Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I’m not quite sure why I bought Episodes from Liberty City. I was only lukewarm towards Grand Theft Auto IV but I guess seeing it on sale must have temporarily addled my brains. So far I’ve finished one of the two included episodes, The Lost and the Damned and these are my impressions. I’ll probably get around to finishing The Ballad of Gay Tony eventually but I’m not particularly enthusiastic at the moment.

• It’s basically more of the same of Grand Theft Auto IV. If anything, the on-foot controls seem even clumsier than before. I think this was deliberate to convey the fact that the main character in The Lost and the Damned, Johnny Klebitz, isn’t quite the killing machine that Niko Bellic is. But the focus here is on riding motorcycles and it certainly feels that the controls here have been much improved.
• Despite some reviews lauding the story, I feel that, if anything, it’s even sillier than usual. The conflict between Johnny and the president of his motorcycle club, Billy Grey, is painfully contrived and telegraphed. The game tries hard to look clever by making it obvious that the events in the game occur during the same time as the story from the original game, so you’re seeing some of the same things from a different point of view. But it just makes thing messy. At one point you’re at war with another motorcycle gang, then you’re at odds with the Chinese triads. Then you help out but are betrayed by the Mafia. It just makes no sense.

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The end of year holidays seem to be the season for light-hearted party games, because that’s certainly what we mostly played. It was just as well since both Shan and myself were sick and we probably wouldn’t have enjoyed anything more strenuous. Since these aren’t very complicated games, I’ll just cover three of the games we played during one recent visit to CarcaSean in one post.

The first thing we tried was FITS that Hiew had brought with him. It’s a best described as a Teris-like game. Each player has his own pad and set of tiles in various shapes and the idea is that the tiles are dropped from the top of the pad and falls until it stops on something. There are four levels and each level becomes more complicated but it’s always about arranging the pattern of your tiles to cover most of the spaces while possibly uncovering some key ones.

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Sean wanted us to play Aladdin’s Dragons as he had read that it was the forerunner of all worker placement games. As it turned out, everyone pretty much agreed that it felt more like a bidding game than worker placement. But everyone liked it just the same. Since it’s an old game and out of print, I’ll just do a quick summary:

• This is once again a euro game with very little theme. Did anyone know that the little chits you’re bidding with are supposed to represent adventurers? I sure didn’t until I looked it up. It’s not as bad as most. You start out in a dragon’s cave gathering treasures, then move to the city and finally try to sneak into the palace to loot the artifacts, inexplicably having to spend treasures to do so. And of course you have the special powers of the artifacts themselves and the magic spell cards adding more flavor. But it’s still a pretty abstract game. Apparently this version is even a re-themed version of an earlier self-published game.

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A. Asohan’s Games column in The Star which ran in the 1990s talked mostly about role-playing games. But he devoted column inches to boardgames on at least three occasions that I can recall. They were Space Hulk, which I’ve since played, Dune, which I know is now impossible to find but I have a vague hope of finding the time someday to craft my own copy of it, and Blood Bowl. This last one is one boardgame I know I’ll probably never get to play as like many of Games Workshop’s products, the basic set for the game includes only the barest minimum and you need to buy and customize a full team of miniatures to get the full experience. So the videogame version produced by Cyanide is the next best thing.

The version I have is the Dark Elves Edition which was released late last year.Cyanide has since released a newer Legendary Edition. However, the main difference is that the new version implements 11 more races. Since I wasn’t sure that I’d be interested long enough to try out that many teams, I opted not to go for the upgrade and try the older version first. Customers who own the previous versions get a discount when upgrading, so I figured I can always do it later.

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Due to its reputation as being a game that’s similar to Race for the Galaxy, Glory to Rome is something that I’ve been meaning to try. One reason is that I’ve liked clever card games ever since I first played CCGs. But over time, I’ve also found that card games are ideal for two players. I like heavy stuff like Agricola too, but they take a long time to play and often I get lazy about doing all the work needed to set a game up when it’s just two of us. That’s why our copy of Race for the Galaxy has seen a decent amount of play while it’s almost embarrassing how rarely we play BattleLore. There’s a lot to be said in favor of easy to set up games that are short enough that we don’t need to plan our schedules around them.

Not only does Glory to Rome fill the same niche, but it’s supposedly an even heavier game with much more player interaction to boot. In fact, Sean thought it was so complex that he asked us to play a learning game first, ignoring the effects of completed buildings and using only about half the deck. I don’t recall him doing that for RftG! Anyway, it’s involved enough that I don’t really feel up to covering the mechanics in detail, plus we’re entering the holiday season here, so I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on. So let’s go with the bullet-points:

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We first played Han’s copy of Twilight Struggle over a year ago. Both of us was quite impressed with it at the time and my wife was eager to play more but I thought we probably shouldn’t keep someone else’s copy of the game for too long, especially as it took us the better part of a week to get through a game. We found it so tense and complicated that we only managed to play a little of it every evening. The design also irked me with its heavy use of hard counters, forcing you to remember whether or not certain cards have already come out before you can safely do some actions etc.

Still, I always had this game at the back of my mind. I’ve become more accustomed to the idea that learning how to play a game includes learning the full list of cards, their effects and when they come out. I’ve also since realized that the game has much more replayability than I originally envisioned as the random distribution of cards creates tremendous variability so that no two game go the same way twice. But most of all, I’ve come to appreciate even more how monumentally difficult it must have been to design and properly balance this game. So when the Deluxe edition finally became available in Malaysia, I went ahead and bought it after conferring with my wife.

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The original BioShock was one of my favorite games of 2007. It was also a tremendous success, both commercially and critically. A sequel had to follow but it was hard to see how the writers could come up with a story that could live up to the original. One early idea was to make a prequel, detailing the events leading up to the disastrous New Year’s party of 1958 that marked the fall of the underwater city. This treatment excited me but I always knew it would be extremely difficult to pull off. Depicting Rapture in its heyday instead of its decline would have needed it to become more of an RPG than a shooter. So I was disappointed but not really surprised when this was dropped in favor of another story set 10 years after the end of the first game.

Following Jack Ryan’s rampage through the city in the first BioShock which left both Andrew Ryan and his greatest rival Frank Fontaine dead, Rapture has settled down into a state of equilibrium under the control of Sofia Lamb. A psychologist, Lamb was originally brought to Rapture to provide counseling for the populace who were beginning to miss life on the surface and such simple pleasures as the feeling of sunlight on their faces. However, Lamb espouses a philosophy that is diametrically opposite that of Ryan, promoting selflessness and altruism. She quickly forms a cult around her that threatens Ryan’s power, and now that he is gone for good, she becomes the de facto ruler of the decaying city.

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Lifeboat is one of those party games that works only with a sufficiently large group. In the case of our session at CarcaSean, we had six, exactly the number of characters available, making it the perfect setup for this game. This one has an exceptionally strong theme with the gameplay to match. Each player takes the role of one of the characters who are stranded on a lifeboat and must try to survive as best they can until they reach land. As such, each character has a Size value which both determines how much damage he or she can take and how well he or she can do in a Fight, as well as a Survival Value rating which determines how many points the player earns if that character survives until the end of the game.

But to guarantee that things aren’t all fun and games on the boat, each player is also dealt a pair of cards to determine which character he hates and which one he loves. Naturally, you get bonus points if the character you hate is dead at the end of the game as well as points if the character you love is still alive. This is true even if your own character ends up dying. Of course, since this is all random, it’s possible for someone to end up loving himself, in which case, he’s a Narcissist and gets double points for surviving, or to hate himself, in which case he’s a Psychopath and gets points for each dead character.

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