The Tea Dragon Society

We have seen this game a few times, and it looked cute.  We finally got a copy a few weeks back, finally got a chance to try it out today and, well ... it was confusing and weird, and not in the good way where we feel we're going to discover something we like.  We really wanted to like it, so we pushed through whatever the rulebook was trying to say.

The rules really need a better section on how to identify the different types of cards, it just starts by saying to sort that big stack of cards you've never seen before into a deck for each dragon character card, a deck for each season, and a market deck. It turns out that the seasonal cards have colors behind the top half, and the market deck starts packed with the cards with a little "st" in the lower right (the "starter cards"), and the dragon cards all match the names at bottom center.  But a few cards have no markings, and we just threw them in the market deck.

 
Yes, there is a detailed Card Glossary page, but that's aside from the initial setup, and it breaks the cards into Growth cards, Mischief Cards, Protection Cards and such, details which really have nothing to do with gameplay -- you can just read the cards to see what they do.

We found this rules walkthrough video from the publisher:
https://renegadegamestudios.com/the-tea-dragon-society-card-game/

We thought it would be a simple "spend points to get cards worth more points" game.  I saw on the box that there were cards with little rules on them, which usually drives us batty.  Here, those rules were generally so simple they were annoying in a different way.  You get to draw one card per turn from your little character deck, or spend cards to buy cards from the season or market.  But about a third of the cards you draw say to discard that card and one of some other card.  So just getting three points is annoying.  If you finally get three points with a Sleeping, an Entertainment and whatever else, and you draw a card that says "Discard this card AND a Sleeping card", all it does it takes points away while you're trying to get enough points to actually DO something.  I had one point, then two, then one, then three, spent the three to get a card worth two, and had that taken away by some other card right away.

In fact, it's so hard to get points to spend that they added a weird Mentors card worth a point, which goes to the player on the right after you use that point to buy a card, just so that player has an extra point to spend.  And when it come back around, it's nice to have the extra point.  But why?

Most of the cards just take your choices away.  Say I spend 3 cards to get 4 points to buy a card with a final score value of 5, and that card says "If drawn, discard this card."  What?  Translated into actual attempts to play the game, if you get that card, don't try to spend it on a better card because it will end up in your discard pile, that shuffles back into your draw pile, and every time you draw it you have to discard it, so you will never get a final score for it.  Is that "fun"?

Assuming that "if drawn" means it had to come from your draw/discard pile, then the effect doesn't happen when you buy it, because obviously that would suck.  You would spend five hard-earned points just to get a card that says to "discard me" right away.

Your dragon card may let you draw if you have a Feeding or Sleeping card (any specific growth card), but there's way too much discarding and in the end Anne beat me by 6 points (we think), based on what we thought we should have been doing, and all those cute little cards just left us feeling like we missed something.

A rule we disn't see the point of: When you buy a memory card, you put it right into your discard pile and then shuffle together the discard/draw pile into your new draw pile.  Why?  You don't even get the pretty card you just spend those points on?  Also, when the season changes, replace the four market cards for "reasons"?  I guess the same four market cards do get stale.

I was impressed that the game could make such a simple set of numbers so impractically hard to work with.

The rules for the dragons were just extra growth cards of one type or another.  They were all going to feel the same, just with different words.

I'm sure we got some detail wrong, but bleah.  I'm not sure we want to try it again to work out the kinks.  

I realize that we're not always going to get the feel or the strategy of a game right away.  In this case, we couldn't get to the logic of it, much less the strategy.  Just expect to have half your cards taken away before you ever use them.

But the art is so cute ...