AGE OF INNOVATION: A Terra Mystica game

[Pielordzz]

As an original TM fan, I'm not so impressed by the game. The implementation is quite good, the only thing I would change is a zoom effect when you hover over the faction board (e.g. the costs for the improvements of navigation or terraforming are very small on my screen).
The game itself... the idea is excellent, to broaden the strategic frame adding variability. This prevents the "scripted" feeling you have when in some setups there is not much room to vary the strategy, at least for some factions. However, for my taste it is way too much combo-centric.
Only a handful of games played, but I've already seen players doing a single thing all over through the game (e.g. tunneling for the Moles or flying carpeting) because with a given faction/palace tile this becomes a very efficient way of scoring. While it is interesting that you don't have to necessarily play it in a Terra Mystica fashion, with aggressive expansion in mind, the fact that you can completely forget about one of the main ingredients of the game just to exploit a certain combo is detrimental to the overall experience. Of course this is my very personal opinion, and I'm glad that I had the chance to try the game on BGA before going FtF.

I haven't played much TM, only a couple of times, so I may just not have gotten a good grasp of how strong the combos are in AoI compared to TM, but I've played a lot of AoI recently and at least in my group it's hard to get a combo together in draft pick since the pieces of the combo are normally good on their own too. Not that it doesn't ever happen and those games do feel a bit stale but the variety added by separating the abilities makes for pretty dynamic games most of the time. Long term I could see having to implement some house-rule for an alternative drafting variant to further limit the occurrence of combos like lake-navigators and wasteland-philosophers.