Knights of the Cardboard Castle

We first played Age of Steam a while back, long enough ago for me to forget almost everything about it. It is essentially the same game with some modifications. The lawsuit thing confuses me so I’m not going to dwell on that and will just go straight to my thoughts about the game.

• The components are professionally-produced and consequently much nicer this time around. There’s now a separate Victory Point track in addition to the Income track so players must choose which of the two to advance. Both of these tracks plus the goods available for future production and the locomotive level are now all integrated onto the main board, making everything neater. The special powers available for selection each turn are now implemented as role cards and there is even space on the board for them now.
• We played the Base version of the rules, which omits the cut-throat mechanism of forcing players to calculate and raise in advance each turn exactly how much money they will need. Instead, you can simply move down the Income track any time you need cash for $5 per space. Another simplification was that the bidding for turn order happens only once at the beginning of the game. After that, turn order is determined by the numbers on the role cards the players selected the previous turn. Needless to say, this makes things much easier and I think probably makes the game go faster because players don’t have to agonize over how much money to raise. I understand that this eliminates some of the tension found in Age of Steam but I was surprised to note that quite a few people prefer these Base rules to the Standard ones which are closer to the original.

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Just a quick update on a game of Campaign Manager 2008 that I played recently with Sean. Sean asked me if it was true that the two decks for Barack Obama and John McCain respectively are identical so I’m just going to link to this detailed breakdown of the decks by Tao of Gaming. As he notes, except for the fact that McCain is strong in Defense and Obama is strong in Economy, both decks are identical save for three special cards. Each side has a unique Media Support and two other unique cards and that’s it.

Yes, this means that both sides have the same demographics cards as well, even if that makes zero sense. It is not even remotely plausible for Obama to win over groups like Seniors or Moderate Evangelicals. Similarly, McCain had no chance with Under-30 Voters or Women (even after accounting for the women pissed off that Obama won the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton). I know this is a game rather than a political simulation, but after seeing the attention to detail and realism in Twilight Struggle, it is disappointing to see such lazy design.

In our game, I think both of us ended up drafting rather similar decks. Obviously both of us saw the value of card draw and drafted both of the card drawing cards and many cantrip-style cards (sorry, Magic: The Gathering terminology here, meaning cards that give a small effect but also let you draw another card). Both of us were also weak at shifting issues and so could do little to affect states that were on the wrong track for us. Sean did draft some weak issue cards but I wasn’t sure if that helped him much. For my part, I drafted a strong attack card that costs two discards and a negativity die roll. That turned out to be critical and won me many states despite the downsides. I also had a couple of demographics cards, Latinos and Women, but they didn’t very useful and I mostly discarded them to pay for my attack card.

Shan watched us and was amused at how tenaciously we fought over big states, with each of us taking turns to play the cantrip cards. Our game ended up being ridiculously close and I finally won with only 271 electoral votes. I guess it’s an okay game but once again, I can’t see much depth in it. Are there even any viable deck designs except for card flow? I think it’s really silly how the designers made some cards so good that they are basically must-haves, thereby greatly restricting the creative space for deck designs. I guess there’s room for some head games when the same two people play a series of games against each other and try to outguess the opponent. But overall, it’s a rather disappointing game that could have been so much better with a more balanced and varied card set.

Once upon a time, flight simulators were practically synonymous with PC games. Some of my earliest gaming memories involved messing around in such games as Night Hawk: F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 and B-17 Flying Fortress. I was never much good with them, but they seemed like such a staple of PC gaming that you couldn’t avoid them. These days it seems that things have come full circle and flight simulators are barely alive as a genre at all. I can’t even remember the last time I played one before this.

Even so, Wings of Prey is not a true flight simulator, being a PC port of the console game Birds of Prey. The game has three realism modes, Arcade, Realistic and Simulator, but even at its highest setting, it’s not anything that calls for a thick ring-bound manual to play. The surest sign of how hardcore a flying game is can be seen from its manual and the PDF for the Steam version of the game that I bought looks suspiciously thin. Even the included tutorials and guides are pretty simple.

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It took some doing, but I finally got around to playing a session of War of the Ring. Sean had included the Battles of the Third Age expansion with the game he lent to us. but after studying the rules for a while, I opted to just stick with the base game. While the basic mechanics are quite straightforward, there are many little quirks to the rules and including the expansion would just have added more. This turned out to be the right decision because Shan was already overwhelmed by the amount of detail in the base game and had trouble remembering all of the rules.

Since there’s no way I’m going to summarize the rules of a game of this scale, I’ll just skip to my thoughts about the design:
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I don’t really recall why, but I didn’t pick up Evil Genius when it was first released in 2004. It should be a game that I’d like but it did have pretty mixed reviews. Then in 2008, Rock, Paper, Shotgun did a retrospective on it that I never quite forgot. So when it went on sale on Steam a few months back, I snagged it thinking that I’ll check out this old game for a few days or so. I ended up spending more than two weeks on it.

This is basically a Dungeon Keeper game with an Austin Powers theme. You’re an evil genius who has set up a secret base on a remote island and your objective is nothing less than world domination. You send out minions all over the world to perform Acts of Infamy, which raises your Notoriety and unlocks new stuff for your base, as well as steal cash. At the same time, the authorities will try to send investigators and special agents to check out what you’re up to and will attack when they get evidence that you’re up to no good, so you need to set up your base to fend them off or kill them. My thoughts:

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Since Sean is away on holiday, he very kindly offered to lend us some games from his library to play while he’s away. War of the Ring is one obvious choice. Sean had offered to lend it previously and considering how long it takes to play it, it’s doubtful if I’d ever get to play this two-player game at CarcaSean. In addition, I also picked Campaign Manager 2008. One of its two designers also worked on Twilight Struggle, which I’ve come to like, and I’ve been intrigued with its theme of recreating the 2008 US Presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. It’s also a light to middle-weight two-player game, making it a good candidate to play with just my wife.

