Knights of the Cardboard Castle

One of the big surprises I had when I went to look this game up on BGG was its age. Primordial Soup was released in 1997 but it doesn’t feel like an old game at all. It also has a pretty cool theme about amoebas struggling for survival in the primordial soup the game is named for. I don’t have time to go into detail (sorry, I’ve been very preoccupied with my entry to the Google AI Challenge), so I’ll just summarize some thoughts:

• The components are pretty lackluster. I mean, I wouldn’t know how you’d represent an amoeba in a boardgame but I certainly wouldn’t imagine it’d look like a block of wood with a stick on it. A quick browse of the photos on BGG shows that plenty of users have made home-brewed versions that look much more appropriate. The included dice were also illegible to us, so we swapped them for another pair from Sean’s vast collection.
• The theme is awesome. Each player has a colony of amoeba and the object is to score points by having lots of them on the board and to have lots of cool mutations. The problem is that your amoebae need to eat and there’s only so much food available on the board, while the genes cards essentially have an upkeep cost. It’s a very neat concept.
• That said, while the most exciting part of the game are the gene cards, most of your time is spent handling movement and eating on the board. This gets fiddly and time consuming. Since I have a slight color blindness, looking at all those cubes of different colors was a bit of overload for me as well. At one point, we even ran out of cubes and Sean had to steal cubes from another game. The cubes represent both food and poop as your amoebae must eat the excrement of the other players’ amoebae to survive while shitting our cubes of your own color. As one review on BGG put it, this game is one huge excuse for lots of shit jokes.

Chee Wee’s winning combo.

• I was getting tired when we moved on to this game and didn’t have a good handle on all of the cards’ abilities, so I never developed much of a strategy and came in last. Chee Wee ran away with the game by getting hold of a godly combination of gene cards which allowed his amoebae to move anywhere two spaces for no cost and to always successfully escape from enemy amoebae. Once again, I am taught that in strategy games like this, movement is king.
• Shan played the part of the predator by using other amoebae as her main source of food, forcing everyone else to buy defensive genes. All of the gene cards are open for purchase, though some have prerequisites. There are also very limited numbers of each card, so I think it’s quite important for players to shut out a player who threatens to get too powerful a combo. I still had the weakest and most unreliable defense, so Shan’s amoebae kept eating mine.
• I think the game is perhaps a bit too long for what it does. It’s easy enough to get the top tier of gene cards fairly early so the rest of the game is just more of the same, plus reacting to mutations your opponents’ amoebae develop. I think the game needs to be a bit shorter or else add another tier of gene cards to force players to change up more.
• Overall, I think this is a very neat game though I’m not prone to liking this sort of stuff. I’m okay with playing this for fun but trying to constantly work out the most efficient way for your amoebae to move so that everyone gets something to eat is just too much work for me.