Skye Frontier

I just played a work in progress by Seth Jaffee, so I thought that I would post about it here.

The game called Skye Frontier right now. It is an Isle of Skye and The King of Frontier mashup. Since The King of Frontier seems like a Carcassonne/Puerto Rico mashup, this is a second order mashup.

Anyway - the game was totally playable, and allowed for strategic decisions to be made. Alison went all out in combining multiple synergistic goals with building a good kingdom. I just went for a degenerate strategy of building the biggest lake possible and then producing and consuming in a cycle.

After the game end we summed up our scores using the remaining money tokens, so you can see that I won by 6 points (78-84), so my strategy didn't seem too overpowered, however perhaps it should be nerfed a bit, since it was pretty powerful, and degenerate strategies (in my opinion) should be less powerful than well-thought-out ones. Here is the end state:

the reasoning behind my strategy - spelled out - was this: It is hard to line up roads, but lakes are easy to build. As long as I keep expanding the size of my lake and getting more boats in it I can build a produce/consume cycle of arbitrary size.

I took care to keep tabs on my wife's ability to deplete coins and end the game, and I also always kept a tile in reserve that could close my lake up to not miss out on those double point scrolls. Once I pulled the trigger on the engine, I was grabbing 11 coins a turn, so the game ended quickly.

Reducing the number of boats on the water tiles would be one way to nerf lakes. I haven't played enough to know if this is necessary, but it might be a good idea (assuming that the creator eventually makes his own tiles this would be easy). Another possible way would be to add more roads.

side notes:

• The hardest time that we had with the rules was actually with some ambiguity in the Isle of Skye rules, so the rule document of the mashup was written at least as well as the source material.
• we both produced when it suited us, so we ran into the three tokens per tile limit a few times. It is a good limit to have.
• We ran out of scroll tiles - I want more scroll tiles in the game, or for running out to trigger game end, or something like that. After we ran out, the explore action was way more boring.
• Money in this game is really points, and cubes are money.
• The dual use of cubes as currency to build tiles as well as currency to buy "money" (points) was great! I love dual use things, but cubes are so rarely dual use. I had to make decisions: do I spend it to build this perhaps useful tile or to get points?
• we ran into a few instances where one player would just grab tiles as a follow up action because it was free even if they didn't particularly want the tiles. Not sure if that was an issue.
• a tile with two sheep shouldn't be twice as expensive as a tile with an ox. Sheep are half as good as an ox in most cases. The same is true for barrels and towers.
• The same thing does not apply to boats and lighthouses, because boats are worse for scoring but have the added benefit of helping you ship goods.
• perhaps sheep and barrels should gain some sort of added bonus similar to the boats bonus of shipping goods? - barrels start pre-loaded with cubes, and if you sell an area with sheep, re-add green cubes equal to the lesser of the number of cubes you sold and half the number of sheep in the area?
• Some tiles were free to build because they had nothing of value on them - that felt weird when they were scroll tiles.
• With a name like Skye Frontier, this game wants to be a space game. Space games are underrepresented among tile laying games, and of Puerto Rico inspired games, I can only think of two space games.

Now - concerning the wow factor:

Both of us have played multiple tile laying games, and also multiple engine building games, and this was a good mix of those. It played well, but my wife commented that the game didn't stand out to her as anything special in either category. She said that felt like another version of Puerto Rico, and though it was fun, it was also fairly normal.

I really enjoy engine building games, and would happily play one even if it doesn't stand out to me, but I was a bit saddened by the  removal of the "auction" mechanism from the source material - that felt like one of the coolest bits of Isle of Skye was trying to figure how to price my tiles, so losing that was a bit sad. My wife could possibly have used that to make my acquiring lake tiles more difficult without being forced to build a lake herself.

Final thoughts:

The game has legs, but at this point I would say that it wants something to differentiate it from similar games. I am not sure what that is, but it does feel a bit too normal.