Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, I’ve been fascinated by the Sun King. The novels depicted him as being by far the most intelligent and far-sighted monarch of his time who, thanks to his ruthlessly efficient intelligence network, was perfectly aware of the attempts by various factions of his court to influence him and used that knowledge to his advantage. So it may be somewhat intimidating that in this game, you play one of these courtiers trying to manipulate the king.

Louis XIV is sort of an abstract area majority game, except that instead of a map or even a real board, the area is defined by a set of twelve cards representing the key individuals that make up the court. These are arranged according to a preset layout to form a sort of checkerboard and the players’ influence markers are allowed to move along cards that touch each other at the corners. Since you’re supposed to put your markers on top of these cards and keep the general supply of markers that are not available for use in the spaces between the cards, it’s quite awkward. You even need to flip some of these cards at the end of every turn so it’s very easy to knock them out of position. I think they messed up the components for this one and should have used a real board or else heavy tiles instead of light cardboard.

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Considering how popular this game is and me being one of the last people to get it, I’m not going to write a review of Left 4 Dead. So here’s a semi-random assortment of thoughts I have on it:

• The single-player campaign is even shorter than I expected. Including the Crash Course DLC, there’s a total of five campaigns that would take at most an hour and a half each to complete. Granted, it’s a multiplayer game, so you’re expected to replay the same maps over and over again, but I was still surprised. Look at how many maps Team Fortress 2 has by now!
• Replayability is supposed to be extended by the AI director mixing up spawn locations for enemies and items. By and large, this works and it’s pretty cool how the director likes to spawn a horde on top of you when it senses that there’s not enough excitement. But once you know a map well, it seems like everyone just heads for the map exit by the shortest route possible. It’s not really worth hanging around to explore in the hopes of finding some items.
• I don’t have a reliable net connection and I’m not really the multiplayer type so I only rarely ventured online and mostly stuck to singleplayer mode. But my experiences with the online mode worked surprisingly well with connection quality being much better than Team Fortress 2. I guess this is at least partly because there are far fewer clients to keep track of. Even so, I felt a bit useless and I just ended up tagging along with people who clearly been through the map dozens of times already and had memorized exactly which locations to stand on to deal with attacks.
• The witch is an interesting concept but it seems to me that it’s not serving its design goals any longer and most players now seem skilled enough to kill it without taking any damage. If the intent is to punish players for provoking it, surely you shouldn’t put a witch in places where you absolutely must cross to get to the exit?
• Though scary at first, the game is really designed to be easily completed at normal difficulty. At higher difficulty levels, it’s a completely different story and making it a serious go at it ended up requiring more patience than I was prepared to give. I have to admit that you get the most memorable moments at higher difficulty levels. The sight of a vast horde of zombies swarming up through a hole in the ground is something I’ll always remember. You keep killing them but they keep coming and coming and you wonder if they’ll ever stop.
• Overall, I’m satisfied with my experience but I’m also glad that I didn’t shell out full price for this at release. It’s not really optimal as a single-player game. The game tries to keep the tension and excitement at elevated levels throughout the campaign which is of course needed in multiplayer but too exhausting in single-player. You really need to intersperse the excitement with a bit of compression time and more story building moments. I’m also disappointed that the plot is paper thin as I would dearly love to have a better picture of what’s going on around the world during the zombie infection, but I guess that’s to be expected from a Valve game.

Kingsburg was a game that we’ve seen others playing at CarcaSean several times previously, but we only played it ourselves recently. It’s a dice-based game that’s surprisingly and pleasantly low on luck factor. It’s very easy to learn so I’ll just go my bullet-point format for this one.

