LogFAQs > #933431034

64. Seasons (2012)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Card-drafting, tableau-building, dice-drafting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-75 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 3-4 sessions with 4 players (2017)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 32/80 (2018)

Summary - At the beginning of Seasons, everyone drafts an equal-sized hand of cards and divides them to be drawn at the beginning of each of three game years. Each year is four seasons, which advance by the last remaining die in a dice draft, which grants various resources, extra cards, and the like. These resources are generally spent to play your cards, which have instant abilities, ongoing abilities, and victory points.

Design There are several minigames within Seasons. It starts with a card draft, which essentially determines the powers and points you are capable of earning throughout the game, as well as which resources to prioritize. Then there's collecting those resources via the dice and trying to control the season track. And finally, there's playing the actual cards, deciding which order to play them in. Each of these is a fun game in and of itself.

Is Seasons somewhat less than the sum of its parts, though? Card-drafting like Sushi Go and dice-drafting like Grand Austria Hotel don't often go together, and that card-drafting phase, which takes perhaps fifteen AP-laced minutes at the beginning seems to take on an outsized importance in the outcome of the game, relative to more mechanically satisfying parts of the game: rolling the dice and actually playing the cards. Is there just a little too much downtime?

Experience - Seasons is like a fever dream in my mind: we played it twice in person and loved the feeling of the differently colored dice, the season-changing mechanism, tapping our cards for their abilities, tracking victory points. We agreed this was one of those games we could play repeatedly and get a feel for, get to know the cards, grow in together. Then we played online two or three times. And then... I think it might never have hit the table ever again. And now that was over two years ago.

Future - For some reason, maybe tied to reading online, Seasons with four seems rather daunting now. The card draft at the beginning feels cumbersome in my mind, and for some reason, I anticipate downtime. That said, I still want to give it another shot and reassess, if only because of that past great experience.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness