Knights of the Cardboard Castle

The first Portal needs no introduction. This is after all the game that spurred a plethora of remarkably persistent memes. It combined so much brilliance in such a compact package that it is pretty much a game than anyone with any interest at all in PC games must play. This sequel was released in April of this year, but I’ve only gotten around to playing it recently. Here are my thoughts:

The Good Stuff

• More Portal is never a bad thing and this is definitely a worthy sequel. It’s also considerably longer than the original and basically offers more of everything: more story, more characters, greater diversity of environments, more puzzle elements.
• I love the new character of Wheatley and his dialogue especially since my wife and I have watched all of the UK version of The Office.

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I heard a lot of hype about this game when it first came out, especially on QT3. As Hiew mentioned, it’s notable for supporting seven players and yet still remaining a short game. Some personal notes:

• It manages to achieve this design goal mainly by being a multiplayer solitaire game in which each player most focuses on building up his own stuff while occasionally borrowing resources from his neighbors or causing them harm through military might.
• The basic gameplay is deceptively simple, which also explains why it plays so quickly. It’s just choosing one card to keep each turn, most likely based on your ability to pay for it, and passing the rest to the next player.
• There are many different ways to score. You can collect sets of particular cards, certain cards are worth a specific number of points, some cards acts like the 6-point Developments in Race for the Galaxy, giving you points for cards you have or even cards that the two players next to you have, plus you can gain point tokens for having more military power than your neighbors at the end of each of the three ages.
• Despite the centrality of the wonders to the theme and the name, building your own wonder is strictly optional. Basically it’s there to give you something to throw cards at, and perhaps a goal to reach for, in case you have no better combination of cards to work towards.
• Overall, the rules are very simple, but it’s hard to build your own stuff while also keeping a watch on what other players are doing. At least paying attention to your immediate neighbors is absolutely necessary since you can use their resources and their military directly threaten you.

I did pretty badly in this game, because I was flummoxed by the icons (no text on the cards at all except for names) and the tech tree which allows you to build some cards for free if you already have prerequisites. Familiarity with this will no doubt come from experience. But I can see how it can be addictive to play and try to get better scores. A very impressive package for such a simple set of rules and such a short playing time.

Yes, I know, from the title alone Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble! sounds like something in the hentai genre, but it’s actually an award-winning puzzle game. While the subject matter is decidedly more mature than first impressions might convey, there is absolutely no naughty things in the game. The overriding theme is one of female empowerment, in which high school girls in 1920s America rebel against the corrupted values of their small community.

The Low-down

• The look and feel is that of a boardgame. The town of Brigiton is represented by a series of boards, complete with the linen finish you often see in many boardgames. Elements that the player can interact with, usually an NPC, is represented on the board as a silver token, much like the player tokens in Monopoly. The minigames all use the standard suits from a deck of normal playing cards. Even dialogue is based on the convention of drawing and playing cards.

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Perikles is an odd hybrid of an area control game and a wargame that we played with five players. I’m pretty sure that it’s pronounced Peri-cleese, like the way Achilles is pronounced, rather than the more English sounding Pericals, but I didn’t make a fuss over it. The name refers to a statesman of the 5th century, under whom Athens enjoyed a Golden Age and which subsequently became known as the Age of Perikles. There are six city-states on the board and during each round, players start by vying for control of them. Once control has been established, the players deploy the armies of each city that they control as they see fit in each of the seven battles per round.

