I’ve played this a few times now, solo and with a second player. I think I won twice, so maybe a 30-40% success rate, mostly on intro difficulty. I’d like to provide some feedback for the designers, as I really wanted to like this game, and I really enjoy some mechanics, but overall it feels very luck based with lots of time waiting with nothing particular obvious to do.
The problem is there are too many card types, and you need specific types to complete objectives, but you only draw two cards per turn. This results in some games where you just don’t draw what you need and there’s nothing you can do. It’s also really slow to travel and pass cards, as the map is large and shortcuts are yet another thing that require cards (or tokens). I agree with some other posters that the research station mechanic in pandemic helps with mobility a lot, and makes the game much more strategic and enjoyable. (As a comparison, I can win pandemic probably 70-ish% of the time on the hardest difficulty, although I have a lot more experience with it). Pandemic almost never feels like a slog or waiting game the way this game does. Perhaps if you could travel between havens, that would help (although maybe not thematic).
Another thought is if you could acquire resources without luck of the draw, it would empower the player to overcome bad luck more. For instance maybe if you could spend an action at havens or other locations to get tokens. Or if each card could be used as two or more types. There are lots of options, but just waiting to draw the cards you need feels tedious.
Anyway, I agree with the sentiment of this thread, but I’d say it’s too random as opposed to too hard. It feels like more of a luck issue than a skill issue (I’m not an expert but it seems impossible to make progress when you don’t draw the right cards). Also the randomness of characters can sometimes be a factor since some are much better than others.
That said I’ll add some positives about the game in case the designers read this. I really like the marching armies. It feels really thematic and ominous. It also adds a lot of strategy to see where you need to go to defend. I like the multiple and diverse objectives, as opposed to pandemic where the objective is always the same (which isn’t bad either, but variety is always nice). The game feels very thematic too.
Hopefully the designers can revise this a little because I’d really like to enjoy this game. It feels so close to being great, but honestly it’s just not that fun as it is, which is a shame given how much thought and work obviously went into it. But I feel it just needs some minor tweaks to overcome the randomness pitfall and could set that point actually be a favorite game!
Double resources, while keeping everything else relatively constant with something like this:
