Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Thebes is a lighter weight game that we played recently. What’s particularly cool about this one is that it’s the rare euro game in which the game’s mechanics meshes with its theme perfectly. Here, the players take on the roles of archaeologists who compete against each other to win prestige and recognition. This is mainly accomplished by making some impressive finds at the dig sites but you can also earn some good points from organizing congresses. I suppose that means talking up your prestige.

When you dig in this game, it’s literal. The game includes four cloth bags corresponding with the different dig sites and different sets of tiles for each of them. Digs are carried out simply by blindly pulling out tiles from the cloth bags. If you snag an artifact tile, then it and the points printed on it are yours to keep. What is nasty is that each bag also includes a fair number of blank tiles, representing nothing but sand. Whenever these are drawn, they go back into the bag. Over time, as all of the good stuff gets dug out, obviously the proportion of sand tiles to artifact ones increases, making excavation of that particular site ever less enticing.

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I must admit that I may be biased because Sean’s German-language version of this game made it something of a pain to learn, but I found little to like about Scepter of Zavandor. Trying to remember what all of the different ability tracks do was a real chore. This is actually a bit odd as it has all the hallmarks of a standard Euro game and even bears some resemblance to Goa, which I really liked. But for a variety of reasons, I only got progressively more annoyed with the game as it went on.

First, there’s the theme. While it was initially intriguing to see fantasy fare in a euro game, I was eventually put off by it as there’s nothing magical about the rules at all. It’s not just American high fantasy either. The art, choice of characters and general feel places it closer to dark European fantasy. Think Brothers Grimm instead of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The backstory is ostensibly about a group of magic wielding characters racing to gather enough magical energy to somehow obtain or unlock a set of powerful artifacts. They do this by collecting sets of gems that generate magical power and then spending that energy to obtain better gems and magic items. In practice, all this ends up being one of the most naked engine-building games I’ve seen and the theme soon becomes a distraction.

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Dungeoneer: Tomb of the Lich Lord was one of prizes that we walked away with from the tournament sponsored by Han last year but we’ve only recently got around to playing it. To tell the truth, even reading the rules sheet that’s included in the game left a bad impression. It’s incredible how convoluted and poorly explained the rules are for such a relatively simple game. The game also doesn’t come with all the required components and we had to buy six-sided dice specifically for this purpose. We used the wooden bits from Agricola to stand in for the various tokens needed and miniatures from Battlelore to represent our heroes.

This is basically a dungeon crawling game implemented entirely with cards. You have the usual cards representing monsters, heroes, skills, items and even the rooms and passages that make up the dungeon. Instead of having one player taking on a DM-like role and the other players being the heroes, in Dungeoneer, each player has his own hero but also acts as the Dungeon Master during other players’ turns. This uses a system similar to to the one I’ve already seen in Marvel Heroes. Here, each player collects Glory and Peril whenever his hero moves through a map space. The Glory is spent by the player himself to play items and skills (called Boons) from his hand while his Peril can be spent by all other players to play monsters, traps and other threats against his hero.

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I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather of late and Brass is too big of a game to do justice to with just one play, so I’m just writing a summary of some of my thoughts on it. It’s an economic game by Martin Wallace and set during the Industrial Revolution, so comparisons with Age of Steam seem natural.

• Components are much better compared to Age of Steam which is a big win for me. I prefer this map style as well with cities linked by predefined routes instead of the total openness of the former game. Looking at the hex map simply puts me at a loss at where to start and what to do, whereas I can look at the map in Brass and think about opportunities and strategic possibilities.
• Rules were very unintuitive at first, what with unflipped tiles being worth nothing. It’s even more painful when you realize that all of the level 1 tiles leave the game at the end of the canal phase. It took me the entirety of the first phase to fully understand what I was supposed to do. I didn’t even appreciate the importance of development actions until after the game.
• I didn’t fully realize the implications of the coal and iron available on the market either. I allowed some of my actions to be limited because I didn’t see any of these resources available but I should have been more willing to buy them off the market when necessary. The demand and supply curve this mechanic simulates is a very nice touch. If you buy something off the market, the next player in turn will have an incentive to build something to fill the demand.
• Loans seem much less painful in this game, perhaps too much so. I only took a loan once but perhaps I should have done it more as I didn’t have money to build two railways tracks in one action at the beginning of the rail phase. Since income level doesn’t affect victory standings at all, there seems to be very few downsides to financing yourself this way.
• Shipyards score a lot of points! But the key here is that there are very few spots to build them in plus two of the spots are very inaccessible. This feels a bit odd to me as getting the location cards for these two areas then become very critical. Surely the game shouldn’t be about racing to get these key cards?
• I like using cards to restrict player actions. It helps to limit the possibility space that you need to consider when deciding what to do, while allowing unfettered freedom if you’re willing to give up two cards to do any action. The added element of hidden information also adds a welcome bit of tension and allows players to scheme a bit more. Do I have the time to delay building in a key location or does my opponent already have the right cards to snag it from me?
• Overall, this is another very crunchy economic game with lots to calculate but I like this one a lot more than similar stuff like Age of Steam and Power Grid. It seems to me that there are actually valid alternate paths to victory in Brass, because points can come from a variety of sources, whereas the two other games seem to be have more singular goals. Plus the card-based restriction discourages you from trying to calculate everything down to too much detail.  For this reason, I’ll be much happier to replay this one than the other two games.

