Finding John Carter

By: Kim and Devin

March 28, 2023

Today we're reviewing Finding John Carter, published by Joe Magic Games. Finding John Carter is a 2-5 player game that combines worker placement and bag-building. Players race to gain resources, upgrade their crew, and complete missions in order to score points and (possibly) find John Carter himself, who awards a hefty points bonus to whoever finds him first. Let's get into it! 

Overview

The goal of the game is to have the most points after the final round. The final round of the game is triggered when the "Finding John Carter" mission tile is revealed (more on these later). This provides players an opportunity to complete that mission and take any other actions to maximize scoring before the game ends.

All players start with a bag containing a number of colored cubes representing their crew. At the start of each round, players will draw 5 new crew members from their bags. If players ended the last round with leftover crew members, they will have them available in addition to the 5 crew members they draw for the current round. Generally, these crew members will be all that's available to a player for the round, though some actions may allow a player to draw additional crew members in the middle of a round. 

Players also begin the game with a lounge that acts as a discard area for exhausted crew members. As you perform actions using your crew, they will usually go to the lounge. When you need to draw crew members but your bag is empty, you will put all crew members from your lounge into your bag and continue drawing.

All players also begin with a starting hull, which hosts a few basic action spaces that only the owning player can occupy. These are the same for all players. 

Lastly, players also have 15 player tokens that act as their 'workers' or markers for action selection.

On a player's turn, they will either place one of their tokens on a space and perform the corresponding action, or they will pass and end their participation for the round. Note, however, that the turn order for the next round is set by the order in which players pass in the current round (e.g., the first player to pass will be the first player to take an action next round). Players may place their tokens on spaces occupied by other players, but it will cost additional resources per player already occupying the space. 

The actions on the main board are divided into different areas depending on the action type. These areas are:

➡️ Market

➡️ Academy

➡️ Shipyard

➡️ Black Market / Cantina

➡️ Missions 

Shipyard:

At the Shipyard, players can exhaust crew members and spend resources to purchase/upgrade hulls/thrusters. Each hull and thruster is double-sided, including the starter hull. The upgraded side is usually worth more points at the end of the game, and often provides a better bonus during the game. Hulls will provide players with better action spaces to acquire new crew members and hard-to-get resources, while thrusters provide once-a-round bonuses for taking actions in either the Academy or Market, depending on the thruster. Players can have any number of hulls and thrusters. 

Black Market / Cantina:

The Black Market and Cantina are different board areas, but they are directly linked by a special crew member, the smuggler (yellow cube). At the Cantina, players can recruit smugglers and add them directly to their draw bag. At the Black Market, players can exhaust a smuggler to perform a trade for any crew member or resource type available in the game. There is a value chart printed on the board, and players can return any number of different items to the supply, but they can only ever receive a single item in return. This can be useful to acquire a crucial resource of a specific type when a player may have a lot of other resources that they don’t need at the moment. 

End of the Game:

Once the Finding John Carter mission tile is revealed, the current round of play becomes the final round. Players continue taking turns until all players have passed. The Finding John Carter mission awards a hefty points bonus, but the game can end with no player completing the mission, and completing it doesn’t guarantee that a specific player will win the game.

Once all players have passed, it’s time to score. We won’t go over the specifics of scoring, but we will note that there are plenty of avenues for scoring points. Players will score points for purchased and/or upgraded hulls and/or thrusters, complete sets of crew members, crystals (with a bonus for sets), specialists (with a bonus for sets), Mission area row bonuses, mission tile agency set bonuses, and points for each completed mission. The player with the most points is the winner! 

Thoughts

🔴Kim🔴

Finding John Carter has some of my favorite mechanics, worker placement and resource management so I was excited to give it a try.

The game was very easy to explain and start playing which is a huge plus. At first glance, the board can be a little overwhelming, with all the symbols and colors, but once we started playing it all made sense. I really appreciate how most of the board was language independent. That can be a big upside for some people.

I really enjoy games that have multiple paths to victory and this game definitely offers that with points from completing missions, set collection, upgrading thrusters and hulls, and a little bit of area control. At first I was worried that the John Carter mission tile that’s worth 20 points would be too overpowered and make for a not close game, but I was wrong! There are so many other things that you can focus on and get points from, so if you don’t think you’re going to complete that particular mission you can work on getting points from all the other areas.

So far we’ve played multiple games at 2 and 3 players and I really like it at both player counts. Obviously, like with most worker placements, with less players there is less competition on the board, but I think this game still works really well at 2. I’m really looking forward to trying this with the full 5 player count sometime too. With play time being about an hour for all of our plays, it really makes it easy to get to the table, especially on a weeknight at our house.

I really enjoy Finding John Carter and I’m looking forward to trying other games from Joe Magic Games. 

🟣Devin🟣

Finding John Carter! I didn’t know what to expect with this one going in. I always love indie stuff when it comes to media I consume. My friends’ bands? Permanent spots in my playlist. Indie video game developer making a janky solo art project? Take my money. Even with that, I was uneasy going into this one. I was terrified I wasn’t going to like it, and that I’d have to write about how much I disliked a self-published game that was sent to us for review.

I’m happy to say that isn’t the case! We played through this game several times at 2 and 3 players, and I loved every second of it. This is definitely staying in our regular rotation of games, and I look forward to combing through the Joe Magic Games catalog and buying a few more to give them a try!

