Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I’m not going to cover this one extensively. This is another one that Hiew has written a comprehensive review of, plus I have mixed feelings about it and really need to play it more to make up my mind about it. The central attraction in Macao is the set of six differently colored dice that everyone essentially shares. One player rolls the lot of them and each player gets to choose any two of the dice results to use. It doesn’t matter if another player chooses the same two colors. This gives you two types of resource cubes to use with the amount of each equaling the respective die result.

The cool part is that the higher the die result you pick, the later it becomes available. So if you’re content with accepting a die result of 1, you get a resource cube of that color this turn, but if you decide to go for a die result of 6, you’ll need to wait an extra five turns to be able to spend it. It’s a very neat if sometimes frustrating system. The problem is that the different uses these resource cubes can be put to seem rather boring and somewhat cluttered to me.

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I finished up Left 4 Dead 2 earlier this week. It’s very much a case of more of the same, so there’s not much to say about it. I even remember how upset many fans were when Valve announced a sequel so soon after releasing the first one. Some thoughts:

• It’s prettier than the first one, but the difference isn’t huge. I tend to dislike the visuals of games that use the Source engine anyway. They look way too crisp and clean. I very much prefer more organic looking games, such as those made with the Gamebryo engine. One thing that stands out in this one is that many levels now take place in bright sunlight, which helps make it look very different from its predecessor.
• This one not only has more campaigns that the first one but they’re also quite a bit harder than the first one, so it takes more time to play through one. Successfully completing them the first time at normal difficulty is no longer a given. Some of the new crescendo events and finales are now quite difficult to do with only AI team mates because they’re not smart enough to pick things up. The new Charger Special Infected is extremely annoying to me. The AI seems to be able to kill him really fast but he manages to surprise me almost every time. But don’t get me wrong. Harder is definitely better.
• Once again, I was disappointed that the storytelling is sparse. Meeting up with the old crew again in the Passing campaign was fantastic, but I’d have loved more solid information of what they’d been up to instead of just hints. And I thought it was interesting that at the end of The Parish the military is evacuating all survivors to cruisers out at sea but I need more! Come on, I need some closure here.
• I thought the locales in this one were overall more varied and interesting than the first one, but there were still missed opportunities. I really wanted to be able to actually ride in a roller coaster and shoot zombies at the same time like in the Zombieland movie. The idea of making your way through a level in Hard Rain and then come back through the same area but having it being flooded was fantastic. And of course, having a level set in a shopping mall was obligatory. I very much wanted to be placed on the roof and try to defend it against hordes of zombies in that one though.
• There are a lot more weapons in this one. I was surprised at how few weapons there were in Left 4 Dead at first but then I realized that it gave each weapon a very distinctive character and made choosing the right one for the right situation very critical. Weapons are still organized according to the same different classes in the second game but there are now variants within each class as well. While more toys are fun and the aesthetic diversity is something I appreciate as well, I feel it dilutes the pureness of weapon choices somewhat.
• Lots of additional game modes but I barely touched them. I was just getting tired of killing zombies and wanted to move on to the next game. I’ll probably keep this on my hd drive for a while and jump in for some quick action from time to time.

Once again, as Hiew has written a complete description of the game’s rules and an account of our session, I’m not going to cover the same ground. I’ll just skip straight to my thoughts. Note that this is with the Intrigue and King expansion. I’ve never played the El Grande basic game and don’t even know how it works.

