Two weeks ago I played my friends pnp copy of Duck Dealer, and never delivered a report.
To sum up this lesser known Splotter box: Peaks and valleys. Some turns are short, take some tokens and pass. Until you have enough movement, trade and build tokens to spend in a gushing torrent of zooming and token swapping and converting and developing the map and creating shortcuts. And then back to token collecting.
It can lead to agonizing downtime. Player 1 is struggling to efficiently cash in their actions, realising halfway through that they fucked up the math or the item recipes. The build up to huge plays through quick and minor turns leads to one 15-20 minute turn if you made any little mistake. Which feels about right for a splotter (the making mistakes and miscounting) but the lengthy execution is excessive compared to the more well known titles.
And throughout all of this watching your buddy cuss and sweat, you are waiting, knowing your next turn is take 3 red, 2 blue, 1 yellow token and pass.
I am wary about playing it at more than 2.
Now, we did not at all engage in trading materials between players. And at 3 or 4 maybe thats the ticket to reducing downtime and having what you need on hand.
How we built the map and led to pockets of combos that would then run dry and force us to backtrack, building your ship for more tokens making it weaker in movement, DD has these tempo considerations that feel peak Splotter.
I want another go at it, as I had first game misgivings about TGZ that were super misguided.
But I could also be playing more TGZ with the fan god expansion that is hilarious and devious.

Bios: Mesofauna (only at cocoon level) review next.