[cfarrell]

You mention theme as a big strength of AoEIII, but you don't really discuss theme in the body of the review and I'd have liked to see some discussion of why you thought the theme was so good. AoEIII is built on the same basic engine as Aladdin's Dragons and Caylus, and I personally felt the game was (unsurprisingly) about as abstract as those games - better than the thematically-impaired Caylus, but not as good as the reasonably solid Aladdin's Dragons. When you borrow a core game system so heavily, you're not likely to get dramatically better thematic results, and to me AoEIII from a thematic standpoint felt no better or worse than an average European game.

Unlike you, I found the randomness in the expedition results to be huge and implemented in a way that seemed designed to be frustrating and annoying. If you run into minimal opposition, you get a tiny payoff and everyone dies. If you run into massive opposition, you get a potentially extremely large payoff and everyone dies. It doesn't make any thematic sense at all, and it injects major arbitrary randomness into the game, especially early. Most players will quickly determine that the reasonable risk management strategy is to simply max out your expedition sizes because the downside risk of wastage is huge if you fail, but then the difference between drawing well and drawing poorly distributes major bonuses arbitrarily, especially once you get into the expedition deck. What makes it especially not fun for me is that you're flying totally blind. When you embark on an expedition card, maybe you're going for circumnavigation and a very major reward, maybe you're going for discovering the Great Lakes or something and a far smaller reward, you have no idea, and all you know for sure is that everyone involved is going to die. Surely Magellan had a slightly better idea what he was trying to accomplish? It would make a lot more thematic sense if you had some idea of what kind of expedition you were sponsoring instead of clumping trivial expeditions into the same deck as world-altering ones.