• This is another euro in which the theme doesn’t really seem relevant at all. In this case, even the pieces, artwork and board don’t really tell you what it’s supposed to be about. It doesn’t help that the choice of setting isn’t a familiar one. Who has even heard of Spanish cowboys?
• The game itself however is fantastic. I understand that it has a glowing reputation as an area majority game. As far as I can tell, that reputation is fully deserved. What’s particularly interesting to me is that many of the area majority games I’ve played have a very strong tactical focus with little long-term strategic planning involved. I think that El Grande rewards both deft tactical maneuvering as well as keeping an eye on longer-term goals.
• I wasn’t happy with how I played the game at all because I didn’t fully understand the implications of all the rules until the game was nearly over. I really admire how Hiew and Sean can go through the rules of any given game once and instantly know the consequences and values of different moves and options. I think I really need to replay more stuff rather than try new ones all the time.
• One handicap I had to contend with was that I had selected my initial hand of cards poorly. Due to the limitations imposed by the King piece on where caballero pieces can and can’t be played, regions changed hands less often than I thought they would compared to the other area majority games I’ve played. I had kept in my hand cards that caused regions worth a certain number of points to be scored even though I controlled no such regions at the beginning of the game. I simply assumed that it would be relatively simple to temporarily gain control of them later. Even worse, these were some of the highest numbered cards I had. Since it was extremely disadvantageous for me to play these cards and I lacked other high numbered cards, I tended to have lots of pieces in my supply but few ways to get them onto the table. For the same reason, I had few opportunities to move the King piece during the session.
• I didn’t fully grasp the implications of the Castillo either. Its five points make it quite valuable in of itself, but most importantly, pieces thrown into it were basically doing double duty as you can use them later to control another area on the board and even allow a bending of the normal placement rules as you can target a region that’s not adjacent to the King. Still, considering how aggressively both Sean and Hiew tried to control it, it was probably best that I mostly kept out of that particular contest.
• I was happy to be assigned New Castille at the beginning of the game. Boy, was I dumb. Yes, it’s worth a lot of points, but it’s also in a central location that is likely to be adjacent to wherever the King piece is placed in very often. But Sean and Hiew mostly left me alone and left Shan and me to fight over it. This makes meta-gaming sense as both of them understood that their real opponents would be each other. I think this intuition is something my wife still lacks even though she’s improved tremendously as a boardgame player since we first started.
• The variety of card effects are quite a lot to take in. There’s even a veto power that can apparently cancel just about anything. I’d bet this gives El Grande a lot of longevity that other games in the genre can’t match. Over time, different players might even come to develop different sets of favorite cards and the ways to use them.
• Hiew commented that he generally isn’t a fan of area majority games. In my case, I tend to do very badly at them but I quite admire them. One quirk about this genre is that, unlike most other euro games, they allow direct conflict between players. You certainly can’t call them multi-player solitaires. To me, this makes the genre very computationally intense. You’re not just figuring out how best to gain points for yourself. You also need to figure out who to pour the pressure on and how hard. I guess this is exactly the sort of thing that can cause sore feelings among friends and some people might not like that.

Since Hiew has already written an excellent account of our recent Die Macher session, I’m going to content myself with just writing some of my own observations rather than going over everything again. Note that some of this covers the same ground I laid out in my comments on his post. In this game, I was FDP, Hiew was Green, Shan was SPD and Sean was PDS.

