Underwater Cities Tutorial & Playthrough - JonGetsGames

welcome to John gates games today I'll be doing a full two-player playthrough of underwater cities now I will be teaching the rules to this game while we are playing it and I would like to ask that you turn on the Klingon subtitles just in case I made any mistakes so that you will see those Corrections now what's going on in this game is each player is trying to build out as vast and underwater city network as they can and they will do this by doing worker placement on the board but every turn you also have to play a card and if the card you play matches the color of the worker placement spot you just selected then you get to do the action on the card and that worker placement spot now there is a lot more going on to this game and I will explain all of the stuff while we are playing it but before we jump in I would like to ask that if you enjoyed this video you please consider clicking the like button down below as well as the subscribe button for the channel also if you would like to directly support the creation of videos like this one then please go to John gets games.com slash support to see a variety of ways with which you can do that including voting law and playthroughs that I make each month which is actually why this video is being made underwater cities was selected in at this current month's poll alright without further ado let's jump into the game out here we have the game fully setup for our two different players now we are gonna play the game from the perspective of the blue player over here and on this man you can see the starting city we have right here and all of the different spots that we could grow out from as we build up our underwater cities now in the middle of the table we have the main board and it's currently on the two-player side if we were playing a three or four player game we would flip it over and it has some more of these action spots now speaking of that it's time to jump into the first turn and if we look right over here we can see the turn order track now since this is the two-player sign there's only the two slots and you can see that we will be the start player in this case so let's go ahead and take our first turn now the first thing we have to do is check to make sure we don't have too many cards in our hand the base hand limit is three cards and as you can see we have three right here and part of the reason of that is because as part of setup every player drew six cards and then we discarded down to our hand size now I decided not to show that in the video so now you can see that we have this hand of three cards and we have an orange a red and a green card now those are the three colored cards in the deck and you'll notice that that matches these spots on the outside of the board when it comes to evaluating our turn what we're gonna do is take one of our action markers and we're gonna put it down into an open spot on the board now these are all spots around the outside and you can only go there if there is no other action marker on there although we can always go here and any number of markers can go onto this spot so I think for our first chart we probably want to go right over here now if we look down here this is a pretty simple action that says we will gain one kelp and a to steal Plast but before we evaluate that we also always have to play one card from our hand now if the card that we play matches the color of the spot that we chose then we get to evaluate the effect on that card however it is legal for us to play a card that does not match that color but we were just discarded and not get the benefit of that card so obviously we want to do that as rarely as possible and considering we went on to a red spot I figure we should play this red card now if we look right here we can see this says federal grant and it's pretty simple it just shows a-1 kelp in the top now this lightning bolt means this is a instant action as soon as we evaluated we take the benefit and then we discard this card now we can evaluate the card or the action first but I figure in this case our first turn is just gathering a bunch of materials so let's go ahead and it discard this and that will get us want to kelp and then we can evaluate the spot right here giving us a kelp and to steel Plast now that we've grabbed these we can add these into all of the resources that we started the game with so as you can see this might not be the most exciting first turn but gathering resources is going to be good for us now that we have fully evaluated all of our actions we can now end our turn by drawing one card from the top of the applicable deck now you can see that I just drew a narrow one card and in fact this whole deck has arrow ones and down here you can see this marker shows that we are in the first turn and this is the first era once we've completed four full rounds then we will go into the second era and then the third era in which case we will bring in the second and third era cards out here on the board for us to draw so the card just got added in to our hand and with that our turn is over and on the next turn I'll explain what all these do in a little more detail but for now we are done and the orange player can take their turn it looks like they want to start things off by placing their action marker right here on this green spot now they are also going to play this green card right here and since they can evaluate these in either order they've decided to do this first now each one of these symbols that means they're going to bump up their Federation marker once on this track and once we finish out the round as in once every player has done at three of these actions then we will look over here to the right and adjust the turn order accordingly so that means they have two bumps so they'll go up twice right here and whenever you go up to a spot you get to the benefit of that location so with the first bump they get to take one credit and with the second bump if they get to take a steal Plast these can now get added into their starting resources and it's worth noting that they are in a much better position for going first in the next round although we can of course try to compete with them but the best space on the board for going up that track quickly has now been occupied so they've now finished out this action and now they get to play this green card because the color of the card matches the color of the action space they chose and we can see here that this says it is a build a structure and it has an A in the top-left corner now if you look down here you'll notice that the orange player has this one assistant with an A and we also have an assistant now the action on both of these is the same even though the artwork is great and different but with these eight cards you simply place them down here and whenever there is an action spot on the board that says you can activate one of your action cards then you can do that card and evaluate what it says now for reference we can take a look here and see that this card that they just built says that when they activate this as an action they can build a one structure of their choice for the usual cost and then advance one space on the Federation track which we just showed over there so this allows them to do multiple things with that action now that we've zoomed out a bit I want to point out that there are two locations on the board where you get to activate that a action and use one of these cards and when you use them you tilt them to the side and it does not refresh until the end of the era now there are other cards in this deck that might change that but for the most part these are gonna be once per era things now the other thing I'd like to mention is that each player can only have a maximum of four of these and the starting personal assistance count so that means the orange player now has 2 out of the 4 max they can have although you are always allowed to discard more if you have too many now I'll talk about that more when actually happens but for now the orange player is done with their turn so they're going to draw a card and now we get to go at this point we have two more turns to go until we go into the next round and let's take a closer look at the three cards we have now this first one right here says a biotech construction crew and along the top we have icons and down the bottom we have text now for every card in the game the text down at the bottom directly explains what the icons do on the top so that's definitely nice that you know what these are doing even though the icons are pretty good now up here we can see this infinity symbol means that this is an ongoing effect as soon as this is played into our area that means that whenever we complete a connected cities second creative farm we can gain one steel blast now I haven't talked about building a cities farms or upgrading just yet so that'll make more sense pretty soon here on the next card is a biomech test now this has a lightning bolt which means it's an immediate effect we would do this if we went on to a red zone and we can see this is gonna allow us to build a city whether that be a regular or a symbiotic one the red ones down here are symbiotic and they discount of one credit now normally it costs one or two credits depending on which type you are doing so that's a nice discount although building cities also costs resources so it's just a minor help now the last card that we have right now is this extraordinary mission now this is also an immediate effect and it says that you may pay one credit to immediately perform an action that is currently available now at this point you might be looking at these cards and thinking that the power level of them seems a little bit different and that is intentional now the green cards have the most powerful effects in the game but the green locations are the weakest actions the red cards are a bit in the middle ground for both of those and the yellow cards are the weakest but the yellow actions are the strongest so that's a nice thing to think about as you are crunching through the options that you have and I think we really want to use this one right now especially considering right now there are many more open spots on the board now with that in mind we're gonna have to select one of the green locations to put our action marker down onto and I think we should go with this one over here on the right now the effect here is that we get to draw two cards in addition to the one that we always draw so we will have lots of cards in our hand to choose from and of course we'll have to discard down at start of our next chart but then down below here it says that we could spend one science resource which we do start the game with in order to upgrade one of our buildings now the alternate option is we could take one and help but I would like to do the upgrade but at this moment we don't really have anything that we can upgrade fortunately we are allowed to evaluate the card first so let's go ahead and spend one of our credits and evaluate it one of the spots on the board that's open and let's make sure to build something that we can then upgrade at this point I think this is the location we should go to now this says that we can build two farms or two laboratories and if we look at our cheat sheet right here we can see that farms are gonna cost one quel beach and laboratories are going to cost one osteoclast each now if we look over here to the right we start to see all of the stuff that these different things produce and this might seem like a lot of information but it's actually laid out really nicely now production happens after the fourth round as well as the seventh round and tenth rounds of the game and you can see here that every farm will produce a kelp and every laboratory will produce a science now obviously spending health to get help is good but we are gonna have to feed our cities at the end of every production phase and each city will take one kelp one a biomatter or three victory points and biomatter is certainly not something we want to feed them it's much harder to come by so building farms to feed our cities is a good idea now I'm getting science is also good because science lets us upgrade our buildings so that they now build things like this upgraded farm would make one kelp and a victory point and this upgraded Laboratory would make a science and a steel Plast so obviously upgrades are good so let's go for it we will spend a one seal class for each of these right here and that will allow us to take two laboratories from this bowl right here and as you can see the laboratories are these little plastic white disks and then we have to build these down into our underwater cities now as you can see there are these four different locations are on the outside of every one of these large circles and one of the spots on each of these locations is kind of off to the side now it has a little dotted line around it to show that this is a restricted area so you are only allowed to put a building down onto the spot if you are doing so and with a card action that says you have access to a restricted area so without that we can see that every single one of these areas has three different open spots and there are three different types of buildings now at the end of the game you will get more points for every city area that has a diverse number of buildings however if you have to upgraded buildings of the same type within a city you get more resources so obviously going in with the same type of production buildings in the city makes you more stuff as you're playing the game but gets you less points at the end of the game and I think for now let's go ahead and build a one laboratory right over here and let's go ahead and split this up now at the moment you might notice that we only have this one starting city and we have no other cities on the board and we are allowed to build two these in two locations without cities automatically the way this works is you are sending out building teams but that location will not be manned now I think we're likely going to want to go in this direction because if you notice on our board we have these three metropolis now as soon as we connect to a metropolis with tunnels all the way back to our starting city right here we get the benefit of that one and this one will actually get us two victory points every time we do production if we were able to connect it so I think we'll want to go in that direction so let's go ahead and send out our build crew and we'll put this laboratory right over here and what is worth noting that this laboratory will not produce anything for us until it is in a area that as a connected city and a tunnel now the reason for that is because you need a city to have a populous they can actually man this spot right here and you need a tunnel in order to get that populous to the city so you could just think of this as a laboratory that is completed and not being used at this point so we as an infrastructure plan need to try and get a city and a tunnel built out certainly before the first production phase at this point all we have done is evaluate this extraordinary mission so we can now discard this card right here and evaluate the spot now the first thing we do is draw two cards and we can just add these into our hand and analyze them on our next turn and then we also have the ability to spend one of our science and let's go ahead and get rid of that in order to upgrade one of our buildings we now have two different buildings to target and I figure we'll do the one that is already being manned and when you upgrade you simply take any other token and you put it on top of the previous one so just like that we now have an upgraded laboratory right here and when we do production we can see that instead of just making one science it will make a science and a steel for us at this point we've now finished out our turns we could draw another card from the top of this deck and now the orange player can go it looks like they've decided to go with it this action spot right here now they also have to play a card and they've gone with this a federal grant this is a red card so they get to evaluate it and it will simply give them a two credits right now so they can add these right into their area and now they get to evaluate the spot now you can see right here it shows an S with a card shape and that means they get to draw a special card now there are effectively two different types of special cards in the game we have this stack right here and in the stack we have a single credit cost and double credit cost cards and at the moment you can see all of these are faced down with a single face up one right here and with this action they could draw this top card right here or they could discard this and then draw the top three cards from this deck and then choose one of those now the other thing they could do is grab one of these three credit costs special cards that are out here in the middle of the table now there are only ever six of these and as soon as these are taken they are not refilled and all of these have this little stopwatch in the top left corner which means they are endgame victory point conditions now the reason that they have at these credits right here it's because that is an additional cost to playing all of these cards and so at this point the orange player gets to choose either one of these the top card here or they can dig down a bit and they've decided to go with this top card right here we can see that it says lobbying office and it will cost them one credit to play down but then for the rest of the game as long as they of course play this with an orange action then it says that whenever they build a city they get to advance two spaces on the Federation track so that means once they get this in play they are very symbiotic as far as putting these cities down not only do they get the city but they also get bumps up on that track which gives them bonuses and it makes it easier for them to be the starting player for now this is simply going to get added into their hand and we can now turn over the top card from the stack so there's always one face up this one right here says autonomous systems it says that during production each connected City with at least two upgraded farms produces an additional two credits and a victory point now connected cities are any city out here on our board that are connected via tunnels all the way back to our starting city right here okay oranges now done with their turns so they will finish off by drawing one card and now we get to go at this point we have five cards in our hand because we of course drew two extra cards on our last turn and that means we now need to discard down to our hand signs of three before we can proceed with our turn now when we looking at the cards we have we got a federal grant which gives us two credits and a card we've got this smuggling which lets us get rid of one seal plastic in order to get a science as well as a credits we've gone to this card right here which says lobbying office it says that whenever we build a second tunnel within the same turn we could do advanced once on the Federation track and that is somewhat nice I mean there is one location on the board and lets you build two tunnels but each tunnel costs one credit and one steel blast now obviously we might be able to in the future build two tunnels without this space based off of the use of various action cards and other bonuses so that is something to consider now right here we've already seen our biomech test which is nice because it gets us a city building action for one less credit and we also have this biomech construction crew which is pretty situational now this says down here if you remember that our if we have a connected city with two upgraded farms then we get one steel plastic an upgraded farm now that's maybe gonna happen but at the moment I do feel like we should activate this location right over here so while I don't think this is a super strong card as I mentioned before the yellow cards rarely are and I do like the idea of playing this down if we're gonna do a yellow action because it might come in handy in the future so with that in mind I think we have to discard two other things and this one I think will probably go that is a nice effect but we've got a bunch of red cards in our hand already and speaking of that I think one of these two red cards should go and right now we have a bit of a steel plastic shortage so I don't think we want to get rid of one so we will discard to this smuggling and it now we can take our turn so as I mentioned I think we want to go right here because this is a really good spot to gather some resources because currently we are a bit low on steel classed and this will also allow us to activate one of our action cards when we take a closer look over here you can see that this will let us take two resources and it could be from any of the three basic ones but we cannot take the same one twice we always have to play one card so let's go ahead and play this a biomech construction crew just like we talked about and since this does not have a lightning bolt we're not going to discard it we are instead going to play it into our tableau because the color of this card matches the color of the location we activated when we come back to our area I think for organizational purposes we'll put this one right over here and then we're gonna put our action spots right over here along the top next up let's evaluate the spot now I just said that one of the reasons we're going here is because we are at a bit of a steel plastic shortage so let's go ahead and grab one of those and then we can take a kelp or a science and right now we have three kelp and at no science so I think that makes us pretty easy let's go ahead and take that science and then we can evaluate an action card when we come back over here we can see that we currently only have a one action card it's our personal assistant the dolphin it's got some flavor text down here it says he wants to talk about our small brain human but as you can see up here when we activate this we either get to take a steel Plast or a credit now as I mentioned before you can only use these at once per era so we will fill this one over to the side and if we want to do more actions then we need to either find a card that lets us refresh this or we can wait or of course we can play some more cards that have this action ability on them now I think in this case we have two steel Plast right now and that is enough to go ahead and build another city so what we should probably do is take a credit with this ability so that we have a couple of credits knocking around these are certainly good resources to have we can now finish out our turn by drawing the top card from the deck and now the orange player can go this is going to be their third and final action of the round and they decided to go right over here onto this yellow place now this allows them to build a city whether it be normal or symbiotic and they also have the ability to build a farm a desalination plant or a laboratory now alongside this they've decided to play this a yellow card from their hand and this is actually the special card they picked up last time around now in order to play this they do have to spend a one-credit to the bank which they will do right now and since this is an infinity symbol that means they can put this face up in their area now if you remember