very interesting, unique, fun, greatly balanced and quite strong.
It "was" a tile, which can be extremely powerful (also in later stages of the game), but it can also be not so strong in other games/spots.
This is one of the two changes that I dislike in the special edition. Of course I love, that they heavily improved Yellow 6 from utterly broken and game deciding to helplessly underpowered, but why, why, why did Stefan Feld not go back to the perfect original ability is mindboggling to me.
It's so funny, that he changed a great and fun ability to first make it utterly broken and unfun, only to then proceed to turn it to utterly weak and boring
I didn't play a whole lot with the 4 new tiles, but I think I can roughly estimate their value's.
Both yellow tiles #27 and #28 are (way) above average yellow tiles for me and are (very) useful at nearly any phase.
I also can see, that both these tiles will often end up in the hands of the 2nd player, which I absolutely love, as it greatly helps to balance the game even further.
The abilities of these two tiles are unique. I love that. I find especially #27 to be a very good design.
I personally find #28 to be a bit too strong and too easy to use effectively. It might ruin the fun a bit, as decisions will be much easier with this tile.
I see it a bit similar to the 2019 Yellow tile 6, as it makes the game especially too easy in later stages, even though it's by far not as strong.
I kind of wished, that Tile 28 would be a black market tile though. 6 Yellow tiles in the black market are definitely too few in my opinion.
7 would be in my opinion a great number of black market yellow tiles.
Especially concerning, that there are now 9 animals in the black market deck and that new animal tile (geese) is super powerful.
I found going for 6 animals in the base game was on average already a bit stronger compared to 6 yellows.
This is now even more severely unbalanced, which is a shame.
Both players can only potentially finish 6 yellows, if 2+ black market yellows show up during the game.
This is especially concerning on board 3, as there is a giant size 6 yellow region on this board, which is a quite mandatory region to finish.
Even though I heavily dislike the new Yellow Tile 6, #27 and #28 are welcoming new additions.
So I see these 3 tiles as an overall improvement, but there was still way more room for improvement in my opinion.
Going for animals is now greatly buffed, because of these amazing geese. I find that to be probably a slight deterioration, as it pushes players
even further into a quite mandatory animal focus. This was already to some extent an existing issue, because of Yellow Tile 24 (4 points per animals). It's such a disaster when this tile shows up, when one player fully ignored animals to this point.
Now, that there are 2 super strong black market tiles greatly benefiting animals, it becomes too mandatory in my eyes to play for animals to at least some extent.
The first player will heavily benefit from this new tile being in the deck. The 2nd player however also benefits from 9 black market animals being in the deck, which helps both players to way easier finish 6 quite good animal tiles.
The geese are on most boards extremely strong. Just think about how powerful geese are on size 4 to size 6 pastures in 2 player games, but also in other player counts. Especially for 2 player games it's definitely one of the strongest tiles available.
It can even be a really good tile for the 2nd size 3 pasture, if you play on a board with two size 3 pastures.
It's in a 2-player game usually easy to get 3 matching animals in the first pasture, but very hard to get the same result in your 2nd pasture.
Overall I dislike the geese for these reasons.
The crane is a very welcome tile to fix the issue of buildings being a tiny bit too weak on average.
This is especially important due to the slight buff of yellows and the great buff of animals.
The crane helps hugely on size 8 cities, but also to some good extent on size 7 cities.
Now going for the size 8 city on board 10 becomes a much more valuable strategy for the player who ends up getting the crane.
That means there are now 2 tiles that make the size 8 city a valuable strategy, instead of only 1. Yellow tile 1 is the other one. I absolutely love that.
Even on boards on which we have the option to play two size 6 cities, it's a very helpful tile and greatly improves the value of going for 12 buildings in a good number of games.
Thus it increases valuable strategic options for all players.
What I also love about this tile, is that it helps increasing tactical options. A player will usually pick it up in Round 1 of any phase.
It can create loads of extremely powerful combo options for that player to use the crane as a church or a market, sometimes even as a carpenter's workshop. That player also gets new exciting options of: Taking a Castle => Buying the Crane => Placing the Crane with a Town Hall effect to place a (previously non connected) Castle, which then let's you collect another powerful tile on a potentially very different number.
