Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Since Hiew has already written an excellent account of our recent Die Macher session, I’m going to content myself with just writing some of my own observations rather than going over everything again. Note that some of this covers the same ground I laid out in my comments on his post. In this game, I was FDP, Hiew was Green, Shan was SPD and Sean was PDS.

• Sean finished in second place and only ten points behind Hiew despite having by far the lowest mandate from the actual elections, 11 points behind Shan. That’s pretty incredible. A lot of his points came from his party membership score and the consequent ten point bonus for having the most party members. I’m tempted to attribute some of this to luck at die rolling. He managed to get a three dice bonus once due to refusing campaign contributions, but then so did I. But, of course, he also made a major effort to win auctions for poll cards and used that to boost party membership.
• Hiew said that I was too conservative with money, which is true. I probably should have been much more spendthrift with the poll cards as I won very few auctions for them and ended the game with the most money. Both Hiew and Sean had significantly less money than me by the end of the game. Actually I think the poll cards’ bark is worse than their bite. People were scared of getting their party trends pulled down by the poll cards, but I think that rarely happened in practice. Most of the auction winners simply used them to roll two dice to add to party membership.
• Sean also gained quite a few points by having party platform cards match the national opinions at the end of the game. Obviously Hiew set out to sabotage him and everyone else, but I’m still quite mystified as to how Sean managed to get so many matches with the national board in the first place. It’s not like he won more elections (with the opportunity to influence the national opinion that this brings) than the others. I wonder if he consciously tried harder to change his party platform to match the national opinion, perhaps sacrificing some votes in the elections to do so. I know that I prioritized matching the state election opinions over the national board.
• Hiew deliberately bid high to gain control of turn order just to make himself go first. This was a surprising move as most players bid to go last in Die Macher. The reason he did this was solely to deny me media control of the last state election. I’d actually wondered while writing down my bid whether he’d try this but underestimated how much he was willing to pay. If I had kept control of the media, I would have been able to change one of the state opinion cards and I think that would be enough to make me win the election for the last state. I would still have gained zero points from the second last election however.
• I’ve read on BGG that the final round is the most crucial as the results of the last two elections usually causes a huge swing in points. This turned out to be true in our session. Hiew’s opportunity to influence the national opinion board twice in a row was a killer move, especially as he was cut-throat enough to make choices that denied us points instead of winning them for himself. Interestingly, no coalitions are allowed for the final election, so you only have one winner and one person making the final adjustments to the national opinion.
• Actually winning elections, particularly in the early rounds, doesn’t seem all that useful, since if you can match the winners’ votes, you gain the same amount of mandate points anyway. You basically get to do two things when you win: place a media marker on the national board and influence the national opinion. Placing a media marker in the early rounds is worth a ton of points but the downside is that you permanently lose that marker. Hiew would not have been able to so dominate the media game as he did in the later rounds if he had actually won elections, and I don’t think he was setting out to deliberately lose them. Earning the right to influence the national opinion board almost doesn’t matter when it comes to points since they’re easily changed in the last two elections as Hiew demonstrated, so the only real benefit is the increase in party membership. Even in this case, placing them in the later spaces is worth more party members than the early spaces. (If you win an election, can you deliberately place an opinion card on the right-most space even though there are still empty spaces on the left?)
• I greatly enjoyed this session and immediately had a hankering for playing it again. That’s just how much fun I had with this game. All the same, I get the impression that this is an “experience” game that you play just for the fun of going through the whole process instead of a game about formulating and executing strategies. I didn’t come away from this session feeling that I’ve learned something new and I don’t think, as in some types of games, that I would be able to do significantly better in a subsequent session. It’s pretty hard to predict the outcome of this game in advance and there’s a lot of thing that up in the air until the last moment, so I think this game has a fair bit of chaos and randomness. Certainly, drawing the right opinion cards at the right time is a matter of luck. So I think this isn’t one of those games that you can obsess over. Of course, with its length, you probably wouldn’t want to anyway.