this says that we get two Federation bumps every time they build a city it looks like that's gonna work out pretty well for them considering they are now going to build a city and one of these other buildings once again we can come back to our cheat sheet and look at the costs for building now they're gonna build a regular city which will be one of these white domes right here and that's gonna cost them both of their steel Plast as well as it one kelp and one credit next up they have to build the city down into their area and that can go adjacent to any of their previous cities now we can see they have this starting city right here so there are three legal spots are right along there and they've decided to put this one right over here now as soon as they go there it's going to cover up this a federation bump icon and this icon right here which shows they get to draw one card so that is a bonus they get for placing this of course that means they are maybe going to be building and they're connected tunnels out this way and over so they won't get access to perhaps these two benefits right here but either way they're going pretty hard on this for now so they're gonna put that right here in again you can effectively think of this as an empty city they sent out their build teams they built the city up but nobody lives there yet because they are not connected to their starting city via tunnels so for now let's go ahead and give them their bonuses this means they draw one card from the top of the deck and they go up a once on this Federation track now if we look down here that little symbol with a water drop and a star that is victory points so that means the orange player has now taken the first point of the game but they're not done yet because if you remember they were able to play this lobbying office which gets them at two Federation Trac bumps every time they build a city now they just built a city and if we look down here we can see they're already at the top of this Federation track and every time you would bump up but you can't you simply get one point for each one that you don't go so in that case the orange player gets two more victory points and that was a very good turn for them with that being said they're not quite done yet because over here on this action they also the option of building a farm and a desalination plant or a laboratory well when we come back to our cheat sheet we can see the only thing they can afford is a desalination plant because they don't have any kelp or steel plant but they're okay with this they will get rid of this one credit to build that desalination plant and as you can see those generate money as well as biomatter when they get upgraded and biomatter is harder to get but it also counts as a kelp or as a seal plastic if you want to use it it's also necessary for building these symbiotic cities now the only reason you want to make a symbiotic red cities over the regular ones is because they generate two victory points every time you do production so obviously getting points is good because of when the game is over the person with the most points is gonna be the winner either way the orange player will now get rid of this credit and then they're gonna build this desalination plant right over into this city at this point orange can now finish out their turn by drawing the top card but I also just realized that at the start of their turn they ended up four cards in their hand and they had to discard one of those now obviously they played this at lobbying office and it looks like the one they decided to get rid of will be this lobbyist right here which gives even more Federation track bumps I guess the orange player feels like if they have enough ways to go up with that anyway so sorry for that mistake they should have discarded that at the beginning of their turn and at this point the orange player is now done and in fact everybody is done with our actions so we can now go into the end of the round phase now the first thing we do is each player will take back all of their action tiles and it is worth noting that every player has three of these at the start of the game and there's no way to gain more of these so you will always have three now once each player has taken all of these back we can now look over here to the Federation track in the player who is farther up will be the starting player for the next round so obviously we're down here at the bottom and the orange player is up here at the top so that means orange will go first we will go second and now all of these tokens will fall all the way down now if you remember the orange player started right here and that was just a bit of setup balancing for the fact that we got to go first for the rest of the game everybody always starts on even footing down here at the bottom now the last thing we have to do is move in the round tracker forward once the show we are now going into the second round of the game and if you look at this tracker you can see there are ten spaces which means we are gonna play over ten rounds and then as I mentioned before there is a production phase after round four seven and ten which means we will produce right before we go into endgame scoring all right it's now the orange player's turn because they are obviously at the top of this track and the first thing they have to do is discard down to the hand limit of three so they're gonna get rid of this scavenging the sea floor card over there and then they've decided to start off by putting their action marker onto that spot right there they of course also have to play a card and it looks like that is going to be improvised green house now this has these gears in the top left which means this card will only activate during the production phases of the game and this says that during production one of their upgrade tunnels that is adjacent to a connected city will create a one-credit one kelp and one science instead of the normal one credit and one point that you usually get for upgraded tunnels now at this point I haven't really talked about tunnels just yet but I'm sure that's coming up soon and it looks like the orange player is planning on getting one built and certainly trying to upgrade it before the first production next up they can evaluate the action on this spot and it looks like they're gonna take one kill and a one steal class because again they get to take two resources but they cannot be the same and they are also going to get to activate one of their action cards at the moment they have two available to them and it looks like the one they want to do is build a structure so this says they get to build a structure for its normal cost and then they get to go up once on the Federation track so the first thing they will do is build a structure and they've decided to build a farm now farms are gonna cost kelp and they do happen to have one kelp now so they will get rid of this and then build this farm over here into this starting city on next up we know that this card will give them one bump on the Federation track so just like that they are already in the lead for trying to maintain the starting player in the next round but we'll see if we'll be able to do anything about that at this point they can finish out their turn by drawing the top card and now it's time for us to take our first action of the round now it looks like the card we just drew is another federal grant this one would give us one credit when we do a yellow action and I think what we should do for this turn is a red action and this biomech test getting one of these domes out for a one credit discount is certainly nice and I think we should go right over here so we're gonna play this one right here and we're gonna put this token down and the reason for that comes from two different angles the first is that we have this brown metropolis over in the top-left corner of our area and it says that as long as we connect this via tunnels all the way back to our starting city by the end of the game we will get two victory points for every special card that we have played so we are somewhat incentivized to try and put special cards down and if we look at the brown metropolis on our opponent's board we can see that they will get extra points depending on the number of cities that they built and obviously they've already started out strong by getting some building city building synergy going now there is one other thing to consider and that is these three government contracts in the middle of the board now technically this is an optional there you don't have to play with but I like using these because they give you a little races that you're going for throughout the game the first person to meet the requirement on the left-hand side will take the card and get all of the benefits on the right-hand side and if we look over here we can see this says that the first person to play three special cards will get three victory points and one biomatter now of course our opponent already has one special card out so we are a little bit behind but we are extra motivated to do this considering we have at the special card brown metropolis now we can look over here and see that this card right here will get will make one player be able to build a farm get a kelp and get three points if they have connected two of their three metropolis and over here the first person to get six tunnels out will get two victory points a steel Plast and two science so all of these are certainly nice and there's something we should start considering as we are playing through our turns well with all that said let's go ahead and evaluate our turn and I think we want to do this before we evaluate the card that we played so as I said before we can either take one of these face-up and game point ones or we could take the top card from this deck or we could draw the top three and choose one of those and I think that's what we want to do endgame points are certainly nice but we are not really sure which one of these we should go after just yet and this card right here well it's pretty situational it gives you two credits and a victory point well every time you produce it in a city with two upgraded farms we currently don't have any farms so let's go ahead and discard this one down to the bottom and look at the top three cards now we have to choose what one of these and put the other two down to the bottom so let's see what our options are this one right here is a two credit card which means we'd have to pay two credits when we play it in it's a secret mission it says that we can pay one credit to perform the action in any slot and that slot must be available or not already occupied by ourselves that is an action card and a pretty potent now let's look at the next option and this is a production card it costs one credit to play out and it says island we would simply produce one credit and to kill every time we produce which is a pretty good card and the last one is an immediate effect now this one has the single credit and obviously the double credit ones are slightly better this is a red card and it says down here that at random we draw two of the blue metropolis tiles and that we did not use when we set up the game and we can choose one and return the other our network is now connected to that chosen metropolis and we can keep that new metropolis in there our board now all three of these are really nice but I think we just can't say no to the secret mission being able to spend one credit to evaluate a location that our opponent went on to before we were able to seems really good now it's expensive to get this one played and right now we don't have a lot of credits but I think that the benefits of these two just simply can't outweigh how nice this card could be in a key moment later on in the game so we can add this card into our hand and put these other two down to the bottom of this special card pile and then of course we have to finish this off by revealing the top card and this one is a red card and it says sale of technology you can get rid of one tech in order to get to kelp and three victory points when you play that card all right we have now finished this part of our action but it's now time for us to do our biomech test this will let us build one city and a one credit discount when we come down here we can see that we would love to get one of these symbiotic cities built because they generate two points every time we produce but unfortunately they cost a biomatter and we currently don't have any of that so our dreams of getting these builds are gonna have to wait until later on in the game so for now let's get a regular city built and normally that costs to seal plastic one kelp and one credit but at that card we just played it means we don't have to pay the one credit right here so we can put this down right over here which makes sense considering we already built a laboratory in that spot and we of course have to get rid of two steel Plast and one kelp now at this point we have built to the city and we built a laboratory but both are empty and that won't change until we build a tunnel right here so I think that's probably gonna start to become a priority for us alright our turn is done so we can draw a card and the orange player can now go it's time for orange to take their second action of the round and they're gonna go right over here and they're gonna play this a yellow card now this says a biomech construction crew and down at the bottom we can see that whenever they build a connected city's second desalination plant they will generate one credit so this is an ongoing effect so they can add that into their tableau and then over here they've simply decided to take two science instead of spending up to three signs making upgrades so they'll take two signs from the bank and then finish out their turn by drawing a card at this point we can now take our turn but we have one too many cards so we have to discard one down and I think we don't need this card right here it says seafood collection and it's red and it says that if we have at least one upgraded tunnel adjacent to a connected city we could gain one kelp when we play this card but we don't have any tunnels at all at this point so let's just discard that and now when it comes to taking our turn I really do think we should start to prioritize trying to get tunnels now we have an action marker and I think if we look down here we can see that we have no steel at all so we should probably go right over here in order to gain to steal and a kelp now the problem is that we have no red cards in our hand and we always have to play a card every time we take a turn so I think we should probably go ahead and get rid of this federal grant this green one right here gives two credits and a card whereas this yellow one just gives it one credit although I suppose we need to consider how are you more likely to go up here or down here on future turns now if we take this we're in a position to build two tunnels and it is a yellow spot over here with the two tunnel markers we can see that our opponent only has a one steal class right now so if they went over here they'd only be able to do one of these two and they might not do that so maybe we should actually discard at this federal grant right here even though it has an extra card and an extra credit because we are hoping to on the next turn go over here and discard that all right I've made my decision we've gone ahead and played this card right here alongside of this action marker but since the color does not match we do not evaluate the card at all and we can now go over here and take our two steel Plast and one kelp we can now finish out our turn by drawing the top card and orange can now take you there third action it appears they've decided to go right over here onto this green spot which will allow them to build two desalination plants and they're gonna play this green card which says my technology negotiation and this will allow them to pay one credit to upgrade at one of their farms they've decided they want to build it the desalination plants first and if you remember those are gonna cost one credit each so when we come back over to their area we can see they're gonna spend two credits in order to get both of these desalination plants built and they've decided to put the first one right over here and the second one over here into the city now the moment they place this second desalination plant into their starting city this biomech construction crew will activate we can see down here that they will immediately gain one credit every time they build that second desalination plant in the city it does not have to be upgraded for this card to happen and that means they get one credit and they can immediately use this credit in order to pay for the green card that they decided to play this round now again this says they can't pay one credit in order to upgrade one of their farms and they do have a farm down here they've been I'm not planning this one for a couple turns so these can now get discarded and they can take you this green marker right here and stack it on top of this other farm so now that means when they produce this farm we'll make a kelp as well as a victory point they can now finish off their turn by drawing a card and now we get to take our last action of the round now when we look out to the board we can see that the place we wanted to go was not taken by our opponent so we can slide that right over here and if we look at our hand if we drew another yellow card let's go ahead and take a look at a specifics of this it says a black ops team whenever you choose an action slot that does not match the card that you played you gained one card so remember last turn where I played a card that we did not activate because the colors didn't match if we have this in play then for the rest of the game whenever we do that as a consolation prize we get to draw a card from the top of the deck to give us more chances that add finding good things now that's obviously really nice and I do think we want to get this one played but for now I think we should play this federal grant first it's pretty simple it just gives us a one credit since the colors match so we can discard that right there and add this one credit to our hand and it's now time for us to build up to two tunnels when we come back over here to our cheat sheet we can see that each tunnel will cost one steagle Plast and one credit to build and we can build two of them and we've set ourselves up well to be able to do this so we can discard all of these resources and now we can put these two tunnels out onto our board now if you look down here the tunnels will actually generate income for ourselves because we have population going back and forth through them and we will only get this income if the tunnel is connected into and the starting area as well as adjacent to a city so let's now go ahead and place these out onto our board and I think for us this will be pretty simple we want to put this one right over here and when we cover up this bonus that means we immediately generate one science that we can add into our pool and we can now put this one right over there now when it comes to these tunnels we technically just have to connect them into previous tunnels all the way back to the starting area so if we wanted to we could have build this here and this right over there but as I mentioned before we'd really like to connect this metropolis back to our starting city and before we produce we need to make sure that this city will become populated so by building this tunnel right here the population could go through here and the city is now inhabited and this laboratory is now manned so that means when we produce we are going to be able to build or gain the science for this laboratory although it is worth noting that when we do production we are gonna have to feed all of our connected cities as in all of our cities that are populated so by doing this we now have to make sure to have to count but once we actually finish production as opposed to before where we only needed at one Kelvin because nobody was living in that city at that point okay our turn is done so we can draw the top card and in fact the round is over because all players have played all three of their action tiles so that means each of us can go ahead and take our action tiles back and then we can look over here and see that the orange player is still ahead of us on this track so these orders will not change the orange player will now come back down here to the bottom and the last thing we do is move ourselves forward and once again on this track so we are now going into the third round of the game and you can see that we have two more rounds until the first production all right the orange player can now take their first turn and they have decided to go right over here now the spot lets them build one tunnel and activate one of their action and they of course have to play a card and it looks like they're gonna do this a yellow card now the yellow does not match the red so we can assume they don't have a red card in their hand and that means this will just get discarded and they will not get to activate it but they do get to evaluate this spot right here the first thing they will do is activate one of their action cards and they will do their personal assistant right here that can get them either a steel Plast or a credit and they've decided to take the credit now the action space they selected says they can build a tunnel and we know that tunnels cost a steel Plast and a credit and they now have exactly that so they can discard both of these and then they can add a tunnel onto their area as long as it is added into their network which means you can trace the path back to the starting city now with that they have now connected to this central city right here with its desalination plant so it is now going to become populated and the desalination plant is now online so that means they will have the ability to make it that one credit during production and orange can finish out their turn by drawing the top card from the deck all right we can now take our first two action of the round and we can take a look here and see this new card we got this says build a tunnel and it's an action card which means it could be used once per era but there are ways that you can refresh your cards as well and this says that you can spend one steel Plast in order to build one tunnel now this is nice because it lets us build a tunnel at a discount and we can build tunnels when we do the a action spots which are out here on the board like this one would now potentially become a build two tunnels with one of them had a discount and then we could also go over here gain the steel class we need and then build a tunnel later on in the game obviously building tunnels is good especially when you consider this government contract that will give two points a steel Plast and two signs to the first person with six tunnels out on the board but I think for the moment what we should do is a yellow action spot and then play this black ops team the reason for that is because we have a bunch of kelp right now and I think it's a good idea for us to try and start getting some farms built and the best way to build farms is this location right here but we don't have any red cards in our hand at the moment now we can look over at our opponent and we can see that they don't have any steel Plast or any kelp so there's no way they can even utilize this spot so