Richard Ham
Malta
Msida
One of our beagles (Taloula) is a bit of a camera hog
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So we just finished our first game of Fresco with the the new expansion modules. In total, we were using:
Standard expansions:
Bishop's requests
Portrait cards
New stuff:
Glaziers
Gold Leaf
We didn't want to throw EVERYTHING in, and this seemed like a good combination of things. What we were surprised to find was how radically the new expansions changed the game, both for the good and the bad.
The Good
Adding the glaziers created a huge, seemingly bottomless money sink. We're used to our games of Fresco building up steam as we make more and more money, and do bigger and bigger jobs at the monastery, 2 or 3 fresco tiles at a time. But with the sudden need to also produce windows for half of the tiles, things really slowed down a lot. Those stained glass windows are EXPENSIVE! Not only do you have to buy all the glass baubbles at 1 or 2 bucks a piece, but the window frames also cost 1, 2 or 3! So it's not uncommon for a fresco tile to end up costing 6 or more bucks to complete because of the associated mandatory window, which is significant!
Now, these windows also mean you also earn a lot more victory points, so in the end, it all evens out, but it made the game feel very different indeed. Not better or worse, just different. So it was definitely a nice change of pace... much more slow, deliberate, and struggling to make ends meet. I can imagine us wanting to use the braziers 50% of the time in future games to keep things fresh.
The Bad?
The gold leaf was interesting. I'm inclined to say I didn't like it, because in a 2p game, the existence of them pretty much invalidates 1/3rd of the market. Because you can't get gold leave on the first cart, we found we never bothered taking stuff out of the first cart, and that always went to Leonardo. When we knew we weren't going to be able to get the first or 2nd grab at the card, we basically wouldn't go to the market at all. The potential swing value of using the gold leaf well was so overpowering, it made anything that appeared on the first cart meaningless by comparison, and we felt this wasn't a good thing.
BUT, here's what we suspect: the gold leaf expansion probably works much better when combined with the original Brown/Pink colours expansion. The reason for this is would be that with the brown/pink Fresco tiles on the board, there's a smaller chance that you'll get to use gold leaf on a given turn (since the colour chosen for them is random every time: red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple). So with less chance of getting the big gold leaf payoff, suddenly, the first cart can become more attractive if the right stuff is in there, if it can help you build towards brown/pink paints.
Or maybe not. We'll have to give this a try in the future. Plus, we've yet to try the wishing well. I have my doubts about the random variance it will add, but my wife is eager to give it a go, so will report back here once we give them a go.
The Ugly
Since this is supposed to be a session report, I guess I should mention that in the end, I won over 30 points ahead of her, mostly because of the gold leaf. By the mid point of the game, I had managed to get both portrait cards that affect the bishop (+1 to score, and move him anywhere on the board), and those combined with gold leaf proved unstoppable. Overpowered, it seemed actually. She generally did much better on the windows than I did (I took some negative points for incomplete ones a few times, while she occasionally got 2 expensive ones out in a single turn). But in the end, the gold leaf doubling power was insurmountable.
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