Cooper Island Gameplay Runthrough

hey everybody today righto runs through Cooper Island but before you're going please turn your subtitles on to the Klingon channel so that when I make rules goose you know they are and if you've done that then welcome to Cooper island which is a lovely place out in the middle of the Atlantic that players have come to to explore and develop and now I'm redoing a solo run-through of the game today which means instead of playing against Jen my wife and virtual component how many playing against Cooper himself the dog that this island is named after now for folks who don't like soullow run throughs don't worry playing against Cooper is 90% the same as playing against another human player Cooper Island is a worker placement game at its heart and so Cooper will be placing workers out here on the island blocking me or creating opportunities for me just like a regular human player but the only really significant difference is if I were playing a two-player game there would be another Peninsula this would be my Peninsula and this would be Jen's Peninsula so a Cooper never actually bothers to gather resources or develop him and insel himself he just gathers lots of points and gets in my way but if I were playing against another player there would be another Peninsula over here or over here or over here and I'd be working on mine my opponent be working on theirs but the worker placement the heart of the game would be the same so what is the heart of this game well we can see a nice little summary right here on our player boards first every round in the game takes place over five rounds we'll have income everybody gets income we everybody does that simultaneously then after the income is done we take turns placing our workers doing fairly standard worker placement stuff and finally at the end of the round we go through multiple steps of end-of-round cleanup including feeding our workers and and gaining points from various things and all the rest of it so that is the situation and of being a game I have two workers Cooper effectively has three because no matter how many workers I've got Cooper always has one more than me and Cooper always gets to be the first player so he's gonna go first which means I draw a card from his deck and we see where his first worker placement is gonna be alright oh no before we do any of that hold on I have to do my income don't worry alrighty so how does income work let's come back here and look at my screen so when we do the income phase that makes a that means we get to trigger any icon we have on our board that has that little i-car income symbol which right now is this in this so I get to trigger both of these incomes later on if say if I get one of these ships into ports then I get more income I get a buck and I could get gold or cloth or whatnot if I were to get these ships developed these shipping lanes but right now all of my income is this action and this action everybody starts with these two so in the first turn everybody will do these Cooper are ever he doesn't he skips the entire income phase so what am I gonna do well what I'm gonna do is I am going to place one of these tiles everybody starts with this same set of tiles one of these inlet tiles are that on my peninsula and I'm also going to place one of these two tiles on my peninsula because I started with these they were drawn randomly from the bag so basically the reminder here is place one of my tiles I've got from my collection and place one of the tiles I've got from these this starting set of special inlet tiles alright so that's what I am going to do first and I can do it in I'd order I can do this in the nests or this and then this and so the interesting thing about the inlet tiles is these all have special bonuses on them that will give me rewards right now and can potentially give me rewards later in the game as well so I've gotta decide which of these do I want to place this one is a mountain at generate stone and will allow me to immediately draw another one of these starting ones from from the bag so I'd have a collection of three to choose from this one would give me some food plus some wood or stone and it's another mountain here's forest here's Plains these forests will generate wood these fields will generate food and these mountains will generate stone although later on they could also generate gold if I develop them enough I see and so this one would also let me increase my cartographer I start at level three but I could go up to level four if I place this this one would give me another coin and by the way I started with one coin over here in my stores and right now I have very limited stores I can only store five things and one of them is taken by coin this would give me a second coin if I do this it generates would and it would give me a gold or a cloth and this one would allow me to explore a ruin although I wouldn't do this one right now because I'm not allowed to explore ruins until I've developed land to reach them right now this is where I've started I've got this one field that's gonna generate food for me to feed my people at the end of the round if I want to explore these ruins I would have had to first place a tile although I could do that I can place this tile like this now I've reached these two ruins which means after that I could then where was it I could take this ruin exploration one I could place it as well and maybe say something like this and I would immediately get to do this action which means I could explore this or this ruin which would start to get me down a route of a particular type of strategy so that would be a possible way I could go although I don't think it is hmmm what am I going to do well what I'm gonna do is based in part on the different objectives I could chase after it's part of set up these four cards were selected with more players there's going to be more opportunities but in a 1 or a 2 player game you have access to 4 these are in-game bonus points I could score for building buildings for outfitting cargo ships for exploring more terrain this is the the fewer spaces that haven't been explored that the more places I explore the more points I get or cultivating my land not only exploring it but developing it which is to say lay tiles tall tall tall on top of each other so these are goals that I'm after and I gotta say I love going for cargo ships cuz this if I can do this it gives me a really big bonus boost so I think with that in mind I'm probably going to want to in this first round if I can pull it off outfit this cargo ship there's a different cargo ship we can outfit each round or actually I said that's not true we can outfit any of these cargo ships but here we are in the first round to outfit this one requires three gold and two cloth but because this marker is here there is a discount it only costs two and two or three and one so if in this round I could get myself three gold and one cloth or two golden two cloth I could outfit this which would give me a special power for the rest of the game and it would give me one step closer to being able to have scored three five or eight points four outfitting three four or all five cargo ships so if that's what I'm gonna chase after I'm gonna be all about trying to get these cargo ships that means right from the get-go I need to get myself some gold and some cloth so with that mind coming back to which of these inlet tiles I could place well this forest would give me wood and it immediately gives me a gold or a cloth so you think that'd be the one I'd go for but no instead I am gonna go for this one this mountain that allows me to start developing stone and later on Gold I'm gonna try and get my gold from this mountain instead of from this tile here and it also when I place this will immediately let me add another tile to my collection of exploration tiles so now normally when you are placing in inlets these inlet tiles since they're half water they always have to hang off the island so they represent some land you've explored and an opportunity in a nearby little islets that you have found and I could put these normally on either side so that whenever I expand I always have to expand from where I start and so I could put this over here but the very very first one of these you place at the beginning the game must be placed to the right so I'm just gonna place this right here like this remember this is one of the two income steps I place the inlet and because I've done this I get to immediately activate this which means I draw another tile from the sack jack and it's a mountain slash forest okay and now whenever you place a new tile down it immediately generates resources for you this mountain has generated one stone for me so at this point I have access to one food one stone and one coin okey-dokey so all righty tighty now I'm also going to place one of these tiles member that's part of my income page remember everybody's doing this at the same time everybody's placing their starting in which gives them access to some power or other and a resource and they're placing one of these and yep this is what I'm gonna do now each one of these tiles are two-sided across all four sides you're always going to see a town a forest field and a mountain it's just they're going to be in different combinations and this one is perfect for me because what I want to do is I want to place this on the board and like I said before hey I could go on ahead like this and that gives me access to these ranges or I could go this way or I could go this way I can't have it extend out into the water only the islets with tiles can do that but instead of spreading outwards so I can cover more terrain which is this goal this goal maps me to cover as much strain as possible I'm gonna build upwards which is this goal trying to build I so I can play styles that match on existing tiles and you'll notice I had this I'm out got a mountain in a field here's a mountain in a field I can place these on top of these ones that are already here although I can't do it because these spaces are full and it's not until I harvest these resources out of here they'll be able to build but fortunately harvesting is one of the free actions I can do anytime I want there's actually it's this little hourglass symbol right here indicates it it's an action I can do whenever and one of those actions is listed up here harvesting I can take resources I've got available on the land and put them into my storage I can also anytime I want take resources from my marketplace and put them in storage and so even though my actual proper turn of worker placement has been I'm already doing so much stuff as free actions I'm going to take both of these and store them now that these this field and this mountain are clear I can go on ahead and do other income a building upwards boom and whenever you play Styles down they generate so I've got more stone and more food although here's the interesting thing this is two stone this is two food because it's on the second level basically placing tiles out is like the equivalent of exploring and finding just basic resources but placing tiles on top of existing tiles is cultivating those tiles developing them so they can produce more from now on this tile whenever I put a cube here it represents two stone and this represents two food and the interesting thing about mountains remember I said they can generate stone or gold if I can get this mountain up to the third level that's when it starts generating gold there's a little reminder of that over here as you can see that a you know the ground levels all generate these but a level three mountain can generate stone or gold my choice so you already I have finished my income phase which was placing two tiles it got me some resources I did a free action to clear stuff up and I'm on my way towards my goal of this round all players are doing this simultaneously once everybody is done and remember Cooper skips income because he doesn't have any peninsula to develop we now move on to step two which is the worker placement and I think I mentioned this before Cooper always gets to go first when you're playing it's human players the turn order can change from round to round but against Cooper well by he's a very quick dog he always gets to go first so what is his first action gonna be it is gonna be b2 now what that is saying is he want that's the worker placement spot he wants to go to which is right here this is B 1 this is B 2 he wants to go to b2 because he wants to build one of these boats the I talked about these before these are things that will give me more income if I build them um Cooper in this particular game is going to be emulating a player who is chasing after a boat building strategy now I knew this as part of setup if we come over here and look at Cooper's section he's got all these cards that remind me on his turn what he does but as part of setup he ended up pulling these two objectives um and that meant I stacked his deck in a certain way according to set up so that he likes building boats and he likes making statues these could have been cards that were available to me to score bonus points but they are he's not actually gonna score bonus points off these this is a visual reminder that he likes building boats and he likes building statues which means his deck is kind of stacked in that favor that's what he's gonna focus on and in this game you really do need to focus on just one or two things even though there's a lot of stuff you can do alrighty so no surprise because he's focusing a 50-percent his focus is on boats Hey he drew a build a boat card so that is what he is gonna do and it says right there that um if I have made of I have unlocked one of my special workers which are these square workers I have not then that means he would place a special worker over here in Section B which is the boat building section alrighty I haven't unlocked a special worker so that means he's gonna place a normal worker onto that space instead so here he goes he's the blue player he comes over here and boom he doesn't actually do the actions he just creates blockages meal for me organ opportunities potentially alright so uh he has done the first half which is he has placed irregular because he would have done a special if I had done specials but since I haven't he hasn't so it's replicating the fact that by the time I've ER unlocked a special worker he probably has as well alrighty so yeah and if when doing this if he if I had already been in this space and he were to come and occupy this space this is a major portion of the worker placement players do not block other players a player can always go to a space you've been but if you get there first and then another player goes there you get a benefit and so the second part of his card is reminding us that if I'd already been here then he I would have gotten the benefit out of it and it would have slowed him down which again replicates what would happen to a normal player it's terrible if you see somebody go into a space you want and then you you could he'll go there but you will have to pay a price this is just Cooper representing him having to pay the price and then finally if he has the Royal Order card about building boats which he does he scores a point all right so that's just a special thing he gets a bonus point this little boat is his point tracker he scored a point that means he moves forward one on this point tracking space basically as I score points I can move either of my boats counterclockwise around the island or clockwise around the island and that represents earning points so he's effectively just earned a point he always goes clockwise but me I have a choice of going clockwise with this boat or counterclockwise with this boat when I score points okay so he is done he is on the map and it is now my turn to place a worker so um right okay I know what I want to do it is um it is make one of these I need cloth I need gold and so I need to get this up one step higher so that I can so that this mountain range will start generating gold instead of stone which I don't need so remember anytime I want as a free action I can harvest stuff and put it in storage now this is a little bit painful remember I said because this is you know this represents two stone because it's on a second level thing but as soon as I harvest it and put it in storage it goes back to representing only one stone so I've effectively thrown a stone away to clear this space out so that I can build it up higher so that's a little painful but I think it'll be worth it to unlock you know to unlock my goal ultimately I could do the same for this food and turn to food into one but I'm not leave that there because effectively resources in the peninsula this is like extended storage I have really limited storage um in my main warehouse but I can keep the stuff stored out here but once I transfer this stuff back to my warehouse there's some wastage some of it is lost and I end up with only one alrighty so I did this for free now I am going to do a nother reaction which has to do with my cartographer field over here is a little reminder I can spend cartography points whenever I want I started with three I can spend one two three or four to do different types of actions that have to do with exploring and developing my Peninsula I am going to spend two cartographer points to do this action and this action says I can place a single tile like say this mountain over here onto an existing piece of terrain I've developed that area on two axes and training now if I were placing oh wait hold on a second I have spend one more I have to spend three because this is gonna be the third level so if it you know if I'm placing it on the second third or fourth level then I have to pay three so I paid all of my cartography and cartography is a very valuable resource I've just burned through all of it so that I can place this up higher on my newly cleared out area and remember whenever you place a tile it immediately generates so ah this could now generate for me three stone uh uh I've made it to the third level I'm gonna generate three gold and I haven't even done my worker placement space yet I've just used another free action although I burned through all my cartography I've wasted a stone to do this but now I've got sitting out here in this mountain mine three gold now I just need to cloth to be able to finish my goal okay so I haven't still I still have until my worker placements so how am I gonna get that cloth alright okay I know how I'm gonna do it I'm gonna use yet another freebie action that I can do whenever I want there's these reminders down here that I can anytime I want I can convert certain resources into other resources I can convert to cloth into one coin I can convert to gold into one of any resource I want of the other cubes food and and lumber and stone or this is the painful one I could give up a combination of eighty-four resources cubes or coins to generate one resource of my choice it just so happens up here in my storage I've got one two three four resources so I going to take all four of these very painful and using this freebie action I can do whenever I want I'm gonna convert all four of these into one cloth boom so four to one is a terrible return but now I've got one cloth and over in the mountains I've got three gold now remember another free action is anytime you want you can harvest stuff from your board and put them into storage you can also take stuff out of your marketplace and put it into storage so hey at least I cleared out a lot of storage space so I can store things I'm going to store this cloth and the reason I'm doing that is anything in the market is basically tied up in deals and business and barter which means I can't use stuff that's down here it's basically dead stock I think it's what the rules call it and if at the end of the round I have not done something with stuff in the market place I lose it forever so as another free action I'm gonna move this up here shew okay so before I give in place my worker I just did another ton of freebie actions I can do but I've got everything I need so my first work replacement action is going to be oh haha okay yes I was I was gonna I was going to say I know what Cooper's next action is gonna be because I know he loves building boats and I know he loves making statues his next action is gonna be come over here and try to build a statue or you'll explore a ruin or build a statue that's what section F is and if I came here first I know he's gonna do it that means he would come sit on top of me and I would get a bonus cuz I blocked him I know that's what he's up to because I know what his strategy is but the problem is I can't do this action because I didn't explore out to reach these ruins if I had I would totally do this now ahead of him and this is a big part of playing against human players too if you know what they're gonna do you want to do it first um so that you can get a bonus when they eventually follow you and do it afterwards but anyway I cannot do that action because I have explored ruins so I'm gonna do what I came to do I am going to outfit a ship boom so um actually if i zoom in a little bit you can see here's my peninsula I'm starting to build up here's my spawn scoring and here is the worker placement board first he came over here to build one of the you know basically build a little in you know import ship you know trade line or something like that he doesn't actually do it he just block this for me I'm coming over here I'm gonna outfit a ship and that means I have to pay based on which ship I want to outfit this would cost eight gold this would cost five gold and two it would give me two points this would give me three points if I had a gold I don't have eight gold I have three gold sitting on my Mountain and I have one cloth sitting in my storehouse over here I need three and two but as you recall if the if wherever the round marker is that creates a discount so I'm gonna only pay one cloth because I've got the discount and as soon as somebody does this he gets knocked over to indicate for the rest of the round nobody else can get that discount so if Cooper had gone there first he would have blocked me on the worker placement board which made up means I would've had to pay more and he would have prevented me from getting the reward but as it is I've got there first before any human player could that's why it was worth me trading four to one so that I could make sure I got there same way I got to pay three gold and one cloth what I'm gonna do here goes the three gold that I had stored out there here's the one cloth and I take this little marker as a reminder that I have outfitted this ship you can see I can outfit this and this and this and this because I've got little markers on all of them as well now in addition to that I immediately score one point and like um like Cooper I could go clockwise and I get a point and we'd be you know this kind of this is our victory point track effectively this represents one point two point three point four points etcetera etc but I'm gonna go clockwise because every time you score points and your ship jumps over an inlet tile it gets to trigger that inlet tile so because I've hopped over this I get to trigger this again which means I draw from the bag and I have another tile sitting around in my supply that I can use during income phases okay so I've scored one point he scored one point I've also gotten a bonus I've done my first worker placement and I have done one ship outfit if I outfit at least three ships I've got the potential to score three points at the end of the game so I'm on my way also because I have now outfitted that ship and the matically it's kind of available to me I now have access to another anytime action I can do which is I can use this old plank that represents my outfitted ship to trigger any one of these five actions anytime I want I could just give myself two coins or two resources that I might want although they have to go into the warehouse which means I have to have room in my storehouse to transfer them so I could use them or I could move up two spaces on my cartography track or I could explore and place a tile or I could draw another tile from the bag this is another anytime action I can do and so that's gonna give me more flexibility shew that was a lot that was my first turn okay it is now Cooper's second turn his turns are a little bit quicker and simpler he is as I predicted going to F because this was part of the setup he had a a B and an F card at the top of the deck but now what's gonna be the next place I have no idea where he's gonna go next he might double down on B and F he might try to build buildings heck he might even try to outfit a ship which would benefit me because I beat him to it so we'll find out what he's gonna do next but in the meantime he's got F 1 now F 1 is slightly different then B 2 B 2 means that if he can he wants to use his specialized worker which are the square workers but he can't do that unless I've already unlocked them so he's not gonna try to do specialized he's gonna try and place a normal worker in Section F now if he can't then he'll go on ahead and place his special worker instead but he can he is gonna take one of his normal workers and put it over here in F now he doesn't do the action at all he's again now if I'd wanted to go here this was the face that I could have used to explore ruins which is another victory point path I would now have to pay extra because I would be following him and I wouldn't want to do that I'd rather wait till next round and wait for him to clear out and get in there fast before he does but remember I know his strategy is really going to be centered on these two space just like my strategy now that I've started outfitting ships I'm gonna be focusing on this a lot more than I otherwise might and my opponents know that because once you've done one you want to do another instance of that action well because well hi um there's so much going on in this game there's a little reminder over here that when I have done two outfitting actions I can take this and move it over into one of these slots to either give myself two points but more importantly give myself another worker so as you can see I've got more workers I can hire or I can upgrade my existing workers turning them from regular into special and to be able to unlock these well I need to build two of these little boats over here or I need to outfit two ships or I need to build two statues which first requires exploring ruins or I need to build two buildings now that I've done this once I want to do it again sooner than later so I can unlock another worker right and so that's why once somebody's done something they definitely want to do that again and so you become a target everybody knows that's what you're going for and so they can get there first to block you and make you pay more including paying them because the beautiful thing is if you know if Cooper does decide to go over here I get paid Cooper has to pay me or suffer consequences and the same you true if I want to follow Cooper I have to pay him and or suffer consequences anyway though so sorry that was a whole bunch stuff so Cooper he wanted to go to f1 and then there's a reminder that if Cooper places a worker on top of one of mine he gets a resource of mine you know because again all right if Cooper places his worker on top of one of mine I get a resource he pays me and right let's see in addition to and in addition to that he would also get blocked this is a penalty you can suffer if you follow somebody else if you go into a worker placement station or somebody else is already gone one of your ships might get anchored which can lose you points now as it happens he did not go to a place where I was so none of that happens but then at the end he gets in any case he gets one point for playing this card and if he has the statue card which he does he gets the point so Cooper just scored two more points boom boom and he's kind of bummed see this is why you know he's kind of bugged he's not going this way because he would have been triggering bonuses but since he's going this way now eventually if he keeps turning points he will go all the way around and come back down this way and he can start triggering my stuff as well Oh buddy wait so that was his second action it is now my second action and right I've achieved what I wanted to do and I need to start thinking about all right well I know next round it's gonna cost me if I want to come over here because there's a discount it's gonna cost me four cloth and two gold now I can always get more gold over here but I don't have a means to get cloth so it might behoove me yeah especially since I want to explore these ruins so that I can get here before Cooper so that I could take advantage of that I think that makes sense so I want to want to explore some more of my Peninsula here and there's a couple of ways I could do it I could come over - I could come over to this space which lets me either draw another tile from the bag or place one on the board and in addition to that I get to increase my cartography or I can come over here which means I have a choice I either draw two from the bag or I place two on the board if I want to explore really fast or I can come over here to Section C which means I draw one and I place one all right or I could come over here and just increase my cartography by three and either get a coin or a resource of my choice this is this would have been a way that I could have gotten that cloth as well instead of converting forward to one but I was running out of storage space and I just wanted to go quick because there's a chance Cooper might have followed me so I wanted to get there before Cooper did right I want to explore I would like to start building my cartography back up so I'm gonna come over here to this space now you will notice unlike some of the spaces there's a little picture here it's a picture of Cooper in a multiplayer game the first player to go to this space and around grabs the first player marker which looks like Cooper Cooper always gets to go first in the solo game so I just put a reminder here that if I come here Anker cooper-cooper is now his ship is stuck and what that means is you take an anchor token you put it underneath one of your scoring ship tokens and now in the future when Cooper would score a point instead of moving forward on the victory point track he will clear out that anchor so I have slowed him down it's the Solo equivalent of getting to go first cuz he will always get to go first but he might so since I came here I unlocked that bonus instead of grabbing the first player marker and I can choose to draw from the bag or place one and I get to increase my cartography by one which I will do now Boop and I have to decide I am going to explore I already have three tokens I've drawn from the bag so I'm gonna place one of these and I'm gonna explore to try to get to these ruins so I could start trying to block Cooper all right so what do I want to do remember I want cloth so that I can upgrade I can do more tripping routes so that means I want to put a tile down that has a town on it or a camper reveals regard because these generate cloth the fields generate food the mountains generate stone or gold the force generate wood I want all right I see I've got two that are exactly same I'll use one of the both of these and what the heck I'll just go like this boom and because I place this I just earned one food because this is on the first level and one cloth because that is on the first level now remember for the upgrade I need to have four cloth or maybe three cloth depending on how it goes but I have just done that that all that came from me doing my second worker placement action which let me place a tile and increase my cartography so I've got one point of cartography available to me which is nice and I think that's gonna work out pretty well okay so that was my second work replacement spot Cooper gets one more so like I said he effectively it's like he always has one more worker than me so his third action and this I don't know what this could be this could be just doubling down on f4 B it could be going to D my hope is he's gonna go to H cuz then I get a bonus Oh baby yes I had a 33% chance of that I was pretty happy okay so he is now gonna try and go to the H base which is the out in space um alrighty and if he places a worker on top of mine I get a resource of my choice if there are any from the Depot and um I place it onto the market and Cooper gets anchored again nice sorry Cooper poor pup so um if let's say the Cooper were a human player here's what happens if a human player manually decides to go someplace where their opponent is already gone they have to give up either a resource or a coin and give it to the opponent and hopefully the opponent has storage or no actually and they put it in this store the opponent's marketplace so that means it has to be moved the opponent has to move it from the marketplace to their storage so they can use it so and if you are going to over space of mind and you don't want to give me a resource instead you can choose to anchor your ship which means effectively you've lost a victory point and then I go on ahead and I get a resource from the general supply I always get paid when somebody goes to a place that I'm already at it's just a question whether you pay me or you don't pay me and then take a penalty and then I get paid anyway from the supply Cooper pretty much works the same he always behaves as if he didn't pay me so that's why he just got anchored a second time he's lost two points basically and normally if it were if Cooper were human player I could take any Q buy one from the supply but in the solo game I have to take it from his Depot so I can only successfully block him four times I could keep blocking him afterwards to make him lose points but I can only get stuff from him four times hey he's got some cloth I think I'll take that I'll put it in my market place alrighty and because it's a free action I'll move from my Marketplace into my store house I now have one two of the four cloth I need to outfit this ship in round 2 Q ok we have finished step B first we did income then we do worker placement now now we are gonna go through all of these cleanup steps although Cooper he has slightly different versions of it let's do mine first because first of all I got to feed my people by default and one since I started with two workers I means I need to spend to food if I had recruited more workers it would be three food or even more if I get the SPECIAL workers and and so on so I owe to food now I don't have any in storage so and if I can't feed my ships get anchored and so I lose points no problem though because remember I've got one two three food out here I'll just go on ahead and take this and use it because if it's out in the fields I can either transfer it into my storage which is a wasteful action I mean I potentially this stuff or I can use it to pay I'm gonna use this double food to pay the to food I need all of my people are fed her ray then uh oh oh hold on a second all a second before no I forgot I'm a bum I worked so hard to outfit my ship but then I didn't use the power I better use it so on my last turn be uh buff before I quit I went on ahead and use this and I'll just go in ahead right now I don't know I have enough tiles I could use this to place another tile somewhere I just want some more money although I could use this down here to get to resources that could be the two goals I need or another a golden a cloth that I need to outfit but then I'd have a problem I would have a problem because the reason I mentioned this I forgot after we feed our workers we have the opportunity to spend coins to get our ship tile back and I want to be able to use this every round if I use this and then when I get here I don't have a coin it's gonna be locked up and I won't be able to use it for the entire second round so even though I could get the resources I need I'll find another way to get that cloth in gold I'm gonna put it right here which gives me two coins they go into the marketplace as a free action I'll move them up here and you can see I'm starting to run out of storage space but now when we get here I can have a choice I can either pay one coin to get one of these planks back or I can pay two coins to get one of my special building powers back these are cards you can get if you build buildings and they give you powers that you can use like a bank but once you've used it it's used up unless you pay two coins to get it back so use it in the next round now I have two coins I'm gonna spend one of them to get this back and next round I could if I want to put this down here and get to more resources I need to outfit more ships all right so basically I effectively netted one coin I made two but then I had to spend one to reset my outfitted ship that's on my side because I gave them their provisions they need so this is set up for the next round again hooray all right so next up if I had built any statues I would score a point for every one of them I have not built any statues yet I might do that later if I have filled up the three uh spots that are farthest away from my landing zone I mean here's my port if I can explore clear out these ruins and fill up these three spaces which means I've developed really far inland that means I score another point every round so I want to from here I want to explore over here and then explore these ruins and clear them out so that I can get all this out so I can start generating points every round the sooner I do it the more points I'm gonna get all right so after that I take my workers back and I empty out my market place which is to say if there is still anything in the market that I had not clear transferred over here and I might not be able to cuz all my storage might be full then I would lose things and then we move on to round two so that's the rest of my stuff I'm gonna do but I really should talk a little bit about Cooper's way that he's clean up because there are a couple of extra steps alright so um all right first of all Cooper gets his workers back so boom boom boom just bring those back you know easy peasy well then if there were any milestone tokens because remember I was talking about how I can complete these milestones and they give me certain things there are certain circumstances under which Cooper can complete milestones as well and if that were to happen he would then trigger one of these benefits it would be my choice which benefit are you know which one of these things happens I should say actually these benefit me I get a benefit when he levels up but that didn't happen because he hasn't done any milestones and now here's the funky thing his discard pile three cards they get shuffled and go back to the top of the deck so I know with 100% certainty what three things Cooper's gonna do next turn cuz I know what his strategy is the problem is I don't know what order he's gonna do it in so if I can get to these spaces before he does then I will in fact get a benefit oh shoot I totally forgot no I did not I did get like I got that cloth before I could get more benefits out of him so anyway so he takes easy shuffles them up and they go back to the top of his deck basically as I earn more workers he earns more workers and as he earns more workers he will dig deeper into this deck so he will start doing other incidental ancillary strategies as well okay so but for now I know he likes FB and H those are his preferred spots to go to alrighty again like a human player you know what a human player wants to do you know what their strategy is and you could try to decide to cut them off or ensure you get their not to cut them off but just to make sure you don't have to pay if they get there first alrighty so he reshuffles all of these after that he was actually supposed to go first sorry folks Klingon subtitles always turn them off he was supposed to have all his stuff and then I do my stuff so I pay my people I reset stuff I get points I recover my workers but there's an extra step it only happens in the solo game I'm gonna recover my two workers two workers of a third color block those spaces so basically next round if I want to do these actions again I gotta pay to get past Cooper Cooper has additional stuff that I have to pay and of course these will clear out as well so every action I do potentially blocks me on the subsequent round now of course this is only a solo thing but it is to represent Cooper by default all of his cards only go to these locations the locations of just getting basic resources which is what these are about he'll never go there but since I go there if I come over here then this would be blocked and I'd have to pay big time to go to it again in a future round so that's that I've done all of mine we now move on to round 2 this is now standing up again so there is a discount so it's three cloth and two wood or gold or it's for cloth and one gold and Cooper as always goes first and he goes to H ah okay so um he is gonna go there and right so it doesn't matter how many people go there ahead you always just have to pay the most recent person and so I mean it was blocked anyway so that's the thing because it's blocked if I want to do this this round I am going to have to either anchor one of my ships or give up an extra resource to give to Cooper all the interesting thing is Cooper doesn't care about resources so as a solo thing when I give him resources he just dumps them and takes a point instead so that's a problem I do want to do this I'm setting myself up to get more clocks remember if I can put this here I can get more gold on this space since it's so tall and I just need to get some cloth I can get two cloth over here and I've still got a coin to pay it off at the end of the round but I will have to have an extra resource if I want to do that this turn but as soon as I do as soon as I hit my second one I'm gonna unlock another worker and that's a huge deal to the more workers the better in a worker placement game so um he has done his first action I know his next action is either gonna be go to F or go to B so I probably want to go to one of those so that I will get some more free B resources from him and I'll lock him down even more preventing him from scoring points now it's a 50/50 chance I don't know where he's gonna go I can come here because I could now clear out either one of these ruins but here's the problem I want to clear out these ruins up here so that I can fill this up and remember at the end of the round I can score points for having all those areas explored I don't want to necessarily take care of those ones I mean it's not the end of the world but if I come here first then I will get resources because I know he's gonna go there eventually now here's one thing I could do I mean I was planning on using this as a free action to get the resources I need instead I could use this to place one of these tiles I could go up here like this and or over here like this let's say and now that means I could clear out a ruin put it over here and start working on a statue which is a point scoring opportunity and then I'll get resources when he follows me but that is not how I'd rather you do this because if I want to if I want to explore I should use one of these I mean there's still plenty of spaces that will allow me to explore I mean I could put two tiles down or I could put one I could draw one in place one so I've got to decide what am I gonna do and I've also got decide am I gonna pony up a third resource or a next resource so I can get here or am I gonna lose a point by locking one of my ships now before any of that though that's all when I get to the worker placement spot and in fact actually I'm sorry I cheated Cooper has not done his he hasn't yet actually no he hasn't yet yes he did but he hasn't done this yet because of course I went straight to skip B first there's income I got to my income which means once again I get to place another one these inlet aisles and I get to explore some more for free that happens then the worker placement so that means I could reach up here and start clearing these out I do think that makes sense okay so and I got to ask which one of these powers do I want to activate and also when I do it do I want to put it over here like this so that I'll get that benefit and then when I cross over I'll get the benefit again or do I want to put it over here like this and then when I hop over it I can get this benefit so right I would like to I would like to get I would like to get this down and get my worker as quick as possible I've got one two cloth I'll need another cloth into gold if I get enough cartography I could just build this although ah see here's the problem for one cartography what I can do is I can spend that to take one of these little singles and put it on an existing space specifically to shim up so that I can let's see if I can find one I need an example tile here ah push the bag won't Gregg does not give it so if I had this in my collection and I wanted to go again number I put them I want to go like this because then I'm getting even more gold and more food I can't do it right now because it's uneven but for one cartography I can put a shim here and do that and then boom that would give me um what do you call it for food and for gold and maybe that's okay cuz that means I could use for gold and - on round three anyway so that's another use for cartography instead of just expanding out you can shim to do regular expansions which is a pretty cool thing - not that it matters because the two tiles I have they don't they don't work like this and you can only shim one level so I can't just shim up a ton to say go like this and just build a bunch right there I could individually for one for two cartography I could put a single forest and then for three cartography I could put another forest and then for one more cartography I could shim up so that so if I had a ton of cartography I could do that get a bunch of wood which I need for building boats and get a bunch of gold which I need for outfitting ships but I would need a lot of cartography for that I remember all that would've been a free action the problem is the problem is I can't oh and actually I misspoke because you can only do one cartography for per turn you can do cartography once in a you can do cartography once during every one of your work replacement spots oh you're all kind of limited but that would be a way to do it but I would need a ton of cartography now coming to this spot gives me three cartography and that would start climbing back up so I could shim over here or I could swim over this way I could just go ahead and store this and then I would need to spend less cartography to shim and but unfortunately n I have a mountain and a force I don't have a mountain in a town so it'd have to be a mountain in a town which I don't have ah the bag is not giving me what I needed so anyway that's there so all this is because I'm thinking about which of these tiles am I gonna take I could give myself a food and stone and wood I could I could clear out one of these ruins right now I could give myself a gold or a cloth I could give myself a coin or I could give myself plus one the old cartography track which I have not done yet I don't have any cartography right hmm that is a tough choice in it but this game is full to the brim of super challenging choices but if say I go on ahead and get the cartography and I put this here my cartography increases by one I've got some more food because I'm gonna need to feed people as well and I don't have to store over here I can just store it out you know in the in the local warehouses or whatever and then he doesn't do cleanup and then he goes we already know that he has decided to go to H which you know he's not bothered by the other player but I'm you know cuz he all right and then if I oh I oh I forgot my other remember my income was place a Inlet and place a regular one so I probably I probably probably probably want to go like this so I've got some stone and I've got some wood and now I've reached these and the reason I'm doing that is because my first action is to come over here and clear out a statue or I've explored a ruin which does nothing for me immediately but now this gets flipped over and on a future turn I could build this statue I have to build it in existing spot and statues starts going pointsme for the rest of the game and as you can see I can only be working on one statue if I previously built a building then I could be working on two statues at once but I did this because I'm hoping this is where he's gonna go and