For everything, there is (a) Seasons...

    

Our more biblically inclined readers may know of a popular verse, Ecclesiastes 3:1, which states: For everything there is a Season, a time for every activity under heaven. For first time players of Asmodee/Libellud's newest game, Seasons, it may just feel like the game has every mechanic under heaven smushed into one package. Instead of leading to a muddled package however, Seasons handles all these things masterfully, and what results is a fantastic experience. 

Like many of the games I've played while running this website, I first heard about Seasons through W. Eric Martin's news article(s) on BGG News. Initial reports didn't have much information, but did provide preview cards with absolutely gorgeous art done by Xavier Gueniffey Durin. If nothing else, I told myself, I'd have to check this game out just to look at the pictures on the cards. 

As luck would have it, Stefan and company had a demo copy available at the Asmodee booth during Origins. So, I sat down and played a game with one of the booth workers; and, even after a clunky playthrough--we drafted 7 cards rather than 9 and forgot to separate them into seasonal piles--I was hooked. The game felt like Magic without being M:tG. I was drafting, I was managing resources, I was rolling dice... my brain was leaking out my ears trying to keep track of everything, but I was loving it nonetheless. After the dust had cleared and I had fully exchanged my energy tokens for Crystals and manipulated the board with some temporal boots, I came up just short of defeating the Asmodee worker (138-129 I believe). Nonetheless, I was impressed and wanted to share this new discovery with my friends.

So I took to BGG, hoping to spread the word about this game. Slowly, and through the help of Asmodee and other reviewers, Seasons started to gain a little bit of visibility. BoardGameArena supported a free online version of the game, Podcasts featured it, Video reviewers got some preview copies, bloggers far more prominent than me put it on their most anticipated lists. All this seems to have had a good effect because, as of 10:45am on Thursday of GenCon, the game was sold out. Fortunately, I was able to snag one of the last 5 copies available at the show; and I've been playing the tangible and online versions quite heavily ever since. 

The first thing one will notice upon opening the box is the component quality and the great insert. Twenty, large, custom engraved die catch your eye. The card art will have you rifling through the deck looking at all the amazing illustrations, and the board and player tableaus have bright colors that pop and demand your attention. The insert itself is very well done (on par with something like the Lords of Waterdeep insert, and gives a definitive "a place for everything  and everything in its place" vibe. I do wish, however, that the two compartments for the cards were a little deeper, as the card stack becomes a little too high if players choose to sleeve their cards. I, admittedly, am a sleever... but I think something like this calls into question the fact that more companies need to acknowledge that players do sleeve their games. By making the wells for the decks deeper, it seems like they could kill 2 birds with one design stone, but I digress.



From a gameplay perspective, Seasons may seem a little intimidating. However, if pared down into its individual parts, it becomes much more palatable. To start, each player is dealt a hand of 9 cards. From that point, much like 7 Wonders, players will draft one card and pass the rest to their left. This will continue until players, again, have 9 cards. The 9 cards are then divided into 3 piles of three, with the first pile starting in the players' hands and each subsequent pile being unlocked once the marker on the seasons board completes one full revolution. With a total of 50 cards (each represented twice in the full deck) available to draft, the number of combinations a player can come up with is staggering.

Once each player has their cards assigned to piles, the real fun of the game begins: a number of die equal to 1+ the number of players is rolled, after which each player will draft a die and gain the benefits from it as indicated by the symbols etched onto its face. A large rectangle indicated that the player can draw a power card from the stack of undrafted cards. A number indicates that the player gains that many crystals (the game's term for VP), Symbols indicate the gain of a Magic-esque resource token (raindrop = blue, feather = red, fire = yellow, leaf = green.), and a star increases a player's summoning gauge. The summoning gauge dictates the maximum number of power cards a player can have in play at one time; and considering that every card left in your hand is worth -5 points at the end of the game, you'll want to get as many on the table as possible. 

I have, as you might imagine, heard a few complaints about the game, which is to be expected. The first, and most minor one is that the score track for crystals/VP is too small. This is a perfectly valid argument and one with which I would agree. The size of the board could have been enlarged; as it stands, if players are on the same number VP, you have to stack their cubes. Doing this makes the cubes much too easy to knock over, and if you get into the game hardcore it's easy to lose track of what number you were on. 

The second complaint about Seasons that keeps getting thrown around is that the cards are imbalanced. I think this is complete and utter B.S. Yes, some cards present ridiculous combos (e.g. The Longneck+Boots combo that seems to be all the rage online, or the Olaf's Statue+Runic Cube that gives you 30VP for 3Blue) and some cards are better in certain years than others, but no card is an auto-win all by itself. Take the Bespelled Grimoire for example; it grants you 2 energy tokens and lets you store up to 10 (normal max = 7). Many people argue that, if taken in year 1, the Grimoire provides a nigh-insurmountable advantage. FALSE. Absolutely False. For starters, in order to take full advantage of the Grimoire, you need to draft cards that give you 2 resources. If you're doing that, you're not drafting dice that increase your summoning gauge, which means most of the spells you would summon with said increase are going to be stuck in your hand. Conversely, if you draft a card to increase your summoning gauge and negate the drawback of the Grimoire, that's one fewer true power card you have to cast. The name of the game in Seasons is balance; generally speaking, the more things your drafted cards can do and react to, the higher the higher the likelihood is that you'll win.



The other reason that I really enjoy Seasons is that, without fail, every time I play, a story is born that I feel like I need to share with all my gamer friends who weren't present. Whether it be the 180 beatdown Grant Rodiek put on a few of his fellow gamers at GenCon or the epic 2+ hour, 4P game last night that included a perfectly timed Air Elemental --> Glutton Cauldron combo and a Double Amsung Longneck into Temporal Boots combo that rewound the game from late year three to very early year 2, there always seems to be something to talk about after a game is concluded. As stated earlier, Seasons is the game this year that's changed more apprehensive gamers, asking "does this have a tutorial" into convinced fans who constantly blurt out "I love this, let's play again." To me, that's the mark of a great game.