Creator Response [Rules Clarification Questions] Grandpa's Goals vs. Number of Players

[DrewzyBluezy]

Well hello!

My fiancée and I dearly love the video game and just sat down to play the board game last night with just the two of us. It was very fun, but wow is it difficult! Even using the first timer standard cards we narrowly lost. I'd like to think we're pretty adept at board games of moderate complexity, but we definitely were feeling overwhelmed by the amount of things that needed done; you really have to get good RNG to succeed, and with 32 total actions per player multiple wasted rolls can feel pretty devastating. Most of the rules we found pretty self-explanatory, but there were a few cards that the wording caught us off-guard and that didn't seem to be answered anywhere in the rules:

Grandpa's Goals
Specifically Tool Upgrades, but also broadly applicable; the card specifies that 2x upgrades are needed for each player. Does this mean that each player needs to upgrade their starting tool twice, or is the number of upgrades in total sufficient? So if I upgrade my Fishing Rod to the Iridium Rod and my partner gets the Copper Watering Can, I've gotten 3 and she's gotten 1. Is that sufficient for the goal?

Cherry Bomb
Triggers one space on the Mine Grid. I don't understand what this is saying. By 'triggers' does it mean that you pick one of the spaces on the Map card and receive the rewards/event from that space?

Hearts
I guess this isn't a rules clarification but maybe a general strategy question; how on Earth are you supposed to amass enough hearts? It seems like with 2 players you about need to spend half your time just making friends in order to get the required number of hearts just to even reveal the bundles, and that's not including hearts spent dismissing Joja cards/donated to bundles/petting animals.

Can someone talk about how this game scales at 4 players? My gut is telling me that even though the bundles require more items, that the action economy more heavily favors a full set of 4 players. Anyhow, loving the concept, just a little confused by some of the rules. Looking forward to playing more.

 

[Colito]

Grandpa's Goals - Tool Upgrades just require total upgrades, not each player having upgrades.

Cherry Bomb - Yes, you get to choose a single result in the mine. For Bomb and Mega Bomb, same is true, you get just to select more result squares on a single map card.

Hearts - I'll let other people chime in with their strategies, but in all my games we each end up few a few friends (sometimes more if we get unlucky gifting) but there are also a handful of profession upgrades that allow hearts from other sources. These can really come in handy to relieve some of the need for hearts.

 

[Matmatics]

Before you reveal all the bundles, it doesn't seem to be a good idea to spend hearts on anything else, since they are quite hard to get at the beginning of the game.
Some Joja tiles I straight up ignore (e.g. museum if I don't have the museum objective), and paying 5 gold seems less expensive than using a heart most of the time.
Petting animals feels like a waste of resources early game; it only increases the produce's cost by one, and the RNG of the dice seems to make animals less profitable than just planting and harvesting crops for money. Personally, I'd only pet animals if I needed to complete a Quality Animal Product bundle.

On a 3-4 player game, if everyone commits to buying as many animals as possible early game, maybe it would become profitable enough. Haven't tested it yet though. But it is quite hard to acquire the money to build the structures and buy enough animals in a 1-2 player game.

 

[linkmastr001]

Before you reveal all the bundles, it doesn't seem to be a good idea to spend hearts on anything else, since they are quite hard to get at the beginning of the game.
Some Joja tiles I straight up ignore (e.g. museum if I don't have the museum objective), and paying 5 gold seems less expensive than using a heart most of the time.
Petting animals feels like a waste of resources early game; it only increases the produce's cost by one, and the RNG of the dice seems to make animals less profitable than just planting and harvesting crops for money. Personally, I'd only pet animals if I needed to complete a Quality Animal Product bundle.

On a 3-4 player game, if everyone commits to buying as many animals as possible early game, maybe it would become profitable enough. Haven't tested it yet though. But it is quite hard to acquire the money to build the structures and buy enough animals in a 1-2 player game.

Basically this when it comes to Hearts. You need 7 Hearts / Player (6 to reveal bundles and 1 for finishing the Bulletin Board) to finish the game. I've sometimes gotten excess hearts and been unsure how to use them, because it may be too out of my way to unlock/buy animals.

 

[Valimure]

To get all of the hearts needed to reveal and complete all bundles, you need around 4-5 friends per player. Of course you can get lucky with some when it comes to birthdays and having loved gifts on hand and might need even less than that.

Like Cole said as well there's several upgrades and other cards that give hearts as well, including event cards, mine event cards, and items!

I do agree that animals and buildings rarely seem worth it unless they're required; I think scaling the price based on the number of players would be a wise rule change for the future, as I have found the game is more difficult with fewer players.

 

[Odin]

Regarding hearts, I would encourage you to get a good variety of items in your inventory before attempting to friend someone (with multiple players, trading can help with this). If you have a crop, forage item, fish, and either an ore, mineral, or artifact, you stand a great chance of earning four hearts from drawing two villager cards.

 

[Giahadra]

I agree with the above. I have only played the game by myself or with one other person, but from those games it is clear that animals are not for gold making. The resources and actions it takes to get any animals plus the randomness of generating any products would leave you in the negative (both in actions and gold).

IMO crops are your gold/gift generating resource. Everything else do only if there is a bundle/goal. Plant crops on the last day of Fall if you need more money going into winter. Try not to take double actions on a single space. Those forageables are great gifts/bundles/gold.

 

[xombieprincess]

I'm a little late to the party here, but after playing a four player game while we were also massively concerned about the number of hearts we needed, we did end the game with a more hearts than we needed. It did require all of us to put a pretty decent effort into making friends. It took us until mid winter to finish the game but in the end we beat the game at artisan level. The funny thing was we got several heart generating items at the very end of the game when we no longer needed them, so with a little luck if you get those sooner I'm sure you won't have any problems.