Together we have survived one of the worst catastrophes ever seen by mankind. Now we are afloat amongst the remains of the world we once lived, trying to be the best Seasteader of them all. We will dive and gain resources, build for the colony and learn to clean the toxic pollution that can choke the waves. All of this and more is what we will face as we dive deep into this game together today!
Seastead is a new 2 player game from Wizkids games. It is designed by Ian Coper and Jan Gonzalez with illustration by Bartek Fedyczak, Jennifer Tatti and Gong Studious. It plays in approximately 30 mins.
Overview
In Seastead two players compete to build up their colony home and collect resources, build up their location and keep the ocean clean. It is your job to build the best home in the flotillas and be the best contributor to the colony. Face off with your competition to see who will reign supreme!
Gameplay
Players will take one turn each in the round, and the starting player is determined by the direction that the arrow on the shallow dive card points. On a players turn, they will either dive or build. If you cannot build, you must dive.
The action Dive will have you reveal the top card of the dive deck and then you can orient it so that one half faces you and the other faces your opponent. Each of you gain the resources as supplied by their half of the card. This is a great way to gain resources but keep in mind you will also help your opponent gain some as well!
The action Build will have you choose one of the available leftmost available buildings on your player board on a matching row. You can build on any space that is open, ship figures can be built on. Pay the building cost,. resolve the building effect and location effect where you place it.
There are three types of buildings, each with their own unique effects and bonuses. These include Ports, Academies and Shipyards. Each will apply their effects once built and will change the way the game moves forward.
-Ports allow you to add dock tiles that will be added to the Port’s location and score points at the end of the game based on the presence of that building on the flotilla.
-Academies allow you to choose a specialist card. By adding one of these to your play area. These cards come in to help you at different parts of the game, some of them can be for the dive or build action and some can be used either action. Once used they are flipped over face-down in front of you. Any unused specialists are scored as victory points at the end of the game.
-Shipyards allow you to add a ship to one of the flotillas. These will make buildings cheaper by one resource to place and can gain you a resource if someone else uses them. They move around the individual flotilla boards as players build on them.
The end of the game is triggered when any one of the end-game conditions are met. These include all but one building being empty on a player’s board, a flotilla being filled with buildings, the cleanup tokens are out or the depths card shows. At this point you will play the current turn and one more round.
Final scoring is performed where players add up all their visible victory point stars from resources and buildings that match docks, specialists, cleanup tokens and locations. The player with the most points wins!
Impressions:
Seastead brings some of the theme that makes Flotilla such a fun and unique game and boils it down to a two-player game. I really enjoyed the unique theme and gameplay that Flotilla brought to the table and this game takes some of that great world and brings it into a different style of play. The flotillas, resource collection and the great art all put focus on the original but it stands as its own game quite well.
The push and pull of the resources and buildings make for quite an interesting game and it fits the idea of a two player game very well. There are times you have to dive instead of building and you can never get so far ahead of the other player with it since you both are awarded resources. This keeps one player from running away with all the resources and locking down builds. In the same way I like the building effects that allow you to focus on one area on spread it around to pull points from a variety of sources. I have tried both the one building rush and trying to build evenly and neither seems like the “better” choice for getting ahead.
The components of this game are top notch in this small box. The wooden tokens are well made and detailed and the cardboard pieces are sturdy and well-designed. You really do get a lot of good game in this box and you can tell there was some great attention to detail with the way it was put together.
I don’t have a lot of strictly two player games in my collection and for those that I do a lot of them end up being head to head combat style games. That’s where Seastead can enter my collection as a two player push and pull game that has you both doing things to push you towards your victory while also at times helping pull your opponent get there as well. But be warned, you still need to make sure decisions focus on what you need so much that you stay ahead of an advantages you give across the game board.
Overall Seastead is a fun two player game that will bring some really fun mechanics to your face-to-face battle with an opponent as you fight to build up the best
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