Tokaido probably had the most definitive phases out of any of the games thus far. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve become more apt to noticing the phases, or if it was the game itself, but I could definitely tell when I had a definitive gameplan, and when I felt like our team was going to win. The game itself was really unique, and I found the theme to fit really well. I enjoyed trying to deduce the objectives of the other players, and think of how they interact with my objectives.
Pandemic could have been more fun if we hadn’t encountered an outbreak on both the first and second turn of the game. If I remember correctly, 3 cities started at level 3 infection, and the outbreaks both occurred in one of these cities. I looked up how many cities there were after the game and found it to be 48. Given a deck of 48 cities, there was a 3/48 * 2/47 = 0.27% chance of that happening. Frustration aside, I was able to enjoy the game for a short time. The theme and mechanics were both fairly unique, and I felt as if I was useful to the team until we inevitably lost. Dealing with 2 outbreaks in the first 2 turns is hard.
8 Minute Empire was difficult, but only because of the rules. The English translation didn’t quite specify where the starting region was, so we had to infer it as the center region (the other playgroup inferred it as the 4 corners and each player began in a separate one – I don’t know which one was correct). I also had trouble determining whether having n of a card counted for x points per card or x points total, and I never figured out why there were resource tokens (which we never took out of the box). Once I had a general idea of how the game worked, I became engaged and concerned with other player’s expansion, but I was so concerned with how to play the game that the theme didn’t even cross my mind.