Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I meant to post some brief thoughts on this before I left for the Chinese New Year holidays, but ended up being too busy. I didn’t have access to a PC at all while I was away, so I had to wait until now to write this. It’s not a terribly complex game, so I’ll be brief:

• The idea of having each player play two different roles, that of game publisher and game buyer, feels a bit clumsy to me. The rules and mechanics are fine. It just feels a bit odd that at one point you’re a game publisher and at another point you’re a game collector, but you need to do well at both portions of the game.
• I ended up winning the game because I think I tried to accomplish both of these goals. Sean did very well at the buying part, successfully completing five sets of games. This was pretty amazing as he would have needed to spend 15 buy actions to do that and you only had 18 buy actions throughout the entire game. I managed to complete four sets but had a significant lead on Sean because I manage to sell more of my own games.
• I’m somewhat surprised at how little buzz this game actually has on BGG, given that it’s named after the site and was made to commemorate its tenth anniversary. It’s nothing special or anything but I don’t think it’s a bad game at all. It takes a while to understand how it works because of the dual roles thing, but once you do, there’s some decent strategy in deciding how many games to put on sale and in which shop. The decisions about which games to buy are relatively simple in comparison.
• Obviously the major draw are the innumerable references to other games. It doesn’t do much for me but I’d imagine that dedicated players of Euro-games would get a kick out of recognizing all the references.
• I normally dislike memory-based games. The BoardGameGeek Game uses screens to hide each player’s game tiles so that some memorization ability is helpful, but I don’t think it’s that critical here so that aspect didn’t bother me much. There’s an element of randomness when determining which player can buy at which store so you can’t really control for everything, further reducing the utility of memorizing everything that everyone else has bought.

Overall, apart from its tie-in with BGG, it’s fairly unremarkable but it’s not bad at all. I do find it amusing that its theme is clearly meant to appeal to serious geeks but its actual mechanics seem more appropriate for casual players.