In this game, the two players take on the roles of the campaign managers for the two candidates respectively and the objective is to get your candidate to achieve the 270 electoral vote threshold that lets them win the presidency. Instead of all 50 states however, the game covers only the 20 so-called battleground states, assuming that both candidates start the game with a number of states already in their pockets. Thus both candidates start with a number of electoral votes already won with the Obama camp having a slight edge in this respect. The score track included is pretty clever as you have pieces for each of the states in play, with the length corresponding to how many votes it’s worth up. This means that you need merely to line the pieces up to determine whether or not either candidate has reached the critical 270 threshold.

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Sean suggested that we play some negotiation games after we playtested a very simple prototype that I recently whipped up. The prototype had some negotiation elements but was so free-form that no one bothered to initiate any deals. I realized from the experience that you need at least some structure to limit the possibilities or otherwise the options become so daunting that no one ever wants to initiate anything. The Traders of Genoa is one of these negotiation games, and as expected, despite allowing players to negotiate for almost anything, its structure ensures that deals are done in a timely and orderly fashion.

As befits its name and its focus on trading, The Traders of Genoa has the players acting as merchants and the object of the game is simply to have the most money. The game last for a fixed number of rounds, the exact number depending on the number of players, though a random event may cause one or more rounds to be skipped. During each round, each player gets a turn though players also have opportunities to purchase actions when it is not their turn. The amount of money owned is secret information throughout the game. At the end of the last round, everyone reveals how much they have and the players are ranked accordingly.

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Including the recent game with my two youngest nieces, I’m now up to at least four plays of Battlestar Galactica. Of these four games, I have been a Cylon in three of them (once with Sean, once with Shan and of course with the youngest niece Zin in the latest game). I doubt any members of our regular group will ever trust that I’m human again. Some additional thoughts since I’ve already written about this game once before:

• Shan declared after the game that she didn’t see the point of playing it ever again. I wouldn’t go quite that far but it does seem to me that despite the high amount of cruft in the game, there isn’t that much depth. Players just don’t have enough control over all the randomness that is in the game. Cylon players have relatively few options to perform actual sabotage while remaining hidden and it’s generally clear all that times what the best course of action is for the humans. Arguably, that is the point of the game. If everyone’s loyalties were clear, it would be easy to determine what is best. But I’d still have hoped for more strategy above that.
• So far in all my games, the only real threat I’ve seen to the human fleet has been the resource dials dropping due to crisis cards and jump destinations. I’ve never seen the Cylon fleet do much of consequence and I’m certainly disappointed that no Admiral has yet seen it fit to launch any nukes. What’s the point? Just jump and they’re all gone. Theoretically, the Centurion boarding parties can be a credible threat too, but it seems pretty tough for a heavy raider to survive long enough and get activated enough to move into the Galactica, let alone progress enough to reach the end of the track.
• Since the main threat are the crisis cards, there are often times in all of the games I’ve played so far when no one has anything really important to do so they just go to draw cards. That seems, well, unexciting. Players will often just go draw cards even if there are still Cylon Raiders and Basestars hanging around outside because everyone knows they’re not much a threat and drawing skill cards is more important.
• Even experienced players often forget about the special abilities and weaknesses of each character. I did this too, forgetting that Tom Zarek’s ability works for both the Administration and Brig locations, which would have made it easier for me to grab the title of President. Just like the almost irrelevant space combat mechanics, that’s another sign that there’s just way too much fluff in the game.
• Similarly, many locations on the Galactica board are hardly ever used. Who ever bothers to go to Weapons Control or Communications? They just seem to gather dust.
• I maintain that if the human players are all competent, it’s almost impossible for them to lose. Competent play means using the Investigative Committee card as often as possible and going to the Press Room to draw more. There’s no reason to go draw Engineering cards unless you really need a Repair card when you could draw Political cards instead. Humans should play as if everyone were human until someone does something to out himself. Even if a human player plays an Executive Order on a hidden Cylon player, what’s the worse that could happen? To do any real damage, he’d have to reveal himself.
• The President’s job should be to constantly draw Quorum cards and play them to restore resources. If the President isn’t doing that, either he’s incompetent or he’s a Cylon. Laura Roslin is also a rather bad President due to her downside. It’s advantageous for the humans to let someone else be President (provided he isn’t a Cylon of course) and use Roslin to play Executive Orders rather than activate locations.

Above all, I wish Battlestar Galactica were more streamlined and less Ameritrashy. I’m surprised that even as flawed as it is, it’s still considered the best traitor game available. I’m still okay with playing it, but I can’t say that I’d be very enthusiastic. I understand that the Pegasus expansion, which I admittedly haven’t played, sort of missed the ball by having explicit Cylon characters. Why would you want to gut the best part of a traitor game by removing so much of the guessing game? But I guess Cylon Leaders are still a better idea than Sympathizers. What I can tell however, the latest expansion Exodus gets it right. The Cylon Fleet board makes sure that the Cylon ships are always a credible threat and the Divided Loyalties cards creates conflict even among the humans.