Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Though not intentionally, Battlestar Galactica has turned out to be one of the games I’ve played the most often. Since I’ve heard that Shadows over Camelot is sort of a precursor to BSG, I’ve been curious about it. Still, I’ve also heard that it’s very simple compared to BSG and its traitor mechanic is much less developed, so I’ve never suggested playing it. In our recent session however, we found ourselves with seven players on hand, which somewhat limited our available options. After playing a great many party games, we tried to look for something a bit more substantial and finally settled on this one.

• As expected, the gameplay is indeed too simple to be interesting for very long. Knights can either stay at the Round Table to draw cards and to destroy the slowly accumulating siege engines or go off to perform one of the available quests. These quests are mostly performed simply by playing an appropriate set of cards on the provided spaces, one card per turn.
• As in BSG, a card is drawn from the black deck on each player’s turn to represent nasty events, unless that player chooses to pay a life point to not draw a card. This usually means that players have to race against the bad events to successfully complete a quest or it will fail. Completed quests yield white swords while failed quests result in black swords. Once you have a total of twelve swords, the good guys win if there are more white swords than black swords.
• Shan was very obviously the traitor. She was about as obvious as the Shadows over Camelot traitor portrayed in this Penny Arcade comic. She complained later that the other players communicated with each other too much, offering too much information about the cards that they held, which is actually technically against the rules. This made her job of hindering the good knights much harder. Even so, it’s not like she had many options. Even if she weren’t outed, the best she could do would be to help as little as possible whereas a clever traitor in BSG could do some serious damage with skill cards and special abilities at the right moment.
• The good guys found it extremely easy to beat the board. At no point in the game was there ever a serious danger of defeat. Probably our game was skewed by the number of black cards we drew that was related to the Lady of the Lake. This quest can be done by any number of knights and each knight can discard any card to advance the quest. This makes it a lot easier to deal with than the other quests which require specific combinations of cards. Still think the game is easy to beat though.
• As usual with Days of Wonder products, the components are extremely attractive, especially since Sean splurged for the premium figurines for all the knights. But once again as with Pirate’s Cove, it’s a case of too much chrome for what is at heart a pretty simple game. I think most people were impressed when they first saw the components but actually grew bored as they played the game.
• There’s not much tension in the game as it’s quite straightforward to see which quests are going to succeed and which ones are going to fail. Players can play black cards face down to draw a white card, which in theory can introduce some uncertainty, but once again, the strategy here is too plain. Except for the traitor, players will expose the high value black cards and place only low-value black cards face down. In many cases, we can even deliberately let some quests fail so it doesn’t even matter what the values are. The consequences of failure are all explicitly laid out for each quest anyway.

Overall, I’d say that this game might have been okay at one point but it’s completely obsolete now. BSG, even with all its flaws, makes for a much superior alternative in every conceivable way.

I’ve been wanting to play one of the open-world racing games ever since the first Test Drive Unlimited came out in 2006. But with so many other games to play it wasn’t a huge priority and so I kept putting it off until the game was so old that it wasn’t worth playing  any more. Arguably even playing Burnout Paradise in 2011 is still leaving it a little late, but I noticed it on sale last Christmas on Steam and remembered that I’d always wanted an open-world racing game. Some thoughts:

• It’s a game with 2008 graphics and graphics are kind of a big deal for racing games. My eyes adapted eventually but, yeah, this is a real climb down compared to the Codemasters stuff I’ve played. On the plus side, the open-world really is quite big and the draw distance is rather impressive, even if the game cheats a bit by fogging things up when you’re at very high speeds.
• The driving physics aren’t even remotely realistic. This is a purely arcade racer but I liked it a lot more than the on-rails driving of the old Need for Speed games.
• I originally intended to play this as a light diversion after spending so much time with Hearts of Iron 3 and expected to only sample a bit of it. I ended up finishing the game anyway. The gameplay mechanics are very well done and collecting cars ends up being very addictive. There are so many of them in the game that even at the end I had only unlocked about half of what was available.
• Out of all the event types, I really only liked the old-fashioned races. The stunt events rely too much on memorizing the map for good places with lots of jumps and the Mad Men events, where you only have to make it to the destination in one piece, seemed far too easy provided you chose a car sensibly. The Takedown events, in which you need to wreck a certain number of opponents, were okay but rather easy as well.
• What differentiates the Burnout series from other racing games are the boost abilities of each car type and being able to wreck other cars. Aggression-type cars actually refill your boost by knocking other cars out of the race. Also, wrecks can be pretty spectacular in this game, with different parts crumpling realistically based on the point of impact.
• The open-world part is that races are point-to-point only and the game doesn’t care what route you use to get there. Using shortcuts helps a lot but generally I found that just skillful driving and judicious use of boost is enough to win races. Even the timed events are pretty generous. You just need to avoid crashing or making mistakes.
• Surprisingly I really liked the DJ commentary and the music selection in this game. I hated EA’s painful attempts to be hip in the Need for Speed games but the commentary here is topical, useful and at times even funny. There must be a ton of recorded voice dialogue in the game because the DJ always had something new to say.
• The motorcycles that were sold as a DLC but included in my Ultimate Edition were advertised as a pretty big deal, but I didn’t care for them much. They have their own events but they still feel like something of an afterthought. Oddly, motorcycle events are based around the time of day and can be done only if you arrive at the starting point at the right time which seems like a pointless restriction.

Overall I still prefer the Codemasters games. While it’s cool to race in an open-world, the lack of variety of terrain becomes grating quickly and I prefer the challenge of well-designed and balanced tracks. Still, it’s hard to beat Burnout Paradise as a casual driving game not to be taken too seriously. It’s a great game to jump in for an hour or two of light fun.

After many months of neglect, we recently played Agricola again with some friends of Chee Wee. It was notable not only because it was the first time we played the Family version of the game, without any of the Minor Improvement or Occupation cards, it was also the first time we played Agricola with the full five players. Some thoughts:

• I won the game, but only by the seat of my pants with 30 points. Choo finished at 28 points I think while Shan shared third place with Choo’s friend Justin. Still, it was embarrassing for us considering how many times Shan and I have played the game already. We had also grown used to scores in the 40-ish range, so dropping back down to the 30-ish range was humbling as well.
• Part of it must be due to omitting the Minor Improvement and Occupation cards, which can add a great deal of versatility and efficiency to your actions. But I’d say most of it is down to the vastly different dynamics of the five-player game. Food is scarce! High-efficiency actions are always hotly contested! Most of the extra actions added to the game to compensate for the extra players are poor in efficiency and are taken only as a last resort. By contrast, building materials aren’t too difficult to get and clay in particular was flowing out of my ears.
• As an example of what I mean, by the end of the game, not one player had elected to grow to five family members. The combination of too little food and the scarcity of good options to take with your extra actions meant no one wanted to take the risk. I had grown to four members much earlier than the other players but at the cost of not being able to build any sort of food engine at all. I’d actually built my house to five rooms, building one room early to grow to three members and building double rooms with a later actions, but I had such a hard time scrambling for food that I opted not to get the fifth family member.
• With no Minor Improvements in play, every single Major Improvement card was quickly bought up. I was very careful to buy up the first Fireplace and slaughtering all the early sheep went some way towards fulfilling my food needs for quite a while. Later, I supplemented my food needs with the Pottery card due to all the clay in the game. Justin was the baker in the game with his early Clay Oven. Actually he could have won the game easily but for his unfamiliarity with the mechanics. If he had optimized his actions better, using the sow action only when he had more than one field to sow for example, or buying the oven only when he already had a grain ready to be baked, he could have freed up a bunch more actions for other stuff.
• The most popular actions in the game were Take 1 Grain, Plow and later, Take 1 Vegetable. Later in the game, players routinely passed over nice stacks of wood or reed just to get the plow action. Consider that each player needs a minimum of three plowed fields by the end of the game and prefers more. With five players, that means a minimum of 15 plow actions without cards to speed things up. Plow and Sow turns up later to help out of course, but there are only two or three such actions in the game. Nice for whoever snags them but it’s far from enough to make up the slack. No wonder competition for that space was so fierce!

Probably the reason I won was because I was gamey about getting exactly one of every needed item and thus avoided getting any negative points, except for empty spaces. Everyone had empty spaces by the end of this game. I’m not even sure that aggressively growing early in this game, the conventional strategy in Agricola, helped me more than it hurt me. Sure, I got extra actions but I had to spend a bunch of them on low quality actions like grabbing two food just to avoid Begging cards. All in all, I was reminded again of how dynamic Agricola is and it’s a nice demonstration that even the family version makes for a pretty meaty game.

Following our victory over the Guangxi Clique, we leave behind a sizable garrison both to guard the three new ports that we now control and the southern border with French-controlled Indochina. The remaining forces are sent to the north. The time has come for us to take the offensive against the Japanese. Confident of our superiority, we begin our offensive in November 1939.

As expected, due to the extensive defensive emplacements on both sides, taking the offensive is extremely difficult. We begin at the westernmost part of the line, throwing troops at the Japanese defenders until they are exhausted and then rotating in fresh units. The death toll for both sides is appalling, but we are pleased to note that due to our edge in equipment and our artillery support, the kill ratio is slightly in our favor. Plus of course, we have an almost endless supply of eager young men willing to give their lives to defend their country. The same cannot be said for the Japanese. Slowly but surely, we are bleeding them to death.

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I wanted to play this one because it’s an old classic that I’d heard a lot about, especially since it was cited by Richard Garfield as a major inspiration for Magic: The Gathering. But Sean was very reluctant. Not only is this a negotiation game, but it’s an Ameritrash negotiation game. That’s like a double zing right there. So he made me read the rules. Some thoughts:

• Given how chaotic the game can get and how little control players can have, this feels like a party game to me. You don’t have a choice about who to attack and you must basically play out all of your encounter cards before you’re allowed to draw more. Then of course there’s the huge variation in the encounter cards that you can draw as well as the powers of each alien race.
• From what I can tell and the rules all but confirm, the alien powers were deliberately designed to be unbalanced. I forgot to tell the other players this as the card for each race is color coded to basically indicate approximately how powerful each race is. At first, I thought that the color codes meant how complex the race was to play. I think it’s actually supposed to indicate how difficult it is to play against this alien, i.e. how powerful it is.
• I didn’t even use my race’s power, the Shadow’s ability to eradicate, properly. I should have used it to slowly eliminate other player’s foreign colonies rather than helping the aggressor. And I think Justin didn’t use his race’s special ability at all. Just pointing it out to show that the game is quite a bit richer than what we gave it credit for.
• The rules explicitly call for the attacking and the defending sides to each call for allies one by one. In our game, we basically called for everyone all the time, which was probably a bad move. At the very least, we should have stopped doing this when someone got to three planets, as this meant that he could potentially win the game on his turn with two successful attacks. Strange as it sounds, whether to ask for allies and who to ask for as allies is one of the things a player always has control over, so I guess we missed this part.
• The game lists the number of players as three to five. I don’t really see how it could work with three. We played with four, which was okay. But I really think the game needs the full five players to reach its full potential. That should make alliances more asymmetrical and the whole game more dynamic. In our game, once Shan and I reached four foreign colonies each, we basically acted as a team the whole time until we won, so Sean and Justin had to oppose us all the time.
• I still don’t quite understand what is or isn’t possible in negotiations. In our game, I had an opportunity to negotiate with Justin. But he had zero cards in hand and I needed just one more foreign colony to win, so we didn’t have a lot of things that we could make a deal with. Could I have just offered him a card from my hand with him giving me nothing and called that a successful deal?

All that said, while this is admittedly a pretty chaotic game, I still don’t think it’s completely useless as Sean seems to think. Hand management, bluffing and some amount of negotiation are all necessary to do well. The sheer variety of alien powers ensures that each game will be different.

Just as we are flush from our success in subduing the warlords of Yunnan, the Japanese surprise us by mounting a second amphibious assault at the exact same location behind our lines. Though this force of six combat divisions is notably weaker than the first one, most of our spare units are deployed in the south of the country. We are forced to deploy reserve militia units to contain the threat. It takes three weeks for us to surround and completely destroy the invaders.

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I only realized after playing Timbuktu (I’m not even going to try to reproduce the weird spelling of the actual edition we used) that I haven’t played that many deduction games. Shan and I played a few games of Mr. Jack back when we first discovered Sean’s shop and I guess Fury of Dracula which we played with Han has some deduction elements, but I can’t think of anything else. I’ve never played the classics of the genre, such as Scotland Yard or even the popular Cluedo.

Timbuktu is a bit different in that it doesn’t use the crime-solving / villain-chasing theme that fits deduction-based mechanics so well. But since the point is to avoid having your goods stolen by thieves along the way, I suppose it ends up being pretty much the same thing. My thoughts:

• The very definition of analysis paralysis. It’s one thing to make decisions based on the cards you’ve seen. It’s another to infer additional information from what you see other players doing. I drew the line at looking at other players’ mats. In theory, you could look at them to see if a player made a move because a space is safe or because that player has no goods that are threatened by being in that space, but that was way too much work for me.
• Sean asked us to take into account the different values of the goods when deciding what, if anything, to sacrifice. But it doesn’t matter for most of the game. Maybe you can try to work in this information in the very last round. In the earlier rounds, you simply do whatever you can to keep as many goods as possible.
• We played the normal version in which the configuration of goods for each player is fixed according to the mat he gets. Interestingly, even this setup is different for each player. Apparently in the advanced version, you can set up your goods anyway you want, which must be painfully tense because you have to decide in advance just how much risk you want to take.
• If everyone is just as assiduous about analyzing every bit of information available, then luck plays a part because at some point everyone has to take a chance based on incomplete information. Given how many points a single good is worth at the end of the game, a single mistake can make all the difference.
• I didn’t really take account of the different paths through the various boards. This resulted in my camels being congested at certain paths and forced me to spend goods to move them to somewhere with a free space. I had too much to worry about to take this factor into account. I wonder if the other players took more note of this?
• I think I still like the more traditional version of deduction. Here, you’re forced to make a decision every round, whether you have enough information to make a safe decision or not. In the traditional format, the trade-off is between time and risk. Do you take a risk and make a move based on incomplete information or take the time to gather more information at the risk of falling behind?

My conclusion: clever game conceit and good use of the deduction mechanic, but probably still too much work for me to really feel like much fun. I can’t imagine playing it without the ability to take notes. It would be total and extremely frustrating chaos.

As tensions grow around the world, we resign ourselves to asking for aid from the European powers. In November 1937, we initiate measures to align ourselves with the Allies. Only the United Kingdom and the United States have fleets that are capable of  being a match for the Japanese Navy. While we cannot hope for direct military intervention in the near future, and indeed the United States is still one of the Japanese Empire’s main trading partners, we fear that we will be excluded from the world’s resource markets if we are not aligned with one of the great factions.

Our war with Japan remains stalemated. The Japanese Kwantung Army has extended the frontlines westward until the borders of Xibei San Ma but seems to lack the resources to go any further. As winter approaches, our own troops in Shaanxi experience intermittent supply troubles which the Japanese are quick to exploit by launching attacks. But we always manage to restore our supply lines quickly enough that the attacks are fended off with relative ease. We do lose our first battle in the west foothills as some poorly organized units are forced to fall back, but reserve units and our allies manage to step into the breach quickly enough to prevent a general breakthrough.

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