I also love how this tile is very unique. It's one of the stronger black market tiles in my opinion.
Last but not least I want to dig deep into tile 28 --> You can buy 2 workers from the supply at any time at the cost of 1 silver coin.
This is extremely powerful and very interesting, as I find it to be an especially super powerful and in this regard, rare, late game economic tile.
I don't think a player should use it's ability too often in the first 2 to 3 phases, except if they find some amazing combos with other tiles or abilities.
But during phase D and even more during Phase E, this tile just bulldozes.
A player who has a strong silverling engine will be able to very effectively use all of their extent silverlings til' the end of the game by turning their excess silverlings into workers.
This is absolutely huge. Even a player who doesn't have a great silverling engine should still very much consider taking this tile, as it is still a strong tile for them and simultaneously be probably too powerful in the hands of a different player's strong silverling engine.
Without this tile, a strong silverling engine player would often end up with a good amount of excess silverlings.
These excess silverlings of course underperform being worth 1 point each.
Especially during phase E, players need very specific numbers to collect very specific tiles and then they also need very specific numbers to place these tiles down.
On top of that, they need/wish to often sell a good amount of specific goods to boost their end game scoring, but it's not always possible to be able to both sell goods and finish all the other big projects as well.
Now they have the option to sell goods to score a good amount of points, while also freeing goods storage for potential boats, while also receiving, if they even wish so, at least 2 workers for doing so. What a fantastic deal!
Who wants to take a Take 2 workers action if they can sell goods to score points and also collect 2 workers simultaneously?
Banks now become extremely much stronger as well, which I do very welcome as well. Banks in late game are otherwise often very weak.
They can in this "new" instance be used for producing 2 silverlings, 1 silverling and 2 workers or 4 workers just like a Boarding House.
So banks are now far superior to boarding houses for the player who owns Yellow 28. This is quite insane, especially concerning that the bank for the other player is way less interesting in later stages. Thus, the player with Yellow 28 now pretty much monopolizes banks for themselves to a good extent, which is of course fantastic.
Warehouses are, for the same reasons, greatly boosted with this tile as well.
Buildings definitely needed a boost, especially after geese and 2 very strong yellow tiles entered the game.
The crane and Yellow 28 definitely heavily improve buildings to a, I believe, very balanced extent.
The famous Buildings + Yellow strategy is now very dangerous and should win way more often compared to before.
All of this closes the gap a bit to the 3 strongest colors of ships, mines and castles, which I find to be welcoming and to this extent, well balanced.
Don't get me wrong though. It is crucial for the game to keep the rarer tiles mostly (way) more powerful compared to the more common tiles.
Otherwise decisions wouldn't matter much at all, if all tiles would be similarly, or even worse, equal in strength.
Pretty much any other yellow tiles (greatly) combo with Yellow 28.
A pretty much broken combo is now combo'ing Yellow 3 and 28 though.
4 and 28 is also extremely strong (as it can produce 3 workers for every sell action, if a player wishes so).
5 and 28 combo's very well as well, because selling goods is buffed so hard with yellow 28. Yellow 5 also wants to sell a lot of goods to make room for a big amount of new goods.
6 in the 2019 edition is even more broken with this combo
6 in the special edition does greatly benefit from 28, which is great.
I can see, that 6 (special edition) needs a combo with Yellow 14 or 28 to become really powerful.
8 is buffed a bit through this combo.
9 benefits a tiny bit, due to the greatly buffed banks and warehouses.
The same is true for 11, because of the vast possible combos of 28 with other yellow tiles.
13 + 28 is obviously also quite good.
14 + 28 is an anti-combo. A huge economic overkill. Both tiles are essentially doing the exact same thing.
15 + 28 is great. Both benefit greatly from selling a lot of goods.
4 points per banks and warehouses benefit greatly due to these buildings being buffed so hard.
25 + 28 is fantastic. Both benefit greatly from selling as many goods as possible.
26 is being buffed, because we will on average be able to finish more colours with the help of 28.
27 and 28 is of course also great, as we want to get ships and first player advantage to fully exploit 28.