CO2 : Awww the world ended....

we were quite close too!

So its been some time since I last played CO2 because I have quite a lot of new games but mostly because its quite tedious to explain the game again and those that played it are hesitant to start on something so meaty.

With glee, I manage to bring this out with 3 new people who have never played before. Explaining gets easier even with a game as meaty as this and this time the way I taught involved explaining a bit more of the story as well as providing examples. Typically when I am explaining games, I tend to just go for the mechanics like what you require to win the game, what do you do during your turn, what ends the game and that's about it. Rarely do i dwell into the theme and all. This time I was tried to do it differently and from the feelings of the players later on, they could understand what I was talking about better and could play the game with few follow up questions during the game.
I really wanted to try the scientist route and not construct any powerplants but since my objective and action cards are all rewarding construction, I gave in to what my cards dictated and went ahead with constructing. We were doing relatively ok when I decided to introduce the Artic expansion.
Boy was that a tough expansion. Immediately the carbon levels rose by 20 and we would have triggered the catastrophy levels which will cost us a lot of negative points because at 2nd decade only a few of us had power plants and we were at most at 1 region. So we decided to forgo it. I will try to play it with my next game of CO2.
We were moving along pretty ok but I guess we should have paid more attention to the emmission track because when the next 2 powerplants arrived in 4th decade, we popped at 500 and we all lost. Groans all around and we were trying to see where we went wrong.
I am pretty glad the players all got the rules correctly and could play it coherently. We moved along pretty smoothly as well without one person APing too much. Its just we did not build our plants fast enough to save the world and thus have a winner amongst ourselves. Its still a great game and I would like to bring it out again especially with the expansion but I think it will be challenging.