we're not worried about them taking it and I think we should go to one of these yellow locations and then place this black ops team so that if we don't draw a red card the next turn we can discard a card and then activate this in order to at least draw another card as a consolation prize for doing an action without a matching card so with that in mind we now need to select one of these four yellow spots to go and if we consider the fact that we have two science right now and our opponent has three I think we should consider going to the location that lets us do lots of upgrades to stop our opponent from getting there and getting three of these out that one is right up here and as you can see it lets you either take two science or you can spend one science up to three times to do three upgrades and we have two science so I think this is still a pretty good action for ourselves we can upgrade twice and like I said we stopped our opponent from upgrading at least for this round it's very possible they might get there in the next round but for now we're at least stalling that out so let's go ahead and spend at these two science in order to do two upgrades the first one I think should be on this laboratory right here that means our laboratory will generate one science and one steel Plast and we actually have two of these upgraded laboratories which is really nice now unfortunately if we had seen this coming maybe we'd have tried to build these in the same city because then we would have had the extra bonus of getting an additional steel Plast but spreading these out will get us more points at the end of the game now we have one more upgrade that we can do and we don't have any more buildings but we do have these two tunnels right here so I figure let's go ahead and upgrade at this tunnel and we do that by flipping it over once its flipped we can see right here it has a star with the water droplet on it that counts for victory points and that means if you look over to the cheat sheet the upgraded version of the tunnel will not only generate a credit but also a victory point as long as it is next to a connected city next up we of course do have to play a card along with us so that will be the black ops team we can add that right over here as it's another conditional spot and in the future for the rest of the game whenever we play a card that does not match the color of the spot we are on then we get to draw a card from the top of the deck speaking of drawing cards we can now finish out our turn by drawing the top card from the deck it looks like we did not get a red card which we were hoping for but we have a good contingency around that now now it looks like this card we just drew says organize a conference and it's another action card in fact all of the cards in our hand right our action cards and lets you draw card get a credit and to get a science so with that our turn is now done and the orange player can take their second action of the round after considering their options the orange player decides to go right over here and if they're gonna play a green card along with that now this action is simple it just bumps them up twice on the Federation track that means they are once again in the lead for being the start player for the next round and they get to generate one credit for reaching the spot now when it comes to the card they played we can see that it says it's an immediate card and it says construction windfall if they have at least three connected desalination plants they may build one tunnel for free well they do indeed have that because we can see they have one two three connected desalination plants so this free tunnel will go right over there for them it looks like they're angling to get over here and connect up this metropolis and it now they can discard this card they can now finish out their turn by drawing the top card and now we get to take our turn now we currently have two more actions before the end of this round and we can still see that our opponent has no steel Plast and no kelp so we're not too worried about them taking the spot so I think we should wait one turn longer and instead of going right here right now let's go ahead and play on to this location when we do that we will have the ability to take two resources out of these three options and we can activate an action card and right now all of our action cards are exhausted but we can now play this build a tunnel one because it matches the yellow color of the spot so let's go ahead and play this card first into our tableau and then we're gonna want to take some resources now we know that this is a discounted tunnel as in it doesn't need a credit but we do still need a steel plaster and we don't currently have any so we should definitely take one steel plaster with that benefit which means that we can take one more but it has to be a different type so that's kelp or science and we're out of science right now so I figure let's take another one of these these are very good for getting things upgraded and the more stuff we can upgrade before this first production the better so we can now take both of these and put them in our area and we can now activate one of our action cards when it comes to choosing and this is pretty straightforward because we only have one available action card so we will use it this one right here and it will let us build a tunnel for just a steel Plast so we can discard that right here and now we can place this tunnel out and I think that we want to put it right over here now you have to put these tunnels down in such a way that they are connected back to the starting city but they do not need to be adjacent to a city now it is worth noting that if we do a production and this tunnel right here is not adjacent to a connected city then we will not produce for that tunnel automatically not enough people are going through the tunnel to make it produce but by doing this we are going to connect this metropolis up with our starting city and that means we can immediately evaluate it now we can see here at the top this says we are going to immediately grab one steel Plast and one card and whenever we do a production phase for the rest of the game we will generate two extra points because of this metropolis is connected back to our starting city so we can add that steel plaster over here and then we can draw the top card from the deck as the other benefits it looks like we got a red card so that's nice it's yet another one of these actions I'll remember you're only allowed to have four actions face-up in your area total although you can discard some in order to get more down now this one right here says that you can build a farm or a desalination plant for the usual cost and then you can gain a card so that's yet another way to get these important production buildings down now at this point we finished down all of the actions on our turn so we can end our turn by drawing another card from the top of this deck and it looks like we found a yellow card this one right here says whenever we build a second of two farms in this on the same turn we advance one space on the Federation track well hell we were planning on doing that next turn so that's a really nice grab although the spot we were gonna go to was red and this is a yellow card so I'm not sure if we're actually gonna get this out in time either way those are decisions that we have to make on the next turn but for now we can move on and the orange player can take their third action of the round after some consideration they've decided to go right over here that will allow them to grab two steel Plast and one kelp and they have to play a card and it looks like it's going to be a green card they were not able to get a red card and they really feel like they need these resources so this card will get discarded without being activated and then they of course get to grab two steel Plast and the one killed before that action spot and they can now finish out their turn by drawing the top cards from the deck all right we now have just this one action left and we have too many cards in our hand this means we have to discard one of them and we know we want to keep this secret mission we're definitely going to get that played at some point this card right here is a really nice action that we could use in the future to have another way of building a farm or a desalination plant and then we have these two cards right here now we just do this and it works really well for the plan that we are trying to build up which will let us go over here and build a couple farms and while the bohtan benefit right here is not amazing just going up once on this track it would be nice to potentially contest the orange player bit with that now I don't think this action is as powerful as the rest of these so let's go ahead and discard that card right there and then take our turn now I was planning on going right over here and building two farms of this turn but I think instead let's put our action token right over here this spot lets us build up to two tunnels and it will let us play this yellow card which will let us gain a federation bump every time we build two farms in the same turn and we can just plan on doing that probably for the first action of the next round which will be the last round before the first production so let's go ahead and add this into our tableau of conditional things we now have two conditional things that work for farms although this one right here simply gives us a steel Plast every time we build a second upgraded farm in the same city which obviously we are not close to doing just yet and at this point we can now do the main action of building up to two tunnels but unfortunately we only have the resources to build one of them one is still better than none though I think so let's get rid of this credit and this steel Plast and lets us put this one out on the board now this is good for a couple reasons this is going to be our fourth tunnel and there is that government contract to be the first person with six tunnels out there is also a government contract to be the first person to connect two of their metropolis so I figure let's go ahead and put this right here so we are working up here to try and connect this one up that means we just need two more tunnels and in fact that would be our fifth and sixth tunnel so if we do that before our opponent then we would take two of the government contracts with that one action right there so I think that's definitely something for us to try and do also by putting this tunnel right here it's adjacent to one of our connected cities and that means that tunnel will generate one credit for us during production which is certainly nice it's going to kind of half pay for itself all right we are not done with our turns we can draw the top card and it looks like we picked up another action this one just says that you could to build a city for the regular cost we'll keep that one in mind it seems like we are just overflowing with action card possibilities at this point both players have placed all three of their action markers so we can now go into the next round it looks like we were really yellow centric I just realized we put all three of ours up there along the top and our opponent was quite heavy on the red this round we can now look over here and see that orange is still at the top of the Federation track so this will go right down here and the turn order will not change and lastly we can move this round token up to the fourth level so we can see that these are going to be the last three actions that we have before the first production phase so the orange player can take their first action of this round and without hesitation they're going to put it right up here and then they're gonna play a yellow card to match up with it this yellow card is a production card and it simply says that on during production they will generate one credit so they can add this into their tableau and now we can see over here they've gone on to the science and upgrading spot this location right here will let them take two signs or they can spend on one signs up to three times in order to upgrade three things on their board well when you consider the fact that they have three signs right now they are definitely going to cash all three of these in to do three upgrades now the first upgrades they're gonna do or for these two desalination plants now normally you're supposed to stack these up but you can't really see that on camera so for the sake of this video I will stack them alongside here and once they put both of these in that means that they now have two upgraded desalination plants within the same city so over here if we look to the GG we can see they're gonna generate three credits and two biomass the one of those credits is effectively a bonus because normally each of those would create one credit and one biomaterial that is so that's a pretty nice combo for them but they still have one more upgrade to do and it looks like they are going to flip over this tunnel right here now that's not too surprising considering they have this improvised greenhouse I guess they effectively make that tunnel a greenhouse and instead of generating one credit and one victory point they now have the option of having this one tunnel create one credit one kill and one science orange is now done with their turn so they can finish it out by drawing the top card from the deck which means that we can now take our first action of the round and I don't think we should put this off any longer we will put our action token right over here and we are going to build two farms we also could build two laboratories if we wanted to and we do have to play a card from our hand so I figured that will be this action card that says you can build a farm or a desalination plant now obviously this only activates when one of the action locations on the board happens I believe there are also cards that you activate some of your actions but either way we can now just add this into our tableau of action cards it will be our third because we had these two already which have both been used so we can now go ahead and evaluate this spot and as we've mentioned a few times we are going to go ahead and build it two farms and each farm will cost at one kelp now at this point we can put these down onto the board and I think we should put both of them into this city right here now the moment we have placed two of these on the same turn that's going to activate this embassy right here which says we could to go up once on the Federation track every time we build it two farms in the same turn which will bring us right to the fourth spot which unfortunately does not have a bonus but we are now in the lead over the orange player to potentially be the starting player in the next round all right our turn is now done so we can draw on the top card of the deck and it looks like we picked up a yellow card and it simply says that you could build a desalination plant by paying the regular costs so it's just an extra action that you have available orange can now take their second action of the round and they've decided to go right over here and they're gonna play a red card now this card is an ongoing effect it says embassy and it says that whenever they advance to the third space on the Federation track they gain an additional credit so essentially for the rest of the game whenever this token that gets to the third location they get two credits instead of one so they can add this into their tableau and we can now see that this location lets them build one tunnel and they can activate one of their action cards now it is worth noting that in order to activate any location now on the board you have to be able to do at least part of that action so they would not be able to do this if they did not activate a card and did not build a tunnel and we can see that both of their action cards are exhausted so they cannot do that aspect to it so they must build a tunnel and this is the main reason they chose that spot so in order to build that tunnel they will spend one credit as well as one steel blast and then they're gonna put the tunnel right over here which isn't too much of a surprise that means they have now connected this metropolis back to their starting city and we can see right here that it has an immediate benefit of giving them Wan kelp and then it will generate two victory points for them every time they produce so it looks like both of us were able to get to our victory point producing metropolis before the first production phase so we can add their kelp right over here for that bonus and then they're gonna finish out their turn by drawing the top card at this point it's time for us to take our action and we have two more actions before the first production phase now I think what we should probably do is spend our action over here on this a middle spot now I mentioned this briefly at the beginning of the video but multiple people can go on to this location and you simply discard a card and then you draw two cards and get two credits this is the main way that you can get credits through the throughout the middle parts of the game although I suppose for us we could try to go right here and bump up twice on this track if we did that we would get one credit and one steel Plast and we would potentially want to play this green card but unfortunately this card requires us to spend two credits it's a fairly expensive card and even though it's very powerful it's kind of been hanging out in our hand clogging up some of our options so I think we should probably still go here and discard this card right here I don't think we need an action to be able to build more cities we don't have the resources to build the cities anyway so we can discard that and then as the bonus we get to draw two cards from the top of the deck and we could take two credits from the supply now this means we have a lot more options before the next round and we've now finished out our turn so we can draw another card and I figure let's take a look at and see what we drew now this one right here is an immediate action it says technology negotiation we may pay one science or a steel Plast in order to upgrade one of our desalination plants well right now we don't have any desalination plants which could be a bit of a problem because those make money and we are a little bit low on money now the next option right here it says motivational speech it says you may rotate one of your used action cards at backup and then use it again so that could be really effect for us in the right moment and then finally we have this lobbyist which simply gives us one credit and one Federation track bump when we go to a red spot just once so overall these are pretty good cards and we can figure out which ones we're keeping on our next chart the orange player can now take their last action of the round and of the era and they've decided someone annoyingly to go right down here that means they're going to jump past us on this track and it means they're gonna get one credit for this but then they will also get another credit because they built this embassy into their tableau which gets them a bonus credit every time their marker gets to this spot so by going here they have now generated two credits which is certainly good for them and that they've decided to play this green card right here and it says that it's an autonomous systems card it says that during production for every connected city they have with two desalination plants they will produce an additional credit and this is something they've already done once orange can now finish out their turn by drawing the top card from the deck and and now we get to take our final action of the round now before we could do anything we do have to discard down to our hand limit which is three and we have five cards so that means that we unfortunately have to get rid of a couple of these and we know we want to keep this card right here and I think we want to play this card that will let us bump right on top of the orange player and be the starting player for the next era also it will get us a credit which is something that I think we're going to want so that means we now get to keep one of the V's at last cards and I think it's kind of tough to say I mean obviously this one is a cheap upgrade for a desalination plant that we don't have so we can somewhat easily get rid of this one it sounds nice but we're not prepared for it and this card right here lets us use one of our action cards effectively twice within a given era and we are about to go into a new era now we do have some nice action cards in fact one of them lets us build tunnels for rather cheap and I think maybe that is gonna be better than this card right here so let's go ahead and discard the rush job and now we can play our turn first things first let's take our action token and I think we want to go right over here we're about to generate a bunch of resources in production and we as I mentioned before the beginning of the game have at this metropolis that gets us extra points if we connected and those points are going to be for our special cards now these special cards or slightly more expensive to play but they are more powerful and I think maybe we should try to invest in making those happen in particular getting this one out and maybe finding one of these single cost cards so now we can go ahead and activate this although we do have to play a card so that will be this lobbyist as I said before the lobbyist is going to put us right on top of the orange player which means we are now in the lead and we are gonna generate one credit for the lobbyist and one credit for reaching in this third spot on the Federation track so we can now discard this card right here and I think we don't want this sale of technology card it does seem nice on the face of it we can sell one technology for two kelp and three points but I think there's probably something better in here for us so let's go ahead and it discard this and then draw the top three cards of the deck now as before we get to choose one of these three and then discard the other one and let's see what our options are now at first glance we can see that only one of these is cheap which means these are probably good but they're gonna be hard to get out this says nanomachine test we may build up to two buildings on expansion sites for free so again that those expansion sites are the restricted locations in our areas and by using this card we would be able to get four buildings around a city instead of the usual three so that is a very effective card it's a one-time-use card but it still counts for the special benefit so we get for that metropolis now the second one right here says corporate sponsorship it says we can build a tunnel for free and then upgrade it and this is an action so just by doing an action we can put an upgraded tunnel right onto our board which is very effective because these tunnels generate points and credits when we do the production as long as they are next to a city that is connected back to the network now the last of these spots is actually kind of similar to the first one we looked at this is an action it only costs one credit and it says that we can build any building on an expansion site by paying the usual cost now I think this is probably gonna be the card that we want to go with this one would let us do two right away but this is an ongoing action card and I know we have a lot of those already but I would I do like the idea of doing this at least two times in the game because that lets us really consolidate the buildings around our cities so let's go ahead and discard both of these to the bottom of the deck then we can add this card into our hand and then we can finish out our turn by drawing the top card from this deck at this point we've now reached the end of this round because everybody has done three actions so just like before everybody can take back of their action tokens and when we look over here we will see that we for the first time in a little bit are the at the top of this Federation track so that means that we will be the starting player and orange will go second and then both of our tokens can come down here and when we come over here to the round track we now push forward and we have entered the first production phase of the game now this can happen simultaneously for all players and the best way to do this is to start at the top of our cheat sheet and work our way down so the first line is the farms and we can see that every regular farm will generate one kill every upgraded farm will generate a kelp and a victory point and every pair of two upgraded farms within the same city will generate three kelp and three points bond between the two of them now if we look down here we can see we have two regular farms that means each one will generate one calvess so we can add those right in to our resources and now we can move on down the list now when it comes to desalination plants these generate credits and potentially credits and bio matter if they are upgraded but we have not built any desalination plants at this point so moving on we now have laboratories now the regular laboratories that make one science and the upgraded ones that make a science and a steel Plast and the combo benefit for having two laboratories in the same city is an extra steel class try there as you can see now we have a two upgraded laboratories but they are not in the same city so that means each one will generate one science so that will be two science total and then each one it will generate one steel blast so that is two steel class total that we can add into our area now we can keep moving on and we can see tunnels now every regular tunnel will generate one credit and this will only happen if it is adjacent to a city and that city is connected back to our starting area now an upgraded tunnel will generate a credit and a victory point and there is no benefit for having multiples in an area well when we look out here we can see that we have one two three tunnels that are connected back to two on this city right here and adjacent to a city unfortunately this tunnel is not adjacent to a city so effectively even though this metropolis is connected nobody not enough people are going through this tunnel here to generate income so that means both of these will generate one credit and this upgraded tunnel will generate one credit and a victory point so all told that will be three credits right now for the moment I suppose we can get rid of two of these and add a five into our area and then we can give ourselves our first point of the game at this point we aren't quite done though and if we take a closer look at our cheat sheet we can see this goes through all of the different steps of the production phase so we have gone through all of the gears on our board I suppose there's one more if we did have a symbiotic city then it would generate two victory points but nobody has any of those just yet I don't think anybody's made biomatter yet in the game so we can now move on and we can generate production from the cards in our tableau but unlike our opponent we have not built any of those cards out just yet we only have some conditional cards so we can pass on that and then we get to produce from every connected metropolis to our area so we know that this metropolis is connected and it does have a production bonus of two victory points so that means we can take it two points right now which means we are now temporarily tied with the orange player when we come back to the cheat sheet we can see we've now entered fades B of production and this says we can refresh all of our action cards so we can just put them right side up and now all of them are available to use in the next era and the last thing we have to do is pay one kelp one biomatter or three victory points for every one of our connected cities at the moment we have two connected cities so I figured let's spend the kelp obviously that is the cheaper thing then spending victory points we definitely want kelp to feed these cities so this these resources are now gone and we have now finished out our production phase and the orange player can now do this as well to start things off they are going to activate their farms they have one farm and it is upgraded so that means they will generate one kill for that farm and they're gonna generate one victory point this means they go up at to four points and now it's time for them to activate their desalination plants now we can see they have one regular desalination plant so that will generate one credit for themselves and then they have to upgraded desalination plants within the same city now if we look back to the board we can see the benefit for that is they were gonna generate three credits and two biomatter so this biomatter once again is better than the other resources in it can count as a kelp or as a steel so it's really good for building things and then of course they also get to take the three credits for those two desalination plants moving on we can check their laboratories but it does not look like they've built any of those and then they have tunnels now only these two tunnels are adjacent to connected cities so that means they will generate two more money right here they can add that into their supply now when it comes to this upgraded tunnel they've decided they're not gonna actually take that point instead they are going to use at that tunnel for this card right here but I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself the last thing they have to check down here is their symbiotic cities each one will generate two points but they don't have any of those so now they can move on and activate their production from their cards and as I just mentioned they have this improvised greenhouse which says that during production they can have a one of their upgraded tunnels make a credits a kelp and a science instead of a credit and a victory point now they have decided to do that and they've already taken their one credit so now they'll get a kelp and a science they can now move on to their other production cards we can see that autonomous systems will give them one credit for every city that has on two desalination plants and they have one of those cities so they will generate a and other credit they have just have lots of money right here and the last of their production cards says they're just going to generate one credit so that one is quite simple and they can add that one into the pile now at this point they have finished out their cards but they can also check their metropolis and it looks like they have connected this one back to their starting city so that will generate two victory points for them right now which is going to bring them up to six next up and they can refresh all of their action cards and they now need to feed all of their cities now we can see that they have a two connected cities at the moment and they're just going to spend at two Kalpa in order to make that feeding happen and with that we have now reached the end of the production phase for both of the players this means we can now move the round marker forward into the fifth round and you'll notice we have now entered the second era of the game now when that happens we are going to remove all of the cards from the discard pile as well as all the cards here from the first era deck and then we are gonna bring in the new cards from the second era deck now you want to make sure that these are really well but I've already done that ha screen and we can now add this onto the board and every player now gets to draw three cards from this new deck and add those into their hand so we will get these three right here and our opponent will get these three and then we are going to discard down to our regular hand size at the start of our turn as normal before we move on I would like to point out that there are only going to be three rounds before the next production and the same thing will happen for the third era so in the first arrow we had of four rounds total before production in order to let us build our engines up and and now that things are going we are going to produce a little bit sooner all right we can now take our first action of the round and we are the starting player but the issue is that we have seven cards in our hand and before we can take our action we have to discard down to three now if you look at the backs of the cards you can see the reason for this is because we drew a special card for our last action in the last round which counts up to four and then we drew three of these new second in our cards now before we discard anything let's take a look at the new cards that we got this is smuggling it's a green card and lets us get rid of one kelp and get a laboratory and two sorry a science and two credits this one right here is an ongoing effect that says once per turn we can get rid of one biomatter and gain a kelp and a steel Plast normally biomatter is worth one kelp or a steel class so that would be great if we had any biomatter but we don't currently have any of it now the other of these secondary cards is this personnel agency and it says that for the rest of the game whenever we play a card with a infinity symbol we get one credit back from the bank now all of these are good but I think we are someone hamstrung by the fact that we really should keep it both of these cards right here they're both special cards and we now have the money to play these and I think we probably want to play this card for our first action it's red and I think we want to go right over there then to build a tunnel and then use an action in order to build another town so with that in mind we've kind of planned this out right here and that means we can only keep one of these five cards now this does feel a little bit painful I mean I really like the idea of this card that lets us use one of our action cards multiple times but we do have a lot of action cards so I don't think this is as necessary as I had hoped so we can go ahead and discard this it's an arrow one card so we just started out of the game and not to the discard pile speaking of that I don't think we want this arrow one card right here it says we can trade a kelp for steel or vice versa Oh once that doesn't seem particularly good for us in this moment so we can discard that one and now we have at these three options here now I figure this one might be better for a long-term gain those infinity cards are really quite good and this is actually an infinity card although getting a quick cash right here for kelp is also nice now we're probably going to want to keep spending kelp in order to maybe build some more farms perhaps some upgraded farms but also getting in this cash rebate doesn't seem really good especially if we are trying to go after these special cards which have a cost on them so I think with that in mind let's keep this one right here and we will discard both of these cards so this will go into our hand we now have our three cards in our hand and I just realized we forgot to flip over the top card of this special deck right here this should be face-up and it looks like this one that says biomech test it says you can pay one credit and one kelp in order to build a symbiotic city which again are the ones that generates two victory points every time you score so that is a very cheap City and I think we are definitely going to be interested in trying to acquire this card hopefully we can do that before our opponent either way it's now time for us to take our turn and I suppose with that in mind maybe we want to change our plan up we were planning on going to this red spot to build a couple tunnels but we do also have this yellow card which we could use to go up here and build a couple tunnels on our next turn as well this card seems really good for us so you know what let's go for it let's spend our action we'll go over here changing up our plan and we are going to draw this card right into our hand of course we are going to play this card out and it is an action card that will let us build buildings into restricted spots in our area so this can now get added into our other action cards and we can now see that this is our fourth action card which is our limit so in the future if we want to build to put any more action cards into our area we will have to discard one of these cards but if the card we discard is unused then as a bonus we get to activate that card so it's not the end of the world so yeah we've added this right over here and so now we can finish out our turn by drawing the top card of the deck it looks like in this one is a biomech test it simply lets us a build at one tunnel for a single science its downtime for orange to take their first turn and they have six cards in their hand they've decided to keep it these three right here and then they will discard at these two arrow one cards out of the game and this one are a two card into the discard pile it's not time for them to take their first action and they've decided to go right over here now when they go there they are also gonna play this green card and this location lets them build a city and then this card here says they can discard one credit in order to gain two steel plants and one card from the top of the deck so this right here is a level one card so it will get discarded out of the game on they can then spend the one credit and that will let them gather one card and then pick up two steel Plast next up they are going to build a city and they decided to build a symbiotic City now in order to do that we can see down here that it will cost them two credits one kelp one steel Plast and one biomatter so that means that they can spend all of these things because they were able to pick up this biomatter right here and once all of these resources are gone they can build this out in the same way as normal and this can go into a spot that is adjacent to a city and they've decided to put it right over here so that this tunnel is now connected or adjacent to a connected city so it will now produce in future production phases once again the big reason to have these symbiotic cities is they generate two victory points during production and since there are two more production phases they have essentially made a four victory points for themselves by the end of the game at this point they're not quite done though because they do have this one lobbying office it says every time they build a regular or symbiotic city they get to go up a twice on the Federation track we can see that this will bring them to the third level and once again that they have this Embassy which gets them an extra credit when they get to the third level on this track so that means that they will generate two credits by doing this action orange can now finish out their turn by drawing the top card and now we can take our second action of the round although I just realized that we once again forgot to refresh this special card deck so this card right here should be visible we can see it is an island that will and generate a biomatter a credit and two victory points every time you produce now we can take our turn and it looks like we have one too many cards in our hand and this biomech test is the card we just picked up and I don't think we really need this ability to spend one science to build a tunnel so we will just discard that right there and I think we should now go ahead and place right up here this is a yellow spot so that will let us play this yellow card and that this will let us build two tunnels which is going to be really good for us this turn I believe we're gonna pick up two of these government contracts before our opponent which is definitely going to be to our advantage now we are also gonna play this card right here which says we will get one credit every time we play a card with this infinity symbol including this one so we can now add this one into our area and then it will immediately activate getting us one credit back now we can do the main action for the spot we went to which is building up to two tunnels and we know that tunnels cost a steal Plast and a credit now we happen to have a to steal Plast right now and we have lots of credits now so we can discard all of these and now we can build these onto our board now these always have to be adjacent to a spot that has another tunnel going through it so we don't necessarily need a city in that location so I figure we will put this one right here and as a bonus we will immediately get one steel blast back which is certainly nice and then we can put this tunnel right over there now by doing that we have now connected this metropolis and we can see it will get us four credits right now and then also one victory point right now so let's go ahead and spend one credit and get this five for that and then we can grab the one point bringing us up to four now at this point we have actually completed two of these government contracts and we are well on our way to getting this third one it looks like our opponent is doing some pretty good stuff engine building wise but they've kind of ceded the race on all three of these government contracts to us which could be really good for us we'll see how that goes but either way for the moment we know that we have now connected to Metropolis 'iz and we have six tunnels out on our board that means we will immediately generate all of these benefits first things first I figure let's grab our points on this one is two points and this one is three points so that is five points overall which will jump us up to nine points total and now we can generate the rest of these benefits now down here you can see this one farm right here I checked it online that the designer confirmed that this is a free farm we don't actually have to pay for it so let's go ahead and build that right over here I think and then we also get a kelp for this government contract so we can add that into our area and then for this one we will get to science and one steel Plast now obviously that is a bunch of different resources we are now very stocked and ready to do quite a bit of stuff on our turn we've now finished evaluating these so we can just leave them facedown in our area and no new government contracts come out at this point we have finished a very long and successful turn so we can draw the top card from the deck and it looks like we have found on a black market it says as an ongoing effect once per turn we can pay one credit in order to exchange a kelp for a steel Plast or vice versa it's down time for orange to take their turn but they do have to discard a card and it's going to be this one right here and now they've decided to place their action token down onto this yellow spot this will let them build a city and then one type of building now alongside that they're gonna play this technology negotiation it says they can pay one science to upgrade to one of their laboratories but they currently don't have any laboratories so we're thinking it's probably likely they're about to build one so it looks like orange wants to build another one of these symbiotic cities and they have decided they're gonna put it right over here now again these have to be put a Jason to another city so this one is adjacent to that city right there now semiotic cities cost one biomatter one steal one kelp and then two money and we can now see over here event and they get two bumps on the Federation track every time they build a city this means they will go here which will generate them one stoop last and then up to here generating them one point so that will bring them from six up to seven and then as another part of the action they get to build one of the three building types now they have decided to spend at one steel Plast this means they can build a laboratory out onto their board and they've decided to put that one right over here and now that they're done with their main action they can evaluate this card it says they can spend one of their science in order to upgrade to one of their laboratories they do now have a laboratory so they can slide this right over here at this point their turn is done so they can draw a card from the top of the deck all right we can now take our last action of the round and we don't have to discard any cards and I think we should play onto a green spot we've been holding on to this secret mission for a very long time and it hasn't been something we needed just yet but as we get later on into the game it very it is very possible that our opponent might go on to a spot that we want to activate and this is a very cheap way to get around that so let's go ahead and play this down right onto here I think this is gonna let us build two desalination plants and then of course we will play this card in order to build desalination plants we have to spend a one-credit each so we can get rid of this five and then take three back and now we can build these out onto spots where we could build buildings now those spots are right here and here as well as that location right there and I think we should put this desalination plant right in here and this one we could put it right over there now the reason we're putting it over here as you can see this locks out our last of the regular spots is because we now have one of each of the different types and I think it's probably now time to talk about on the extra points we get for the buildings around our cities now if we look right here at our end game victory point card right here in the middle we can see that every city that is connected back is going to generate two points and then if it has one building it'll actually be three points instead of two if there are two different types of buildings it'll be four points instead of three and lastly if it has all three different types of buildings rounded it is worth six points instead of four so there's a two point jump up there if you have all three types of buildings around a city and we have now effectively built a six point city by putting this desalination plant right here now obviously there are incentives for having multiple upgraded building types within a given city but since we now have this card right here that's an action card that lets us build on to the expansion spots we could use this to build right here with a second laboratory or farm or of course desalination plant if we want to in order to get that benefit also right down here we've filled all these spots in but perhaps by the end of the game we will try to use this card right here in order to put a desalination plant on that spot so that all three are present here and that will also be plus two points for the city all right we have now finished the main action and we can now play our card now I know this is gonna cost us two credits so we can get rid of those right now and when we go to add this into our action cards we can see that we now have too many now as I mentioned before you cannot have more than four but as you put this in you have to discard one of these and if the one you discard is currently active then it has a benefit you get to activate it as it leaves so I think what we should do is unfortunately discard our flippered friend right here this personal assistant has been good for us early in the game and it will let us take a steel plastic or a credit and currently we have two steel plasti and five credits so I think as a parting gift with our personal assistant we will take a steel Plast and then we will discard this card from the game so we can add this right over here and we've now finished out all of our actions which means we can now finish out our turn by drawing the top card from the deck now it looks like we have just picked up a trial run god that says that if we have at least two connected upgraded desalination plants we can gain a card and a victory point it's now time for orange to take their final action of the round and they've decided just to go right over here they're now gonna play a red card from their hand and it looks like this one says undersea server farm it's an ongoing effect and it says that for the rest of the game their hane limit is raised by one so they're always gonna still draw just one card from the top of the deck but if they have some other way to gain extra cards they are always going to discard down to four cards in their hand instead of three so that definitely makes things a little bit more flexible for them they can now add this into their tableau and then they can activate this area generating one kelp and two steel Plast at this point the orange player can finish out their turn by drawing the top card from the deck okay with that completed we have now come to the end of this round everybody can now grab their action tiles back and then of course we can look down here and the orange player has easily gone to the farthest on the Federation track that means once again that they're gonna pop back up and be the starting player we can now move this token down here and lastly move the round token up to the sixth around the orange player decides they want to start off by pleading their action marker right over here and then they're gonna play this red card now we'll look at the specifics of this later because they want to evaluate this first this will let them do an action card and then they can build a tunnel in order to build this tunnel right here they have to spend a 1 steel Plast and one credit and then they also get to evaluate one of their action cards and they're gonna do this action card here this allows them to build a structure paying its full cost and then they also gain a one bump on the Federation track and they have decided to use this one kelp right here and that will let them build a farm they have to put this farm somewhere on their board and they've just had to put it right up here and now they are gonna evaluate the red card that they selected now this says that if they have at least four connected cities then they could build a farm for free and we can see that now that they have this tunnel right here all four of these cities are connected so this will happen they can now discard this card and it looks like they're gonna build another farm for free and they're gonna put that one right up here looks like maybe they are hoping to get these upgraded to get that consolidated bonus up around the city they also get one federation bump before using this card right here so they go up to the fourth spot where they don't get any benefits at this point they are now finished with their turns so they will draw a card all right we can now take our first action of this round and I think we should go right down here and the reason for that is because we have five science tokens right now and that means if we do the spot we will get to draw two cards and then we can spend one science to upgrade something and we still on a later turn could hopefully go over here and spend three more signs to do another upgrade obviously upgrades are good and another reason we're going down here a big reason is because we want to play this green card now we can see here that this is our biome test and it will cost us one credit to play and then it says we can spend a credit and it helped to get one of these symbiotic cities placed out and that is the big thing that we want to do and when it comes to the green options this seemed like the best so let's go ahead and evaluate this first we can draw two cards off the top of the deck and it looks like we have found on this red card right here says it's smuggling you can spend one credit to get a science and a card and then this yellow card right here says a black market on it says that whenever you use an action card you may exchange one steel plaster for one science or vice versa now that's pretty good for us considering we have a lot of action cards and we get one credit back every time we build one of these or at least play one of these infinity cards into our area either way these now get added into our hand and we don't have to worry about what we discard until later and now let's do this action here once again this says we can take one kelp or spend a science to upgrade one of our buildings and we certainly want to do that at this point we have a lot of different structures that could be upgraded and I think we should probably go down here for one of these farms if you're really great to get both of these farms upgraded before the next production phase because then we could see we would get three kelp and three victory points for that pair so let's go ahead and get rid of this and then add the upgraded farm right over here and now we can go ahead and play this card now again this is one of these special cards and it looks like we have to pay one credit in order to play this card and then it says we can spend at one credit and one kelp in order to build a symbiotic city now we have five credits at the moment so we have to make some change and then we can place this city out on our board and I figure we should go right here we already have the tunnel built in that space and we already have a desalination plant so as soon as we put the city right here the inhabitants flow through the tunnel populate the city and then man this desalination plant so it will now activate during the next production phase all right we can now I guess turn this card over it's a special card so normally we would discard it but we are tracking how many of these special cards we play so we'll put this over in our area and in fact we have now played a one two three special cards and that is what we need in order to complete this government contract right here so we were able to swoop in and do all three of the government contracts which is definitely a nice bonus for us and we can see this is gonna get us three victory points right now as well as our first a biomatter of the game it looks like three points is gonna bring us up to 12 and now all of the government contracts are done so at this point everybody can really just focus on the engine building that we're doing and the orange player is certainly feeling like they maybe missed out on not trying to compete with us on some of those we've now finished our actions so we can end our turn by drawing the top card from the deck and it looks like we found a lobbyist which gets us one bump on the Federation track and two cards if we play it alongside a red action it's nap time for the orange player to take their second action and they've decided to put their token right over here and they currently have no science so they are going to gain at to science by doing this action and they've decided to play this industrial espionage card now the color matches so they get to evaluate it and it's pretty simple they just get to draw three cards from the top of the deck so they will add this to science into their area and then they'll draw two cards off the top of the deck and at this point they're done with their turns so they can draw another card from the top and now we could take our second action of the round at this point we do have too many cards in our hand we have five total which means we have to discard down two and I think we don't really need this lobbyist and this trial run right here is all about having upgraded desalination plants and right now I don't think that's going to be our priority so let's go ahead and a discard of both of those and now we can figure out where we're going to go for our action now at the moment we have a whole bunch of science but we can see that our opponent went on to this spot where we could cash in three signs to do three upgrades now we do have this one secret mission right here which could be activated if we went to an action spot and that would let us pay a credit to evaluate a spot where our opponent is already or a different open spot I suppose so that is one good option for our turn and I figure when you consider the fact that we have two of these yellow cards and this one in particular works really well for our strategy let's just go for this plant we can put our action token right over here and I figured let's play this black market right now once again this says that every time we activate one of our action cards we can swap a steel plastic for a science and when we put this right over here that is a new on go effect and whenever we add those into our area our personnel agency will get us one credit back from the bank I suppose not even back to the bank as a bonus from the bank so this credit will go right over here and now we can evaluate this spot now we can take two resources that are different and I figure let's go with a kelp and a steel Plast because we have a whole bunch of science at the moment and then the next thing we can do is evaluate one of our action cards now when we come back over here I think the one that we should do is the one we talked about and that is the secret mission it says we can spend at one of our credits in order to perform an action in any slot that is either available and not occupied by ourselves now we can get rid of this one credit to do that now the one we are obviously going to pick is right over here where our opponent went so we will discard three of our science and do three structure upgrades when we come back down over to our area I think we should spend two of our upgrades on our farms we can put one right over here and that means that this farm will now generate an additional victory point and I think we should take this upgrade and put it alongside this farm down here now the moment we do that we now have two fully upgraded farms in the city and we can see that when we produce those farms will collectively make three Kalp and three victory points which is going to be very good for us also there is an additional benefit and that is this card that we built I think the very first car to be built in the game this right here says it's a biomech construction crew and it says that whenever you complete a connected city's second upgraded farm we get to gain one steel blast so that means we can just gather another one and add that into our area so we now have actually a lot of Steel Plast and we have one more upgrade we can do and I figure we should go with a desalination plant let's upgrade this one right here and that means that we will make a credit and a biomatter with this desalination plant instead of just the credit obviously we could flip over one of these tunnels instead and that would make us an extra victory point but getting biomatter is also a really nice resource to have when trying to build things out in the board specifically when it comes to these symbiotic cities we can now do one more thing and that is activate this black market now this says that whenever we use an action card we can exchange one steel plastic or a science or vice versa I now realized that we have tons of Steel passed more than I realized we would have at the beginning of the round when as part of this action we grabbed a kelp and a steel plastic so I figure let's go ahead and activate that we will get rid of one steel Plast and then we will gain one of these science right here and then we can also see that we have some laboratories to make other science so we've kind of changed our original decision a little bit because we of course could have just taken a science and a kelp but either way we have now finished out this turn so let's go ahead and draw the top card from the deck and then the orange player can go now before we move on let's see what we picked up here this is a invite investors card and it simply gives you two victory points when you activate it as an action so orange can now take their last action of the round and they currently have five cards in their hand but because they have this undersea server farm they now have a new hand limit of four so that means they do have to discard one card and that's gonna be this consumer goods research card and and now they can take their turn and it looks like they are worried about turn order because they've decided to put their token or write down here now once they go there they are also gonna be playing this coral tunnels card we can see that it's an ongoing effect that says once per turn when you build a tunnel you have a discount of one credit so going forward they can make tunnels and a little bit more of a discount when it comes to money but it looks like the main reason they did this was so that they could go forward twice on this track and stop us from going here because if we had gone there with orange on this position then we would have gone ahead of them and then we would have been the starting player for the next round and it looks like the orange player is pretty keen on being the first player in the next round so a couple things have happened here they haven't actually activated this card just yet we know that this three spot is gonna generate two credits for them because they do have that Embassy card so they will get two credits right here and then they will gain a steel Plast for this location and then they can play this green coral tunnels right over here into all of the rest of their conditional cards and with that they are now done with their actions which means they can finish out their turn by drawing a card we can now take our last action of the round and I think we probably want to go down here and grab a special card now we've already picked up three and played three and we don't worry about that as far as this contract is concerned we do still get benefits for connecting up with this brown metropolis at the end of the game for the special cards that we play and I think it's now time for us to grab one of these endgame cards over here now we of course do have to play a card from our hand alongside this action and I figure we'll go with this invite investors card but we will take care of this once we've drawn a card so let's take a closer look at all of these over here I randomly pulled six of these out and it looks like we have three trade surplus and three of these federal priority cards but that's not always going to be the setup just like this now it is worth noting that the top card on this 1 to 2 stack is pretty nice during production it makes two victory points a credit and a biomatter and we have two more production cycles so this could potentially be worth 4 points to us but if we look at this card right here we will get 3 points at the end of the game for every pair of upgraded farms that we have and right now we have a three upgraded farms so that's one pair and we're just one upgraded farm away from a second pair so that means this is verging on at 6 points and potentially more if we go even harder on this and try to get even more of these upgraded farms built before the end of the game now there are five other options out here we can see this federal priority says that for every upgraded desalination plant we have we get two points but right now we don't have only do we do actually have one so they'll be worth two points to us this one right here is worth two points for every symbiotic city you have we have one in our opponent has two so they definitely might be interested in either of these because they already have two of the upgraded desalination plants and then up here with these trade surplus this is a way to get more points from your resources at the end of the game when we take a look at our endgame cheat sheet we can see that every one of our kelp ax science and steel plaster at the end will turn into one money every one of our biomatter will turn into two money and then every four money that we have will turn into one point which is not a great conversion ratio so if we look down here we can see that by spending 15 money a player can just get 13 points right away so that's almost a one-to-one conversion if a player happens to have a lot of excess money at the end of the game likewise right here you can spend a biomatter in order to get two points and you could do that a maximum of six times and then this one over here says you can a maximum of five times trade in two signs for three points now overall I think I still like this one and it does cost three credits in order to get this placed but it's going to kind of define our strategy for the rest of the game I think we're gonna try to get this played before the game is over and we will of course trying to get as many of these upgraded kelp farms built as we can once this card is drawn we do not fill this in anymore so every time you play the game you will have six of these triple credit special cards and those are the only ones that are available in that play at this point we do have to evaluate the card that we played and that is this invite investors now currently we have our four action cards which is our limit so just like before we can discard one of these cards and if it has not been activated then we get to use it once before it's gone now I think what we should do is get rid of this build tunnel and we can use this immediately by spending one of this steel Plast and then we can discard this and it looks like we'll make one tunnel with this action the reason I decided to get rid of that one is because we can build this tunnel right here and realistically we just need one two three more tunnels in order to connect to our Brown end game scoring metropolis up with our starting city and I think we will be prioritizing our action activations on these more powerful cards in particular this one right here which lets us build in the restricted zones around our cities so getting rid of that one is fine we got one tunnel built and I think we'll hopefully build three more tunnels before the game ends and with that we have now finished out our actions so let's complete our turn by drawing the top card from the deck now it looks like we have just picked up a trial run it says that if we have at least three connected laboratories we can gain one steel Plast at this point everybody has taken all of their actions so we can all grab our action tiles back and then we can look over here and see that once again the orange player is just dominating this Federation track that means they will stay the starting player this token can go down to the bottom and we can now move it into the seventh round of the game and this is the last round and last three actions that we have before this second production phase all right it looks like the orange player will start things off and for their first action they're gonna go right up here and they're gonna play this a yellow card now we can see that this says smuggling they can spend at one credit in order to gain one science and they have indeed decided to do that because they are about to do a bunch of upgrades speaking of upgrades we can come up here and see that they are definitely going to do the left-hand side of this that's going to let them spend up to three signs to do up to three upgrades one to one with that action well it appears they have planned this out well because they do have three signs in their area so they will discard all three of these and now they've decided to upgrade to both of these farms up here so they are also gunning for that really nice bonus of three Kalpa and three victory points for the pair of upgraded farms before their last upgrade they've decided they're gonna flip over this tunnel right here and that means that tunnel will generate an extra victory point during production orange is now done with their actions so they can draw their card to finish out their turn and now we can take our first action of the round well the first thing we have to do is discard one of our cards and I think we don't need this trial run right here we just do it on the last round and we currently have two laboratories so it wouldn't even activate and I'm not feeling super motivated to build more laboratories at this point so I doubt we will actually activate this so let's go ahead and it discard it and now when it comes to taking our actions we know that these aren't the last two three actions we will do before the next production phase and with that in mind we know that when we produce all of our action cards we'll reset and I think we probably want to try and activate both of these action spots on the board so we can use as many of those actions before the reset happens now with that in mind I think that this might be the more important of the two that will let us get another tunnel built and as I mentioned before I think we want to get three more tunnels built before the end of the game so let's go ahead and put our action marker right over there and then we of course have to play one of our cards and I think at this point let's just go ahead and play this card right here it will cost us three money which is pretty expensive but it will be nice to have this out of our hand we know we want to play this before the end of the game and we don't want it clogging up one of our three spots so let's play over here into an endgame score pile and then we of course have to spend three of our money so we're starting to get pretty low on money and we can now evaluate the actual action now in that spot says we can build one tunnel and we can evaluate one of our action cards right here and I figure let's start with the tunnel we have one credit right here and we can spend that along with a steel Plast and that will let us take this tunnel and place it right over here because that's can - in line with all the others now when we cover up this spot right here we will actually get the steel plastic back so that's a pretty good discount on building out those tunnels and now we get to evaluate one of our action cards now I think probably the most important one will be this a build expansion card this lets us build any building on an expansion site paying the usual cost now at this point I think we probably want to build on this expansion site right here and let's go ahead and spend it on calve and with it let's build a farm now we can put this into a restricted location and I figured let's put it right down there the city already has all three different types of buildings in it so it will score the maximum amount of points of six at the end of the game and by putting a farm down here in this restricted spot we have a chance of getting two upgraded farms in this area and getting that really good benefit going off for us so with that we of course have to use this card so we can tilt that over and at this point we do have the option of using this black-market card it says that every time we activate one of our action cards we can trade a science for a steel plastic and vice versa but I think at this point we are happy with the resources we have so let's pass on that and then we can finish out our turn by drawing the top card now it looks like this one is a lobbyist and it's pretty simple if we play this alongside at yellow action we get one bump on the Federation track it's time for the orange player to take their second action of the round and unfortunately for us we can see they're gonna go right up here we were hoping to go on the spot and activate this action location but they've gotten there first now alongside this they have decided to play this organize a conference card now this is an action card which will go into their area and it says that they can pay one science or one credit in order to upgrade one of their tunnels after they've played their car they are now going to activate this spot right here and it looks like if they are simply gonna grab a science and then they will also take a kelp and and now they can activate one of their action cards at the moment they just have these two available to them and they really like this organize a conference it's a stronger card than this personal assistant so they will activate this one right here and if you remember this lets them to spend a science or a credit in order to upgrade one of their tunnels and they will get rid of one of their credits they have a whole bunch of those at this point and then they're gonna upgrade it this tunnel right here this will of course exhaust the and then they'll finish out their turn by drawing the top card from the deck at this point we can now take our second-to-last action of the round and I think we really want to go down here now the main reason for this is because it's the only place that we can go on the map that lets us do an upgrade and upgrading one of our farms is gonna have a really big impact on this next production round and we can see that our opponent has won science so they could easily go over here and do another upgrade themselves because squeezing these upgrades and before the production is definitely a common tactic so by going over here we now of course have to play a card from our hand and we don't have any green cards but we can go ahead and discard this lobbiest I don't think we care too much about it we can put that into the discard pile and now we can activate our black ops team if you remember this says that whenever we choose an action and a card that does not match then as a bonus we get to draw a card from the top of the deck so that means our black ops team will get us one card this action space right here will get us two more cards and then we can spend one science to do an upgrade or we can take a kelp well this one is certainly a no-brainer let's go ahead and spend a science and then we can upgrade this farm right down here so the city is completely full and we do have a pair of these upgraded farms now the other thing that happens in this moment is we are able to activate to our bio mecha construction crew this says that whenever we complete a city's second upgraded farm a connected city that is then we get to gain a steel Plast so by doing that we get yet another steel plastun we're doing pretty well on our resources at this point we can finish out our turn by drawing the top card from the deck but we haven't looked at the other three that we've drawn so far so let's take a look at the new cards we picked up this one right here says rush job we can build a one laboratory or one farm by paying the regular cost if we go with the yellow space the next one is a duplicating systems test duplication system assess that is and it says if we have two steel Plast then we could take another steel this one right here says construction windfall it says that if we have at least four connected farms we may build a tunnel for free and we do have four connected farms so that is definitely a good card to grab and this last one right here says a free trade tunnel it says it once per turn when you upgrade a tunnel you can pay one credit in order to gain a victory point and a card it's time for orange to play their last two action of the round and they've decided to go over here onto the special card spot now they're also gonna play this a red card right here this is a green house and it's a production card it says that at the end of production one of their cities does not actually require Kelvin in order to be fed so they can add this into their production area and then they can draw a special card it looks like the one they want to grab is this federal priority that will get them two points at the end of the game for every one of their symbiotic cities of course as long as they get this card built out into their tableau at this point we have the last action of the round and we have it twice as many cards as we need now I don't think we are particularly interested in duplicating our steel Plast in spending money for science because we are out of money and on this black market changing our kelp for steel Plast does not seem too appealing to me so I think we'll discard all three of those and now for our main action I have noticed that the orange player did not go up at all in this given round now if neither of us go up at all then the relative player order does not change so I think what we should do is build two farms on this turn the reason for that is because we have this embassy in our area and it says that if we build two farms in a turn then we will get one Federation track bump and that will be enough to allow us to go first in the next round and that's certainly a nice thing to have now with that in mind I think we should put our token right over here now we currently don't have any money so there's no way we can afford to build a city but we also have the option of building a farm a desalination plant or a laboratory and I think along with that let's go ahead and play this a rush job which is also yellow now what we can do is using this card build at one farm and then using this action build another farm which will be our two farms in a turn condition so let's go ahead and do this one first and we can discard the card and that will let us spend one kill in order to get this farm built and I think we should put it right over here and then for the second one activating the actual action space once again we are not building a city because we don't have any money but let's go ahead and build another farm and we can do that by getting rid of this biomatter again biomatter counts as kelp or as seal Plast and it's a very valuable resource so it's not great to get rid of it like this but I think this will still be worth it so we can now spend this and then we can build another farm and I figure let's put it right over here because if we put it anywhere else then it wouldn't actually produce on this round because it has to be next to a city that is connected in order to generate that kelp and while we don't need the kelp it it will be nice to have around so let's go ahead and put this right here and we are also setting ourselves up with the science that our laboratories will make in order to upgrade both of these and then again have two of those upgraded farms within the same city to activate this nice bonus right here so with that we have now finished out the actions but this embassy will come into play we have indeed built two farms within a given turn so we get one bump on the Federation track this brings us up to the four spot and while it does not have a bonus we are now ahead of the orange player which is all the counts here okay we've now come to the end of the round because everybody has played all of their action titles so we can now return these back to the players and then we can check the Federation track and we are indeed ahead so we will be the starting player for the next round and we can now reset that back here and now we can move into the second production phase of the game just like before we can evaluate these simultaneously but I'll show you what both of us do now the first thing we are going to do is evaluate our farms now we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 forearms out here and both of these are regular farms so each one of those will generate one kelp for ourselves and then we can see that this pair of upgraded farms will generate 3 help and 3 victory points and at this pair of upgraded farms we'll do the same this means we can take 6 kelp and 6 victory points it appears we were at 12 so now we go up to 18 points and now we can move on to our desalination plants now we have two of these one of them is not upgraded so that will generate a one-credit for ourselves and the other one is upgraded so we'll get us a credit as well as a biomatter now we can move on after this going to our laboratories we have the same amount of laboratories as we did in the first production phase and that is these two upgraded once so each upgraded laboratory will get us one science and at one steel blast so that will be two science overall for the labs and then two steel Plast now we can continue down our track right here to the tunnels now again only the tunnels that are connected to connected cities are or tunnels that are adjacent two connected cities are going to get us scoring so we can look down here and see that this one is not and unfortunately these three are also not adjacent to connected cities but these four right here are so that's one two three four credits so we can go ahead and take a five and get rid of this one and we can see that this tunnel is upgraded so that means we will generate one victory point for it which brings us up to 19 we can now move on and we can see that our regular cities don't have any production but our symbiotic cities will generate two victory points and we do have one symbiotic City so let's get two more points which brings us to 21 at this point we finished all of the building production types and next up we can produce for our cards but we still don't have any cards that actually activate during production so we can pass on that and then activate any of our metropolis --is that are connected and to give us a bonus now it looks like we still have this one down here which will get us two victory points for being connected which brings us to 23 and then we can refresh all of our action cards and then we have to feed all of our connected cities now we have just three connected cities at the moment and each one of those wants to eat a kelp as a priority so let's go ahead and discard this three kelp token right here and now everybody is fed and let's go ahead and see how our opponent fared during their production they're gonna start things off by evaluating their farms and we can see that they have three of those and all three of them are upgraded now this one down here is by itself in this city that means it will generate one kelp and one victory point so they can add that right over here and then these two up here or in the same city and upgraded so that means that collectively they will make it three kelp and then three victory points and it looks like that is gonna bring them from seven up to ten moving on they can now check their desalination plants and they have three of those this one is not upgraded so it will just give them one credit and then the other two are upgraded and they're in the same city so that will get them three credits as well as two biomatter next up the haven't laboratories and it looks like they have one of these and it is upgraded so that will generate one science and one steel plaster for themselves and then we have a tunnels now we know that they have a special benefit that lets them have one of their tunnels not generate a victory point and instead it makes a science and a Celt but they decided they just want the points so that means that we can see out here that all of their tunnels are adjacent to cities and those cities are connected back to the start so that is going to be one two three four credits that they get so they can take this five right here and then we can see that they have a three upgraded tunnels and each one of those will generate one victory point for them which brings them up to 13 next up on the production list it looks like they have symbiotic cities and they currently have two of those now each symbiotic city generates two points so that will be four points total for them right now and while we're here we can see that they also have this one metropolis connected so let's give them those points as well so that will be two four six points which brings them from 13 up to 19 and now they can activate all of their production cards now they have four of them over here this first one says that for every city that has two desalination plants they get together one credit so they have just one of those cities right now because the city just has one desalination plant so this credit will get added into the area next up this improved green house they decided not to use so they can now move on to this Cvent factory that will make one credit for themselves and they have a lot of money at this point and the last one right here says that when they are actually paying the kelp for their cities they can pay one less so with that in mind let's go ahead and move on it looks like they can bring all of their action cards back up ran ready to use and then they have to feed all of their cities now they have four cities but this card means they only have to feed three of them so they'll get rid of this three kelp token right here in order to satisfy that at this point everybody is done producing so we can now move into the eighth round of the game and this is also the third era so just like before we can now get rid of the discard pile for the second round and then we can bring in the third era cards we once again want to make sure that they are nice and shuffled but I've done that off-screen and just like before each player will draw three cards and we'll take these and our opponent will grab these here and then we can of course discard down when it's our turn okay it looks like we get to take the first action of this seventh round of the game although I just realized that we only have two cards from era two and we should have three and it looks like we forgot to draw card at the end of our last turn so let's draw one of those in here and now we have to of course at discard down and we have six cards and we can only keep three so let's look at the new ones now this one right here is our era two card it says smuggling and it's pretty simple you can spend a one-credit to take a kelp or a steel Plast and now we have the first of our era three cards and this one right here says demonstration now as an immediate effect we can spend one credit up to two times in order to activate our action cards so this is really good actually we could play this card and two credits to do two action cards of which we have four with some really good effects so I think we're probably going to want to keep this moving on we have this one which says exports it says at the end of the game we can buy points by spending one science and one kelp for points so this is a better conversion ratio than we normally have for our resources so this is a way to liquidate kalfa and science and we do make a lot of killed so this might be good for us to play and it looks like we actually got another one of these this is another export it's another endgame card and it says at the end of the game you may buy points by spending one biomatter for every point so obviously those are really good and we now need to decide which one of these we want to keep now I think we definitely want to keep this card right here because activating a couple of our actions in a really efficient way it seems like a good idea and now we can keep two more of these now this construction windfall is nice because we need to build two more tunnels and we are a bit low on money so by doing this we can build one of those tunnels for free but of course if we choose that then that means we are really losing out and some of the options over here I think we definitely want to keep this exports because we do make a lot of kilt and science we can try to pair those up and that means that we will not have access to these three but I think that's ok I guess we are hoping on doing some upgrades of tunnels but there's only so many things that we can do with these last three rounds and I think we need to make a hard choice here and we're not making that much biomatter anyway so yeah let's go ahead and discard these these two era two ones will get taken out of the game and this one will go right over here and now it's time for us to figure out where we are gonna go for this first action of the round well we only have these three cards at the moment and I think let's go ahead and get this construction windfall out of our hand it's maybe one of the weaker cards but getting that tunnel built is a good idea and I think we should play right down here we've just finished up a production so I think we do want to have some more cities before the last production of the game although we do have to feed every one of these cities with kelp each one of these cities is also a place to generate stuff with our buildings so let's go down here and then we will play this construction windfall and if you remember this says that if we have at least four connected farms then we could build a tunnel for free now this is the case because as you can see we have one two three four five six farms actually so let's put this tunnel right over here now if you look at the board you'll notice it actually takes two tunnels to make it all the way to this Brown metropolis I think the idea is it's actually way over here but they've put the two tunnels next to themselves so that the board does not have to be as big now we're not connected to this metropolis until we build another tunnel right here but we're just one away so we're rather close and this is gonna be worth two points at the end of the game for every one of our special cards and at this point we have gotten four of them played already so that is an 8-point metropolis that we do really want to get connected now at this point we have used this card so it can be discarded and now we can do this action right here which says we can build a city now obviously these symbiotic cities are nice because they generate two points when you do the production and there will be one more production phase but the problem is that those symbiotic cities cost two credits and while we have a bunch of other resources that lots of kelp and lots of Steel passed we are a little bit low on credits so I feel like it might make more sense to build one of these regular cities right here which only cost one credit that will bring us from five six down to five instead of six down to four and that way we have more credits knocking around to potentially get more of these special cards played now I can't math it out at this point to know if that one I credit difference will be the difference between playing maybe a fourth or fifth special card but I think we should probably play with that in mind because that would be a really big bummer if that happened so let's go ahead and build this one right here that's gonna cost us two of our steel plants which we have a whole bunch of so we're okay with getting rid of that'll also cost a kelp in one of our credits and now we can finish out our turn by drawing the top card and it looks like this one is a corruption it says we can get rid of one kelp to go up twice on the federal track and we do have a lot of kelp so we can consider this one in the future it's time for orange to take their first action but they currently have seven cards in their hand now that they have the ability to hold four cards in their hand due to their undersea server farm so they're gonna keep it these over here and discard these both of these era two cards will get discarded from the game and this one will get put into the discard pile now they can take their action it looks like they want to go over here and draw a special card now they're gonna play a red card alongside this and this is cost analysis it's an ongoing effect that says that whenever they build a symbiotic dome they get a discount of one credit so this will get added into their tableau and now they can pick up one of these cards and they've decided to pick up this trade surplus right here currently they have 16 money and lots of ways to make even more money so they like the idea of grabbing this and trying to get it played so that they could get 13 points at the end of the game as long as they have 15 money left over to spend that's gonna finish out their actions so they can now draw a card from the top of the deck and now we get to go at this point we have two actions left in this round and I think I do like the idea of this corruption card it's yellow and we can match that up by playing this tile over here and we know we want to go over here at some point because we have three signs already so that will let us get three upgrades in and by placing over here we can now use that this corruption ability which will let us get rid of one of our many kelp and go up twice on the Federation track so let's go ahead and to do this first we have a four kelp so let's go ahead and discard one of those and we can now discard this and that will bring us 20 sub this track which will get us a 1 credit and we are a little bit light on credits so I think that worked out pretty well and of course going first is a good thing next up we can evaluate this location and we are gonna spend all three of our science in order to do three structural upgrades when we come back down over here I think the first two are obvious we can upgrade this farm here and that farm there as soon as we upgrade the second farm then our bio mecha construction crew will activate and that will get us one steel class to every we do our second upgraded farm within a city so we can take one steel plastun and that to all of the rest that we have already and this is now another set so that will evaluate this great spot over here during the last production and that's another pair of our creative farms to give us three more points at the end of the game now with all that being said we have one more upgrade at left available to ourselves and we could go ahead and upgrade this desalination plant that's the last of our buildings that is not upgraded we've definitely gone with a small number of cities a large amount of buildings strategy in this game and all that would do is get us another biomatter and i don't think we care about that too much at the end of the game so instead let's go ahead and upgrade this tunnel right here so that will generate us an extra point when we do that last production okay we can now finish our turn out by drawing the top card and it looks like this is a nightshift it says as an action we can gain the production from one of our upgraded structures adjacent to a connected city so that could be a really nice way to get some extra resources that we might need as well as potentially points Orange can now take their second action of the round but before they do that we can see that they have one too many cards in their hand so they have decided to discard it this card right here it's another one of those endgame points cards but they're not super confident they'll get more than one point out of it so they like the idea of the