Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Six Gun Saga is the latest game out by QT3 member Vic Davis. Like his previous games, this is a strategy game on the PC that uses design elements and metaphors drawn from boardgames. This one is set in the Wild West and is single-player only. Some notes:

• This is a very modest game. A whole game might take only 15 minutes, making it very much a coffebreak filler type of thing. You don’t get to customize a deck or anything like that. Just pick a boss character and go. All players draw from the same deck.
• A card in your hand can be put to multiple uses. You can buy them, paying their full cost. Character cards, think staples of Western-lore like The Man With No Name and Billy the Kid, can be bought as dudes to fill out your gangs. Property cards, called deeds, can be bought, and usually provide an income every turn. Ambush cards are like one-use attack cards that you can buy to make it harder for your opponents to move his gangs around.

• In addition, the cards can be cashed out to provide an immediate infusion of money. Each card has a different cash out value. Next, each card can be played as an action for no cost. This can pretty innocuous, such as lowering or raising the VP value of a due, or can be downright evil, including instant killing a random dude owned by an opponent. Finally, each card can act as a card from a normal deck of playing cards, so it can be played on a gang as a hole card to be used for a fight.
• Combat uses poker as a metaphor. A common pool of five cards is drawn that both players can use. The two hole cards and the common pool is used to build the best poker hand for each player. If a player has no hole cards, two extra cards are drawn instead. Each poker hand has a set value and this is added to the combined gunfighting skill of the two opposing gangs. The difference between the two totals is imposed as damage to the loser. Not a bad idea in theory, but in practice, unless you have a pair, there’s no point to adding any hole cards and if no one adds any hole cards, the gang with the highest gunfighting skill wins almost all the time.
• You earn point by travelling to and occupying story cards. There’s a cool twist in that cards can only be first occupied by a gang with a matching character, so a Bank Robbery card can only be first occupied by a gang with at least one outlaw on it. Once a gang is standing on it however, any opposing gang can go challenge them.

• The game continues until a preset ending condition has been reached, usually when one boss has earned a set number of VPs or when the set number of turns has passed. It’s pretty quick and they aren’t that many cards in the game so you can see everything in just one game.
• Overall, it’s a neat little package assuming you don’t expect too much out of it. The optional Weird West cards add a bit of extra flavor (dinosaurs! alien! vampires!) but don’t change the game that much. Too bad there’s no multi-player mode. Even just hotseat functionality would be nice to have.