• The main twist to the usual area-control mechanics that this game uses is that pure majority of control tokens doesn’t suffice to gain control of a city-state. Instead, each city-state has two open spaces for candidates and at the end of each round, only the tokens of the players with candidates are counted. This means that having lots of tokens in an area counts for nothing if your candidate doesn’t get nominated. Allen pulled a nasty trick on me when I nominated a weak opponent to stand against me, as the winning candidate must sacrifice tokens equal to the support of the losing candidate. Allen subsequently assassinated my candidate. Since he was in front of me in turn order, he was able to nominate his own candidate to the newly empty spot before I had a chance to do so.
• The wargame part is represented by the seven battles that must be fought each round. The game uses a combat table that feels a bit archaic to determine what number each player needs to roll to get a hit on the opposing player. Like all dice based results, this can lead to some pretty wild swings of luck. I guess I’m still a bit sour over gaining control of Athens in the first round but failing to achieve much with its forces despite superior odds. The same thing happened to me when I managed to gain control of Sparta.
• Each time you gain control of a city-state, you gain a statue there. Each statue is then worth a variable number of points, depending on whether it has been successfully conquered. I guess I messed up here and underestimated the points value from this system as I used Sparta to assault Athens when I had a statue there.
• Allen played very well in this game, gaining control of cities while not having obvious majorities in them and losing very few support tokens to do so. Hiew surprisingly came in last, probably because he was perceived as the leader in the first round and so became public enemy number one. Shan did well too, though part of it was because the other players gave her a free ride by not attacking her cities, giving her automatic victories a few times.
• Each player gets a special once-per-game power. I never used mine. It was the ability to remove a Sparta hoplite token from the board during the deployment phase. I expected to use it in the second round when Allen was playing Sparta but he never committed forces against me. And of course, in the last round, I found myself in control of Sparta myself.
• Conventional wisdom in this game is to gain control of Athens or Sparta, as these two have the biggest armies, but the fixed set of battle tiles ensures that most fighting will take place in Athens or Sparta so these two are guaranteed to fight each other all the time. This means that both of them are sure to get conquered. Conversely, the smaller cities get invaded very rarely and even though their forces are much weaker, their controller can easily commit everything to defending just one place so they’re almost guaranteed to be worth a ton of points per statue at the end of the game.

I originally expected this game to be more like Struggle of Empires, particularly in having revolving alliances, but as there is little point in being an ally instead of a main participant in a battle, I don’t believe anyone actually chose to do this in the entire game. Theoretically, you can ally to defend a city you’re invested in or to reduce the points value of cities you have no interest in, but since deployment opportunities are so limited, it’s hard to imagine why you wouldn’t want to focus everything on the battles in which you are actually the main participant. Overall, another very neat design by Martin Wallace, but less randomness in die rolls please!

When Hiew brought this little card game out, both Shan and I were struck by how similar it was to Primordial Soup, a game that we’d played a while back with Sean. It shares the exact same theme, down to the evolution of traits to aid survival, the need for food to survive every round and the scoring system that is based on how many of your creatures survive. While Evolution is clearly a light, filler-type game and Primordial Soup is a full game, I ultimately found Evolution to be too simple to be very interesting, especially given how well the older game already covers the same ground. Some notes on the game mechanics:

• In the older game, you’re in charge of an entire species of amoebas, all of which share the same traits. Here, each of your creatures are different, though there are special traits like Symbiosis and Communication that can link pairs of creatures together. Instead of a resource cost for playing trait cards in Primordial Soup, playing cards are essentially free here and you’re limited only by the number of cards you have in your hand. However, some traits do increase the amount of food that your creature needs to eat to survive, thus imposing a cost during the feeding phase.
• Food available each turn is determined by a roll of the dice, so it’s completely unpredictable how much food will be available. Of course, there are many traits to help with food, such Fatty Tissue which allows you to store up extra food for future turns and the ever popular Carnivorous trait which lets you eat other creatures. On the other, opponents can also give your creature the nasty Parasite trait which increases your food requirement by two!
• You can start a new creature any time you wish just by laying a card face-down, unlike Primordial Soup where each new creature costs resources. The real test here is whether or not the new creature has enough to eat and whether or not it can escape being eaten.
• Oddly enough, scoring takes place only at the end of the game. You gain points for both the number of creature you have and the number of traits on those creatures.

My thoughts:

• The abilities are varied enough to have some cool combos, but the relationship between cards are the most part straightforward and hence boring. E.g. camouflage prevents carnivores from eating you, unless it has sharp vision, only swimmers can eat each other and so forth. Nothing like the complex combos that you can achieve in Primordial Soup.
• It’s quite amusing to load up creatures with abilities and imagine how ridiculous the end result must be. And the game does tend to reward going for super-creatures with tons of traits rather than an entire menagerie of weak ones. But even large creatures can die quite unexpectedly, especially since they’re an obvious target for the Parasite target, making it painful to lose something you’ve invested so much in.
• Since scores are counted only at the end of the game, it makes one wonder why the early turns even matter at all. Well, you do need to have something out to let you draw cards and to prevent your opponents from getting a free pass at all the food. But it seems to me that it is perfectly viable to hold back most of your cards for the final round and play them all at once since you can play as many times as you want so long as you still have cards in hand. Some reviewers on BGG suggested scoring the game at the end of each round, which makes far more sense to me.

So, while it’s not an awful game, whenever I think of it, I’m reminded of just how much better Primordial Soup handled the same theme, so why play this one at all?