• You roll all of the dice you have and then decide where to put them, making it feel very similar to a worker placement game. Since you normally have three dice, you can split them up and put them in three different spots (unlikely, since you’d have to get a different result on each die and you’d be in competition with the other players for the spaces) or add two or three together to place in a spot. Due to all of the possible combinations, there are quite a few choices of where to put your dice on.
• There’s also a chit that lets you add +2 to any dice roll and you may get an extra die sometimes due to having a building or because you’re the player with the fewest buildings, adding even more possible combinations. Since each space can only have one die on it, you need to strategically place your dice in an order that will shut out your opponents and preempt them from shutting you out. This can result in a certain amount of analysis paralysis.
• It’s quite cool that even low dice rolls aren’t necessarily bad results. It’s possible to get a resource for a single die, even you rolled relatively badly. Of course, it’s always exciting to see the ultra-high results but that’s not how the game is won. I’m more dubious about the rule that gives the player the most buildings an extra Victory Point every turn. Won’t that just make it harder for the other players to catch up? Of course, there are other catch up mechanics to balance it out as well.
• Supposedly the different building tracks, approximating tech trees found in other games, provide different paths to win the game, but I couldn’t really discern different strategies from my one play. It looks like each player ends up building all of the early stages of each track anyway and specialization only happens at the top ends of the tracks. I mostly built what I could based on what resources I could get instead of having any clear determination about what to go for. But then I didn’t do very well in our game anyway.
• The battles at the end of each year seem a bit too easy to me. Except for the final year, no one bothered to buy any soldiers or influence any of the military advisers at all. I hear that the expansion changes this and makes it more important to invest resources early on to be safe. I do like how all the players share a single die roll and so feel compelled to maintain their military strength at a level fairly close to each other.
• Overall, this is another excellent game that falls more on the lighter end of the spectrum. It would be interesting to play this with more players. I’d imagine that the competition would be a lot more cut-throat and having players end up with wasted dice would be a regular occurrence.

Ever since we first played Die Macher, it’s been a game that my wife and I have thought about often. So when I learned that its designer, Karl-Heinz Schmiel, also has a Roman-themed game that’s published in English by Fantasy Flight to boot, I was very much interested. It turns out that Sean does own a copy but has never played it. In fact, he hadn’t read the rules either, so I had to read them and teach him. He did warn us that I probably shouldn’t expect too much as Schmiel is also known for designing some dud games and Die Macher should be considered the outlier.

Tribune is set in some indeterminate point in time in ancient Rome and the players embody the various aristocratic families vying for dominance over the republic. The actual victory conditions vary from game to game as you’re supposed to select them from a set of cards. These cards list various conditions, such as possessing a Tribune tile, having a certain number of Laurel Wreaths, controlling a certain number of Legions etc. and depending on the number of players, you may need to meet only a subset of the listed conditions to win. You collect all this stuff by taking and keeping control of the various factions in Rome and that’s what the game is all about.

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The last citybuilder game that I played was the very mediocre Civcity: Rome last year, so I’ve been looking forward to something more substantial in Tropico 3. This wasn’t a game that I originally intended to buy and I’ve never played any of its predecessors, but it was on sale on Steam, looked like a cool citybuilder and was even made by a QT3 member, so I snapped it up.

As “El Presidente”, the dictator of a banana republic in the Carribean, your goal is to build up the island nation of Tropico and take every measure necessary to remain in power while stuffing your secret Swiss bank account with ill-gotten gains. The main game consists of a series of fifteen scenarios, each with unique goals and different islands to play on. In addition, there’s also a sandbox mode and online challenges made by other players that you can download.

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Some thoughts on Thurn & Taxis, a game which Sean considers himself to be an expert at. Interestingly, it’s by Andreas Seyfarth and I liked both of the games by him that I’ve played so far, Puerto Rico and Airships.

