Knights of the Cardboard Castle

The last citybuilder game that I played was the very mediocre Civcity: Rome last year, so I’ve been looking forward to something more substantial in Tropico 3. This wasn’t a game that I originally intended to buy and I’ve never played any of its predecessors, but it was on sale on Steam, looked like a cool citybuilder and was even made by a QT3 member, so I snapped it up.

As “El Presidente”, the dictator of a banana republic in the Carribean, your goal is to build up the island nation of Tropico and take every measure necessary to remain in power while stuffing your secret Swiss bank account with ill-gotten gains. The main game consists of a series of fifteen scenarios, each with unique goals and different islands to play on. In addition, there’s also a sandbox mode and online challenges made by other players that you can download.

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Some thoughts on Thurn & Taxis, a game which Sean considers himself to be an expert at. Interestingly, it’s by Andreas Seyfarth and I liked both of the games by him that I’ve played so far, Puerto Rico and Airships.

• Its theme is about building a postal network? I guess its as good a choice as any if you want to make a route connection game without falling back on trains. As usual with such things, the theme doesn’t really matter and trying too hard to square the rules with the premise makes my head hurt. Why do you get carriage cards for building ever longer routes? Why do you get points for these cards but not for the little post office houses you put down? Who knows? But I do like the artwork and the map.
• The basic rules are famously reminiscent of Ticket to Ride. Collect city cards and play connected cities  to build routes. The scoring system is quite a bit more complex however. Not only do you race to collect the region-based score chits, you also need to ensure that you have as few unused post office houses as possible at the end of the game since they count as negative points. This gives Thurn & Taxis a much richer strategic layer than Ticket to Ride.
• The rules discourage hoarding cards. In Ticket to Ride, I always amass large numbers of cards before committing myself. Here, not only are you required to put down a card to add to your route every turn, but you can only keep three cards in hand after you’re scored a route. This makes turn-to-turn tactical planning very important as being forced to discard cards means wasting turns. I like this rule too, though it seems very unforgiving.
• The postal officials’ powers, due to how they’re implemented, may be a bit difficult to grasp. At first I thought that you only had limited uses of the officials over the entire game or that you needed to bid for their use against other players. No, you simply pick one power each and every turn to use. In my case, the confusion stemmed from representing the powers as people. I’ve probably played too many worker-placement games.
• I feel that Ticket to Ride has a significant luck factor because ideally you want to get long routes on your destination tickets that complement each other but whether or not you get what you want depends on the luck of the draw. I’d say that Thurn & Taxis has almost no luck. Each city has so many connections that it’s generally quite easy to build routes so the real challenge is to efficiently build routes in such a way as to maximize your ability to place post offices.
• I’ve often thought of buying a copy of Ticket to Ride just to have a good gateway game handy that I could take out for visiting friends and relatives. Now I think that Thurn & Taxis is a much better prospect. It’s significantly heavier of course, but it’s still a pretty easy game to teach and I daresay that its physical components look more lavish and beautiful. Most of all, it would at least have more than just a passing appeal to my wife and myself.

I’m not entirely sure if the Through the Seasons postcard expansion for Agricola is merely a collectible novelty or something that’s actually meant to be played. Judging by the paucity of posts on its little corner of BGG, it seems that most people think it’s the former. Being huge fans of the game however, my wife and I thought that it would be a shame not to give it a shot. Since playing it once wasn’t enough for me to form an informed opinion, we’ve ended up playing it three times so far.

The little postcard basically divides every round in Agricola into one of the four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter and makes three types of changes to the round depending on the current season. First of all, it modifies the resources that are added onto the board at the beginning of the round. Winter for example, is particularly painful as it shows -1 Clay and -1 Reed, meaning no clay or reed will be added to the board at all. Autumn however gives +1 Wood and +1 Reed, so it’s a good season to grab resources in.

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I suppose it’s only natural that even boardgames have trilogies or sets of oeuvres sharing a common theme by the same author, but it’s something I wouldn’t have guessed before I started this hobby. In any case, Mexica is another game in the so-called Mask trilogy that started with Tikal. It’s quite a bit simpler than the first one though, so I’ll just summarize:

• Tikal has a Mayan theme while Mexica has an Aztec one. I think I’ll go with AllLookSame on this one. That’s just a joke of course, but the exact choice of civilization and location doesn’t really matter in my opinion. I do appreciate the exoticism of both themes.
• Apparently all of the games in this trilogy use the action point allocation mechanic. But other than this and the fact that both games are about area control, the two games are really different, so it’s not as if Mexica is a rehash to capitalize on the success of the first game.
• No map hexes to place here. Instead, you play canal tiles of one or two squares each on the board to define borders for districts. The trick here is that you must create districts consisting of specific numbers of squares according to the tokens still available so expect to count squares a lot as you try to create districts using the least canal placements. You get points both for founding districts and for controlling them by virtue of having the most temples in it.
• You only get one guy to move around this time around but due to the rather unintuitive rule that moving from one bridge on a canal to another bridge uses only 1 action point, he can zip around the board surprisingly quickly. You almost always want to use this rule so physical distance on the board doesn’t keep an area safe. A player can even place a bridge on a canal without even needing to have his token there!
• Like Tikal, this game is all about tactically reacting to your opponents’ moves. Sean says he got screwed by turn order here, especially given how quickly the player token moves around the map. Plus when a scoring condition comes up, everyone plays one more round according to turn order before scores are tabulated. That stands in contrast to Tikal in which each player scores at the end of his turn. Since Sean went first, the two of us had better opportunities to react in whatever manner that would be worth the most points while there was nothing he could do about it.
• Overall, I find this to be a significantly lighter game than Tikal with a commensurately shorter playing time. It’s still a good game for what it does but I’d bet that the strategy possibility space isn’t huge and it has limited long-term replayability.