that's gonna give me a little something-something alright and I have free I'm not gonna do him I let's just have him go again and it's be alright he went you went to the other place but that's okay all right so uh and all he is going to do is just go there and block that space or oh but I forgot I forgot Cooper when he drew this he went there and if he's if he has that Royal Order card which he doesn't he does not get freebie points for this because this was the new card II had but the Harbormaster if it was already down or oh when he played this and he went here he knocked this down so there is no discount I am NOT gonna try and do that this round because he's blocked the discount I'd have to pay full price plus extra so that happened on his first round and again folks clean on subtitles Paulo noted it and he did not get points because he does not have that in his own little personal supply but then he blocked B and it says he gets a point because he does care about building boats and he can't get a point but what he does instead is he swaps off one of these anchors that were slowing him down so okay so that was that I know he's gonna go here next so that's cool I've got one more worker placement action I could do I got a whole bunch of stuff here and I know next round I am going to outfit this ship which means I'm gonna need five gold and I'm gonna need that gold I'm gonna need I'm gonna need some cartography I think I'm just gonna come over here and get one two three cartography plus a coin or a resource of my choosing which I will immediately have to store and that will be a gold there we go alright well it could be a coin no but I've got the coin that I'm gonna need and I still haven't done this so on my last turn I'm gonna do one of these things I could give myself two more resources that could be two more gold I've got room to store it so then next round I'm gonna need five gold I'm gonna need four gold because I've got the two cloth I need so I only need one more gold next round and I could do it if I do this to take cloth yeah so let's go ahead and just get some more gold cuz I was thinking I was gonna need that cartography to build up here to get a bunch of gold off of it and I could still do that I could still do that let's let's not let's not yeah is that's my plan I need this cartography so I can build here so this will be a gigantic mighty level five gold mine and that'll be all the gold I need so let's go on ahead let's just go ahead and get two more cartography so I'm maxed out I'm cartography master so as you saw that round was very quick because I didn't do a bunch of really complex enter I'm setting myself up for round three Cooper gets one more action and as we know it's F that's where I wanted to see him go and boom uh he gets anchored again anchors not away and um right but he does and I get another resource so you don't want some food yeah with that let's just go on and take some food cuz I'm gonna need to feed people D in the second round so and uh because he does have the statue card he scores a point so that anchor he just got he just lost he just shook it off all right so that was it for him round two much quicker then round one but you know there was a lot of stuffs I could explain in round one so at the end of the round once again we uh you know he was all he he gets his workers back bippity-boppity-boo including these ones so they are no longer blocking those spaces they're gonna block these spaces when I get pulled off and then he didn't do any milestones which is to say I didn't create any workers that would allow him to get milestones and then he just shuffles this back up so he's set to go again we know what he's gonna do but we don't know what order he's gonna do it in and now I got to do all of my stuff I need to feed I'll take this food cuz it's wasting storage space and one of these ones out here what the heck I'll go on ahead and take this one so those are the two food I needed to feed I have one coin to reset my outfitted ship so I get another bonus later on I have not built any statues I have no I've started to work on this but I haven't finished that up there so I don't get you points for that I take my workers back and then as an extra thing they get blocked for the next round I don't have anything in my warehouse we move on to round 3 of 5 and we do our income and once again I have to make a choice about why I've only got this tile left I didn't draw any from the bag and this is really painful if at the beginning of your turn you don't have any tiles you are missing a free income step which is super painful um but so I'm gonna place this somewhere where we gonna place it I could I could go like this let's say and now I've almost completely filled that up and I've got more stone and more wood and I could use that stone in wood for building ships alright I need wood and coins to build ships I need stone and wood and coins to build buildings which I haven't even done yet but if I build buildings I can start getting myself all kinds of cool special powers and if I build three buildings Ford's over I can score points off of it yikes all right bless today I did that I don't know if that's necessary the wisest thing because here's my problem I now get to put another inlet out and I can't put it here because it's ruined I can't put it here which means I gotta put it over here which means I'm gonna try and score points with this boat and this boat but let's say I go with that and I put this here like this it gave me one coin which I have room for and now the next time I score points I want to move forward on this one to get more cartography or this one to get more coins alrighty and um oh shoot I did have one cartography from that I did have one cartridge or no idea I guess right ok I think I did and I uh uh folks watch the Klingon subtitles turned on I I think I screwed myself out of one cartography but c'est la vie so I've done that and I've done my free income and then Cooper says hey where am I going boss he's going to go to H and that is a real problem that is not where I wanted him to go that's bad news but again players will block you like that if their first alligator which is why fighting for first player is a really big deal shoot so now that means he's again taken away I have to pay more or lock one of my ships and he has taken away the bonus so now I've effectively got to play five gold - cloth and something else Oh drat drat drat drat well for starters I will spend one two three four of all my cartography to build up here so I've got all the gold I need there's the five gold and I've got the two cloth so I can do it and hey I've got an extra gold or a coin I could give him uh you monster you monster so here's the deal next he's gonna go here or here I want to go to the ones place before him can I build a boat to build a boat I need the cheapest one I could build would be coins and one would which I have would but I do not have coins no siree Bob now I can get coins by converting cloth in the coin but I need the cloth for up there I could get two coins right here that way yes okay so first of all as a freebie action I'm gonna give myself two more coins boom boom then my first action is gonna be oh you block me I'll block you pal and so I'm gonna get to build a boat so if I come back over here and looky-loo I can pick any one of these boats here and um but and they will like the inlet tiles they will immediately give me that reward and then they will also keep giving me that reward for every round as part of income so I want gold and cloth coins cartography duplicate the power of a different one more storage plus a resource or just drawing ooh wait wait regardless I'm gonna spend one wood and three coins here's the three coins and I'm gonna take one wood from these forests I've got out here I'll just go ahead and take this one so that's how I paid for this slot and you know what well these are all good I think I'm just gonna do this because now at the beginning of every round I get to draw tile from the bag and that's the tile that I can place so I will never be in a situation where I don't have a tile to place for free