Last night, we did game night at home (given last week's verdict), and ripped through 2 games of Point City. One of them was by the book and we removed the requisite cards, but the other I made some component notes on.
(interlude)
Years ago, a wise friend made a remark that has lived on with me; "components matter." In effect, if there are only 2 remaining tiles in the current track roster in 1830 that meet your needs, and your opponent realizes this, they can use said tiles in bad ways to force you into a problem (cause you can't place them where they are helpful to you and have to spend energy/time/etc changing your plan). We have defined a boundary in the game, and pushing your opponent up against said wall induces suboptimal play while enabling you to go about your own plans. Ergo; component (restrictions) matter.
Back to Point City. I pulled out two of every type of resource in the first block of cards and it turns out, there is a correlation between the resource and what it can provide your engine. So one of our games, we removed an equal number of each (and any remainder came from the Ingenuity resources). What that meant was I had an idea about what sort of resource engine I could build compared to the random removals which gives you a lopsided (potential) engine. That unknown isn't good or bad, it's a personal preference. One thing that I did notice out of that though was I used the "your row/column is just resources, you may flip one" rule much more knowing this.
