Seasons

29th January and we're back at 'The Sovereigns'

​Published by the same company that published 'Lords of Xidit' is 'Seasons'.

Seasons is a bit different to anything I've played before. It combines card drafting, deck creation and dice rolling mechanics.

To start with, Seasons is played over 3 'years'.
Each year has 4 'seasons'.
Each season has 3 'months'.
Well that's obvious you're thinking? but this is important.

The game is won by having accumulated the highest amount of crystals at the end of the 3rd year.

There are several ways to do this. But it appears that the main way is to 'summon' cards into play.
This is where the seasons matter.

• Each card requires you to spend spend elemental energy (fire, earth, water, air, you know the score) to summon the card.
• Elemental energy is normally acquired from the results of dice rolling. There are 4 sets of different dice - 1 set for each season.
• Each season has 2 elements it produces in abundance and 1 element it does not produce at all, seasons determine the rate at which you gather elemental energy. This can impact when you are able to play your cards.
• Thinking ahead here can pay off.

Once you can play a card, it can have an immediate, activated or continuing effect.
These effects are quite varied and can give you crystals, energy, acquire more cards or allow to steal from other players etc. There are 50 different cards in the base game. Most cards also have a bonus value which is added to your crystal score at the end, some have penalties.

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There's a limit to the number of cards you can play that needs to be managed (it starts at 0, maxes out at 15 and needs to be raised - normally by dice results).

The card drafting mechanic I will describe though.
Each player starts with 9 cards, they keep 1 and pass the remaining to the left, rinse and repeat until every player has 9 cards.
Each player then creates 3 decks of 3 cards - 1 for each year.
​You start the game with the 3 cards from the first year, when you reach the 2nd year, you get 3 extra cards and same for the final year. It's also worth noting that your final score is penalised for each card remaining in your hand at the end of the game.

The game is fairly straightforward and the rules will be picked up quickly, the only tricky thing is knowing which cards to put in which deck during deck creation.

The game is actually plays quite quickly for the first 2 years, but by then you'll probably have 6 or so cards in play and will need to start tracking their effects. The final year is probably 50% of the play time.
I would happily try this again. I'm tempted to buy a copy.

One Final thing I will mention is the game's colour scheme.
Water elemental tokens are blue - fine.
Fire elemental tokens are yellow- WTF, really WTF, yellow!