Gone Fishin'

Instead of Liz and her friends going to trivia, they all came to the house and we played...

Fleet 1-6 players
I watched a gameplay video and loved it. It's an interesting bidding game where the cards act as...everything:money, boats, and captains. I pledged toward the kickstarter for the expansion and added on the base game.
During the game you use your hand of cards to bid on contracts. Once you have contracts, you play you cards as boats which get you fish. Each contract gives you a special ability too. The more of the same contract you have, the stronger the ability. The game starts out slow, but as you build your fleet and number of contracts, it ramps up quick. The game ends once you get through all the contracts or all the fish. Points are based off of contracts, boats, and fish you have.

We had a 5-player game going with Liz, Raeann, Jess, Sarah, and myself. Jess started with and early jump with a Processing Vessel contract. I got some early discounts with a Shrimp contract. Raeann and Sarah got a good card income with Lobster, Swordfish and Tuna licenses. Liz got a little bit of everything. Sarah made some big victory point purchases, but the game changer was over the King Crab contract. Jess and Liz bid all the way up to 13 coin. That pretty much clinched the win for Liz. She beat us all by about 10 or 15 points.

I really, really like this game. I love the diversity of the cards and because of that you always have a couple of options even if you miss out on a contract you really wanted. Unfortunately, there are two big problems: set up and clean up. The set up of the game is base off of the number of players and is kind of confusing if you haven't played in a while. You can only have so many of certain types of contracts. I made a small setup chart to keep is simple. After the game, you have to separate everything back out. Imagine that after you finished playing rummy with two different decks of cards, you had to organizes the cards by their suits and decks. It's time consuming. I always see this game on the shelf and want to play, but every time I think about that last fact, I avert my eyes.

Tally: 175/185  Bonus: 43/50