Minecraft was without doubt the breakout indie hit of 2010, instantly giving its creator fame and fortune and inspired countless programmers to try their hand at indie game development. I chose to give it a miss however. It sounded more like a toy than a game to me and I don’t really feel inspired to create anything out of blocks, especially since Internet forums are full of pictures of silly things like giant dicks made in Minecraft. So along comes Terraria, which has some of the crafting and world-shaping features of Minecraft, but within the context of a true game and I found myself instantly hooked.

To the uninitiated, you can think of Terraria as your standard fantasy action game, albeit set in an anachronistic 2D environment and using correspondingly low resolution graphics. Unlike RPGs however, your character doesn’t gain experience and become innately more powerful over time. Instead, it’s all about gathering materials from the world and crafting them into increasingly better gear. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the console games Monster Hunter and Demon’s Souls in that regard. As such your primary tool isn’t your main weapon, but your trusty pickaxe, with which you mine everything from dirt to stone to demonite ore.

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For personal reasons, I’m back living in Kuala Lumpur for a while, which explains why I was able to show up at a recent session of the so-called Midah group. The main game we played was Martin Wallace’s Automobile, a game that I’ve previously expressed some interest in. Hiew’s copy is the first edition of the game which was released only in very limited quantities, but judging from the photos on BGG, the newer, mass-market edition looks much snazzier and attractive. We played it with five players, guaranteeing  a very hotly competitive marketplace for cars. My thoughts:

• Han commented early on about how few actions each player has in the game, despite the appearance of complexity and multitude of options visible on the board. The game is played over a fixed four rounds and during each round each player has only three main actions. Since every player must take car production as an action every turn, that leaves only a total of eight actions for a player to make his or her mark on the game.
• In addition to the main actions, each player has to choose a character at the beginning of the round and may pick from the available executive decisions at the end of the round. The characters are of course all luminaries from the history of automobile manufacturing in the U.S. and the choice determines not only player order but also special abilities ranging from free R&D cubes to the ability to immediately build a factory without using a main action. For our game however, players tended to grab Howard, who guarantees you the sale of two cars, whenever he’s available.
• Similarly, for the executive decisions, players seemed to grab the promotions whenever they can. Basically the first three players in turn order will always grab the three available advertisement slots as the cost in R&D cubes is almost negligible. The factory closure one is nice as an additional action but there doesn’t seem to be much competition for that action. Similarly, grabbing the discount option is up to the judgment of individual players but it’s pretty much always available to whoever wants it. I don’t want to sound too snobby, but having no-brainer decisions like this in a game doesn’t feel good to me.
• Shan and I obviously messed up by not going early for the distributor network and basically have Hiew and Han a free pass on that score. I also messed up by not having factories that produced all three classes of cars and therefore greatly restricted my available options.
• I commented that viewing two of the demand tiles per player doesn’t feel like a meaningful amount of information in a five-player game. After checking out BGG, I find that I’m not alone in that assessment.
• The losses cubes mechanic makes it feel very much like a Martin Wallace game to me. At least you do have good options for getting rid of them. Plus you can take out loans in this game too.

After playing it, I don’t feel like Automobile is much of a business simulation after all. It feels like more of a game of chicken where drivers race to the edge of a cliff. Here, players loudly proclaim that they’re going crank up their factories to maximum production to scare off other players or boldly fill the distributor pool with salesmen and dare others to add to it. Even at the beginning players jostle to not be the first player to commit to building a factory in other to piggyback off of the efforts of other players. Of course, you don’t want to be that player who is so reckless that he ends up falling into the ravine. So, not quite I expected when I first read about it, but a very compelling game all the same.

Anyone who reads this blog will know that I’m a sucker for open-world games. But I’ve played so many of them over the past couple of years that even I’m starting to get a bit tired of the genre. But then I got around to playing Just Cause 2, which was very well received on the QT3 forums when it came out last year, and it reminded me what the open in open-world games really mean. I skipped the first game of the series due to mediocre but the sequel seems to have been cleaned up and polished to perfection.

The Low-down

• As Rico Rodriguez, a special agent for a secret black ops division of the CIA, you’re basically James Bond, Rambo, Jason Bourne and every other action hero you can think of rolled into one being. You’re sent to Panau, a fictional country somewhere in Southeast Asia, when the previous US-friendly dictator passed away under suspicious circumstances. The dictator’s son Baby Panay ascends to the presidency and is far from being a good pal of the US. Things seem to get worse when an agency operative, Tom Sheldon, who is also Rico’s mentor, seems to have gone rogue in Panau. So in comes Rico to save the day and effect a little regime change.

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