Grade Stuff and Three-Player Playtesting

You wanna know something terrible? Checking my grades, I'm actually getting mostly A's and B's, in, all of my classes, which means that I'm not totally choking, which means that the stuff I'm behind in I don't really have an excuse to fail on. Isn't that the worst? It's just awful, for me.

And I actually finally figured out what I'm supposed to be doing in my big Information Design project that's been going on for about a third of the semester now! They say that online courses are somehow harder, but I shrug my shoulders firmly at that assertion.

Playing Somerset with three players:

Player	Coins at end	Points from buildings	Points from tiles	Points from spellbook	total points
Eric	5	3	11	4	23
Isaac	9	3	24	4	40
Ryan	9	3	15	4	31

Something along those lines. Ryan/Emmalynn (team) went first, then Isaac, then me. It was Isaac's first time, he went straight-out straightforward, get resources, build tiles, and got points quite handily from it; it was he who ended the game, through the purchase of his eighth tile. 

We all tied in spellbook size (I would have gotten more points than they both if I'd kept my spellbook smallest, yeah that makes sense) and likewise we all had the same number of buildings out (each building one recruitment station; does anyone ever play with all six workers?), so that doesn't really matter; and though I tried raking it points through coins, I came in last there. I tried going for a strategy using the advancement track of King Arthur's, but it's simply not worth it apparently. 

Would have helped to have any other government-track advancing tile other than the one that comes with Camelot out; the others were placed only in the endgame. Maybe that was just my stupidity and poor gameplay skills (I mean I tried to build those tiles but I was always too poor to do anything, and Isaac meanwhile by the end had amassed this trove of resources such that he could have bought any tile he felt to end the game) but having a more powerful King Arthur track would have been nice. Does anyone really play with that? because I just used it to see if there was some secret it hid, and it's better than it looks. But nope.

And this may be just me, but spells could be more powerful, I don't know. It's like there's this crazy power that's possible, but not until you've upgraded one of your workers, which won't happen till you've got the resources for it. But more power isn't the fix, I don't think, thinking about what's needed to activate the powers, the whole magic-power-hand symbol and spending crystals. Maybe crystals should be easier to get or something? Or maybe it's just me, like how I was bad in general at obtaining resources (do crystals count as a resource, by the way? It's never explained.) In general, that game just kicked my b*tt.

The first-time player winning was instructive, though. Just by going the obvious simplest strategy. Like in Dominion: sometimes there may be awesome juicy cards out there you can use to construct a nice engine for yourself and get all the points, but in the end, a lot of the time, big money is the most reliable strategy.

Maybe there should be better rewards for high-falutin-er strategies, maybe there shouldn't. Balancing a game is tough, dude. Apparently. And I read on Andrew's blog (my nephew is the best!) that even more tweaks have been made since the last tweaks that were made, so, that should be interesting; I'm genuinely curious.