Knights of the Cardboard Castle

According to Steam, I’ve spent about 86 hours on Dragon Age: Origins. That’s nearly twice as much as any other game in my Steam account. Despite my initial enthusiasm, spending this much time on a single game is enough to wear anyone down. Part of this is of course because I’m such a completionist and insist on doing every quest available, plus playing on hard difficulty means repeatedly banging my head against some of the difficult bosses. But overall it’s still a surprisingly long game. I guess I’ll be skipping Awakening then but I’ll probably still pick up Dragon Age 2 when it comes out.

Being long isn’t a fault in of itself of course, if the game has the content to match. This means enough locations, characters, quests etc. Unfortunately for this game, it doesn’t have quite enough of all that and instead achieves its length by making each combat section much longer than it needs to be, causing it to feel like a slog after a while. Anyway, my thoughts:

Read the rest of this entry »

Reiner Knizia seems to be one of the most prolific designers in the boardgame industry, but none of his games that I’ve played so far have really appealed to me. In general, I’ve found his games to be neat, but too dry and nakedly mathematical for my tastes. Of course, I note that I have yet to play some of the staples such as Modern Art, Tigris & Euphrates or Blue Moon.

Amun-Re is one of the more elaborate of Knizia’s designs that I’ve played so far. Unlike the others, it also has much more of a substantial theme. The board depicts the various territories of Egypt arranged around the Nile. Offering more sacrifices to the local deity raises the flood waters, giving you more income from farming, but too much flooding eliminates income from trade caravans. It’s not much, but that’s already a lot better than many Euros.

The other thing that surprises me is the fairly substantial randomness in the power cards that you can get. Shan won this game and she told me later that she couldn’t have done it without drawing three or four of the cards that let you build a pyramid for only two stones. Each player gets one of these at the start of the game but I never managed to draw any more of these. Instead, I got a couple of cards that change the bidding rules up some for you and a couple of other cards that give you bonus income for one turn. From Sean’s comments, I expected the bonus cards to be a big deal but I never drew one so it didn’t matter for me either. They’re worth only three points anyhow and it must really suck to draw a bunch of them and know that you can only complete one.

The rest of the game is normal Euro stuff. Arguably the heart of the game is the auction for territories, but even here the rule that you can’t put in a higher bid for the same territory when someone outbids you encourages you to submit what you think it’s really worth to you the first time around. It’s a pretty neat twist to normal auction mechanics. The resource cost rules are interesting too, and essentially encourage you to buy a bit of everything each turn. The sacrifice phase is more normal. The more you offer, the more rewards you get, but you also have a bluffing card that effectively acts as a negative bid.

Overall, I don’t find the whole package very appealing at all, though it’s hard to say why. It’s just a bit too staid and the addition of the bit of chaos feels out of place in what is otherwise a game of very meticulous calculation. I don’t hate it or anything. It just falls a bit flat for me.

The Anniversary Edition of Axis & Allies is probably the single most imposing game Sean has in his shop, both physically and, judging from the current figures on the BGG Marketplace, cost-wise. To tell the truth, I’d been eager to play at least one game of any version for a long while due to the franchise’s status as a gaming classic, but my enthusiasm has dwindled greatly as I gained more experience with Euros and especially since I read a copy of the rules Hiew sent me a while back. I realized that the rules are quite simple and really straightforward and the game is intimidating only because of its scale.

Nevertheless we took advantage of the Deepavali holiday in Malaysia and the addition of both Chee Wee and Neil, who continuously and loudly exclaims that Axis & Allies is his favorite boardgame ever, to have a game. In addition, Alain showed up to advise though he declined to actually participate. This meant that for the Allies, we had Neil playing as the United States, me as the Russians and Shan as the United Kingdom. On the Axis side, we had Sean as Japan and Chee Wee controlling both Germany and Italy. For the record, Sean picked the 1942 scenario as he’d previously played it before and wanted to continue his Japan strategy from an earlier game.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the big surprises I had when I went to look this game up on BGG was its age. Primordial Soup was released in 1997 but it doesn’t feel like an old game at all. It also has a pretty cool theme about amoebas struggling for survival in the primordial soup the game is named for. I don’t have time to go into detail (sorry, I’ve been very preoccupied with my entry to the Google AI Challenge), so I’ll just summarize some thoughts:

• The components are pretty lackluster. I mean, I wouldn’t know how you’d represent an amoeba in a boardgame but I certainly wouldn’t imagine it’d look like a block of wood with a stick on it. A quick browse of the photos on BGG shows that plenty of users have made home-brewed versions that look much more appropriate. The included dice were also illegible to us, so we swapped them for another pair from Sean’s vast collection.
• The theme is awesome. Each player has a colony of amoeba and the object is to score points by having lots of them on the board and to have lots of cool mutations. The problem is that your amoebae need to eat and there’s only so much food available on the board, while the genes cards essentially have an upkeep cost. It’s a very neat concept.
• That said, while the most exciting part of the game are the gene cards, most of your time is spent handling movement and eating on the board. This gets fiddly and time consuming. Since I have a slight color blindness, looking at all those cubes of different colors was a bit of overload for me as well. At one point, we even ran out of cubes and Sean had to steal cubes from another game. The cubes represent both food and poop as your amoebae must eat the excrement of the other players’ amoebae to survive while shitting our cubes of your own color. As one review on BGG put it, this game is one huge excuse for lots of shit jokes.

Chee Wee’s winning combo.

• I was getting tired when we moved on to this game and didn’t have a good handle on all of the cards’ abilities, so I never developed much of a strategy and came in last. Chee Wee ran away with the game by getting hold of a godly combination of gene cards which allowed his amoebae to move anywhere two spaces for no cost and to always successfully escape from enemy amoebae. Once again, I am taught that in strategy games like this, movement is king.
• Shan played the part of the predator by using other amoebae as her main source of food, forcing everyone else to buy defensive genes. All of the gene cards are open for purchase, though some have prerequisites. There are also very limited numbers of each card, so I think it’s quite important for players to shut out a player who threatens to get too powerful a combo. I still had the weakest and most unreliable defense, so Shan’s amoebae kept eating mine.
• I think the game is perhaps a bit too long for what it does. It’s easy enough to get the top tier of gene cards fairly early so the rest of the game is just more of the same, plus reacting to mutations your opponents’ amoebae develop. I think the game needs to be a bit shorter or else add another tier of gene cards to force players to change up more.
• Overall, I think this is a very neat game though I’m not prone to liking this sort of stuff. I’m okay with playing this for fun but trying to constantly work out the most efficient way for your amoebae to move so that everyone gets something to eat is just too much work for me.

Sean calls this the third in our series of recent plays of out of print Avalon Hill games. Vegas Showdown is also the least Ameritrashy and most Eurofied of the three games, so it’s no surprise that both my wife and myself liked this one the most. This one’s theme is about building a casino and I was curious if it had any gambling mechanics. I had been wondering if there were any boardgames that let you stake some variable amount of resources on a certain outcome and then reward you if your bet turned out to be right.

As it happens, Vegas Showdown doesn’t have anything like that at all and overall feels very much like a Euro game. It’s mostly a bidding game as the object is to buy tile pieces that you lay on a mat to build your own integrated casino and hotel resort. The rest of the components are fine and we especially liked how each of the different types of tiles had unique art showing what’s going on in that room, but the mat itself is just a flimsy sheet of glossy paper. As we needed to put tiny tokens on top of it to track various things, using paper instead of thick cardboard made it easy to knock them out of place when you’re reaching for stuff or just adjusting the tiles on your mat.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the earliest multiplayer PC game experiences I can recall was with Rampage. This was a port of an arcade game first manufactured by Midway in 1986. Up to three players could simultaneously play on a single machine, each taking control of one of the three giant monsters, and they competed for the most points by razing buildings, eating people and stomping on all manner of vehicles while fending off the armed forces. It was a very simple game, but the novelty value of playing the evil monsters for once made it very entertaining and it was very satisfying to pop open buildings to see what’s inside.

I had Rampage in mind when Sean showed us his cheaply acquired copy of the out of print Monsters Menace America. That it should be a good game was something I knew would be too much to hope for, but given its theme, this was most certainly a game that I needed to play at least once. It even comes with an impressive set of painted miniatures representing all the usual giant monsters: Godzilla, King Kong, a Giant Eyeball, etc. It’s a pity they didn’t use an Ultraman-clone in place of their Mecha figure. All the action takes place on a large hex-map of North America, representing the various cities and military bases ripe for destruction. What could go wrong?

Read the rest of this entry »

Nexus Ops is an Ameritrash, lightweight wargame that we played recently at CarcaSean. Frankly, after playing it I’m pretty mystified at how well it seems to be regarded on BGG. I’m also curious that its current price seems quite high given that it’s out of print. In case anyone is interested, I noticed a brand new copy of this game sitting on a shelf at Comics Mart Midvalley in Kuala Lumpur about a month ago.