and continue exploring because remember there are bonus points to be had for exploring all the island so I did that I get it I get to do it immediately and at the beginning of every round from now on and we've got that and oh this is was looking for earlier cover the mountain and the town get a bunch of cloth and although I need cartography to to build up but anyway so I did that and that is what I done and I've still got free all right and so now he says hi I'm going to be okay so he's got to follow me sorry pal he doesn't want to pay me so he gets locked down again like a human player would and I get one of these a wood or a stone and I'm running out I don't want to block him much anymore I see you know I've got two son if I get enough stone I think I'll take a stone and I'll go ahead and store it I could start aiming at trying to build one of these buildings to give me a special power for the rest of the game too so anyway so that was that he blocked me um but as it says at the bottom of the card he gets if he has the World Order card and he gets one point which he does so he didn't get stuck there all right so still I am slowing him down you got to interfere with him um to slow him down okay so that was that and it's my last action and well I don't wanna I don't know I could do that I could still go there I don't want to go a whole nother round so this is very painful this represents me I'm going someplace and whether is Cooper or another player it works the same I have a choice I can give Cooper a resource which he would store in his marketplace although in Cooper's case he doesn't start he just takes the resource and turns it into a point um or I can lock one of my ships which means and then in the future when I score points that I haven't scored very many points although yeah because I haven't done any of the big items when I score points instead of getting to move my ship forward and trigger these abilities I will unlock that anchor potentially oh if I lock one ship the other ship can still move but if I get multiple locks I have to spread them equally amongst all my ships alright I don't want to get my ships locked down do I know I don't so I will go on a heading this stone I just got I'll give it to him but he treats it as a point so he's now free to move around again um and I didn't lock myself down so that was the tax I had to pay to get in here but now that I am in there I'm gonna take five gold and 1/2 cloth and unlock a second one of these boom alright and because I have now unlocked - I have triggered my first milestone I can either score two points uh uh I'm gonna take a worker and this gets interesting as well I'm gonna choose one of these I can take another regular worker or I can take I can upgrade an existing worker now here's the problem all of my work on the board so if my workers were still just hanging around I could upgrade this guy into this guy and then I would place him um but since they're all used up it makes no sense to get one of them but if I still had a guy I would probably do this I because the whole process is very interesting if you take one of these upgrades one of your workers who hasn't been used at Drowned gets placed on one of these victory point cards and now that means because I've done this I have now triggered the ability to score points based off of the number of ships or the number of buildings or the amount of exploration or the height that I have built that's if I do an upgraded worker but I don't have a worker available sadly because I didn't get there in time I could still take the upgraded worker but since there's no existing work to upgrade that means I would just have to put him out here and that's hugely wasteful because once I have an upgraded worker you'll notice there in each of these zones there's a round in a square spot if you want to go there and the round spot is already blocked use your upgraded worker because they go into the square spots and you will get an upgraded version of the main action like over here instead of choosing either/or you get to do both or over here in addition to doing this action you also get to activate an inlet tile so these workers are hugely valuable because hiring them gives you the ability to get in game points and it gives you better worker placement actions but unfortunately I'm not gonna do that cuz I don't have any workers left so I have another choice I can hire this guy or this guy if I hire this guy my food costs go up by one saw oh three food at the end of the round if I get this guy instead my food cost will go up too but if I feed everybody I start scoring an extra point do I have enough food to feed everybody no I don't and in fact this is a problem I am out of food oh my goodness Oh nope nope nope okay I like to do this but if I can't feed then I have to start locking stuff down I'm gonna take this guy although remember I get this guy I'm gonna get to activate him right away can I get the food I need if I take this guy because if I do and I provide for food I'll score a point let's do it let's do it let's do it okay so I've just unlocked this guy now because I'm playing solo whenever I get a worker then he gets a young wonder they are see when I get a new worker he puts one of these over here which means he is going to trigger one of these which are benefits for me these allow me to manipulate his deck so I can kind of change his strategy if there's something I don't want him to do anymore I can put it at the bottom of the deck or I can there's something I wanted to do when I wanted to do it I can put at the top of the deck etc etc so um right so I gained a new worker so I take one of his milestones put it here at the end of the round I'm gonna pick one of these three spots which is gonna let me manipulate his deck but um because I'm not done he's gonna keep going which means he's gonna start drawing new cards cuz it's like I got workers he's got extra workers too so how did all this happen all right because I did that I triggered this it gave me another worker um a bunch of stuff happened and now that means he gets to go again we're in undiscovered country here folks he's gonna go to eff he's doubling down on his F now F is already right so that means she's just gonna go here again he doesn't have to worry about paying anything have I been there right so I know he really wants to push F now cuz both F cards are in his deck and because right so he gets a point and if he has the statue Yoshi does so he just got two points boom and now he he's reached the end of this Peninsula what happens is depending on the number of players there'd be other peninsulas you start traveling to other players peninsulas because the lie the victory point track keeps going now in this case he gets a second point he comes all the way around here to this Harbor that's over there whenever a player reaches that Harbor they get a logbook now he doesn't care about the logbook but i other side of the logbooks give you resources you don't know exactly what you're gonna get he just takes this cuz it'll be worth points to him at the end of the game um so I want to keep going so I can get to this spot so I could reload and now if he keeps coming down here getting points he's gonna start going past my endless all right same way so he scored two points with his new F card so he is really doubling down on this strategy okay and so it's my turn I get one more action and then he'll take one more action so he's gonna add another card to the deck now I need food I have one what am I gonna do I have a bunch of to cartography my phone is ringing and you know what folks I think with that I'm gonna stop right there and leave as a cliffhanger because hopefully have a pretty good idea of what the game is all about you won't hear some pile thought you can hit that I in the top-right corner follow the show notes in five four three two one

Channel: Rahdo

Views: 18,483

Keywords: rahdo, baord game, baordgames, game, boardgame, review, radho, board games, boardgames, baordgame, board game, baord games, rhado

Id: X44eEbosy14

Length: 67min 13sec (4033 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2020