other cards that they have in their hand so they will discard that over there and then choose an action spots and they've decided to go with this one over here which lets them build a city as well as one type of building now they of course have to pay a play a card along with that and they're gonna go ahead and put this a federal priority card into play now we saw them grab this it's one of those special cards and it's gonna cost them at three credits right now to play this and it will be worth two points at the end of the game for every one of their symbiotic cities that are connected at the moment we can see that that is just two cities but it's obvious they're trying to change that and they of course have to spend three credits for that so they'll get rid of this five and they can then take a two back now at this point they can now do the main action for this round and that involves a building a city as well as potentially a building now they do want to do build one of these symbiotic cities and they've decided to put it right over here that is legal because it is adjacent to this spot right here even though there isn't a tunnel on that spot we can look over here and see that normally this costs one biomatter as well as one steel Plast one kelp and two credits but they have this down here which gives them a one credit discount when they are building symbiotic cities so they only have to spend one credit in order to make this happen now that the city is down they can activate this lobbying office that says whenever they build a city they can advance two spaces on the Federation track unfortunately for us that means they will go right on top of our spots and they're gonna get one credit for this location and then an additional credit because they do have that Embassy card which activates when they get to this third spot here the last thing they can do on their turn is build a laboratory desalination plant or a farm if they like it looks like they're gonna build a desalination plant they're gonna spend one credit to do that and they're just gonna put it right over here so there are now two different types of buildings around at this city at this point they're done with their actions so they can finish out their turn by drawing the top card which means we can now take our third action of the round and I think let's go onto this red location here that's gonna let us play this exports which will get us endgame victory points behind getting rid of pairs of kelp and science and we can put this into our tableau and after we do that we can now act to be the spot which will let us build one tunnel as well as activate one of our action cards when it comes to the tunnel this is pretty obvious we really want to connect this brown metropolis up so we can put a tunnel right over there and that's of course gonna cost us one steel Plast as well as one of our credits now we have the option of activating one of our action cards and these are all really good but I think the one we should do right now is going to be this a build expansion once again this will let us build one building in a restricted spot on around one of our cities but we do have to pay the regular cost for it and at the moment this city right here is completely full up and it has all three types of buildings and this city and this city both of them are pretty close so this one right here needs a laboratory in order to have all three types and this one it needs a desalination plant in order to have all three types now we know that we need science in order to pair up for this exports so I figure let's go for the laboratory angle also laboratories cost steel Plast which we have a bunch of and the desalination plants cost credits which we are starting to get a little bit worried about having enough to potentially get some more of these three costs special cards down so let's go ahead and a spend this steel classed and then we can build this laboratory right over here and that means we have now used this action card at this point we've now finished out our actions so we can draw the top card from the deck and it looks like we have found a trial run this says that if we have at least a one connected upgraded desalination plant we can get a credit as well as a biomatter it's now time for orange to take their third action and they're gonna go up here and build two tunnels and they're gonna play this yellow card which is a federal grant and it's really simple it's just gonna give them one biomatter that they can put right into their supply so after they grab this they can now build it they're up to two tunnels which they've decided to put right here and then right over here so obviously each one of these is gonna cost them one of their steel Plast as well as one credit however they do have this coral tunnels which says that once per turn when they're building tunnels one of them costs one less credit so they only spend these three resources and they can keep that one right there and you'll notice they covered this spot up that means they will generate one kelp by doing that and you can see that they're heading over here instead of over to their brown metropolis now this is pretty good for them they have a five connected cities right now and four or five connected cities we can see they will get four victory points now for every further connected City they have they get even more points all the way up to 12 and at this point they are hoping to get another city right here and then potentially to join up with this metropolis later on within this era although there aren't that many actions left in the game so with that they have now finished their build orange is now done with their turns so they can finish out by drawing the top card and now we can see that everybody has placed all of their action markers so it's time to end the round so we can all grab these markers back and then we can look over here to the federal track we can see our Federation track that is we can see that the orange player is on top of us which means that they get to go first and if we will go second and then both of our tokens fall back down over here and lastly we can move into the ninth round of the game and it looks like the orange player will start it looks like the first thing they want to do is activate this green spot down here that's going to allow them to build one city and they're gonna play this trade surplus now this is one of those triple credit special cards so they have to spend three credits in order to play this and now at the end of the game if they were able to get rid of 15 money they will get 13 victory points this of course costs three credits so they can get rid of this ten right here and then bring seven back and and now they can evaluate that spot on the board which says they can build a city now it looks like they are interested in building yet another symbiotic city and it is worth noting that there are only two of these left over and we are component limited on all the different types of cities although there are currently 12 of the normal cities left at the moment so they're gonna build this one and they want to build it right here now that is gonna cost them one biomatter as well as one steel Plast and a kelp and then just one credit because again they have this cost analysis down here which gives them a one credit discount whenever they build these symbiotic cities now after that is built they of course get to bump up twice on the Federation track because of this a lobbying office card which will get them up to the third spot which will get them one credit and then of course they continue to have that Embassy card which gives them another credit when they get to the third level at this point they are done with their turns so they can draw one card from the top of the deck and now we can go at this point we have two yellow cards and one green card in our hand and while part of me does kind of want to go over here and pick up another special card or go over here and build another couple farms I think instead let's go over to this spot we know that our opponent seems to be trying to build lots of cities although maybe they are tapped down at this point but as far as we are concerned we can also build a city I think potentially a symbiotic one actually and then we can also build a building which should turn into a decent amount of points for us now when we do this let's go ahead and play this trial run and if we look down here it says that if you have at least one connected upgraded desalination plant you can gain one credit and one biomatter well we do indeed have that with this upgraded desalination plant right here so that gives us this one biomatter and this one credit and now we can discard this one and to do the main action on that spot now as I said I think let's go ahead and build it one of these semiotic cities and we can put this right here now that is going to cost us two of credits unless we can get rid of this five and then bring it three back over here I know I did not build a symbiotic city earlier because I was worried about running out of credits but at this point I am a little bit less worried about that so next up we can look over here and see that we need to spend at one of our bio matters as well as one kelp and a1 steel blast and that will get this built out onto the spot now we have the ability to build at one of the different building types and I think that should be another laboratory with these of make science and we can pair science up well with our kelp it in order to get these exports points coming at the end of the game so let's put this laboratory right here and that will of course cost one of our steel blasts at this point it is worth remembering that every city that's connected is worth two points by itself and then more points if it has buildings around it now the symbiotic city is going to generate two points during production and two points just for existing so that was a four point turn actually a five point turn because by adding this building over here we've now increased the amount of points that that city will get us so overall I think that was a pretty good use of one action this also means that there is only one city on a city left in supply and that we could potentially build this one as well on a future turn denying it from our opponent who is getting two points at the end of the game for every one of their symbiotic cities so the race is definitely on I think to get this last one built but for now our turn is over so let's go ahead and a draw the top card and it looks like we have found a genetics experiment this says that we can discard a biomatter to get two points and we do actually have one bio matter right now so we could potentially use that for this last civvy otic city or just cash it out for points so that's a pretty good card overall it's time for orange to take their second action of the round and they've decided to go right over here this will let them build a tunnel as well as activate one of their action cards and along with this they're gonna play this coral tunnels card now if we look right over here this says that whenever they build more than one tunnel on their turn they pay nothing for the second tunnel so this is an ongoing effect and they can now add this into their tableau and then evaluate this action spot it looks like the first thing they want to do is activate one of their action cards and that will be this build a structure so this lets them build any of the three buildings as well as potentially a tunnel and it also lets them bump up once on the Federation track now you can do these in any order so they are going to go ahead and advance on the Federation track first which brings them to the second level which gets them one steel Plast and then they will use it that steel PLAs along with this action right here to build another tunnel so tunnels cost steel Plast as well as credits but they have this coral tunnels right here which says once per turn they have a one-credit discount of when they are building tunnels so that means that they can build this tunnel right here for effectively 1 steel Plast and when they put it down on the board they've decided to put it right over here I think actually no they're gonna go right over there and once they've done that they've now completely evaluated this card but there is also that build a tunnel action spot on the spot they placed on the board now they just placed this coral tunnels down which says the second tunnel they built within a given turn is free and they have built one tunnel so that means that they were able to build this next one right over here and just like that they have now connected their Brown metropolis up to their starting city and they currently have it looks like six cities so right now that is worth eight points to them but if they are able to connect to another city to this overall network that will be an additional four points bringing it to 12 so overall that was a really good turn for the orange player now they're once again that back to zero steel classed although they do have this biomatter which can act as a steel blast either way they are now done with their turn so they can now draw a card from the top of the deck and now we get to go it looks like this is going to be our second action of the round and I think maybe we should just play to this genetics experiment right now we don't have any science and I think one thing we might want to do is play right up here and then grab to science and then trying to build a couple more of those farms and then use the to science on on a future round I guess only there's only one round left to try and go over here and spend that science to upgrade those two farms and get even more points for them so with that in mind I think we should go ahead and do that and now let's go ahead and just play this genetics experiment this lets us get rid of our one biomatter and we can get two points for it immediately I know that I said we could use this biomatter to try and take this away from our opponent but it looks like they could probably do that anyway and I being able to convert this right into two points is definitely a good thing we don't desperately need extra cities anyway so let's go ahead and to discard this as well as the biomatter and that will bring our point value up to 25 and now we can simply grab a - science from this spot so that's a pretty simple turn but we're trying to set things up so that we can build another one of those on double upgraded kelp farm combos this means our turn is now over so we can draw the top card from the deck and it looks like we found a nano Grill online card this says that if we have at least three connected laboratories we gain a victory point and we do actually have that so maybe this is something we'll try to do before the game ends to grab a miller victory point it's now time for orange to take their last action of the round and it looks like they're gonna head right over here now alongside that they're gonna play this red card which says corruption and this says they can spend it one of their credits in order to bump up twice on the Federation track now they have a lot of credits at this point so they're gonna get rid of one of these and that means they will go up once here which generates one point and then they are pegged out at the top so they can't go up any more and just like I said way back in the beginning of the video whenever you need to go up more you just get a point for it so with that they are gonna generate two points bringing them to 21 and then this location right here will get them to steal Plast as well as one kelp orange is now done with their actions so they can finish out by drawing a card which means we can now take our last action of the round and I think we should just go right down over here this will allow us to use our demonstration card and it lets us put two desalination plants down and that will simply increase the victory points that some of our cities will make so let's go ahead and start things off I think by building the desalination plants now at the moment we only have four credits so it looks like we might be spending all of them right here but the game is getting close to the end and by spending both of these we can put two desalination plants down and I think we should put one of them right over here and one of them right over there we've effectively turned two credits into two victory points because each one of these cities is now worth one more point than it was so that's a pretty good conversion ratio and I know I talked about getting more special cards so we could get an extra two points each for those cards as we played them but it seemed like this is maybe a slightly more efficient way for us to go ahead and play out our cards I was thinking about picking up another special card but we don't have any red cards in our hand and I know we could just take one of those actions without playing an applicable card but it really is nice are using these cards themselves and they do give really good benefits speaking of which it's now time to do our demonstration and this will let us activate up to two of our actions at one credit each so with that in mind I think what we should probably do is activate this build a farm or desalination plant spot that will allow us to get rid of this one kelp right here and with that we can now build a farm right over here and this also says that we get to draw a card from the top of the deck and maybe it'll be a red one for the next round of the game and it isn't but it's another action that says we can go up once on the Federation track and get a point it looks like it's an emissary here well we can add that into our hand and at this point we're not done because we've course have to spend one credit for the activation of this action but we also have the ability down here whenever we use an action card we can exchange one steel plastic or a science and I think we want to do that so we will get rid of this steel class t'right here and that will generate a science that way we have three science ready to try and do a big upgrade on the next round and at this point we can activate one more of our action cards and it's a tricky thing to consider because if we spend this right here we could go ahead and use this spot which will get us to victory points for one credit but we will also be out of credits entirely and we know that this secret mission right here requires us to spend one credit now we're not sure if our opponent will try to go to that upgrade spot first thing but they might and if they do then we are gonna have to find some way to come up with the one credit needed to activate this if we end up spending this but I think we should we should live life by the points let's go ahead and grab the points for now and to deal with that potential problem in the future there are several ways to get money so let's go ahead and spend this we will now activate this invite investors here and that will generate us two victory points when we come back to the track we can see that will bring us up to 27 total and then we can finish out our turn by drawing the top card from the deck if it's once again not a red card but this one says if we have at three steel Plast we can gain and another steel glass so overall this one is not going to be good for us I think we might end up just as guarding this one if we need to alright we've now come to the end of the ninth round of the game that means we can gather up all of our action tokens and then after that we can look over here to the Federation track now it looks like the orange player is definitely ahead so that means they will stay as the starting player this will now come all the way down here and we can now move this forward and that shows that we are now entering the tenth and final action round of the game all right the orange player can now take their first action of the round and they've decided to go right over here now along with that red action they're gonna discard at this special delivery card we can see that it lets them get rid of one kill which they have they have to Cal pactually so now they have just one as they get rid of this and that will turn into two victory points so that can be discarded and that will bring them from 21 up to 23 points and now over here we can see that they can build a tunnel as well as activate one of their action cards it seems they want to build the tunnel first and they're gonna put it right over here and that's gonna cost them one at steal Plast and then they don't have to spend the one credit because they do have this coral tunnels which gives them a one credit discount on one of the tunnels they build each turn so this will go away and as soon as they build this tunnel onto this spot they get to bump up once on the Federation track which will bring them up to four next up they can activate one of their action cards and it looks like they want to do this organize a conference now that says they can spend a credit or a science in order to upgrade one of their tunnels and they're gonna spend the credit and they'll upgrade it this tunnel right here at this point they're done with their actions so they can finish out their turn by drawing the top card alright it's time for us to take our third to final action of the game but before we do that we do have to discard one of our cards and I don't think this replication system test will end up being good for us we have at zero steel plastron ow so let's go ahead and and discard that and now for our main action we do have our three signs that are ready to upgrade things but we only have a one farm that's ready to be upgraded so what that means is we have to build one more farm this turn so that hopefully we can do this action on the next turn hopefully our opponent does not go there before that and there are effectively two places on the board that we could do that over here we could build up to two farms and here we can build a farm as well as a city now we only have yellow cards in our hand so I figure let's go right over there and then play this at Nano Grill online this says that if we have at least three connected laboratories we get to gain one victory point and I don't think we need to look down there to know that we definitely have at least three in fact I can tell you right now that we have four so we can take our point right now which brings us up to it looks like twenty eight and now we can evaluate the spot and we don't have anywhere near the resources to build a city we're just doing this so that we can build one farm this will of course cost us one kelp and now we are out of kelp and let's build this farm right over here so we are now well set up to try and do this double upgrade our actions are now done so we can finish out our turn by drawing a card now we continue to not draw red cards here but this one is an action card it says build an upgrade farm wow this one says you could pay a biomatter to build a farm and then immediately upgrade it that is a really cool card although I'm not sure we'll be able to use it at this point we don't actually have any biomatter but either way this is now going to go into our hand and the orange player can now go orange can now take their second action and they did consider going up here to block us but after looking everything through they decided that was not gonna be as impactful as they were hoping and it would kind of disrupt their plans so instead they're gonna go right down over here that is a