July 2023 – Tom'S Epic Gaming

or My New Epic-Replacing Obsession (hopefully)

Overview

7th Sea : City of Five Sails is a 2-player, expandable (non-collectible) dueling card game with Pirates, Musketeers, and Sorcerers (with multiplayer formats).
Your goal is either

Assassination: Kill your opponent’s Leader
Domination: Control all 3 core locations in the city at the end of the day
Renown: Control locations in the city over 5 days to collect 7 (or the most) Renown

To accomplish this, each Day you choose 1 of your 5 pre-selected Characters to add to the fray and 1 of your 5 pre-selected Schemes to shape it. These are supported by your randomized 40-card Faction deck. However, before you make your choices, a neutral card is added to each location that players can race to Recruit, Equip, or exploit that Day from a randomized 30-card City deck. (This City deck is defined by Pine Box Entertainment, and they plan to rotate it, in part based on the actions taken in Organized Play events/tournaments).

Cards in your Faction deck can be

Played for their primary effect (equipping characters or performing one-time effects)
Played for their combat values in a duel (regardless of their primary effect)
Discarded to pay the cost of other powerful Faction and/or City cards
(Race for the Galaxy style [one of my favorite game mechanisms])

Players alternate taking a single action until all players pass consecutively.

Initiating back and forth Duels and Claiming a Location are the primary two actions the game is built around (in addition to playing cards, character movement, and Passing).

Current Thoughts

As of this point, I have played about 10 games, half of which with decks I’ve built. I am still in the exploration phase as I feel out everything this game has to offer, but so far, I have been enjoying it and actively want to continue experimenting.

During the third game, the flow of play clicked and now actions can go pretty snappy back and forth, especially since you’ll want to be thinking multiple moves into the future. I actively enjoy the combination of City cards coming out, and then deciding which Scheme card to respond with, to determine where Renown gets put, what bonus effect to gain, your likelihood of going first each day, and whether you’ll draw more of less cards than normal. That feels great, especially since you can only use each of your 5 schemes once for the up to 5 days.

Card management also feels good. As mentioned above, I love the discard cards from hand to pay for other cards mechanism. It also synergizes well with deckbuilding enabling you to include situational cards, cards you actively want to play, and cards you actively want for dueling (especially if flipped in gambling). The tension between Gambling in duels and playing from hand is also a satisfying choice; Gambling has certainly screwed me, but not in a way that turns me off from the game, since “Gambling” is a very apt name for the mechanism.

My one disappointment so far is that deck building feels very limited at this point, with seemingly only one way to take each faction, for now. As additional expansions come out with new cards and characters for each faction, I expect/hope this will improve. For now, it mostly feels like optimization as opposed to exploration.

Faction Overview

Each of the 5 factions feel different and interesting to play. Currently, my vague feeling for each is

Castille: Try to deprive your opponent of as many actions and choices as possible, weak dueling, Renown primary win condition
Eisen: Bruteforce overwhelm your opponents by ending duels (refusing or returning no threat) and pushing unpreventable damage, Any win condition
Montaigne: Best duelists, force your opponents into duels and extend them, Any win condition
Ussura: Combo deck, find the hammer and/or buff Yevgeni to issue one-shot challenges, kill opponent in a duel as soon as possible, Domination/Assassination win conditions
Vodacce: Take as many actions as possible, everyone outside The Family is expendable towards your Renown win condition (or surprise Assassination)

I plan to do individual write ups on the deck I built for each of these factions.

Theme/Art/Lore

If I can buy this playmat at GenCon, I will, love it. Would buy a framed print of it too.

I’ve recently discovered that good Theming/Art/Lore can really draw me into a game (much more than I expected), and I have been drawn in to 7th Sea : City of Five Sails.

I learned about the game while looking for tournaments in the Gen Con 2023 event catalogue, and as a non-collectible, 2-player card game, I was obviously immediately intrigued. There is a World Championship Festival Saturday starting at 10am, and it will have a story-based game augmentation in 3 of the rounds (28 open spots remaining as of today).

So I looked into it further and saw they had Chanteys with lore on their website and in their rulebook. All of the stories have been interesting and have actively made me want to explore the world. Apparently, the setting is based off a 7th Sea Role Playing Game and there was a previous collectible version of the game in the late 90s.

