Knights of the Cardboard Castle

A couple of things caused me to ask after Pirate’s Cove at Sean’s place. First was the release of Merchants & Marauders which I’d read was basically a boardgame implementation of Sid Meier’s Pirates! Second was a totally awesome photo of Pirate’s Cove that someone posted on QT3 some years ago. You can see it here. It’s a 3D version of the game that was apparently made by Days of Wonder to display at conventions and special events.

Unfortunately, once we started actually playing the game, it became evident that the components, which even in the normal edition of the game are admittedly quite cool, were more impressive than the rules. That many of the components are just there to look nice and actually play little role in the game simply adds insult to injury. There’s not much in the way of rules, so I might as well go through the whole thing.

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I only played this because I had bought the Episodes from Liberty City expansion and thought it would be a shame if I didn’t at least try this out. I wasn’t expecting much after being disappointed by The Lost and the Damned, but The Ballad of Gay Tony turned out to be quite a pleasant surprise and Luis Lopez is my favorite protagonist by far from the current generation of Grand Theft Auto games.

Some reasons why:

• Luis Lopez is largely angst-free and though his relationship with his boss, Gay Tony, has its share of problems, they make for a great duo. It’s actually entertaining to watch them interact in the cutscenes for once. I also liked that he basically has a day job in helping to run his boss’ nightclubs rather than being a full-time career criminal. Running the clubs is one of the new side-activities in the game. It’s mostly busy-work with some titillating sex scenes as the payoff, ending with you needing to help out a celebrity with something. It’s cool that it’s completely non-violent and most of the writing is passably humorous.

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Since Shan and I are leaving Kota Kinabalu soon, I guess I ought to make a more determined effort to play those games in Sean’s collection that I’m interested in. As a reader of the book series and a fan of George R.R. Martin since I discovered the Wild Cards anthologies back in high school, I would certainly count the Game of Thrones boardgame in that category. This one is a wargame recreating the War of the Five Kings depicted in the series. As we only had four players, House Greyjoy was omitted as per the rules and so Chee Wee controlled the Starks, Shan controlled the Lannisters, Sean had the Tyrells and I had the Baratheons.

The object of the game is to be the first to control seven cities or strongholds. Unfortunately, we got some critical rules wrong so our experience probably wasn’t what the designers intended. Still, I felt that Chee Wee’s win was legitimate, considering how aggressively he moved and how slowly the rest of us moved to stop him. The game is old enough that I’m not going to describe the rules in detail, so here’s a summary of the salient points:

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After playing both Age of Steam and Steam, it was only fitting that we should play the last member of this family of train games. Sean seemed quite reluctant to play this however. Perhaps because this feels like a very un-Euro game. Steam in particular felt very Euro-ish to me, what with the role selection mechanic, the choice of earning Victory Points or Income and even the importance of finding clever ways to connect cities in such a way as to maximize scoring opportunities. Railroad Tycoon on the other hand, despite sharing the same core mechanics, feels more American. Here’s a summary of some of the differences:

• The board is huge, bigger than it needs to be actually. Even the hexes and goods tiles are bigger. I understand that this is meant to be a more accessible game than the Steam family, but this seems to be overdoing it. The same goes for the plastic miniatures that are included to mark cities emptied of goods and thereby the approaching end of the game. They’re just too gimmicky. The map makes a noticeable effort to reflect the real world geography of the United States but due to this also includes lots of space that no one will ever bother building railroad tracks on.
• But the real annoyance is that the printers seems to have messed up with the colors on the board. Since I have red-green color blindness, I’m used to this in boardgames, but with this game everyone else seemed to have problems differentiating some of the colors on the board and the goods cubes as well. I understand however that the successor game Railways of the World has since fixed this and made the board smaller.

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After joking about it for a long time, we recently managed to organize and actually finish a game of World of Warcraft. To tell the truth, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about it, especially after Sean continually warned that it would take 10 hours to play to completion. To me, the important thing was just to learn the rules and see how closely the boardgame’s design matches the videogame. As it turned out, not only did we finish the game in under six hours, we also did it with the full six players supported by the game.

Like all adventure games, World of Warcraft has each player control a hero who needs to go forth and perform quests in order to earn experience points and gain magical items. Half of these heroes belong to the Alliance and the other half are part of the Horde. Each team competes with the other to gain power quickly enough to defeat the end boss selected for the session. If both teams fail to successfully defeat the boss by the time the turn counter runs out, then it’s an all out pvp match to the finish to determine which side is the victor.

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I’m not generally a fan of RTS games, which is why I opted not to buy Starcraft 2 last year. I was even one of the rare few who preferred the first Dune game by Cryo Interactive to the second one by Westwood Studios which is considered to be the pioneer of all modern RTS games. Nonetheless, I’ve dabbled in the genre over the years and the last RTS game that I really liked was Relic Entertainment’s Company of Heroes.

One notable omission from my list of played RTS games was Chris Taylor’s Total Annihilation. I simply didn’t notice the game when it was first released and by the time I realized what a groundbreaking game it was, it was too late as the game had aged too much. I had a second chance with the first Supreme Commander, but by then didn’t feel up to the challenge of learning a complex strategy game played in real-time.

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This is smallish negotiation-based game that we played recently. I don’t think it’s very notable and wouldn’t have written about it if not for a very odd card effect that Shan used. I discovered later from BGG that this isn’t the only odd card effect in the game. I was also amused to find after the fact that Dragon’s Gold was indeed designed by Bruno Faidutti as it felt very much like his style when I played it.

In this game, each player controls a set of four adventurers and must steal jewels from dragons. Both dragons and adventurers are represented by cards and each has a strength rating. To defeat a dragon, the players must simply assign enough adventurers to it such that the adventurers’ combined strength equals or exceeds that of the dragon. In addition, each dragon card has two more numbers on it. One shows how many jewels (colored markers) must be drawn from the drawstring bag to be placed on the card as a reward. The other shows how many additional jewels need to be drawn when the dragon is actually defeated.

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Yes, two party games in one post. As Sean correctly observed, they’re actually quite similar, despite one game being a small deck of cards that show nothing but images and the other one being a ridiculously large collection of cards showing nothing but adjectives or nouns with some explanatory definitions at the bottom. If you like one of them, you’re apt to like the other. I’ll start with Dixit as that was what we played first.

Dixit first came to my attention when it was announced as the winner of the Spiel des Jahres competition for 2010. Naturally I went to BGG to check it out and was amused that the rules could be explained in only a couple of paragraphs. I didn’t think much of it as party games aren’t really my strong suit and so I was less than enthusiastic when it was chosen by our group of six. But by the end of the game I became a convert and was sorry that the game comes with so few cards.

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