Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Oddly enough, of all the Knizia games I’ve played, the auction games stick out the most for me because at least in their case the mechanics match up with the theme. Okay, Ra is still a bit weird, but both High Society and Modern Art are light games with relatively simple rules that intuitively reflect their subject matter very well. Some quick notes about the theme and the rules that I find amusing:

• It’s a game about auctioning piece of modern art, yet it doesn’t use real-world artist and artworks, which is a bit disappointing. Obviously the issue is licensing. Getting permission to use pictures of real-life examples of modern art would be prohibitively expensive and no self-respecting artist would want their work to be associated with a board game like this anyway. But they could at least make them more recognizable parodies of existing works.
• Knizia could have gotten around this by using images of classic art, changing the theme, but perhaps he consciously intended this game to be a critique of modern art? After all, prices of well-known classic works don’t fluctuate that much. Perhaps Knizia meant to use this game’s mechanics to point out how some artists in the modern art become fashionable and have the value of their work go up to stratospheric heights simply because of the hype? Then after a while the hype dies down and they could become worthless.

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A few days before the end of 1936, thanks to our ongoing propaganda campaign, we convince the masses of the need to go to war. This allows us to impose a three-year draft on all able-bodied young men in China. This will automatically reinforce all of our reserve units to 75% strength, reducing the time that it will take to mobilize our forces to full strength when war breaks out.

We also redirect our elite to build up our officer corps, something that we have been neglecting. A better ratio of officers to enlisted men should hopefully improve our organization and allow us to be more of a match for the technologically superior Japanese. Research projects are substantially trimmed to make this possible. At the same time, we decide to lower our training standards, so that new troops will be ready to take the field more quickly. We’re going to need lots of men to fill out our lines.

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Tigris & Euphrates is one of the games that my wife and I noted early on as being almost always near the top of the best boardgames list on BGG. Although it’s a Reiner Knizia game, I labored under the impression that it was a lengthy and heavy game about the birth of civilization in the Middle East. When we finally had the chance to play it last week, I was surprised by how different it really is from the impressions I had gleaned of it. Chee Wee seemed surprised too. My thoughts:

• The rules for this game really threw me, both because it wasn’t what I expected at all and because it’s so abstract. Personally, it would have helped a bit to know that the blue leaders are farmers and the blue tiles are farms, that the red tiles are temples etc. Mind you, it wouldn’t have helped a lot. It’s still confusing to me why internal conflicts are resolved using only red temple tiles but external conflicts use the appropriate colored tiles for each attacking leader. But it would have helped some.
• Shan commented that this game is very chess-like. But perhaps Go would be a better comparison, seeing as how you need to control the game space when it comes to accessing treasures and monuments and linking kingdoms together.
• There’s still a random element here as which tiles you manage to draw has a huge impact. Shan won this game and at least part of the reason for this is that on two occasions she drew exactly the right number of the correct tiles to defend against attacks. The failed attacks dismayed the rest of us and discouraged us from attacking her again.
• But it also helped that she was the only one who built monuments and started the first one quite early. I was too caught up with opportunistically snagging points and especially treasures to even think about building monuments. Only Sean used his catastrophe tiles. I suppose they’re there to break up kingdoms that become too big to be challenged directly. I didn’t remember they existed. There are just too many small quirks in the rules.
• I think I didn’t do too badly considering how confusedly I played throughout the game. That was mostly because Chee Wee kept making obvious openings that I could exploit, notably allowing me to snag treasures a couple of times. I’m still not sure what the strategy in this game is. Are you supposed to build up your own kingdom? Or are you supposed to spot weaknesses in other kingdoms and try to meddle with them? A little of both I guess.

This is undoubtedly one of the more creative and unconventional game designs I’ve played so far. Like other Knizia games though, it’s still too abstract for me to really like it but I can’t help but admire the design.

By February 1936, our plans begin to fall into place. As new kit reaches the hands of our troops, our upgrade costs go down enough that we can now think about actually starting some new construction projects. We immediately begin training new divisions of infantry to expand our forces. Individual brigades of artillery are also ordered, though we must be careful not to build too many of these as their construction and maintenance costs are significant. It is more important at this stage to have more footsoldiers than to ensure than each division has plenty of punch. All units are ordered as reserves to save on costs.

After some consideration, we also decide to begin building a division of mountain infantry. If possible, a full corps of these will assist in the pacification of the Communists. These troops will be invaluable if we are to expand towards the hilly western and northwestern regions and we might as well do our utmost to gain experience with using them as early as possible.

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(Reminder: almost all screenshots are clickable to expand them to full size.)

In 1936, the fledgling Republic of China led by the Kuomintang has reached an uneasy truce with the other Chinese factions. Following the Long March, Mao Zedong’s Communist forces has retreated to the interior of Shaanxi. Many parts of China are under the rule of warlords including Shaanxi itself to the north, Yunnan to the east and to the south the most powerful of all the warlords, the Guangxi Clique. To the northwest are the Xibei San Ma clique, composed of Muslim Hui Chinese warlords, but they are our puppets and do our bidding.

The reason for this detente of course is the Japanese threat in the north. The Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and formed the puppet state of Manchukuo. The Chinese are all too aware that the Japanese will not stop there and intends to conquer all of China for its resources. The common people urge an end to the civil war and for all parties to present a united front against the Japanese. But as the Nationalists, we will have none of this. As Chiang Kai-shek has stated, the Japanese are a disease of the skin, but the Communists are a disease of the heart. We are confident that a united China under the leadership of the KMT would be more than strong enough to fend off the foreigners.

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Despite fancying myself as a strategy gamer, I am ashamed to confess that I have never played a single game by Paradox Interactive. Even Hiew has played Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis. For my part, I’ve always been intimidated by their complexity and the real-time nature of the games. It didn’t help their case either that many players consider their games bug-ridden messes and are unhappy that their many expansions basically amount to charging money for patches and user-interface features that should really have been part of the original game in the first place.

Still, I have to admit that no one else makes the kind of games that Paradox does and many fans are perfectly happy to play them, so I duly snagged both Hearts of Iron 3 and Europa Universalis III Complete when they were on sale on Steam and now I’m playing HOI3 first. Rather than write a review about this beast of a game, I thought it would be more fun to write an After Action Report on it. Note that I’m playing a fully patched but unmodded copy of the game with the Semper Fi expansion. Also, unlike the other posts on my blog, all screenshot images used are clickable to expand them to full size. There’s a ton of detail in these pictures and I figure that people following the AAR might want to scrutinize the screenshots more closely.

I picked Nationalist China to play because the sheer scale of the major powers still frightens me and China while being big enough to influence major events is still small enough to fully grasp. I have tinkered a bit with Siam before this to learn the mechanics but found that to be boring as I couldn’t accomplish much and so gave up on that game. I have also read the manual, the official strategy guide and extensively studied the HOI3 wiki so it’s not like I’m exploring blindly. However, I also notice that a lot of that information is obsolete due to Semper Fi and subsequent patches, so I do still need to watch myself.

Finally, I am well aware that many people start AARs but never finish them. This is because we play too far ahead of our reports and forget what happened. Therefore I will try to post an update as quickly as possible after each playing session. I will also take lots of screenshots and let the images tell the story whenever possible so I won’t have to write as much. This does mean that this blog will be updated a bit more often than usual with tons of small posts.

We played the Europe map just a couple of weeks after we played Railroad Tycoon. The rules are essentially the same, so no point in going over them and making the Major Line bounties something that is clearly known and available from the start is just common sense. Some notes:

• The Europe map is smaller with less cities and more evenly placed cities. Russia is still pretty sparse, but nothing compared to the sprawling west of Railroad Tycoon. With four players on a more crowded map, this resulted in predictably tighter competition. Sean repeatedly complained that there weren’t enough goods to ship. I found that it made for a very distinctive difference from the base game and I quite enjoyed that.
• Despite finishing behind both Sean and Chee Wee once again, I was quite happy with how I did in this session. Due to a bounty card, there was a very obviously lucrative first-move in the game which Sean went for so I tried to make him bid high for it and competed with him quite a bit in Italy. Unfortunately, this left Chee Wee free to build as he pleased in Eastern Europe while Shan dominated Spain and Portugal.
• The vast majority of my deliveries were only for three links, though some were augmented by a hotel card that I held. I upgraded my locomotive very late and only ever went up to six. I stayed competitive simply by issuing very few shares, even making small deliveries to bide my time to collect more revenue before I upgraded my locomotive. I actually had too much cash at the end of the game, which arguably is a sign that I wasn’t efficient enough.
• The other players went very single-mindedly for the Major Line bonuses. I wanted to connect them in a way that made sense for later deliveries but the others simply went for the shortest possible connections. I’m starting to feel that this is a bit too gamey. Perhaps the bonuses are just too lucrative? It offends my sensibilities that people get so much revenue just for making a connection compared to actually delivering goods. Chee Wee commented that I could probably beat Sean if I had tried harder to get the Rome to Berlin Major Line connected before he did.
• Surprisingly, no one did an urbanization action at all in the game. Due to how the cities are laid out, it wasn’t difficult to find destinations for goods, so the point of urbanizing would be to introduce new goods into the system or to devalue an opponent’s route. No one used the new City Charter cards either, which prevent other players from making any links to the named city.
• I think we got a rule wrong. I think you’re supposed to pay $3,000 per tile as long as any water appears on it, regardless of whether it is a river or the sea. I was just surprised that you could build over the sea in some places and that it only cost $2,000 per tile.

Once again, I liked this expansion and see the value of a different map for the base game. My only gripe is that going for the Major Lines seems to be too dominant a strategy, as opposed to cleverly constructing your track to maximize delivery opportunities.

I normally skip writing about short filler games. They’re usually so simple that the strategy involved in quite straightforward to understand, even if it isn’t quite as simple to carry out, and their rules are short enough that a few lines suffice as a summary. I’m making an exception for Cartagena however. I’m skipping the rules since it’s an old game and will just jot down some thoughts:

• The theme is a bit rubbish, frankly. You’re supposed to be in charge of a gang of pirates escaping from prison, but really the mechanics have nothing whatsoever to do with this. It’s really just an excuse to have your peons advance down a track with the stipulation that a maximum of three peons, from whichever player, may occupy a space at the same time.
• The rules are extremely simple but interestingly thinking of the correct move to make at any given time is anything but simple. This is why I admire this game so much. In particular, it is quite a chore to figure out how and when to drop back to draw cards. Keeping a decent set of cards in hand so that you can respond to the developing situation seems key in this game. I messed up on this front.

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