Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Once again, I find myself slogging through my PC games backlog and playing a game that was originally released late last year. Dragon Age: Origins was something I had looked forward to for a while but I had my plate full when it came out and so waited a while for it to go on sale before buying it. I’m happy to report that 40 hours in, with my estimated progress at a little over half of the game, this is easily the best party-based role-playing game I’ve played since the Baldur’s Gate series.

To be sure, one major reason for this is that party-based RPGs have fallen out of favor. The classic series of old, eg. Might & Magic, Wizardry, Ultima etc. are now dead. Many new RPGs have appeared to fill the void but most are either action games (e.g. Diablo and its innumerable clones) or RPGs based on a single adventurer (e.g. The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher etc.) In fact, Bioware, the makers of the Baldur’s Gate games, remains one of the few companies to continue to make games in this genre, so it’s particularly appropriate that Dragon Age is their newest baby.

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I recall Chee Wee often praising the art in this game, and indeed, now that I’ve seen it for myself, I have to agree that it’s one of the best looking games I’ve seen. Michael Menzel’s art has a very earthy quality, with rich colors and tons of detail. It’s a style that’s more often seen in the fantasy genre I think, so it’s very attractive to see it in a Euro game, a genre that seems to either go for generic or cartoonish inoffensiveness.

As Sean observed, I’ve been playing too many games recently to be able to catch up with them in my blog posts, so I’ll have to be brief. Moreover, I think Pillars of the Earth is a bit too complex for me to form a good opinion after just one play, so I think this is one day I should make a note to try again sometime. In the meantime, here are some brief thoughts:

• It’s yet another game about creating a victory point-earning engine with a fixed turn limit. This one is even more naked than the usual ones. You basically convert building resources into points and you do this with the Craftsman cards. Later cards convert resources at a more efficient rate than earlier ones, so you have an incentive to upgrade them.
• However, you only have a limited number of spots for these craftsmen and discarding the basic ones takes some options away from you, so you don’t want to do this casually but must instead take care to ensure that your chosen strategy isn’t going to require these options. It’s an intriguing mechanic.
• There’s a worker placement mechanic in this one is more muted but it’s also arguably the biggest source of randomness in the game. It’s more muted in the sense that getting precisely what you want isn’t as important as in, say, Agricola or Caylus. There are enough alternatives that second choices aren’t too bad either and no one can really lock anyone out of anything. But it’s still important that missing out on good opportunities will add up and cost you the game. I guess the bit of randomness adds tension and excitement but I still prefer less randomness in my euros, thanks very much.
• The most eye-grabbing part of the board is of course, the wooden cathedral pieces in the middle. As in Tutankhamen, it’s ostentatious without being strictly necessary as it serves only to record what turn it is. I guess having nice wooden blocks to play with is still better than a cardboard pyramid.
• Having everyone’s money being represented as another track on the board was neat. It eliminates another bulky component from the game and lets everyone see how much money each player has in one glance. I can’t recall offhand if I’ve seen any other games do this. The difficulty of course is that some players may accumulate too much cash for the track to accommodate, so it’s only useful for games in which players’ money is within a predictably constrained band.
• Thematically, I dislike that the game is a fixed six turns. The cathedral will be built in six turns no matter what you do! I’d have preferred something like Caylus in which the length of the game in directly controlled by the players or include some way to penalize the players if they’re slow.  That would seem to be more in keeping with the spirit of the original story.

Overall, I’m inclined to put this into the average category. I suppose that the greater luck factor might make it more palatable to more casual gamers who don’t want everything to be perfectly computable but apart from the art, there’s nothing here that particularly impresses me. And frankly, it doesn’t even sell me on watching the series or reading the book. The trials and tribulations of building a cathedral? Thanks but no thanks.

This is yet another kiddie game played at CarcaSean. I’m not sure why Sean buys so many of this type of games. In this case, I was the one who noticed it on his shelf and asked him about it as I wondered what kind of game would be named after a French cheese. After that, I guess he just had to have us play it the following week. I actually messed up on the trivia front as I told him that the cheese was called Chateau Roquefort, when in fact the blue cheese is simply known as Roquefort. Then again, I think the game is wrong too as the name, more properly written as Chateau de Roquefort, refers more to the wine produced there.

