First impressions on Seasons

Spring? Great. Summer? Good too. Fall? Very cozy. Winter? Kinda sucks.

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Oh, you meant Seasons?

I got to play my first playthrough of the game with a couple of colleagues during our board gaming club session and I wanted to share my initial impressions with you.

Seasons is a tableau building strategy game for 2-4 players. We played it with three and it worked nicely. BoardGameGeek says it's best for 2 which I find interesting because it didn't feel like a specifically good two-player game but since I haven't actually played it with two players, I can't comment.

I lost the game gloriously at the end, despite being over 30 points ahead around the midway of the game. It's very common for me to do well in the early game of tableau/engine builders and then notice towards the end that my engine doesn't really run and others get past.

The game is played over 3 years of 12 months, split into 4 seasons per year. Each season has their own dice and market prices. After each year, you get to pick more cards that you set aside at the beginning of the game. There are three main resources in the game: crystals (which are points that can be spent like a resource), energy tokens (which come in four elements: water, ground, fire and air) which are used to summon cards, and power cards that you summon to build your engine.

The cards have a cost, a point value and either an immediate action, an activatable action or a reactionary action – or any combination of them. To summon these cards, you need to gain stars on a summoning gauge: each star allows you to have one card in play.

First playthroughs of these sorts of games are always tough because it's hard to know what kind of synergies exist and what kind of powers are good. I got couple of really nice combos but my fellow players managed to rack up eventually even better ones, gaining them extra resources and points on regular basis.

As I got a nice head start, I tried to accelerate the game to finish as quickly as possible but fell behind in the last year so much that even with my final scoring from the tableau, I couldn't make it to the top at the end.

Compared to similar games like Everdell, Seasons is much more streamlined and gaining energy tokens to summon cards is easier and you can get a lot more of them compared to Everdell. On the other hand, the card powers are not as exciting or powerful so summoning cards doesn't often feel that great.

I would love to give it another go in the near future though so definitely a positive experience and a recommendation from me!

Big thanks to Chris for helping me out and providing pictures as I forgot to take some while playing ❤️!