Knights of the Cardboard Castle

We had a little tournament of sorts at CarcaSean last week organized by cafe owner Chong Sean and Han, one of the cafe’s regulars. Since Han is leaving Kota Kinabalu at the end of the year, he wanted to give away some of his older boardgames and decided to hold a tournament with the games offered as prizes. Only a handful of people actually showed up. This meant everyone got a prize of some sort, but I would have preferred see more fresh faces.

While waiting for more people to show up, we played a game of Star Wars: Epic Duels. It’s a simple miniatures combat game that’s driven by cards. Each player controls a major character from the franchise and one or more minor characters. I had Mace Windu and a couple of Republic Clone Troopers. My wife had Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Aaron had Han Solo and Chewbacca while Sean had Count Dooku and two Trade Federation Droids.

The game uses a die to indicate how many figures a player can move and by how far, which I disliked, but I enjoyed the card-based combat which reminded me a bit of the system used in Fury of Dracula. Typically the attacker plays a card with a certain attack value and the defender plays a card with a defense value. If the attack value exceeds the defense value, the excess is taken as damage by the defender. Being a Star Wars game, there are also cards with other neat effects, including the obligatory Force powers.

My wife and I did rather badly in the first game as we didn’t understand that it was only necessary to eliminate the major characters to win. We got our revenge when Kevin showed up and we played a 3 vs. 3 game with Han on our side. The highlight of the match was probably my wife’s Darth Vader one-shotting Aaron’s defenseless Yoda. Sean’s Obi-Wan Kenobi took a long time to kill but we eventually wiped their whole team out.

A 3 Goal card for the win!

After that we started with the main event, which was The World Cup Game. After looking it up on BGG, I found out that it could be played either as a simulation of the 2002 World Cup or the original 1930 tournament. We played the 2002 version and with Han sitting out, we had five players and a total of 32 teams, meaning that some players controlled six teams while some controlled seven teams. The board for this game looks exactly like the charts of the different matches whenever an actual World Cup takes place.

Players take turns to play cards with various effects. A 2 Goal card is just that, slap it down and you get to put a 2 Goal token for the team of your choice. Some cards are used offensively. The Foul card allows you to flip a Goal token that has already been placed for example. Different teams have different numbers of slots with the more powerful teams having more slots to play effects in. All of the matches are effectively simultaneous as a round only ends when you finish the deck of cards. At the end, you roll some dice which can add one or two goals to a team, but for the most part, the tokens alone are enough to determine which teams win their matches.

Just like the real tournament, the 32 teams get whittled down first to 16, then 8 and then to the semi-finals and the finals. This also means that as teams get eliminated, the number of teams that each player controls goes down as well. Han advised us that we should focus on getting one strong team to the next round and only divert attention to other teams once one at least one team’s place was assured.

We had to break for lunch after the first round but everyone got into the second round fine. Everyone had at least three teams each but Shan had four! We arrived back a little later than the others so they were playing yet another round of Star Wars: Epic Duels when we got back. It was still pretty entertaining to just watch, especially when Sean played the Sith Speed card again and again to inflict damage as Darth Maul.

When our World Cup tournament resumed, Aaron was the first to be eliminated as he failed to get a single team into the final eight. This caused him to characteristically claim that the game sucked. Unfortunately for me, I was the next to get kicked out as my South Korea team got trounced by my own wife! In the semi-finals, she agonized over getting a team into the finals as the tokens were stacked against her but pulled off a surprise win when the dice roll went heavily in her favour. Poor Sean ended up with two of his teams in 3rd and 4th place and gamely played on, giving Japan a 7-0 victory over Paraguay.

This left Shan’s Spain and Kevin’s Brazil in the finals. Unfortunately for my wife, she’d blown all her good cards in the earlier matches and went down to an ignominious defeat. Overall, though I was glad to have a chance to play this game, I can’t say that I really care for it at all. There’s very little in the way of real strategy but most of all it’s most complex at the very beginning when you have to decide which teams you want to devote resources to and which teams to give up on, leading to a bit of analysis paralysis, but gets simpler and simpler as the game progresses. Judging by how many expansions it has, I suppose that ardent soccer fans like it even if it’s a very abstracted take on the sport.

Finally we played a round of Wings of War to decide how to distribute the final prizes. My wife and I have played this once before and she didn’t like it but it was the first time for Aaron and Kevin. We took Allied planes while they took Axis ones. We tried to play with Sean’s miniature planes at first, but they turned out to be too cumbersome when the planes overlapped one another and switched back to cards.

In this game of World War I air combat, each player issues orders to their plane by selecting three cards from their maneuver deck and placing them face down on the control mat. The orders are then uncovered one by one and carried out. These cards basically have arrows and lines showing the direction the planes travel and you’re supposed to use them as a sort of ruler to determine the new position of your plane after every maneuver. A straight ruler is used to determine whether or not an enemy plane is both within range and inside the cone of fire of your own plane. Damage is handled by drawing cards from a damage deck and looking at the results.

After these two plays, I think I don’t like this game much as well. I appreciate that there’s some strategy in this, especially once you understand that each maneuver deck has slightly different cards so that good players can better guess where enemy planes will go and I do think the basic mechanic is quite clever and cool, but ultimately it feels like a gimmick game to me. My wife and I handily won that game as both of our planes were still in the air at the end but I’d put it down to luck than skill.

For our part we walked away with three games, Caylus: Magna Carta, Wings of War: Watch Your Back and Dungeoneer: Tomb of the Lich Lord. We’re duly grateful to Han but feel a bit guilty about accepting these presents. Of the three games we played on that day, I liked Star Wars: Epic Duels best but it seems that it’s long out of print. According to the BGG forums, there should be a new version coming out next year, so that’s one thing to look forward to. Many thanks again to Han and Sean for organizing the event!