Board Game Arena

Recruit is obviously the strongest special power in this game. It has gone beyond the limit.
I have been playing ranked and Recruit is the only special power I have lost to, not to say that I won all the games that I got recruit.
It's simply a game whether you can draw recruit or not.
We should consider about option of banning recruit.

Funny, I'd wanted to make the same argument about Muster. Evidently you're better at this game than I am, but I suspect Muster food spam can at least give comparable scores to whatever you're doing with Recruit (I'm consistently breaking 70 points with it, though maybe it gets worse against really good people actively trying to steal your villagers?).

That said, I agree the actions aren't all balanced. Maybe instead of a banlist, the cleaner answer is adding a mirror mode where both people get the same randomly-chosen special action? Wouldn't be unprecedented (see Ark Nova, etc), but I suspect either answer would need designer approval.

Yeah, I take my words back. Recruit Muster and Tend Land is the S Tier.
Bear may be A Tier, Innovation may be B tier but all others are obvious C Tier.
Muster relies on how the cards come out and if the opponent blocks you or not, but it has the highest potential.

By “Bear”, do you mean “Hunt Boar”? What makes that one A tier? Do you use all the hide for furnishing? Seems like innovate is better for the extra actions you get.

I created a suggestion for everyone to have the same special action, upvote it if you agree:

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=213271

Yeah, pretty sure "bear" should be "boar". Boar+boar+cook is a net gain of 2 food, 2 knives, 4 hide, which isn't quite as efficient as muster or tend land but is still pretty good (and it's nice to be able to cook 2 boar at once, as opposed to only one round of food from muster/tend). And it turns out you want to trade the hide instead of furnish.

In general, furnish seems not great. Sets of workers aren't worth nearly enough compared to the extra resources from stacking them, so you'd be aiming for level 5 furnish, which is okay but not amazing (5 actions including upgrading furnish for maybe 15 points), but then you need to do something with your extra actions. It's probably good with recruit just because it's something to do with extra actions, and maybe good with explore, except I've never figured out how to do anything remotely good with explore ever. OTOH, maxing the trade track gives convenient resources for upgrading clean then using it twice at end of game to clean up all your midden, and becomes more points per action the further up the track you go (plus getting the animals earlier makes it easier to spend the bones, and not having to upgrade furnish saves an action).

Innovate's not amazing. It's at most 8 "free" actions (no action for upgrading craft or innovate), the actions cost food, and you don't have a strong action like muster or tend land to use your actions on. Upgrading furnish isn't amazing as described above, and half your other free actions are random gathers which are maybe good for feeding clean+trade but aren't amazing. Plus innovating cook gets weird because you need to have food/bone to use the innovate, but also have stuff worth cooking, and then have even more stuff worth cooking by end of round to really take advantage of it. Feels good when things fall right, but it's not actually worth that much time or points even when things do fall right.