Board Game Arena

Just curious if this is normal:

https://imgur.com/a/tKRO8eX

I have only played MP II a couple of times (but MP I somewhere in the teens), both with 4 players, and the winning scores were <120, even though in one game a player managed to score 43 points for shields.
I suspect that Gantulga Od (GO) is one of those characters that you can't beat just by playing more efficiently than him yourself. You have to target him explicitly, and encourage the other players to do so as well. By 'target him', I mean you have to get to the cities first so that he doesn't collect the bonus tiles; and you have to deny him access to the 'free move' opportunities on contracts and city cards; you should probably also collect resources rather than camels with your early dice, to make them more expensive for GO (he will not be as interested in camels as other characters are).
The problem is that if there is only one player who is doing all those things, then the other non-GO players will have an easy life and one of them is more likely to win - if GO doesn't - than the self-sacrificing player.
It's that prisoners' dilemma again. There are similar problems in a lot of other games (eg. try beating the cowboy strategy in GWT if no-one is blocking the trail with buildings) so you just have to avoid them if you don't think your group is ruthless enough.

Steve Cox

183 is very high but GO is not imbalanced in my opinion.

Its not normal, but its not unusual. The scores of the 2nd-4th players are all very low, none of them are even over 100, so they are probably beginners. I would imagine in this case that these less experienced players were not taking black dice and not blocking important spaces, and so the winner had many more black dice than normal and could go to unblocked spaces. In that case, the score is not surprising.