Fort Sumter: Secession Crisis

I REALLY wanted to like this game. And my initial review would have been four or five stars. But now I’m giving this game just two stars. And I will delete it. Why? This game is way too dependent on luck. You might as well just roll two dice. High sum wins. Here’s what I mean. If you are, say, the Union player and you are dealt a run of Confederate 1 cards, just quit and start over. You will lose. And why is the Union player being dealt Confederate cards anyway? The Union player should be dealt only Union cards. And the Confederate player should be dealt only Confederate cards. This flaw ruins the game for me. Developer, please consider fixing this! And here’s one more thing. Each round, each player should pick his action card in secret. Just like with the Objective cards. This game could be so great. But as it is, no. On edit: I’ve played maybe 10 more games since this review. And my two-star review still stands. Get a run of opponent 1 cards, and the game is over. It doesn’t matter how clever you are. You lose. That’s ridiculous.

Update to review- thanks for the turn indicator. A new problem is the log stops at the final crisis (at least I've noticed it in my current game wherein the final crisis was triggered by cubes in 2nd turn.). There is, afaik, no way to tell what opponents previous cards were, nor what either of their or your cube moves were. It's really important to be able to see that. 5 star after that gets fixed. Good game but, afaik, there is no way to tell whose turn it is in a multiplayer game. When you play multiple games, it is extremely annoying to go through the games to find the one where is your turn. Also the AI is weaker than I'd have expected. A decent neural net should have been able to make a reasonable AI I'd think.

This is a smooth implementation of the excellent GMT board game. It plays well and has a fairly intuitive interface. No complaints, I’m enjoying it thoroughly!