Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Jeff Vogel has been making indie RPGs since the mid-1990s but they always looked so cheaply produced that I never paid much attention to them. But when he brought his latest game to Steam and gave it decent graphics to boot, I thought that it was the right time to check out his work. After putting in more than 60 hours into the game, I’m happy to say that not only is it absolutely worth your money and time, but it’s one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played.

The Good Stuff

• It’s a tile-based fantasy RPG with 2D graphics made by mostly one person, so you need to come in with lowered expectations. The combat is turn-based and quite crunchy but the game’s main strength is its setting and writing. Text is used liberally, not only in dialogue but also in descriptions of scenes and places to supplement the graphics. This will turn off impatient players who hate reading but I’ve been a big fan of this approach since Darklands so this is a huge plus for me.

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Well, after finishing with Six Gun Saga, I felt like playing more Western-themed games, and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is it. I believe that this is the first time I’ve played a Western-themed shooter and since Rockstar doesn’t appear to have any plans for porting Red Dead Redemption to the PC, it’s probably the best one we’re going to have for a while. Some thoughts:

• The name is very obviously an allusion to the Call of Duty series and that’s where it takes all its cues from too. It’s mostly a corridor shooter that tries very hard to be cinematic and epic. There are a couple of open-world sequences where you have some choice on what to do and where to go next, but it’s very perfunctory. That apart, it’s all very formulaic, down to vehicle chase sequences, scenes where you need to man a fixed emplacement machine gun etc. There’s even one scene in which you’re on a stagecoach, which behaves for all intents and purposes as if it were a tank.
• I played through the entire first level without first going into the configuration screen and thought the graphics were terrible. The textures were all low-res and so muddy that I couldn’t even see the snipers shooting at me. Then I realized that this was a console port and I probably need to tweak it for my relatively high-end PC. ‘Lo and behold, it’s a pretty game after all, with impressive scenery and good animations. The open-world levels may be empty but they sure look good!

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Since we only played the England side of the board, I guess maybe this should still be called Last Train to Wensleydale. Fun fact: I was confused while looking up this game. After all, why is it Last Train to Wensleydale but First Train to Nuremberg. It turns out that there is a song called Last Train to Nuremberg. Weird. Anyway, this is yet another of Martin Wallace’s train games in which you run a railway company and ship goods and passengers to make money. Some thoughts:

• On the surface, the rules sound like they’re terribly complicated. Each player has a set of black investment cubes, but there are also four tracks, white, brown, red and green respectively, denoting different types of influence. This influence can not be spent to do various things, they also determine turn order for the different phases of the game. But once play actually started, it’s not that hard, at least leaving aside my color blindness problems with how similar the brown-red-green hues look to my eyes.
• I think I found it to be not that difficult because there seems to be less planning ahead in this game.  Really, you just want to ship as many things as possible and other than train capacity, there are no limits no how many goods you can ship. It’s not like Steam etc. in which your engine level limits how far you can ship something. Here, you can ship goods however far you want, so long as your tracks can reach it. Plus, track maintenance costs mean that you usually want to sell off your tracks whenever possible, so you sort of start anew every turn.
• A lot of Wallace’s games impose some kind of upkeep cost that forces you to sprint just to keep up. It’s a great source of tension in his designs. The track maintenance costs play that role here but they feel weak since you’re allowed to sell your track to the big railway companies and get rid of them that way. It’s as if Steam allowed you to redeem the bonds you issued to investors. Another factor is that the initial auction for influence and most of the track laying is paid for using the investment cubes instead of money, and everyone gets a fixed 12 investment cubes per turn. It’s not tied to the income track and because each player has only 15 cubes in total, you can’t really save much from turn to turn either.
• Maybe the problem with our session was that we weren’t aggressive enough in the auction phase. We didn’t even have auctions worthy of the title most of time. Since each player can only grab two sets of influence max, and there are a total of eight sets available, just enough for each of the four of us, we almost always got away with just paying the minimum cost for them. This gave us plenty of cubes left to build tracks. The bottleneck wasn’t the cost of laying tracks, it was having enough green or red influence to sell the tracks after we were done using them.
• The train renting phase is one part of the game I liked. It’s cool to see the board with all sorts of configurations of trains since in this game, goods and passengers need completely different carriages. Each specific configuration can only be rented by one player, so it’s quite important to get the one you really need or you’ll need to spend extra brown influence to rent more capacity than you actually need to ship your stuff.
• One way to get points is to ship enough to complete sets of goods and passengers. This ended up being the most important for me, but it feels like an odd and not really thematic rule. I guess it encourages players to try to spread around and access different things, especially since the red and the green towns are on separate parts of the map and you need to work to be able to ship both green and red passengers but it feels artificial and arbitrary.
• Finally, since you have no limits on how far you can ship goods and you can’t really build up your railway over the course of the game, the net effect is that the turn in which players manage to ship the most goods is the very first turn, when the board is most full of stuff. Unlike most games in which you start slow and then build up to a climax, this makes First Train to Nuremberg kind of end with a whimper instead of a bang.