It’s old, out of print and there are plenty of reviews on BGG, so I’ll just jot down some thoughts:

• The board is made up of hex tiles so there’s some variation from game to game. Face down counters are placed on them at the beginning of the game, so you get an exploration bonus when you’re the first to get a unit there. This is either a mine on that hex or some free units.
• It’s a victory-point based game and you get points almost exclusively by winning battles, so this is game of aggression. Basically you get one point for winning a battle by collecting the regular Mission cards or you can play a Special Mission from your hand if you fulfill its conditions to earn its points. While the Special Mission cards are kind of neat, I think that awarding points one at a time using the Mission cards feels very cumbersome.
• At the beginning of every turn, you spend your resources to buy units and place them in your starting area. Then you get to move all your units on the board. You earn resources for mines which you control. Battles are quick to resolve. Basically the better and more expensive the unit, the earlier and the easier it hits. The defender chooses which units to lose. Units which die before it’s their turn to fight don’t get to hit at all.
• The winner gets to play Mission cards for points as mentioned while the loser gets to draw an Energize card as compensation. This gives some nifty bonuses in future battles. Actually, we forgot to follow this rule consistently in our game and I never drew even one of these cards though I lost plenty of battles. The player who controls the central monolith gets to draw two of these Energize cards every turn.
• Each unit except the cheapest and weakest humans have a special ability of some sort to differentiate them a bit. The most expensive unit, the Rubinium Dragon, can breathe fire into an adjacent hex, essentially enabling it to attack with no risk to itself. Some units fight better on a specific terrain type and worse on another. One unit moves faster if it travels through a specific terrain type etc. It’s worth noting that the most expensive units can’t collect resources from mines, so cheap units are needed for more than just fodder duty.
• The background story is about humans traveling to a distant world, sparking a conflict between rival corporation who vie for its resources. They also discover that the world is populated by all manner of weird creatures and conscript them into their armies. It’s very generic fluff geared for kids.
• I wasn’t very enthusiastic about this game once I understood the rules and so didn’t try very hard to win. Sean correctly understood that you needed to spread out as much as possible in the beginning for the exploration bonuses. I could have had a better chance of winning if I had attacked Shan while she was weak but I didn’t feel like it. Regardless of how large or small a battle is, you still gain the same amount of points, so it would be best to send small groups to pick off lone enemy units rather than go for a huge confrontation like I did.
• Overall, I suppose that there are plenty of players who would dig a quick-playing, lightweight wargame with some room for surprises and smart strategy, but I’ve found that this sort of stuff isn’t really to my taste. I guess I’ve veered more to the Eurogame side of the industry than I thought.

Some thoughts on this filler game that we closed a recent session with. Amusingly enough, it seems that its name really is derived from Through the Ages, though I don’t think that the game are similar beyond sharing the same Civilization theme.

• It’s a game with wooden dice, wooden player boards with holes for pegs and most surprisingly, a big stack of score sheets as you need one per player per game. Wow, that’s a lot of dead trees! Jokes aside, it’s the first time I’ve seen a game use a score sheet so extensively. While I can see why it’s necessary in this game (lots of things to track), I still think it’s very inelegant. Just design a nifty board so that you can keep track of everything in one place already!
• You roll dice to get the resources shown on the die faces and you even get to set some results aside and reroll the other ones, up to three times. The  only exception is that you must set aside the die results with crossbones on them, and getting enough of them triggers bad stuff, either for you or for your opponents. Appropriately enough, the classic Civilization unit of production is turned into dice in this game. The more cities you have, the more dice you can roll and the more resources you can potentially generate. But each city also imposes an upkeep cost in the form of food.
• The spend those resources to get things done, which usually translates to points. You use people to found new cities and build monuments. You spend money, including money gained from building resources, to buy technology. Food is of course used to pay for upkeep. The game ends when any one player has bought five technological advances.
• In our game, both Shan and Sean had nicely humming civilizations as they competed to found ever more cities and complete monuments. In the meantime, I kept rolling lots of crossbones results which everyone interpreted as bad news because I kept losing points because of them, I couldn’t get enough food to feed my cities and I couldn’t get people to grow more cities or build monuments either. On the other hand, I kept piling up resources and early on only bought the technological advance that removes resource accumulation limits and to mitigate the effects of rolling two crossbones results.
• Surprisingly, I ended up winning the game because I managed to buy the two most expensive technologies in my last two rounds, despite having fewer cities and almost no monuments. Sean came in dead last as he had invested a lot of manpower in building a huge monument but Shan chose to end the game before he could finish it.
• I guess this nicely demonstrates that there are multiple paths to victory in this game. What the two of them should have done, when they noticed me accumulating resources, should be to buy cheap technologies in an effort to end the game before I get too much money. The end of the game is very much under the control of the various players.
• Still, I can’t say that I really like this game. It’s a bit too straightforward for me and I don’t like the mechanic of allowing the player to selectively reroll dice to get what he wants. As dice games go, I very much prefer both Airships and Kingsburg.