Everyone who plays PC games will have already heard of the massive sales Steam is currently running until July 4th, but in case you haven’t, this is easily the best chance to pick up games by the truckload, until at least the inevitable Christmas sales. In my opinion, particularly good deals are the Square Enix and THQ complete packs. Each pack contains more games than the average gamer will probably be able to complete in a year at a price barely highly than the current cost of a single game.

So far I’ve used this opportunity to finally jump on the Left 4 Dead bandwagon, buying both the original game and its sequel. In addition, I’ve also picked up Resident Evil 5 and Bioshock 2. Plus, I also bought Dragon Age: Origins during the EA promotion week before the current sales. Even without buying any of the complete sets (I opted out since I already most of what I’d want to play in the collections anyway), it looks like I’m more or less set for the year. And there are still two more days of daily deals to go!

One game I really hoped I’d be able to buy is Rockstar’s Bully. It’s on Steam and was even a daily deal, but due to region restrictions, Malaysians can’t buy it. I’ve heard on LYN that you can set your Steam region to US to buy it. It’ll throw out a warning but the transaction should go through. I don’t want to risk getting my Steam account or my credit card locked however, so I’m still waiting for it to become available in Malaysia.

Incidentally, of the games I’ve listed I’d buy in my post last November, only one remains unbought: Cyanide’s Blood Bowl. I was ready to buy the Dark Elf Edition that was released on Steam this year (which is itself an improved version of the game released on retail last year) but then I heard that Cyanide would be selling yet another new version of it by the end of this year. Apparently even customers who have already bought the previous versions won’t be able to get the new teams through a patch and will have it buy it all over again. And despite continuing reports of bugs, Cyanide has announced that it won’t be patching the older versions any longer. With such dodgy business practices, I’m now extremely reluctant to buy the game even though I really, really want to play Blood Bowl.

My wife agrees with me that for whatever reason I’m rather poor at games that are played on maps, especially if it’s a game that involves more than two players and includes area control elements. Tikal has all of these things, so as expected, our session mostly amounted to a competition between Sean and my wife. This doesn’t prevent me however from recognizing that it’s a pretty good middle-weight euro game and one that is a lot more beautiful than the norm.

Another plus is that Tikal has a solid theme that, unlike most euros, it does more than pay lip service to. Each player takes charge of a group of workers who are racing each other to explore the jungle. This is simulated by using large hex tiles that players draw and place onto the board to form the map of the jungle. Some of the tiles are merely empty clearings. Others represent temples and treasure troves. Players earn points for uncovering and securing temples and for recovering treasures using their workers.

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Our Runebound session not too long ago was actually our first official exposure to Ameritrash adventure boardgames, but I’ve read up on them enough to already know what to expect. Apparently, they all share the same central conceit. Each player takes control of a hero and travels across the board to complete quests. This invariably requires lots of fighting. As they become more powerful and gain better items, they move on to harder quests. Eventually someone becomes powerful enough to take on the big bad boss, thereby winning the game.

Since we’ve played Descent, most of the art and even rule conventions used in this game are familiar. The game uses the exact same heroes, down to identical plastic miniatures, which probably helped Fantasy Flight to save on production costs, and many of the same monsters and items appear in both games. Personally, despite all of the effort that they obviously made to get the lore right, it’s to generic for me to care about it much but I think the familiarity does help to get up to speed with this game. It helps to understand what the various tokens represent and remember what the different heroes are good at.

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While the original Mass Effect was a great game in my book, I still called it out for the mediocrity of many of the individual components that make up its whole. It represented Bioware’s first attempt to create an RPG that plays like a shooter and their inexperience with the new format showed. Barring a couple of missteps, even if they are pretty big ones, the sequel is a much improved and polished affair, demonstrating just how hard Bioware has worked to address the criticisms leveled against the original game. More importantly however, it further refines the original formula and streamlines it so that it’s much more of a shooter now. That has prompted many gamers to question whether it should even be considered as an RPG any longer.

To answer this, let’s take a look at its disparate elements, beginning with the story. Mass Effect 2 starts shortly after the events of the first game, with the original Normandy being destroyed in a surprise attack by a mysterious alien race known as the Collectors. Presumed dead by both the human Alliance and the Citadel Council, Commander Shepherd is secretly retrieved and essentially resurrected through an expensive two-year process by the pro-humanity paramilitary organization Cerberus. Shepherd is then put to work by the organization’s leader, the Illusive Man, to stop the Collectors who seem to be systematically destroying outlying human colonies one by one on behalf of the Reapers from the original game.

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