Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I wanted to play this one because it’s an old classic that I’d heard a lot about, especially since it was cited by Richard Garfield as a major inspiration for Magic: The Gathering. But Sean was very reluctant. Not only is this a negotiation game, but it’s an Ameritrash negotiation game. That’s like a double zing right there. So he made me read the rules. Some thoughts:

• Given how chaotic the game can get and how little control players can have, this feels like a party game to me. You don’t have a choice about who to attack and you must basically play out all of your encounter cards before you’re allowed to draw more. Then of course there’s the huge variation in the encounter cards that you can draw as well as the powers of each alien race.
• From what I can tell and the rules all but confirm, the alien powers were deliberately designed to be unbalanced. I forgot to tell the other players this as the card for each race is color coded to basically indicate approximately how powerful each race is. At first, I thought that the color codes meant how complex the race was to play. I think it’s actually supposed to indicate how difficult it is to play against this alien, i.e. how powerful it is.
• I didn’t even use my race’s power, the Shadow’s ability to eradicate, properly. I should have used it to slowly eliminate other player’s foreign colonies rather than helping the aggressor. And I think Justin didn’t use his race’s special ability at all. Just pointing it out to show that the game is quite a bit richer than what we gave it credit for.
• The rules explicitly call for the attacking and the defending sides to each call for allies one by one. In our game, we basically called for everyone all the time, which was probably a bad move. At the very least, we should have stopped doing this when someone got to three planets, as this meant that he could potentially win the game on his turn with two successful attacks. Strange as it sounds, whether to ask for allies and who to ask for as allies is one of the things a player always has control over, so I guess we missed this part.
• The game lists the number of players as three to five. I don’t really see how it could work with three. We played with four, which was okay. But I really think the game needs the full five players to reach its full potential. That should make alliances more asymmetrical and the whole game more dynamic. In our game, once Shan and I reached four foreign colonies each, we basically acted as a team the whole time until we won, so Sean and Justin had to oppose us all the time.
• I still don’t quite understand what is or isn’t possible in negotiations. In our game, I had an opportunity to negotiate with Justin. But he had zero cards in hand and I needed just one more foreign colony to win, so we didn’t have a lot of things that we could make a deal with. Could I have just offered him a card from my hand with him giving me nothing and called that a successful deal?

All that said, while this is admittedly a pretty chaotic game, I still don’t think it’s completely useless as Sean seems to think. Hand management, bluffing and some amount of negotiation are all necessary to do well. The sheer variety of alien powers ensures that each game will be different.