Knights of the Cardboard Castle

The X games are a series of space trading and combat games in the vein of David Braben’s Elite and well-known successors such as Wing Commander: Privateer and Freelancer. Made by a German developer, Egosoft, they have a reputation for being obtuse and tedious to play. Nevertheless, with three full games out so far plus various standalone expansions, they have managed to garner a devoted following. As a fan of the genre, I was willing to look past its faults and approached it as if it were a single-player version of Eve Online, which I admire greatly despite its reputation for being a boring spreadsheet game.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be a mistake. If anything, making any sort of progress in this game is even more tedious than Eve Online. At the same time, its interface is awkward, combat is uninspiring, the plot completely forgettable and did I mention how slow this game is?

The Good Stuff

• The game has nothing to be ashamed of in the graphics department. Planets look vibrant with life, even if you can’t land on them; space stations range in size from lonely outposts in a deserted expanse to colossal fortresses that will leave you awestruck, rendered with excruciating detail; ships come in a wide variety of designs and sizes etc. One thing I dislike is that the external camera view isn’t playable as there is no smart camera mode, so you don’t get to see your own ship in action most of the time.

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For those who don’t read my other blog, I’ve been busy at my new job at Seremban, Malaysia, so I don’t get to write or play games as much anymore. Nevertheless, I still intend to play games and to write about them whenever time permit so this blog won’t die completely. So here’s a summarized report of the latest game I played, Cities in Motion by a new studio Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive.

The Good Stuff

• It’s a transport management game and I haven’t played one of these in ages! This is a really pure public transport game. The maps are more or less pre-made. New buildings are scripted to slowly appear over time but for the most part the cities are static and you have no say over how roads are laid out and where all the buildings go. Your job is to work with the layout of the existing city and build a public transport network that people will actually want to use and that can turn a profit.
• Unlike the well-known Transport Tycoon which focused on long-haul routes carrying both goods and cargo between cities, this game is all about ferrying people around within a city. The standard transport options are the lowly bus, the tram and the mighty rail system. More exotic options are the water buses and the expensive helicopter.

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Despite using a ridiculously contrived acronym for a title and being notoriously buggy, the original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl was one of my favorite games of 2007. As I recall it was a very polemical game. One half of reviewers slammed the game for its technical problems, lack of polish and a story that was difficult to make sense of, especially due to the poor job done with translating the content from Russian to English. The other half praised it for its incredible atmosphere, sense of immersion and even claimed that the poor translation job added a distinctive character to the game. It didn’t help either the game was originally supposed to be released in 2003 and many people had given it up as being vaporware.

I was firmly in the latter camp of course and went around the net loudly defending the game on forums and blogs. Yes, the game was hard but there was something simultaneously nostalgic and refreshing about a modern game that dared to kill the player within minutes of entering the game world just like in the old days. The graphics were impressive but what really stood out was how immersive the world felt.

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The Europa Universalis series is Paradox’s flagship game and arguably its most complex game in a ludotheque renowned for difficult to access games. Although I’ve heard plenty of stories about them, this is the first time I’ve ventured into the series. Plus I’ve been doing this all in too, with the base game plus all four released expansions to date. As with Hearts of Iron 3, this entailed reading read up on a ton of materials including the manuals for the game and each expansion, the general strategy guide and browsing the game’s wiki site. That’s easily several hundred pages of text, all told.

Even then, to play it safe, I picked Switzerland to start off with, but still got completely lost. How much inflation is considered tolerable? How am I supposed to do anything when all my neighbors all have so many more troops than me? When I became successful at trading, some big countries started to embargo me, locking me out of lucrative centers of trade. What am I supposed to do about that, given my pathetic army? Some of the missions I got seemed impossible to achieve. Get a bigger army than Austria? In your dreams, buddy.

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I recently bought Railways of the World from Boardgamecafe.net. As I wrote when I talked about Railroad Tycoon, it’s a type of game that I didn’t yet have a copy of in my collection. The nice thing about this particular edition is that it has a couple of nice improvements. For one thing, the color problems have been resolved so that even someone with color blindness like me can distinguish between them. Well, most of the time anyway. The other thing is that this is one game that can be said to actually scale well from two to six players even if that’s because it comes with the smaller Mexico map that’s designed for two to three players, while maintaining the huge Eastern US map for four to six players.

Shan and I just played a two player game with the Mexico map, so here are a few thoughts on it:

• The Mexico map is narrow and tough. Most of it is hilly terrain and there is plenty of water all around, so building is expensive. The best starting location is probably the area around Mexico City to the south and both Shan and I gravitated towards there but it’s not a complete shoo-in like the Eastern US map. The terrain there is just as rough as elsewhere, it’s just that distances between cities are a bit shorter.
• Like Rails of Europe, the bonus points for connecting specific pairs of cities are printed right on the map and can be completed at any time. However, unlike the Europe map, construction costs on the Mexico map are so high that I don’t think that loading up on debt to complete these connections is a great idea. You really need to make sure you have the right mix of goods to make use of your network. Service bounties are still implemented via cards and go to the first player to make a delivery to the stated city when the appropriate card turns up, making it an element of randomness.

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Since leaving Kota Kinabalu, Hiew has been kind enough to invite me to his so-called “Midah Group” sessions. So far I’ve only been there once and I probably won’t be able to join them very often before I have to move away again. We only arrived at 9 PM and so played only two games. Cyclades and a family game that goes by the awkward name of Fast Flowing Forest Fellas. The latter isn’t very interesting to me. It’s very reminiscent of Niagara, but is much simpler and seems mostly luck-based due to the importance of having the right card in hand at the right time. I think Niagara is the better game in every way, so I won’t be writing much about this one.

Cyclades on the other hand has been something that I’ve been intrigued by since I first read Hiew’s post on it because it looks like a Eurogame-Ameritrash hybrid. It has invasions and combat. It uses mythological Greece as its theme. And it comes with plastic figures depicting soldiers, ships and even monsters. After playing it however, I’ve found it to be much more of a Euro that I expected as there is usually only one invasion event per round. This means that victory is still more about building things than conquering to grab islands from others. My thoughts:

• Contrary to expectations, this plays more like a bidding game than anything else. The most important part of the game is deciding what action you really need and how much you’re willing to pay for it. Since there is only just enough actions to go around, competition is always tight. The only action that more than one player can take is a consolation prize action which gives you a bit of money, and if you’re the first player to take it, a resource boost that you can choose to put on any island.

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I first played Mount & Blade back when it was in beta and the Turkish husband and wife team who made it were selling licenses for cheap on their website to fund the game’s continued development. Though sorely lacking in content, it was a revelation at the time, fully deserving of its reputation as the preeminent medieval combat simulator. Even now I still can’t think of any game that handles mounted combat better and it’s incredibly satisfying to learn the use the full array of weapons at your disposal. You can pepper enemies with arrows, skewer them with lances or cut them down with your sword. The innovative control system put you fully in charge of the direction of your swing and the damage system reflected not only your character’s skills but also the speed at which your blow contacts with the enemy.

While I spent many, many hours mastering how to couch my lance properly so that it will do maximum damage, how to swing a cavalry sword from horseback as I gallop past infantry and how to circle strafe enemies with my horseback archery, even I got bored pretty quickly by how sparse the game world was. Basically you rode around an almost empty world, traveling from city to city to buy and sell goods. Occasionally, you’d run into bandits that you can fight. You spend the money you earn on better equipment and to recruit new soldiers to join your army. Rinse and repeat. After a while, I went and downloaded the Last Days mod that turned everything into Lord of the Rings. Running around recruiting elvish archers and Gondorian infantry to slaughter orcs by the hundreds turned out to be much more fun.

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Now that I’ve left Kota Kinabalu, this will probably will the last post I write about boardgames for a while. On our final visit to CarcaSean, we played Piece o’ Cake, which Sean prefers to call by the literal English translation of its German name, “… but please, with whipped cream“, San Marco, which seems to have been an inspiration for Piece o’ Cake and Alhambra. The last of these is too well known for me to meaningfully write about, so I’m just jot down some observations of the former two games.

Both of them are pie division games, in which the active player must choose to divide resources into different piles while knowing that he will be the last person to get to choose one of the piles. In the case of San Marco, the resources to be divided are good cards that permit the owner actions plus bad cards. Accumulate too many of these and your turn ends early, potentially giving the other players an extra turn of actions plus bonus points. In the case of Piece o’ Cake, you literally have to divide pieces of cake into portions to be distributed among the players. It’s a very neat game mechanic that I’ve never encountered before this.

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