• Sean finished in second place and only ten points behind Hiew despite having by far the lowest mandate from the actual elections, 11 points behind Shan. That’s pretty incredible. A lot of his points came from his party membership score and the consequent ten point bonus for having the most party members. I’m tempted to attribute some of this to luck at die rolling. He managed to get a three dice bonus once due to refusing campaign contributions, but then so did I. But, of course, he also made a major effort to win auctions for poll cards and used that to boost party membership.
• Hiew said that I was too conservative with money, which is true. I probably should have been much more spendthrift with the poll cards as I won very few auctions for them and ended the game with the most money. Both Hiew and Sean had significantly less money than me by the end of the game. Actually I think the poll cards’ bark is worse than their bite. People were scared of getting their party trends pulled down by the poll cards, but I think that rarely happened in practice. Most of the auction winners simply used them to roll two dice to add to party membership.
• Sean also gained quite a few points by having party platform cards match the national opinions at the end of the game. Obviously Hiew set out to sabotage him and everyone else, but I’m still quite mystified as to how Sean managed to get so many matches with the national board in the first place. It’s not like he won more elections (with the opportunity to influence the national opinion that this brings) than the others. I wonder if he consciously tried harder to change his party platform to match the national opinion, perhaps sacrificing some votes in the elections to do so. I know that I prioritized matching the state election opinions over the national board.
• Hiew deliberately bid high to gain control of turn order just to make himself go first. This was a surprising move as most players bid to go last in Die Macher. The reason he did this was solely to deny me media control of the last state election. I’d actually wondered while writing down my bid whether he’d try this but underestimated how much he was willing to pay. If I had kept control of the media, I would have been able to change one of the state opinion cards and I think that would be enough to make me win the election for the last state. I would still have gained zero points from the second last election however.
• I’ve read on BGG that the final round is the most crucial as the results of the last two elections usually causes a huge swing in points. This turned out to be true in our session. Hiew’s opportunity to influence the national opinion board twice in a row was a killer move, especially as he was cut-throat enough to make choices that denied us points instead of winning them for himself. Interestingly, no coalitions are allowed for the final election, so you only have one winner and one person making the final adjustments to the national opinion.
• Actually winning elections, particularly in the early rounds, doesn’t seem all that useful, since if you can match the winners’ votes, you gain the same amount of mandate points anyway. You basically get to do two things when you win: place a media marker on the national board and influence the national opinion. Placing a media marker in the early rounds is worth a ton of points but the downside is that you permanently lose that marker. Hiew would not have been able to so dominate the media game as he did in the later rounds if he had actually won elections, and I don’t think he was setting out to deliberately lose them. Earning the right to influence the national opinion board almost doesn’t matter when it comes to points since they’re easily changed in the last two elections as Hiew demonstrated, so the only real benefit is the increase in party membership. Even in this case, placing them in the later spaces is worth more party members than the early spaces. (If you win an election, can you deliberately place an opinion card on the right-most space even though there are still empty spaces on the left?)
• I greatly enjoyed this session and immediately had a hankering for playing it again. That’s just how much fun I had with this game. All the same, I get the impression that this is an “experience” game that you play just for the fun of going through the whole process instead of a game about formulating and executing strategies. I didn’t come away from this session feeling that I’ve learned something new and I don’t think, as in some types of games, that I would be able to do significantly better in a subsequent session. It’s pretty hard to predict the outcome of this game in advance and there’s a lot of thing that up in the air until the last moment, so I think this game has a fair bit of chaos and randomness. Certainly, drawing the right opinion cards at the right time is a matter of luck. So I think this isn’t one of those games that you can obsess over. Of course, with its length, you probably wouldn’t want to anyway.

Ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, I’ve been fascinated by the Sun King. The novels depicted him as being by far the most intelligent and far-sighted monarch of his time who, thanks to his ruthlessly efficient intelligence network, was perfectly aware of the attempts by various factions of his court to influence him and used that knowledge to his advantage. So it may be somewhat intimidating that in this game, you play one of these courtiers trying to manipulate the king.

Louis XIV is sort of an abstract area majority game, except that instead of a map or even a real board, the area is defined by a set of twelve cards representing the key individuals that make up the court. These are arranged according to a preset layout to form a sort of checkerboard and the players’ influence markers are allowed to move along cards that touch each other at the corners. Since you’re supposed to put your markers on top of these cards and keep the general supply of markers that are not available for use in the spaces between the cards, it’s quite awkward. You even need to flip some of these cards at the end of every turn so it’s very easy to knock them out of position. I think they messed up the components for this one and should have used a real board or else heavy tiles instead of light cardboard.

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Considering how popular this game is and me being one of the last people to get it, I’m not going to write a review of Left 4 Dead. So here’s a semi-random assortment of thoughts I have on it:

• The single-player campaign is even shorter than I expected. Including the Crash Course DLC, there’s a total of five campaigns that would take at most an hour and a half each to complete. Granted, it’s a multiplayer game, so you’re expected to replay the same maps over and over again, but I was still surprised. Look at how many maps Team Fortress 2 has by now!
• Replayability is supposed to be extended by the AI director mixing up spawn locations for enemies and items. By and large, this works and it’s pretty cool how the director likes to spawn a horde on top of you when it senses that there’s not enough excitement. But once you know a map well, it seems like everyone just heads for the map exit by the shortest route possible. It’s not really worth hanging around to explore in the hopes of finding some items.
• I don’t have a reliable net connection and I’m not really the multiplayer type so I only rarely ventured online and mostly stuck to singleplayer mode. But my experiences with the online mode worked surprisingly well with connection quality being much better than Team Fortress 2. I guess this is at least partly because there are far fewer clients to keep track of. Even so, I felt a bit useless and I just ended up tagging along with people who clearly been through the map dozens of times already and had memorized exactly which locations to stand on to deal with attacks.
• The witch is an interesting concept but it seems to me that it’s not serving its design goals any longer and most players now seem skilled enough to kill it without taking any damage. If the intent is to punish players for provoking it, surely you shouldn’t put a witch in places where you absolutely must cross to get to the exit?
• Though scary at first, the game is really designed to be easily completed at normal difficulty. At higher difficulty levels, it’s a completely different story and making it a serious go at it ended up requiring more patience than I was prepared to give. I have to admit that you get the most memorable moments at higher difficulty levels. The sight of a vast horde of zombies swarming up through a hole in the ground is something I’ll always remember. You keep killing them but they keep coming and coming and you wonder if they’ll ever stop.
• Overall, I’m satisfied with my experience but I’m also glad that I didn’t shell out full price for this at release. It’s not really optimal as a single-player game. The game tries to keep the tension and excitement at elevated levels throughout the campaign which is of course needed in multiplayer but too exhausting in single-player. You really need to intersperse the excitement with a bit of compression time and more story building moments. I’m also disappointed that the plot is paper thin as I would dearly love to have a better picture of what’s going on around the world during the zombie infection, but I guess that’s to be expected from a Valve game.