Nevertheless, this is a cheese-themed game and each player controls a team of four mice who, predictably enough, want nothing more than to steal the cheese hidden inside the castle. As it turns out, stealing the cheese is quite simple. You simply need to have two of your mice stand on spaces with the same cheese picture on it at the same time to get a tile representing that cheese. The first player who gets four different cheeses this way wins the game. The game also ends when one player is down to only one mouse and therefore can no longer get any cheese.

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This is an older game than we played recently at CarcaSean. Considering its age, I’m not going to cover rules and mechanics in detail. So here are my thoughts:

• Sean specifically noted that the art is done by the same person who worked on Carcassonne. While I think the art in Carcassonne has a rustic style that fits in well with all the landscape elements on the tiles, it doesn’t work for me in Saint Petersburg, which mainly has a lot of portraits. I’d have preferred a more detailed, heavier art style.
• This is another of those Euro games in which the theme is completely irrelevant. I’m especially disappointed with this as I was curious about it would do with the Russian tsars as its background. Its not a theme that comes up very often after all. It turned out that it didn’t serve any purpose except to provide some art ideas and names for the cards used.
• That said, I quite like this game. This is a bit odd for me as it’s a very naked engine-building game. My wife correctly identified it as being fundamentally very similar to Scepter of Zavandor, which I hated. In this game, you buy cards from the common pool available and visible to all players. Mostly, the cards either give you points or give you money to buy more cards.
• What makes this game distinctive is that a maximum of eight cards can be available in the pool for purchase and so new cards can enter the pool only after some have been bought. So buying the correct number of cards each phase is important to open slots as needed for the next phase. This is dependent on the turn order, which is different for each phase. For example, if you’re second in turn order in the aristocrats phase, you need to make sure that there are at least two open slots when that phase arrives so you can buy something. It’s a very neat twist.
• To help you fiddle with the slots, you can also choose to take a card into your hand instead of buying it, and then buy it from your hand later as an action. You can only keep a maximum of four cards like this however and you’re penalized for each card you’re still holding at the end of the game. But it seems like knowing what cards to put in hand and when to do so is a key skill in this game.
• Some cards offer additional abilities, such as allowing you to spend money to buy points or to hold an additional card in your hand. Only Sean bought those in our game. You probably need some experience with this game to understand their value and how they should be used.
• Some parts of the game do seem scripted to me. Sean even straight up told us that in the first phase of the game, the worker phase, everyone should just buy worker cards from the cheapest to the most expensive and everyone should buy as many workers as possible. I also belatedly realized that when buying aristocrats, you should always buy the most expensive one available first and try to buy the cheap ones later, to give more time for the expensive ones to pay for themselves. I dislike game designs with such scripted moves, especially ones that are identical every time you play the game.
• Shan ended up winning this game, which peeved Sean off a little as he said himself that he’d played this game many times already. As she explained to me later, while Sean and I were busy trying to maximize our income and to figure out how many card slots to leave open for each phase, she concentrated only on buying cards that gave points and didn’t bother to manage her money supply. For my part, I grew alarmed with seeing the income Sean was getting from aristocrats and tried to buy more of them, neglecting the buildings in the process. I should have figured out that aristocrats are a very inefficient way of earning money.
• From what I can tell on BGG, it’s surprisingly decent game for two people as well, though I worry that it would become even more scripted in this case. Anyway, it’s a good game that I like well enough, but still, shame about the theme.

