As many Succession cards can be stored there as needed, free of charge. (Yes, we all know the 3-pile rule, too).īut in Heart of Crown, you can’t amass Succession Points until you have a place for them, and that place is the domain, which you get once you choose one of the princesses. And when the Provinces (or Colonies) are gone, game over. Get them too early and they’ll just clog up your deck for a while, but there are diverse ways around it (especially in the myriad of Dominion expansions) depending which cards are in play. In that game, you can start taking in the Victory cards any old time you can afford them. You see, you can’t really collect Victory Points (called Succession Points) the same way you do in Dominion. But all those things still weren't enough to warrant putting this on my wishlist. THE DOMAIN! Sure, the supply pile mechanic was good, and the artwork was superior, and the little arrows to indicate extra actions made a lot of sense, and the princesses were cutesy anime characters. After all, it seemed to me that there was a simple strategy: Be the first to gain a princess, choosing the best one, and use the advantage to be the first to reach 20 VP…game over. Still, quotes like ‘my favorite deck-building game’ and ‘Better than Dominion’ just seemed a bit overboard. The few video reviews I watched for the game did more than just fill in the missing blanks – they RAVED about this game! The videos didn’t appear to be paid shills by the game company, but seemed honest and completely legit. From the demo, I already knew about how the supply piles worked differently than Dominion and that we had to work our way to choosing one of the princesses to support, paying with the larger tracts of land (the game’s currency) as much as possible, but I didn’t really understand why. He briefly gave me a description, but amidst the convention noise I didn’t quite hear a lot of the details. But the company rep had mentioned to me during the demo that a game consisted of two separate phases, and that there wasn’t sufficient time to get to the second phase. I should have left well enough alone, and been content with thinking it was just another Dominion clone. Not that you had to be Einstein to figure out how many actions you had left in Dominion, but this makes it a lot easier for newbies and those who are math-challenged. You just keep playing cards until you run out of arrows. For example, a “+1 Action” is replaced by a right-facing arrow, and a “+2 Actions” has an arrow pointing right and another one facing down. Perhaps you’d really like card A, but opt to buy card B now because there’s only one available right now and you have no idea when that card will show up again!Īnd kudos to the designers for replacing actions with arrows. This makes your buying choices a bit more thought-provoking. So you could have 3 copies of card A, one copy of card B, 2 of card C, etc. Duplicates are stacked on top of their corresponding piles. You draw from the top of the deck until eight different cards are found. One mechanic that I thought was really cool was that even though you got to choose 10 card sets to be in supply (like in Dominion), that only 8 different cards were in the market at any one time. My initial thoughts were that Heart of Crown would not be a worthwhile investment for me because I had those other deck-builders at home already.īut a few things did impress me about the game. It’s pretty innocent, but not really something that I’d want to play with my wife and grandkids). The company’s big seller seemed to be Tanto Cuore, in which the artwork was a bit more provocative (the game is about hiring cute maids. I was attracted to Japanime Games booth due to the lovely artwork, and gravitated to this game in particular because the artwork was less ‘gratuitous’ than other games in the booth. So why is Heart of Crown such a thorn in my side? To date, I’ve only played a single 10-minute demo at a board game convention. The last thing I need is another deck –building game. I should be all set with the deck-building mechanic, thank you very much. And there is the diminutive ‘Star Realms’ deck box, too, not to mention the ‘dice-building’ tin cube of ‘Quarriors’. I also have a ‘Trains: Rising Sun’ box that deceptively holds both that set AND the original. Deck, Bag, and Pool BuildingNOTE: This blog has NOTHING to do with that infamous Seinfeld episode…my apologies if you found this misleading.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |