Knights of the Cardboard Castle

We recently had the opportunity to play Arkham Horror again, not once but twice, in quick succession. The first one was a five-player session with three complete newbies to the game. The second one was just me, Shan and Sean, and Sean surprised us by opening his copy of Curse of the Dark Pharaoh for the occasion. I’m a bit pressed for time at the moment as I’ve leaving soon for an extended holiday during the Hari Raya, so here are some brief thoughts:

• Playing Arkham Horror with unenthusiastic people who have no idea what they are in for is a bad idea. The game is so rules-heavy and takes so long to play that you just can’t waltz into it casually. I think by the time I was done going over the rules, the group at the other table were already on their second game. This is definitely not a case of the more the merrier. Much like Tales of the Arabian Nights, this game is better played by a compact group of players so everyone can keep track of what each other are doing and the game won’t drag on for too long.
• Having the right mindset is important and being a fan of the Lovecraft stories helps immensely. This is definitely not a generic horror theme. Reading aloud all of the encounter text is also part of the fun. If you’re just skipping to the game effects, you’re missing the point. One QT3 poster suggested that you should really think of Arkham Horror as a highly structured role-playing game. At the same time, it’s probably best not to try to optimize your decisions too much. In our first game, one player took twenty minutes to decide whether or not to confront a monster, working out the probabilities and such. Not only does that annoy the other players, it goes against the spirit of the game as well.
• On the other hand, it’s also important that the investigators actually try to win. Another player from our first session seemed to have given up on understanding the rules and simply wanted to do interesting stuff, such as trying to confront a monster when she obviously had zero chance of survival. When one player does stuff like this, it makes everything feel sort of pointless to everyone else. This is why getting a good game of Arkham Horror going is so hard as you need a very particular type of player.
• Even if you get a good group, it seems to me that you still need just the right alignment of the stars to make it work. If a game becomes too much of a cakewalk, no one feels satisfied. If the investigators get horrifically bad luck, everyone quits in disgust. It’s a fine line to walk. Alternatively, you could also get a situation in which the investigators essentially cannot lose, but it would take a long slog for them to actually win. I guess that’s just something you have to put up with in games with lots of randomness.
• We won both games rather handily though I forgot to spawn two monsters per gate for the first few gates in the first game. I tried to compensate by adding an extra monster to each open gate when I realized this but it probably did mean that the game was much easier than it was supposed to be. In the second game, neither the Doom Track nor the Terror Track posed much of a threat, though at one point, we did come close to losing due to the “too many gates open” condition.

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In one of the first missions you get in this game, immediately after you break out of prison, you learn that your gang’s right-hand man is currently on trial for murder. So you launch a one-man assault on the courthouse to free him, gunning down dozens of police officers in the way. Even the judge, a gray-haired, grandmotherly type, produces a shotgun from somewhere beneath her robes so that’s clear license to blow her head off too. This sets the tone for the whole game and gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect.

While the Grand Theft Auto games keep being embroiled in controversy, the Saint’s Row series has been flying under the radar of the mainstream press. You get the impression that developer Volition kind of resents this as much of what they’ve done here seems deliberately calculated to upstage the more well-known series. Gratuitous violence? Check. Risqué sexual references? Check. Profanity? Check. No effort is spared to make this game as obnoxious as possible. As they say, all publicity is good publicity and garnering more sales is well worth the cost of getting some nasty hate mail.

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We recently played In the Year of the Dragon again, this time using the Great Wall of China mini-expansion included in the Alea Treasure Chest. Naturally, as we’d gotten the rules wrong the first time around, we made certain this time that only one action out of each selected group could be performed. The box actually included another mini-expansion for this game, called Superevents, which consisted of nothing more than a set of special event tiles, out of which one would be chosen to take effect in the seventh month of the year. Apparently one of Sean’s magazines counseled against it, so we skipped that one. It sounded lame to us anyway.

The components comprising the Great Wall expansion consists of a set of six Great Wall tiles in each player color and a new action tile. The action tile is mixed in with the other tiles and represents a new type of action that players can select. The player who elects to take this action selects one of his Great Wall tiles, immediately gets the benefit printed on its reverse side and then places the tile as a completed wall section beneath the row of  events. The Great Wall is always constructed from left to right and have the same width as the event tiles, so completing the Great Wall requires twelve sections to be built.

