LogFAQs > #985919653

The other major thing to go over is how riots work. When a hero attempts to riot in a location it costs 1 trust per guard x the number of UNidentified famous citizens (once you identify a citizen you change the rotation and the heroes can look at them at any time from then on). So it can be pretty expensive or outright impossible to do if there's a lot of guards and unidentified famous citizens. Once you do pay you flip face up all of the citizen in the space and the number of people supporting you must be more than the people against you (which is spies + guards). So generally early on you will be trying to raise discontent figuring out where people are and doing the riots later on. You also get one free riot for maxing out the discontent track, which sounds like happens in most games. If a riot fails the master plan advances and the great machine can arrest the active citizens in the district for free.

There's some more small stuff but that's the gist of the game. I like how it has a lot of different things going on and it seems like it has room for different strategies from both sides. I will say in our game we kind of steamrolled so that's one negative that if the Great Machine gets behind it can be hard for them to catch up.

But I like the options the Great Machine has, they can try to get their cards in play early to scale late or they can focus on moving guards around and denying heroes trust to do much. The city events are also done well since usually they require the heroes to do or not do something to prevent the master plan from advancing, which can give the Great Machine some insight to guess what they are going to go for.

This is really a game I want to play more and see how it holds up balance wise with multiple plays (although I believe he said there are some things you can to make the game easier for one side or the other). I also really want to try and play as the machine side as it seems more interesting to me. The guy hosting this game said he heard there might be a new printing with an updated ruleset (fixing a few minor issues with base rules) the end of the year and if there is I will likely pick this up. Do note once again that I am generally biased for 1v3 games/

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Likely to Trend: Could vary in either direction
Future: I'd like to play this again, Heard it might get reprinted so might wait for that
Next Game Hint: A deep sea mission based game where the missions don't effect all together that much.