Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Bully took a long time to arrive on my computer but it was on my radar since it was first released. The original Playstation 2 version was released way back in 2006. The game was then upgraded to the Scholarship Edition for the Wii, the Xbox 360 and the PC in 2008. However, I was never able to find a retail copy of the game in Malaysia. Sometime after that it became available on Steam but was restricted for sale in North America only until I believe early this year which was when I finally bought it.

The lack of availability of the game probably has something to do with the controversial nature of a game allowing you to physically bully other students within the context of a high school. It also probably didn’t help that the ports were plagued by pretty serious bugs for a long time until they were patched. But for me the primary attraction was always the novelty value of playing the game set in a high school. After all, who doesn’t fantasize about going back to school to do the things you never dared to do.

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I was pretty surprised to learn after the fact that this game was designed by Tom Lehmann, the same person responsible for Race for the Galaxy. While this game has cards, and those cards can be “tapped” to invoke their special abilities, this is mainly a game about dice. It’s a small game so this will be short:

• The game is very dry. It’s a bit of backstory about how you’re recruiting palace workers and officials until you reach the king and the queen, but none of it is relevant at all. It’s just abstract manipulation of dice with the powers provided by the cards.
• Like Race for the Galaxy, this game uses icons to explain the special abilities of each card. I had a hard deciphering them, which is I guess why they included the player aid explaining the abilities in English.
• The basic mechanics are easy to understand, especially since you start with just three dice and no card abilities. But once you get more than five cards or so, the combinatorial possibilities are downright AP-inducing. Particularly rich with possibilities is the ability to set off the value of a die with the value of another die.
• One important rule is that the turn order reverses each round with the last person to play in a given turn becoming the first person to play in the new turn and the start player token then moving. I don’t think I’ve seen this before. I think it’s supposed to solve the problem of one player winning simply by virtue of having an extra turn in which to act.
• Near the end of the game, you amass such a powerful set of abilities with which to manipulate the dice that it seems that actual results of your dice roll barely matters at all. We were somewhat incredulous that you could nine dice results of the same number but Sean won the game with something like twelve dice showing the same results, simply by invoking the card abilities in the right order.

While there’s no denying that this game has decent strategy, I still like it less than Airships and Kingsburg. It’s just too dry and abstract for my tastes. But then I’ve never played Yahtzee either. After reading up on it, I guess I can see why To Court the King would be better.

Imperial is one odd game that looks a lot like a wargame but is in fact an economic one. I had a hard time getting to grips with it as it wasn’t immediately clear to me what you’re supposed to do. Instead of directly incarnating nations, each player is an investor (or war profiteer depending on how you look at it) who can lend money to the nation-states of the pre-World War I era this game is set in. Whoever owns most of a nation’s outstanding bonds gets to control that nation. Victory points are derived by multiplying the value of the bonds you own for each nation by a score representing that nation’s relative power.

• We played with variant rules that omitted the Investor card because Sean felt that using the card would make the game slower. After checking out the rules myself, I’m not sure that this is necessarily true. There will be fewer buying opportunities, yes, but not that much fewer. On the hand, the player holding the investor card gets a free $2 million with which to buy more bonds. Over time, that ought to increase the amount of money flowing into the game significantly and make more buying possible.

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Ok, it’s official. I’m woefully behind the curve when it comes to videogames. I’ve only just finished playing Assassin’s Creed 2, but not only has its sequel Brotherhood been released, even the next game after that Revelations has been announced. My only defense is that Ubisoft has a habit of significantly delaying the release of the PC versions of their games. The PC version of Brotherhood after all was released only last March, some four months after the console versions.

Fortunately one by-product of almost all modern PC games being ports of the console versions is that since the original versions still need to be run on hardware that are now over five years old, there’s no significant difference in graphics between a 2011 game and one released two to three years ago. This means Assassin’s Creed 2 still looks pretty modern and I don’t expect Brotherhood to look much better than it.

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Endeavor was originally on my radar because a Kiwi QT3 friend heavily touted it on the forum as a New Zealander-designed game. It also helped that quite a few QT3ers expressed favorable opinions on the game, which is quite unusual given how strongly the crowd there tends to veer over to the Ameritrashy side. That was last year however and it was only when I went back to check Hiew’s blog that I remembered that Sean promised to buy this based on our comments there.

The theme of the game doesn’t seem particularly inspiring to me. How many Euro games are there already that involve the European nations sending ships out to the rest of the world? The mechanics aren’t particularly innovative either but as Hiew mentioned, this game scores bonus points both for being extremely streamlined and hence easy to pick up and for its very effective graphic design. Many games these days like to use icons instead of text to denote game effects, no doubt because it saves space and to make the game language-independent, this can sometimes make a game difficult to learn. That’s not the case at all for Endeavor.

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Not much to say about Niagara as it is a light family game. Or at least it’s supposed to be one, as our session turned into a protracted bout of vindictive backstabbing and thievery. I didn’t think family games could get so nasty! This time around, the implausible premise is that there are gems all along the banks of the Niagara river and you job is to navigate down the river on canoes to snag them while being careful not to fall over the edge of the waterfall. Naturally, this is easier said than done as the river’s current will constantly bring you closer to the edge.

I guess the main appeal of this game is the gimmick of using clear plastic discs to represent the flow of the river’s current. The river is forked and filled with the discs. At the end of each turn, a certain number of discs are inserted at the far end of the river, which will push the discs downstream until they fall off the edge, together with any canoes on them. Thanks to the way the board is set up, the discs that fall off will alternate between the ends of the fork, giving players a bit more to think about to avoid their canoes falling off.

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Apart from Agricola, it’s been a while since we last played a good solid Euro game. The past month has been mostly filled with children’s games, party games and Ameritrashy stuff. I’d mentioned Colosseum to Sean before because it sounded like a game with a cool theme and I guess he remembered. In this one, players are charged with presenting the best possible show for the dignitaries during the Roman era. To do this, they collect various asset tiles that can be used to mount shows, such as warriors, ships, lions, poets etc. while also expanding and renovating their respective arenas. My thoughts:

• We played the advanced variant since those were the rules that Sean described. It was just as well since the basic rules, allowing for each player to only win one auction per round, sounds far too simple, reducing the competition in the auction phase.
• One very interesting review on BGG describes this as a simplified version of Princes of Florence. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but that roughly fits. Each game even has two separate round of buying stuff. In Colosseum, you begin by taking an investment action and then proceed to bid in an auction for the asset tiles that you use to stage events. Since I like Princes of Florence anyway, I do agree that’s it the all round better game.

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I’m not a regular reader of Penny Arcade. The comics are too hit and miss for me and I often don’t get many of the things they reference. But whenever someone cross posts a strip to QT3, I’m generally amused by what I see, so it’s not like Tycho and Gabe are totally unknown to me. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (henceforth abbreviated as OTR) is basically an attempt to make a videogame of their own, featuring their art, writing and general style.

I bought the compilation of two episodes because I was intrigued by the idea of a Lovecraftian story done by the Penny Arcade team and because it’s been years since I’d last played an adventure game. I’d also read that the combat system used is similar to that of the Final Fantasy series which I have no exposure to beyond a combat demo many, many years ago, so I thought I’d use this to get a better idea of how those games work.

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