This is a fun little cooperative game that Shan suggested we try. I’d actually read the rules for this one some time back and once you understand the time system lifted straight out of Thebes, it’s very straightforward. Not much point going over this one in detail considering its simplicity and how well known it is, so here are my thoughts:

• The name Red November is an obvious spoof of Red October and making them gnomes in a fantasy world is an understandable choice. What’s odder is that they’re not only gnomes, but seemingly Russian gnomes, completely with an unhealthy fondness of thinly-veiled vodka. Add to the fact that it’s set on an attack submarine armed with nuclear missiles, it makes me think that designer Bruno Faidutti was making an explicit reference to the Kursk submarine disaster, which seems a bit awkward. (Edit: I checked Faidutti’s blog, it is an explicit reference. That’s seems risque to me. Imagine making a boardgame of the 9/11 disaster.)
• There are a lot of components packed inside a very small box! When I first saw the size of that box ages ago, I was convinced the game was played on a paper map of some kind. It turned out that it does use a mounted board, albeit a small, and has enough components to accommodate up to eight players. Finding a way to pack all that into a box of that size must have been no mean feat! Of course, as Sean explained, packing it all away afterward constitutes a significant effort as well.
• That said, I can’t imagine that a game with eight players would go well. As Sean demonstrated, even stacking the timekeeping tokens so high is a problem and the submarine will soon be full of all manner of fires, flooded areas and stuck doors.
• The game mechanics are all very intuitive and fit the theme very well. You spend time units to perform actions, as time passes you draw event cards to determine what new disaster befalls the beleaguered submarine and you win once everyone is at the sixty minute mark and the submarine is still intact. Some actions require a die roll to determine success, and you essentially have better chances of doing anything by spending more time on it. You also collect and use up items to help you do various tasks.
• Strangely enough, the game starts with no disasters in the submarine at all, which means everyone has nothing to do except grab items. Of course, the bad stuff tends to start piling up rather quickly once you start doing things but it still feels a bit odd.
• Overall, it’s a solid enough cooperative game and one that probably even kids can get into. I don’t like that it’s quite obvious most of the time what the needed moves are and the only choice is how much risk you want to take when you perform actions.

(Edit: A reader Brett has indicated that this review is inaccurate as we played with the wrong rules. Using the correct ones, it should be much harder to pick up treasure so the first player isn’t the predetermined winner. I’m still leaving this post up for posterity and I don’t know when I’ll be able to play this again. Thanks Brett!)

The first thing we saw when we checked back in at Carcasean after an absence of two weeks was Sean playing with LEGO bricks in his shop. It turned out that he’d bought it while visiting Italy, with the “it” being Atlantis Treasure, one of the entries in the relatively recent LEGO Games line of products. This is apparently LEGO’s attempt to break into the tabletop gaming market with games that are made entirely out of LEGO bricks.

Sean was just about finished assembling the bricks when we arrived so we decided that we might as well play it since it was already on the table. I didn’t expect much, but at least it would be short and I thought the little LEGO die with rubberized edge looked kind of neat. It turned out that the game was even worse than I expected. Note that I haven’t read the rules as Sean did all the reading and explaining, so I have no idea what the official terminology for all the components or mechanics are and I’m just substituting logical terms of my own for them.

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The original Thief: The Dark Project is considered one of the classics of videogaming, being the first stealth game to take advantage of 3D rendering technology and the first to incorporate darkness and light into gameplay. The game’s technical requirements were pretty high for its time though so I gave it a miss when it first came out. Eventually, I got into the stealth genre through the more modern Splinter Cell series and never got around to playing Thief or any of its sequels.

This is why I only bought Thief: Deadly Shadows from Steam recently with some hesitation. On the minus side, it’s the third game in the series and isn’t as highly regarded as its predecessors. It was also originally released back in 2004, so I’d have to put up with poorer graphics and production values. On the plus side, it was only USD5.00 and it is a game in the Thief series, so I said what the heck and gave it a whirl.

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I actually did manage to sell my Magic: The Gathering in one go while I briefly stopped over in Kuala Lumpur during the holidays. I had some trouble at first as the old MTG trading forum seemed to be abandoned and full of spam, but I managed to discover that the local MTG community had moved to a new forum at 1mtg.org. After revising my card value calculations against the buy list prices of US-based card dealers, I decided to post a thread and ask for a price of RM4,000 for the whole lot.

At first, my intention was simply to sell to the first person who would be willing to pay that amount, subject to practicalities such as being able to physically meet on the two days that I would be available in KL. The thread however quickly turned into an auction as the members of the community quickly realized that I was asking for far less than the actual value of the cards.

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