Going in to the World Championship, for gameplay reasons I think I am leaning towards playing Eisen, but for thematic reasons, I will likely pick a different faction so I can usurp them. That being said, I see that Ussura won the 6-week salon (and Eisen won the initial 2022 Gen Con tournament), so my personality is pushing me away from those. Ahhh, so many fun considerations to agonize over for what I want to play! Ultimately, I need (and want) to get more games in to feel out the factions more, and I need (and want) to pour through all of the lore to come to a compromise of the two.

Closing

For anyone looking to play, there is an official Tabletop Simulator mod and Pinebox Entertainment discord. I am looking to get as many games in as possible, so if interested you can reach out through discord, username: tomsepicgaming

**Edit: I have really been enjoying this game. Here is a link to my tournament report from Gen Con 2023, my more in depth Eisen Deck Tech, and my tournament report from Gamehole con 2023.

In addition, my Ussuran Deck tech from Gen Con 2024, and the start of my match reports from that tournament in addition to first streaming announcement 8/25/24.

Base Game

Mindbug is a 2-player card game where you play creatures to attack your opponent. You only get 10 creatures, but the deliciously intriguing part is you also get 2 mindbugs which let you steal an opponent’s creature as if you had played it.

Elegant and beautiful.

Trying to figure out how to sequence your plays to navigate your opponent’s mindbugs, while agonizing over when to use yours is just so good. So, so good.

Beyond Evolution

Mindbug Beyond Evolution is the first stand-alone expansion and second expansion overall for Mindbug. It contains 44 new playable cards (16 unique and 14 with two copies). Beyond Evolution also introduces two new keywords: Action and Evolve.

Action is an effect you can trigger on a creature that started your turn in play, instead of Attacking or Playing a card for your turn. For example, if you start your turn with Infernostrich in play, you can use its action to Defeat an enemy creature with power 7 or more, and then your opponent takes their turn.

Evolve lets you upgrade a creature to a stronger version of itself going from stage I to stage II to finally stage III.

Beyond Evolution Review

I actively do not recommend this new stand alone product as a starting point into Mindbug, one of my favorite games literally included in a tattoo on my arm.

As is frequently the case with expansions, this adds a level of complexity and nebulousness Beyond what you find in the base game. If you already love Mindbug and both you and your opponents want an added challenge, this expansion definitely delivers that. There are interesting new cards that lead to significantly more complicated board states and “discovered” attacks as the board states shift due to dying creatures (love you Coach Panda), but the counter play is much less obvious, less forgiving, and feels worse/more unfair than the base game (even though the balance seems on point when you adjust to it).

One of the major culprits for this is the increased amount of Tough, especially on creatures with incredibly powerful effects like difficult to prevent damage. Robopup is the prime example, a 1 power Sneaky, Tough. If you play a Robopup on an empty board, whoever gets it is likely to be able to make at least one and likely two unblocked attacks before it can either be destroyed twice, or a hunter can be played to attack it twice. (In this stand alone expansion, there are only 2 copies of a sneaky card bigger than this, and two copies of a card that stops sneakies from attacking.) Knowing this, you do not want to play a Robopup unless you already have a hunter in play or one of the few immediate answers to it available, or conversely you want to mindbug it if your opponent plays it. However, if you do not know this and you let it resolve for your opponent, or they mindbug the one you played, you are going to have a serious problem. Even playing against better than average strategic-gamers, they repeatedly made the mistake of playing this and other similar cards only for me to mindbug it and make them feel helpless. Other culprits include Dragon Inn, Mole Machine, and the frog and penguin levelers. (To be fair, The Experiment and Octocopter are two additional answers to these powerful Tough creatures.)

In addition to these, cards like Dr. Orange U. Tan (which lets you lose a life to return all opposing creatures to hand) and Westside Monster feel oppressive while Chuckling Chimporg feels too narrow.

All that being said, when I got a chance to play against one of the best Mindbug players in the world, everything felt reasonable and interesting; however, even I still made an objective misplay into a board state that my opponent insisted we rewind (allowing reasonable rewinding being my preferred way to play for all games).

Month: July 2023

7th Sea : City of Five Sails