green spot and that will allow them to play this green card now this is an action card and it says that when activated they can spend one science as well as one credit in order to build an upgraded tunnel but they don't get to activate this just now this will go into their action card area and it's their fourth card so they don't have to discard anything and now they can evaluate this spot right here which lets them build a city now it's gonna come as no surprise that they want to build the final symbiotic city and they're gonna put it right over here so that it is now connected in their network now that will cost them one biomatter it'll also take a steel Plast and a kelp and it's also gonna take one credit it's not going to be the two credit because again they have this cost analysis down here which gives them a one credit discount when they're building in these symbiotic cities so with that they have now built the city and they're lobbying office is going to come into effect once again and that will give them two bumps on the Federation track because they built a city it appears they were already up here one time so they will go up at twice now when they get to this third level they will once again get two credits one for the spot and one for their Embassy card and then they will get one seal Plast for getting to the second location at this point they're gonna finish out their turn by drawing the top card from the deck and now we get to go and we are definitely gonna go right on the spot it was pretty close there it looks like our opponent was definitely thinking about going here but they decided it wasn't in their best interest so now that we've placed over here we can spend one of our cards and I figure we'll put this nightshift down now it's an action card which means we are gonna have to discard one of our other cards in order to put this in but unlike before when we've done this it looks like all of the cards we want to activate have already been used now we could activate this secret mission right now if we had any credits which we don't and if we did that this would be discarded and then it wouldn't count and has a special card for our endgame bonus so we certainly don't want to do that let's just go ahead and discard this invite investors away now we can slide this in right over here I'm not sure if we're actually gonna have a chance to play it but it is nice to have it as an option for our final action but either way now we can do the main action on the board which of course involves spending up to three science to do up to three upgrades so let's go ahead and do that now well the first two upgrades are obvious we definitely want to get both of these forms upgraded up here and as soon as we have the second upgraded form in this city that's going to make our biomech construction crew activate and that will give us one steel plaster which we can put into our supply and at this point we have one more upgrade available and I don't think we necessarily want to upgrade these desalination spots it will just allow us to get one biomatter but if we flip over one of these tunnels that will just give us an extra point now I suppose if we upgraded a laboratory that would get us an extra plant steel fast but we don't need that either so let's go ahead and upgrade this tunnel and now we've finished down all of our upgrades and we are in a really good position for scoring this federal priority right here we have one two three four different sets of two so that is gonna be worth it looks like twelve points to us at the end of the game at this point we're now done with our turn so we can draw the top card and it looks like we found a repeatable mission this says that you may perform it you may pay two credits to immediately perform the action in any red slot occupied by another player well that is a situationally very powerful card although I don't think we are gonna end up using it in this game okay it looks like the orange player can now take their final action of the game and they're gonna place it right down here and then play this trial run card now before they activate this card they're gonna go up twice on the federal track that means they will go up once getting themselves at points and then they are once again at the top of the track so they get another point so that's a two point action right there for them and then we can see this trial run says that if they have at least one connected upgraded farm they can gain one kelp and a one victory point well we're about to look down at the board but I can tell you right now that they have been able to satisfy this so we can give them their point right now getting them to 26 and then they can add one kelp into their area it looks like if they are a little bit light on food for all these cities that they have and with that they have now finished evaluating this card which means their turn is done so they will draw the top card from the deck although I suppose it doesn't really matter because it's not going to be playing anymore in the game all right we have one turn left for the game and I think we should head right over here that will allow us to play one of our yellow cards in particular this invite emissary card and when we put this down into our action area we will have to discard another card to make room well this is gonna work out pretty well for us because we can discard this nightshift which we just put in on the last turn and when we discard it since it's not activated we can as a bonus activate it once as it leaves now down here it says that we could to gain the production from one upgraded structure adjacent to a connected City now I think we should simply go with this one a tunnel right here that will get us one credit which we can add into our area and it will get us one victory point it looks like that point will bring us up to 29 and then we can add this invite emissary card right into the set we can now move on and activate this space now I think we should take one science because it pairs up well with our kelp at the end of the game to get points and then I guess let's go ahead and just grab a kelp for the other one I don't think we really need SEAL Plast now the last thing we get to do is activate one of our action cards and I think we should go ahead and spend this credit that we just got in order to activate these secret mission now once again this lets us perform any action in any slot that is either available or occupied by someone other than our and so with that in mind let's go ahead and activate this a red location right here which nobody's gone to this round and we'll go with the top which lets us build farms now the reason for that is because we have just a one open spot left on all of our cities areas and by putting this farm right over here and spending one kelp to build it we now have one of each of the different types of buildings and once again at the end of the game we will get positive two more points for having that third different type around so by putting that down right there we have essentially spent one kelp to get to any game victory points which is pretty good also this farm will generate another kelp for us so I guess we just netted even on that and are just making points for this with that our turn is now done so I suppose we could draw a card even though again it doesn't really matter I suppose we don't need to be drawing cards at the end of the game but with that in mind that this round is now over so we can now move into the third and final production phase of the game before we go into the final scoring now this production phase is just like the rest of them that we've done so that can be simultaneous between the players and we will take care of ours first first things first we have our farms and we have done a lot of farming in this game now it looks like we have a one pair of upgraded farms here another pair here here and here so that is four of those pairs so if we look over here that means we are gonna get four times three kelp or twelve kelp and four times three points or twelve victory points for those farms we also have one more regular farm right here which will get us another kelp so I suppose we get thirteen capital and at twelve points so here is our 13 kelp and then twelve points will bring us up to 41 next up we have our desalination plants and it looks like we have one two three of the regular ones and a single upgraded one so the regular desalination plants can give us one credit each and the upgraded ones come with a biomatter so we can take one biomatter and then it looks like four credits total moving on we now have laboratories now it looks like we have two regular laboratories and two upgraded ones now all of these laboratories will make a science so that means we can take four science right now and then the two upgraded ones will also make a steel Plast so that means we will gain two steel Plast as part of that production we can now move on to the tunnels and again these are only going to be tunnels that are adjacent to two connected cities so that means unfortunately this tunnel and these two over here will not actually produce anything because again not enough people are going through them to make that production happen but either way we are gonna get one two three four five six seven credits right now and then we can check to see which ones are upgraded and when and we look out here it looks like we have three of them so that would be three extra victory points we get we can now skip ahead a little bit and then also score our symbiotic cities we know each of them will get us two points and we have two of those so overall that's two four five six seven points we get right now for our upgraded tunnels and semiotic cities well it looks like we were at 41 so seven points will bring us up to forty eight and now we're done with the base production we can now look to our production cards but it looks like we've gone this entire game without playing a single production card so we don't have to activate any of those and we can now check our metropolis is now we still have just this one down here that's producing for us that is gonna make two victory points right now which will get us up to 50 the next thing we can do is reset our action cards although we don't need to bother with that because the game is now over and the final thing we have to do is feed all of our cities now we only feed cities that are connected to via the network back to this starting spot right here and it looks like we have two four or five cities so let's go ahead and spend at five kelp and now we are done with our production so let's go ahead and see how the orange player did as per usual we can start off with the farms and it looks like they have a one set of upgraded farms in a city and then a single upgraded farm down here so this set is going to generate three kelp as well as three points and this single upgraded farm will get one kelp and one point so overall they're gonna generate four kelp from their farms and they're gonna generate four victory points at the moment they're pretty far behind us but I think that's about to change so those four points we'll bring them from twenty six up to thirty and then they can produce on their desalination plants now it looks like they have two regular desalination plants and a two upgraded that are in the same city so that pair will get them three credits as well as two biomatter and these two single ones will get them one credit so all told it looks like they are going to get five credits and to biomatter which they can then add into their area and now they can move on to the laboratories now it looks like they have one upgraded laboratory and that's it so that will get them one science as well as one steel blast and now we can look at their tunnels now it looks like all of their tunnels are connected back to here via cities that are in the network so that means they are going to go ahead and grab one two three four five six seven eight nine credits and then they can score they're upgraded tunnels and they have four of those and one of those could potentially turn into a kelp and as well as a labyrinth in stead of a point but they like points at this point in the game so they're just gonna take four extra points for those tunnels it looks like they were at 30 so now they go up to 34 and it's now time for them to score their symbiotic cities now they have one two three four five of them and each one will generate two victory points so that is ten points total for those which will jump them from 34 up to 44 at this point they are now done with their building production so they can now move it into the cards now they have four of these we know that they decided not to use this improved greenhouse and we can see right here that this greenhouse will mean that one of their cities does not have to be a kelp when they go ahead and feed those cities so we can take care of that soon and now we can see this event factory will simply get them one credit and then this right here will get them one credit for every city that they have that has at least two desalination plants now it looks like that's still just one city so they will get one more credit from the bank for those and finally they can evaluate the production for their metropolis --is that are connected it looks like they never actually connected this metropolis on the Left although it doesn't actually have production on it but they do have this one connected which will get them two very points so now that all production is done if they get to pop up to 46 and it looks like they're just four points behind us at this point the next thing they have to do is reset all of their action cards but again that doesn't matter because we're at the end of the game and now they have to feed all of their cities now it looks like they have one two three four five six seven cities and right now they just have a five kelp now if you remember they do you have this greenhouse which is going to essentially feed one of the cities but that still means there are one Kalpa behind so they can get rid of all of this kelp right here and the next thing that you can feed your cities with is biomatter now you can of course lose three victory points if you like but they would much rather get rid of one biomatter to feed that seventh city so that worked out pretty well for them and now their production is complete this means we can now move the marker one last time and we can finally evaluate the final scores for all of the players let's go ahead and start with us and it looks like the first thing that we do is evaluate to the victory points that are on in the brown metropolis if we weren't able to connect it back to our starting city via our tunnels now this metropolis is going to get us two points for every special card that we've played and we know that we have one here then two three four so that is going to be 4 times 2 or 8 points and I'm going to go ahead and work my way through this whole card and then we will sum it all up and then add to the track in one big chunk so the next thing we get to do is evaluate points for the cards that we've played now we have a two of these cards right here it looks like this federal priority will get us three points for every pair of upgraded farms we have and we have one two three four of those so that means that this card will get us four times three or twelve victory points and then this exports lets us discard a pairs of science and kelp at a rate of one for the pair in order to get points for that now if we look over here we have a whole bunch of kelp and a5 science so I think what we should do is discard all five of this science right here as well as five kelp and that will be worth five points to us and we'll just put it right there on the card to remember as we are tallying everything up we can now move on and the third thing that we get points for are our cities now we only get points for cities that are populated and connected back to the starting area and once again every city is worth a base two points but if it has a one type of building on it it's three and it has two different types of buildings it's worth four and if it has all three types of buildings it is worth six points so if we look out here we can see that this city has all three types so that's six points the city has two different types so that is worth four points the city has all three types so at 6 another three types so six again and then two types so four points so all told that is quite a bit of points we got for our cities and the fourth thing that we can do is convert all of our resources into money at a rate of one to one I'm not gonna bother doing that we'll just look over here and count all of these as money including the biomatter which is actually worth two money instead of the one so I suppose for that let's go ahead and get rid of this biomatter and put two money down over here and the last thing that we have to do is convert all of our money or add it all up divided by four and then get one point for each of those so if we look over here it looks like we have 13 here 14 15 16 17 18 19 so if we design divide at 19 by 4 that gets us down to 16 so that is 4 bonus points so all told we get 55 extra points as part of this final scoring so we can now add that to the previous score that we had which will bring us to a final endgame score of a 105 okay let's see if the orange player is able to catch up with us just like for us the first thing they check is to see if they connected they're brown metropolis back to their starting city and they did so if we look a little bit closer at this it says they are going to gain it looks like 12 victory points if they have at 7 connected cities in their area and they do indeed have that so that is 12 points so that they will get for their brown metropolis next up they will gather points for the cards that they have their end game and they were able to get two of these special three cost cards made now this one right here will give them two points for every symbiotic city they have they have it looks like five of them so that is gonna be 5 times 2 or 10 points for this card and then this one right here says if they spend 15 credits they can take it 13 points well if we look over here oops they should actually have 5 more credits sorry about that they have 25 total so they can spend the 15 which does get them the 13 points for that and now they can move on and score their cities so if we look over here we can start at the top there are no buildings here so this is a two point City this is another two point City this one is a four point city with two different types of buildings and then this is also a four point city with two different types of buildings and then a two point City a two point city and then lastly another four point city for the two different types of buildings moving on they can now convert their resources into money the only thing they really have to do that for is this biomatter they can get rid of this and gather to money and then just consider all of the rest of these as credits so it looks like they have 12 here 13 14 15 16 17 and they can then divide that by four and it looks like it they will get four extra points for that just like we did and when they add all of that together they have 59 endgame points and when you add 59 to 46 you actually get 105 so after all of that we have tied here at a hundred and five and the tiebreaker is the current turn order now I forgot to evaluate this when we got out of the last round but we can see that the orange player was indeed at the top so they would have been the starting player in the next turn so that means they are gonna win the tiebreaker and the orange player has just barely beaten us and that completes one full two-player game of underwater cities well I hope you enjoyed this playthrough overall I think it went very well considering the scores were so close there at the end obviously it wasn't quite a tie because I did make a mistake earlier in the video and the orange player should have had one more point but in the end of the orange player still won and I guess it's possible that I might have made another mistake or two in the process of this video but that's the only victory point mistake I saw now obviously we kind of cheated earlier as well as the blue player we were supposed to pay one credit when we put down one of those special cards and we didn't and at one point we definitely went down 2-0 credits so if we had played that correctly we would have done things differently and I don't think it necessarily would have had a huge impact on our score honestly maybe if we'd played correctly we would have found ourselves making better decisions with different options that we had and actually ended up winning potentially with those different decisions but either way the orange player was victorious and I was really happy to see that the two strategies that we took kind of converged in very similar scores that at the end obviously we were gunning really hard to get those special cards because they gave us bonus points at the end and the orange player was trying to build a bunch of cities because they got bonus points at the end for doing that now our cities have scored a huge amount of points for each individual city because we decked them out with all of those different buildings whereas the orange player had a lot more buildings than us or a lot more cities that is but this those cities scored a lot less points because they were kind of barren there were just a city with people in it but they were not actually producing anything with the lab two of the farms or anything like that so that was definitely the main focuses that we were going for although I guess for us we also had an emergent strategy of trying to go really hard on getting those upgraded farms builds because we had a couple cards that we were able to play into our tableau that gave us bonuses for building on those farms and those upgraded farms can obviously give a lot of points there at the end a significant portion of our points came from those and also that special card that gave us points for having those upgraded farms so obviously underwater cities is a game about trying to do the best you can with the cards that you are drawing randomly you're trying to piece together combos and strategies that work well for the things that you are already doing and I think both the players did a pretty good job of that and yeah I think that is going to wrap up all my thoughts on this play as always I'd like to thank everyone who's been supporting this channel including all of these producer level patreon backers if you two would like to directly support these videos then please go to junkets Gamescom slash support to see a variety of ways with which you could do that also if you enjoyed this video please consider clicking the like button down below as well as a subscribe button thanks for watching

Channel: JonGetsGames

Views: 61,569

Keywords: jongetsgames, jon gets games, johngetsgames, jongetsgames playthrough, jongetsgames play through, jongetsgames playthru, jongetsgames runthrough, jongetsgames run through, jongetsgames runthru, jongetsgames Underwater Cities, Underwater Cities playthrough, Underwater Cities play through, Underwater Cities play thru, Underwater Cities runthrough, Underwater Cities run through, Underwater Cities runthru, Underwater Cities review

Id: 6_HCzo_HAYI

Length: 159min 51sec (9591 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018