Knights of the Cardboard Castle

We had a session at Carcasean recently for which we forgot to take along our camera, so no photos were taken. Since we only played a series of lighter games during this session, I’ll just combine them in a post detailing some of my thoughts on them rather than writing extended reviews.

Airships

• Seriously good dice game. I really like the idea of building up a toolbox of dice of different types, various bonuses and fixed value dice and using the toolbox to gain scores.
• It’s a dice game so some measure of randomness is to be expected. But it’s surprisingly restrained. For example, the white dice have 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 on their faces, greatly restricting the range of possibilities. It’s also very neat how failing a roll gets you a +1 token and three of these things can be cashed in to get another rolling attempt.
• It’s by the same designer, Andreas Seyfarth, as Puerto Rico! I didn’t know that when we played.
• Apparently the differently colored boxes are meant to represent the various components that make up an airship but I don’t get the impression that there’s any meaningful distinction between them. I don’t really see that the game fits the theme either but at least it’s a rather unique and cool theme.
• The cool factor alone makes me feel tempted to buy this but it’s really not the best game for two players. I can totally see the appeal of playing this with more casual players however.

Shadow Hunters

• A sort of more elaborate version of the familiar Mafia / Werewolf type games that can be played without any special components. Ever since I first saw these things being played on various Internet forums, I’ve wondered about designs for more elaborate versions of them, especially if it would be possible to do without a moderator. Thus I was fairly enthusiastic about trying this game. Some of the forum games I’ve seen have been incredibly complex. One version on QT3 for example, had the player taking on the roles of DC superheroes with various powers.
• That said, I ended up not liking Shadow Hunters. Deducing who’s on which team is much too easy and it becomes a game of who can do enough damage more quickly. All the dice rolling to determine where to go and how much damage to do didn’t help the game’s case either.
• Some of the neutral characters in the game seem badly balanced. Plus there seem to be too many of them. This is especially problematic because while it is generally easy to find out which team a given player belongs to, it usually doesn’t matter which specific character someone is. For neutral characters however, guessing his or her exact identity is quite a big deal but the game doesn’t provide the tools to do that.
• Shadow Hunters deals with the problem of needing a moderator to execute secret actions by not having any secret actions at all. All actions are public. I guess this really make it not much of a Werewolf game so it might not be really fair to judge it like this. It’s fast playing and amusing enough with a large group and I think my nieces will love it, but it’s not something to be taken seriously.

Pyramid

• I was initially curious about this game after reading about it on Hiew’s blog but ended up not liking it much. It’s just a bit too simple for me. In our game, one of the players kept resetting the dice and gave the mummy extra moves. In a more serious game, this would be viewed as griefing.
• Much like tabletop implementations of Werewolf, this game suffers from the practical limits imposed by its physical components. In this case, even with the partition the mummy player can guess the general area of the treasure hunters’ movements just by looking at the players’ hands. Plus the sound of magnets sticking to the board can be a giveaway as well.
• That said, it is a pretty tense game on the part of the treasure hunters. I’d imagine that it would be frustrating to a mummy player who doesn’t have a good memory of the general location of each player. Another game I’d add to the list to try with my nieces.