Innovation: Echoes of the Past

Playing Innovation online with younger daughter Chen Rui has now become our norm. Now that she is studying away from home, this is a good way for us to continue playing games together. Well, kind of together. We mostly play in asynchronous mode, but sometimes we are online at the same time, and we video call while we play. Innovation is free to play on BoardGameArena.com. In addition to the base game, these expansions are available too - Echoes of the Past, Artifacts of History and Cities of Destiny. Now Chen Rui and I play Echoes of the Past. 

The version implemented on BoardGameArena.com is no longer the latest. Innovation Ultimate was released this year. The base game and all the expansions have been tweaked. I find the online version works just fine. We are now happily enjoying ourselves exploring all the card powers in Echoes. We are in no hurry to delve into Artifacts or Cities. 

In the online version, the rule for drawing an expansion card is whenever you have no expansion card in hand and you are to draw a card, you must draw an expansion card. In the latest rules, if your highest level stack is the only stack of yours at that level, then whenever you need to draw a card, you draw an expansion card. 

Echoes is a big expansion. It comes with a full set of cards, which means you have as big a strategy space to explore as the base game. Plenty of quirky powers to explore and exploit. In terms of game mechanisms, the two new elements are bonuses and echo effects. Bonuses appear on some of the expansion cards, in the position of one of the icons. They simply give you additional points, on top of the cards you score. If you have multiple bonuses visible in your tableau, only one will score based on its face value. The others give you only 1 point each. Echo effects are like mini dogma effects. If an echo effect is visible, if you dogma that colour, you execute all the echo effects first before executing the dogma itself. If you splay your stack in such a way that you make many echo effects visible, your dogma action can become very powerful. 

Chen Rui and I set our games to require an extra achievement to win. Normally with two players and one expansion in use, the victory condition is 7 achievements. We make our game require 8 instead. This way it is more likely we will reach the later ages. Also we more like need to claim some special achievements. This lets us explore and experience more aspects of the game. 

We had one particularly exciting game. She did well early on, scoring many points and quickly grabbing the normal achievements from age 1 to 6. 

This was bad for me. She only needed two more achievements to win. I had no choice but to work on the special achievements. I kept falling behind on points. I worked on making my nation strong. I collected many cards, splayed them as much as I could, and built a huge empire with many icons. It was by doing this that I was able to start claiming the special achievements. Special achievements are hard to claim, but if you can persist until late game and build a large empire, it becomes easier. Patiently I built my nation, and step by step I managed to get seven special achievements! 

Later Chen Rui managed to get a seventh achievement too, a normal achievement based on her score. Now we were tied at seven achievements each. Eventually I managed to get my eighth achievement, which was a normal achievement based on my score. That was a hard-earned victory. By this time three of my stacks were splayed up. My nation was a superpower.