Board Game Arena

Anyone else find the red faction at a huge disadvantage? The manta unique to this faction offers discounts for conquering the red-suited location cards. Cards of this suit are much less desirable because they only offer discounts in conquering. Contrast that with the other suits and their benefits:

Blue offers the ability to raise and score locations.

Green bestows greater wealth to purchase locations, recruit characters, and recover characters from your discount pile.

Orange not only offers all the bonuses above, but adds the ability to recruit any available character for free.

Compare that to red, and it’s absolutely embarrassing. Thoughts?

Aquatica offers enough tactical play that I still enjoy the game a lot despite some glaring issues.

One of those issues is exactly what you mentioned. The red cards (and thus the red faction) are mostly trash.

Among other things I would change, I would allow player 2 to get first choice of faction color (this would be done before seeing what the starting display looks like).

Going 2nd and having the red mantas is just a brutal combination of misfortune.

Here's a good illustration of the weakness of the red locations:

https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=867809511

I think a way to fix this inbalance is to take away orange’s bonus of recruiting characters for free and give it to red. Getting discounts on conquering would be much more effective if you had more power to add character cards into your hand that can conquer. Do you think that makes sense?

DougVader wrote: ↑04 November 2026, 12:08 I think a way to fix this inbalance is to take away orange’s bonus of recruiting characters for free and give it to red. Getting discounts on conquering would be much more effective if you had more power to add character cards into your hand that can conquer. Do you think that makes sense?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. There are 4 cards that can recruit a character for free, but they're not exclusively orange locations. Two are orange, one is blue and one is green.

The free recruit is another major balance problem. I've always though that ability should still require coins when used. It would still be strong as a free action, but allowing it to take any character from anywhere in the ocean row is overpowered.

If you're suggesting that some of the red locations should have this ability, rather than the 2 orange, one blue, and one green, I would agree with that. Those existing cards are already excellent cards (high point value with other useful abilities). Having the free recruit be on some red cards instead would help with balance, yes.