Kingsburg was a game that we’ve seen others playing at CarcaSean several times previously, but we only played it ourselves recently. It’s a dice-based game that’s surprisingly and pleasantly low on luck factor. It’s very easy to learn so I’ll just go my bullet-point format for this one.

• You roll all of the dice you have and then decide where to put them, making it feel very similar to a worker placement game. Since you normally have three dice, you can split them up and put them in three different spots (unlikely, since you’d have to get a different result on each die and you’d be in competition with the other players for the spaces) or add two or three together to place in a spot. Due to all of the possible combinations, there are quite a few choices of where to put your dice on.
• There’s also a chit that lets you add +2 to any dice roll and you may get an extra die sometimes due to having a building or because you’re the player with the fewest buildings, adding even more possible combinations. Since each space can only have one die on it, you need to strategically place your dice in an order that will shut out your opponents and preempt them from shutting you out. This can result in a certain amount of analysis paralysis.
• It’s quite cool that even low dice rolls aren’t necessarily bad results. It’s possible to get a resource for a single die, even you rolled relatively badly. Of course, it’s always exciting to see the ultra-high results but that’s not how the game is won. I’m more dubious about the rule that gives the player the most buildings an extra Victory Point every turn. Won’t that just make it harder for the other players to catch up? Of course, there are other catch up mechanics to balance it out as well.
• Supposedly the different building tracks, approximating tech trees found in other games, provide different paths to win the game, but I couldn’t really discern different strategies from my one play. It looks like each player ends up building all of the early stages of each track anyway and specialization only happens at the top ends of the tracks. I mostly built what I could based on what resources I could get instead of having any clear determination about what to go for. But then I didn’t do very well in our game anyway.
• The battles at the end of each year seem a bit too easy to me. Except for the final year, no one bothered to buy any soldiers or influence any of the military advisers at all. I hear that the expansion changes this and makes it more important to invest resources early on to be safe. I do like how all the players share a single die roll and so feel compelled to maintain their military strength at a level fairly close to each other.
• Overall, this is another excellent game that falls more on the lighter end of the spectrum. It would be interesting to play this with more players. I’d imagine that the competition would be a lot more cut-throat and having players end up with wasted dice would be a regular occurrence.

Ever since we first played Die Macher, it’s been a game that my wife and I have thought about often. So when I learned that its designer, Karl-Heinz Schmiel, also has a Roman-themed game that’s published in English by Fantasy Flight to boot, I was very much interested. It turns out that Sean does own a copy but has never played it. In fact, he hadn’t read the rules either, so I had to read them and teach him. He did warn us that I probably shouldn’t expect too much as Schmiel is also known for designing some dud games and Die Macher should be considered the outlier.

Tribune is set in some indeterminate point in time in ancient Rome and the players embody the various aristocratic families vying for dominance over the republic. The actual victory conditions vary from game to game as you’re supposed to select them from a set of cards. These cards list various conditions, such as possessing a Tribune tile, having a certain number of Laurel Wreaths, controlling a certain number of Legions etc. and depending on the number of players, you may need to meet only a subset of the listed conditions to win. You collect all this stuff by taking and keeping control of the various factions in Rome and that’s what the game is all about.

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