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We first played 10 Days in Asia quite some time ago. It’s a short and simple game that acts purely as a filler. After that, we never played it again at CarcaSean but we were always aware of it as Sean uses the wooden card holders from it whenever a game calls for holding cards in hand. Recently, my wife and I bought a copy of 10 Days in Europe (we wanted Asia but it wasn’t in stock), partly because the card holders were handy to have, but also because we thought that it would make for an accessible game for family members.

All of the games in the 10 Days series play in the exact same way, so there’s not much difference between the versions. Each of them come with a decently-sized mounted map of the geographical areas it covers  but quite amusingly, the map is used for reference purposes only and nothing actually gets played onto the board. Instead, the game comes with a large set of tiles depicting either countries or modes of transportation. Each player is given a set of the card holders and the object of the game is to fill the holders with a full set of ten of these tiles connected in a legal fashion as determined according to the map.

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No photos for this one as I hadn’t expected to have the time to get to CarcaSean and consequently didn’t bring my camera. Since Shan didn’t feel like learning any new rules or playing anything too taxing, we settled on the Seaside expansion for Dominion and ended up playing three games using three of the suggested sets from the rulebook. Since there’s not much point talking about the rules, I’ll go straight with my thoughts:

• It has a much more coherent theme than anything I’ve seen from Dominion before. Not that it really matters, but it’s still a plus point.
• I’m somewhat ambivalent about the extra bits. The metal tokens are nice, feel quite weighty in your hands and actually useful in gameplay. The card-specific mats feel a bit silly and it’s a bit too obvious that there were just included to justify the price. I guess that they needed to do something to help remind people about the different ways of temporarily setting aside cards and the mats are as good a method as any.
• The duration cards represent a new type of effect that are interesting to use and therefore welcome. I’d say that the different ways of setting aside cards represent a new mechanic as well, though this hasn’t been talked about as much.
• All three of our games felt very, very different, which is a fantastic testament to how changing up the set of Kingdom cards can result is drastically different types of playing experiences. Our first and third games went rather slowly, with the third one being especially excruciating what with everyone’s decks being heavily bogged down by Curses and Victory Point cards. Our second game was over in a flash as both Shan and Sean used Treasure Maps and both of them managed to pair them up quite early.
• Overall, I think I had more fun with this set than with either Intrigue (which I’d only played once) or the base game. I think that the cards in Seaside feel a little more powerful than I’m used to. The base set was notorious in that in many cases, buying a silver was almost always a better deal than any comparably priced Kingdom card. In Seaside, I feel much more tempted to buy and therefore have fun with the new Kingdom cards.
• When I first played Dominion, I liked it enough that I thought I’d buy every expansion. Now, I’m more hesitant, not because I like it less, but because I’ve realized that Dominion isn’t really ideal with just two players. As my experience with this session shows, a lot of the appeal comes from the interactions caused by the Attack cards as well as seeing and responding to what other players are doing. With just two players, it’s too much of a straightforward race and the mechanics aren’t deep enough to be interesting on their own.
• So is Dominion a filler or a game to stand on its own? I can’t really think of it as a filler because it would be frustrating to play just one game of it and then move on to something else. You really want to play multiple games of it in one sitting, mixing up the card sets all the time, and give everyone a chance to do different things and hopefully, to shine.

I’ve been immersed in Saint’s Row 2 for a couple of weeks now. Steam reports my playing time as slightly over 30 hours by now but I’m still at only about 50% completion. With all of the optional side activities, it’s just that expansive a game. In the meantime, here are some hopefully helpful tips that I wished I’d known before I started out:

• One of the great things about this game is that doing just about anything can unlock cool rewards, but unless you hit up an online guide, it can be hard to tell which activities to do first to get the unlocks you want. The best unlock to aim for early is easily Insurance Fraud in the Factories District. Having access to Infinite Sprint makes doing everything else a whole lot easier.
• When doing Insurance Fraud, the game tells you to go to designated locations that give an Adrenaline bonus. Don’t believe it. Having a bonus is useless if there isn’t any actual traffic at those locations. The best place to go are the highways. You’re guaranteed a nonstop stream of traffic there, making it easy for you to get hit by multiple vehicles.
• Once you have Infinite Sprint, you’d probably want to aim for one of the Infinite Ammo unlocks. The easiest of those is doing the Fuzz activities at the Projects Districts. This gets you Infinite Ammo for all pistols, which is nice as you can use them both on-foot and in a vehicle. The nicest overall unlock is Infinite Ammo for SMGs which are also dual use but the Snatch activities are harder to complete. You probably won’t be able to complete the last level without first getting an upgraded vehicle of some sort.
• Don’t forget that unlike the Grand Theft Auto games, you can steal any vehicle and then store it in any of your garages. You can then retrieve that vehicle to use over and over again so long as you remember to use another vehicle between retrievals. If you complete the Escort activities at the Red Light District, you can even use your mobile phone to call for a vehicle delivery. There’s nothing quite like calling for an APC with a mounted minigun to be delivered to you in the middle of a fight.
• Buying clothes and upgrading cribs earns you Style points. Having enough Style gives you bonus Respect for completing activities. But I found it easy enough to get Infinite Respect since I enjoyed doing the activities for their own sake anyway so Style wasn’t very important to me. If it’s important to you, keep in mind that you don’t actually have to wear the clothes you buy to get the Style bonus for them, it’s enough to just have them available in your wardrobe.
• If you’re having trouble making it through a fight, remember that you can recruit homies you help you out. The number of homies you can have following you around at a time increases automatically as you complete Storyline missions. The coolest part is that if they can’t all fit into your current vehicle, they’ll automatically hijack a nearby vehicle and follow you around it in. They’re not very good drivers however.
• The fastest way to get from one end of the map to another is by helicopter. There’s a reason why you have helipads on most of your cribs after all. Remember that you don’t even need to land your helicopter carefully if you don’t need it anymore. You can just bail from it in mid-air and quickly hit the button to release your parachutes. It’s awesome.

There’s way too much stuff in the game to list them all out and I could go on and on about good things to try out, but the above list should make for a good start. What’s particularly fantastic is everything is available right from the beginning, so if you don’t like one activity, just go elsewhere and do something else. Rockstar needs to learn this lesson ASAP.

As a life-long PC gamer, I don’t quite yet know what to make of expansions for boardgames. Things are pretty simple with video game expansions. You basically get more of the same thing: more quests, more maps, more items, more units, more everything. They’re for people who liked the original and couldn’t get enough of it. And once you get an expansion, you always play with it. Always.

Some boardgame expansions work like this. Race for the Galaxy is a good example. Each expansion adds new cards and some new rules, but don’t change the game significantly. And once you get an expansion, there’s no reason to play without it. It would actually be quite troublesome to remove the additional cards. But you also have things like the Power and Glory expansion for Thurn & Taxis. It adds a new map and new rules for that map but ends up actually using very few of the components from the original game. It’s certainly an either-or expansion instead of an always-on one. You use it as an alternative to the base game, not to supplement it. Intrigue and King for El Grande is a similar case and I’ve heard people say that it changes the game so much that it’s almost a different one.

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I’ve been a bit remiss in updating recently, mostly because I’ve been distracted by arranging to sell my Magic: The Gathering collection. I will be visiting Kuala Lumpur for a few days in September and I thought I’d arrange to meet buyers then. At this point, suffice to say that I seem to have greatly underestimated the value of my collection. The response has been more enthusiastic than I anticipated and the sale has turned into an auction. I guess that explains why so many people offered to buy my cards in the comments section of this post. It will make for an interesting blog post once the deal is over and done with.

In the meantime, I managed to play a two-player game of Le Havre with my wife over the weekend and have some thoughts about it. It has been so long since we last played that we’d forgotten quite a lot. Both of us made an error in planning as we looked at the last round card and thought we had one extra round before the end of the game when in fact turning over the last round card should signal one last action for all players and that the final Luxury Ship could only be bought as that last action. This meant that some actions turned out to be wasted, contributing to low scores.

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