• Its theme is about building a postal network? I guess its as good a choice as any if you want to make a route connection game without falling back on trains. As usual with such things, the theme doesn’t really matter and trying too hard to square the rules with the premise makes my head hurt. Why do you get carriage cards for building ever longer routes? Why do you get points for these cards but not for the little post office houses you put down? Who knows? But I do like the artwork and the map.
• The basic rules are famously reminiscent of Ticket to Ride. Collect city cards and play connected cities  to build routes. The scoring system is quite a bit more complex however. Not only do you race to collect the region-based score chits, you also need to ensure that you have as few unused post office houses as possible at the end of the game since they count as negative points. This gives Thurn & Taxis a much richer strategic layer than Ticket to Ride.
• The rules discourage hoarding cards. In Ticket to Ride, I always amass large numbers of cards before committing myself. Here, not only are you required to put down a card to add to your route every turn, but you can only keep three cards in hand after you’re scored a route. This makes turn-to-turn tactical planning very important as being forced to discard cards means wasting turns. I like this rule too, though it seems very unforgiving.
• The postal officials’ powers, due to how they’re implemented, may be a bit difficult to grasp. At first I thought that you only had limited uses of the officials over the entire game or that you needed to bid for their use against other players. No, you simply pick one power each and every turn to use. In my case, the confusion stemmed from representing the powers as people. I’ve probably played too many worker-placement games.
• I feel that Ticket to Ride has a significant luck factor because ideally you want to get long routes on your destination tickets that complement each other but whether or not you get what you want depends on the luck of the draw. I’d say that Thurn & Taxis has almost no luck. Each city has so many connections that it’s generally quite easy to build routes so the real challenge is to efficiently build routes in such a way as to maximize your ability to place post offices.
• I’ve often thought of buying a copy of Ticket to Ride just to have a good gateway game handy that I could take out for visiting friends and relatives. Now I think that Thurn & Taxis is a much better prospect. It’s significantly heavier of course, but it’s still a pretty easy game to teach and I daresay that its physical components look more lavish and beautiful. Most of all, it would at least have more than just a passing appeal to my wife and myself.

I’m not entirely sure if the Through the Seasons postcard expansion for Agricola is merely a collectible novelty or something that’s actually meant to be played. Judging by the paucity of posts on its little corner of BGG, it seems that most people think it’s the former. Being huge fans of the game however, my wife and I thought that it would be a shame not to give it a shot. Since playing it once wasn’t enough for me to form an informed opinion, we’ve ended up playing it three times so far.

The little postcard basically divides every round in Agricola into one of the four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter and makes three types of changes to the round depending on the current season. First of all, it modifies the resources that are added onto the board at the beginning of the round. Winter for example, is particularly painful as it shows -1 Clay and -1 Reed, meaning no clay or reed will be added to the board at all. Autumn however gives +1 Wood and +1 Reed, so it’s a good season to grab resources in.

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I suppose it’s only natural that even boardgames have trilogies or sets of oeuvres sharing a common theme by the same author, but it’s something I wouldn’t have guessed before I started this hobby. In any case, Mexica is another game in the so-called Mask trilogy that started with Tikal. It’s quite a bit simpler than the first one though, so I’ll just summarize:

• Tikal has a Mayan theme while Mexica has an Aztec one. I think I’ll go with AllLookSame on this one. That’s just a joke of course, but the exact choice of civilization and location doesn’t really matter in my opinion. I do appreciate the exoticism of both themes.
• Apparently all of the games in this trilogy use the action point allocation mechanic. But other than this and the fact that both games are about area control, the two games are really different, so it’s not as if Mexica is a rehash to capitalize on the success of the first game.
• No map hexes to place here. Instead, you play canal tiles of one or two squares each on the board to define borders for districts. The trick here is that you must create districts consisting of specific numbers of squares according to the tokens still available so expect to count squares a lot as you try to create districts using the least canal placements. You get points both for founding districts and for controlling them by virtue of having the most temples in it.
• You only get one guy to move around this time around but due to the rather unintuitive rule that moving from one bridge on a canal to another bridge uses only 1 action point, he can zip around the board surprisingly quickly. You almost always want to use this rule so physical distance on the board doesn’t keep an area safe. A player can even place a bridge on a canal without even needing to have his token there!
• Like Tikal, this game is all about tactically reacting to your opponents’ moves. Sean says he got screwed by turn order here, especially given how quickly the player token moves around the map. Plus when a scoring condition comes up, everyone plays one more round according to turn order before scores are tabulated. That stands in contrast to Tikal in which each player scores at the end of his turn. Since Sean went first, the two of us had better opportunities to react in whatever manner that would be worth the most points while there was nothing he could do about it.
• Overall, I find this to be a significantly lighter game than Tikal with a commensurately shorter playing time. It’s still a good game for what it does but I’d bet that the strategy possibility space isn’t huge and it has limited long-term replayability.