All this means that I ended up feeling that I must have missed something, especially since we only used a very small part of the scoring track. While it’s still reasonably fun, I don’t see anything special in this game or why anyone would choose to play this instead of one of Wallace’s many other games. It just feels lacking in tension and excitement.

This is the post where I talk about my Ants bot and its development process. It finished in 71st place in the AI Challenge 2011. You can read about the contest details and the overall results in my other blog. Here is the complete source code in a zipped file. For a while I toyed with the idea of learning Python and using it to make a bot as the game engine and tools are themselves written in Python, but I realized that speed is huge in this challenge and Python is much slower than Java, so I switched back to Java which is still the language I’m most comfortable with.

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Six Gun Saga is the latest game out by QT3 member Vic Davis. Like his previous games, this is a strategy game on the PC that uses design elements and metaphors drawn from boardgames. This one is set in the Wild West and is single-player only. Some notes:

• This is a very modest game. A whole game might take only 15 minutes, making it very much a coffebreak filler type of thing. You don’t get to customize a deck or anything like that. Just pick a boss character and go. All players draw from the same deck.
• A card in your hand can be put to multiple uses. You can buy them, paying their full cost. Character cards, think staples of Western-lore like The Man With No Name and Billy the Kid, can be bought as dudes to fill out your gangs. Property cards, called deeds, can be bought, and usually provide an income every turn. Ambush cards are like one-use attack cards that you can buy to make it harder for your opponents to move his gangs around.

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The first Portal needs no introduction. This is after all the game that spurred a plethora of remarkably persistent memes. It combined so much brilliance in such a compact package that it is pretty much a game than anyone with any interest at all in PC games must play. This sequel was released in April of this year, but I’ve only gotten around to playing it recently. Here are my thoughts:

The Good Stuff

• More Portal is never a bad thing and this is definitely a worthy sequel. It’s also considerably longer than the original and basically offers more of everything: more story, more characters, greater diversity of environments, more puzzle elements.
• I love the new character of Wheatley and his dialogue especially since my wife and I have watched all of the UK version of The Office.

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I heard a lot of hype about this game when it first came out, especially on QT3. As Hiew mentioned, it’s notable for supporting seven players and yet still remaining a short game. Some personal notes:

• It manages to achieve this design goal mainly by being a multiplayer solitaire game in which each player most focuses on building up his own stuff while occasionally borrowing resources from his neighbors or causing them harm through military might.
• The basic gameplay is deceptively simple, which also explains why it plays so quickly. It’s just choosing one card to keep each turn, most likely based on your ability to pay for it, and passing the rest to the next player.
• There are many different ways to score. You can collect sets of particular cards, certain cards are worth a specific number of points, some cards acts like the 6-point Developments in Race for the Galaxy, giving you points for cards you have or even cards that the two players next to you have, plus you can gain point tokens for having more military power than your neighbors at the end of each of the three ages.
• Despite the centrality of the wonders to the theme and the name, building your own wonder is strictly optional. Basically it’s there to give you something to throw cards at, and perhaps a goal to reach for, in case you have no better combination of cards to work towards.
• Overall, the rules are very simple, but it’s hard to build your own stuff while also keeping a watch on what other players are doing. At least paying attention to your immediate neighbors is absolutely necessary since you can use their resources and their military directly threaten you.

I did pretty badly in this game, because I was flummoxed by the icons (no text on the cards at all except for names) and the tech tree which allows you to build some cards for free if you already have prerequisites. Familiarity with this will no doubt come from experience. But I can see how it can be addictive to play and try to get better scores. A very impressive package for such a simple set of rules and such a short playing time.

Yes, I know, from the title alone Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble! sounds like something in the hentai genre, but it’s actually an award-winning puzzle game. While the subject matter is decidedly more mature than first impressions might convey, there is absolutely no naughty things in the game. The overriding theme is one of female empowerment, in which high school girls in 1920s America rebel against the corrupted values of their small community.

The Low-down

• The look and feel is that of a boardgame. The town of Brigiton is represented by a series of boards, complete with the linen finish you often see in many boardgames. Elements that the player can interact with, usually an NPC, is represented on the board as a silver token, much like the player tokens in Monopoly. The minigames all use the standard suits from a deck of normal playing cards. Even dialogue is based on the convention of drawing and playing cards.

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