Cooper Island Playthrough - Meeple Overboard

[@andreasodendahl]

Since I am here right now listening to your feedback I would like to weigh in and explain some stuff: The amount of luck is by design and refers to some elements. So the buildings are very powerful. The amount of VP you get is way higher then for boats and for crates. Crates and boats give you constant income you do not need to invest in any longer. You just get stuff and the stuff can be very powerful. The buildings are worth more VP and the in-game effect is more random. To balance the different path in this game. I tried a lot of different approaches to how the buildings should come into play. From laying them all out at the start (like in Puerto Rico), having a smaller display of cards per building shape to choose from. Or in the end, the way turned out to be the best, drawing a number of cards and choosing one while play continues (to minimize downtime). As for the logbook tokens I wanted players to know that these bonuses can be very strong. I wanted an incentive for the players to go there. Also a small amount of randomness sometimes addes some emotion to the game. You either cheer happily or curse like a sailor. As long as this randomess doesn't affect the outcome of the game I am fine with it. And I can asure you that it does not. If you rely on this random factor only you are to blame when loosing the game. So there is a different value in different logbook tiles. But if a unlucky draw keeps you from scoring 35 points there is nobody to blame but the player itself. This especially is true for the luck of drawing landscape tiles from the bag. If you rely on making the right draw you just haven't understood the cartographers track and it's effect of not having to rely on a lucky draw. Actually in my version of the game the randomness from the landscape tiles was way higher. Because they did not have backsides. I wanted this to be random and the element that was not random was the single landscape tiles. So you could go two ways: Relying on randomness from drawing at random. Or taking the secure way and go for single landscape tiles to know what you will get. And it still is this way, but the randomness in a double landscape tile draw got minimized by the publisher since you are sure that you will at least be sure to get that one landscape you want - you just don't know what other kind it will come with. One last thing and then I will leave you with your thoughts: If you want to you can try the variant my wife and me used to playtest all the buildings. We just took the ones we thought would be most useful to us in our current situation (because even when you just draw 4 this card could come up randomly and we needed to have the best possible outcome to be sure about extreme strategies). Just ick up the stack and choose whatever you think is best. After a couple of plays you will know all the cards and choosing will not take long. Just make sure that you don't take the same cards over and over again when playing. Because this is another means of the "take 4 cards and choose 1" rule: You cannot always take the same cards you liked in a previous play. You have to try different things and adapt to your draw. So this is some insight you asked for in your brilliant video! Thanks for taking so much time and effort to make it and have fun with the game in hopefully many more plays!

[@MeepleOverboard]

Wow, thank you for your insight! I think a few plays we had after the video did help us see a few of the items you talked about like the logbook bonus, it really won't make or break a game win but it is a nice enough bonus. That's fascinating to learn about the landscape tiles. I would likely be cursing like a sailor more if they weren't double-sided! Haha. It is a good point that just the right amount of randomness can add that emotion to the game. Maybe next time we'll try the building variant you recommended. Overall, we both think very highly of the game, and it's one that grows in me with each additional play. Congrats on making a great one!

[@andreasodendahl]

@@MeepleOverboard I am not certain you would curse so much about the one sided landscape tiles because there was an open display of 5 tiles so you saw what was possible to gain. The single landscpae tiles were the way to balance missing landscapes in the display or balance random draws from the facedown stack. Because when gaining a bonus from e.g. income boats you would draw a rondom tile. Only the main actions allowed to take from the open display. So, it was a bit different in my version.

[@dsweet5273]

Thanks for the insights Ode! It’s a very lovely game and brilliantly designed! Keep up the fantastic work!

[@andreasodendahl]

Oh, just one comment on the score: The all-time-high I know of is my wife scoring 48 points. It was actually 51, but she had one card that scored her extra points when feeding her workers and that card got streamlined (actually after this playtest) so she got bumped from 51 to 48... My personal all-time-high is 45. But I consider everthing upward of 35 to be really good. More than 40 - you really have to plan very well...

[@ALeXKazik]

At 1:16:00 Wendy cheated twice: after unlocking a square worker you have to put one of the available workers on a scoring card, since she had only the square there, the square should have been used. And the helm-point below the square worker just acquired (and also for the second round worker) gets rewarded each cleanup phase, but only when you feed everybody.

[@MeepleOverboard]

Ahh, good catches! I think we genuinely misunderstood the rule about earning the helm point, whereas I think the circle/square worker was more of a flub of an accident. Thanks for pointing these out!

[@zamoose]

Quibble: You kept calling Cartographer Points "Helm Points". Helm Points are the movement points for the ships, Cartographer Points move your Cartographer disc.

[@MeepleOverboard]

Bahaha, oh no, you're right! The also often refer to "ships" for a few different things in this game, so we really tried to keep it straight for the video. We don't always succeed. Hopefully it was never too confusing.

[@3838jeroen]

Great playthough guys! Just wondering: do you prefer this game over Brass Birmingham?

[@MeepleOverboard]

Brass Birmingham is a top 5 game for us both. This one is really great, but it's hard to to top Brass. Wendy enjoyed this one even more than I did, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it pretty high up.

[@MeepleOverboard]

And thanks for watching! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[@andreasodendahl]

This is an unfair question. There are no better games than Brass. Ok, maybe Underwater Cities recently. But that might be the only one! So the answer can only be: No!!! ;-)

[@LaraBlancoSantos]

Wendy is soft, Chris changes his mind so much lol