Let’s get the obvious things out of the way first. This game is self-published by a one-man company, Joe Magic Games, based in Idaho Falls, Idaho. With that in mind, there are a few inconsequential misprints or rules ambiguities that made it into the final copies of the game. For instance, the explanation for setting up Thrusters at the beginning of the game doesn’t line up with the Thruster tiles as-printed. The rules say to place all Thrusters with their “1” side face-up, but it should say to place them with their “blue” side face-up, and placing them this way doesn’t line up with the outline printed on the board. This is a misprint, sure, but it doesn’t affect the gameplay in any way whatsoever. The only significant rules ambiguities we encountered were…

 The rules are a little unclear one how long the game goes after John Carter is revealed. The rules use the word “turn”, but then say that players continue until everyone has passed, which would imply it should be “round.” This was confirmed as meaning that the round continues until everyone has passed, thanks to reaching out to Joe Magic Games directly!

 While it may be rare that resources might run out, it could be possible in a higher player count game. The rules never state whether resources are meant to be limited or not, but Joe Magic Games has confirmed that resources are intended to be unlimited.

On top of that, I will say that the board is visually a bit busy and definitely overwhelming at first glance. On the other hand, the board print is overall vibrant and crisp, which I liked. After reading through the rules and understanding the very simple and clear iconography, it becomes much easier to understand what you’re looking at. The board construction quality feels a little weak where it’s meant to fold, and I’m worried that we might have to do some DIY repairs after repeated plays, but I might just be paranoid. A quick positive note for the board is that ALL of the end-of-game scoring information is printed on the board very clearly. This is something I wish I saw in every game I played with multiple scoring pathways, so I was very happy to see this here. While on the topic of visuals, the art on the mission tiles is… okay. It’s a mixed bag of CGI sci-fi art. It serves its purpose, and I’m sure it was what could be reasonably afforded.

Now that we’ve got my minor sore spots out of the way, on to what makes this game rock!

One of the coolest things about this game to me is how balanced it is. The action-resource economy is well thought out, and no single scoring method feels like the one and only path to victory. We even had games where the player that completed the Finding John Carter mission ultimately lost since they neglected other important scoring paths! To get the highest score in this game, you really need to balance and consider your actions to make the most of every move you make.

As you start to realize this, it can turn into a brain-burner as you start trying to pre-perform actions, trades, and draws in your head while other players take their turns! Despite the ‘randomness’ of the bag-building aspect of the game, you can plan your turns and rounds pretty far in advance, especially since crew members you recruit go straight into your draw bag. I’m a fan of games that allow long-term strategy like this. It feels rewarding when your plans come together and you snatch up a high-value mission tile, or you upgrade a hull tile and gain access to incredibly powerful actions available only to you. Still, the randomness in play from the mission tiles and from your draw bag keep the game exciting and can lead to unexpected twists, like revealing a mission tile that another player already has the resources to complete! Finding John Carter manages to walk the fine line of “this game is too random - there’s no strategy” and “this game is too deterministic - it’s the same every time.”

One specific part of the balance that I want to shout-out is the way that the Mission area is handled in regards to player tokens. Player tokens that are placed here, stay here. Early game, this doesn’t matter so much. Your turns will be limited more by your access to crew and resources than the number of player tokens you have. As the game progresses, however, you’ll be able to generate a lot of resources with less crew members. Now, the limiting factor in a round may be the number of player tokens someone has, and that means the player that’s completed the most missions has less player tokens than everyone else. I thought this was a wonderfully clever way to reel back a leading player without straight-up punishing them.

There are no real rules adjustments for more or less players. This means that at 2 players, there is a little more freedom in where you might place a worker, while the board will become much more crowded with more players. Since you can place your workers where other players are by simply paying additional resources, this isn’t too punishing anyway, and encourages players to temporarily pursue a different pathway to stay efficient (unless they really need that one worker space)!

For us, player count had no impact on play time, which was awesome! Our games ran about 1 hour each time. While I’m sure that higher player counts would run a little bit longer, the end-game condition is set up so that, no matter the number of players, the same number of mission tiles are likely being completed at the same rate, so the end of the game comes at roughly the same time. Smart! I like a game that gives me a satisfying strategy experience in a reasonable length of time! Setup is easy, too, so getting started should take no time at all.

I was very surprised by the quality and quantity of components in the game. Metal coins! Glass marbles! Plastic crystals and specialist tokens in 3 different colors! Different color bags for each player! It would have been cheaper to go with a whole bunch of cardboard and nothing else, but Joe Magic Games went the extra mile and made sure the game was satisfyingly tactile to play. I really appreciated that.

Theme-wise, I can’t really say how well the theme meshes with the mechanics! I’m not a huge John Carter fan - my only exposure was the Disney movie. I’ve never read any of the books or checked out any other John Carter media. Whether or not this makes sense as a John Carter board game, I can definitely say it manages to make me feel like a ship captain managing my crew, getting paid for tasks, and being greatly rewarded for completing important missions, all while racing against other captains to be the best in the quadrant (a little more Firefly-esque to me, personally)!

If you’re a fan of worker placement games, bag building, and games about trading resources and completing ever-changing objectives while competing with other players in every regard, I highly recommend Finding John Carter. This has been a blast to play, and I can’t wait to get it back to the table with more players!

Disclaimer: We were provided with a review copy of Finding John Carter from the publisher, Joe Magic Games.