We played In the Year of the Dragon some time back, but as we made a critical error during our session, I’ve been reluctant to write anything about it. Since then, I’ve spent some time toying around with the flash version of the game so here are some of my thoughts. In this game, the players take on the role of rulers of ancient China who must each guide their respective realms through an eventful year. Oddly however, while dragon years are generally considered auspicious ones to the Chinese, the year that this game covers is a decidedly tumultuous one.

In the Year of the Dragon has deceptively simple rules. The game is played across a total of twelve rounds with each round representing one month of the year. Each player starts the game by choosing two skilled persons to come under his or her employ but the game imposes a rather devious restriction of not allowing players to take the same combination of persons. Each player is also given an identical set of cards allowing him to hire one person of each of the nine different types plus two wild cards which can be used to hire any person. Thus set up, the players do only two things every round. First, they select an action to perform according to the player turn order. Second, they play a card from their hand to employ a new person. After that the event for the current month is resolved, the scores updated, and then it’s on to the next round and the next month.

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I have to admit to a fair amount of skepticism when I first learned about the existence of this game. One reason is that Sean described it as the Japanese-version of Dominion with a maid theme, so unless it brings something drastically new to the table, I’m inclined to dismiss it (yes, even though I did try to design a Dominion-like game myself). The other reason is that I’m not terribly fond of cutesy anime tropes. Yes, my wife and I enjoyed Bleach back when it was good and we’re actually watching Naruto Shippuden now, but I draw the line at the girly stuff.

Still, I figured that since it’s so similar to Dominion, learning it would take no time at all and a single game should go by rather quickly, so we gave it a shot. Since everyone and their mother should know how to play Dominion by now, it’s easiest just to explain the differences. First, the terms used are obviously different but refer to the same concepts. Treasure coins have been replaced by hearts. Actions are called services. To employ a maid means to buy a card. One cool thing that Tanto Cuore does is to specify card effects through standardized icons instead of in the card text. So a card that has +1 in the draw card space, +1 in the hearts space and +1 in the services space lets you draw one card, provides one heart to spend and gives you one extra action when played.

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On a whim, I tried out the optimal game selection tool on BGG not too long ago, asking it for recommendations for a medium weight euro game suitable for two players. The only answer that popped out was Goa. It seems that this is a much sought after game that has been out of print for a while now despite the fact that it has a respectably high ranking on BGG. I’d have thought that these classics would be constantly in print since there’s obvious demand for them. Once again, I’m reminded of how small the boardgames industry really is.

The first thing that my wife said when presented with the game was to comment, “Wait, all this looks sort of familiar.” Indeed, there’s a distinct samey-ness about these Euros once we’ve had a few of them under our belts. This is evident not only in their mechanics but also in the themes that they choose and the general look of their components. It doesn’t change the fact that each is different enough to be distinctive in their own way, but the mutual resemblance is still unmistakable. That said, I found Goa to be an excellent game that certainly deserves its place on the BGG rankings. I am however amused that it’s somewhat deceptive what the game is all about.

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Veteran game reviewer Tom Chick once said when reviewing World of Warcraft that he’d always thought that he didn’t like sushi until one day he went to one particular sushi restaurant and learned that it wasn’t that he didn’t like sushi. It was just that he hadn’t had the right kind of sushi before. Well, what goes for Tom Chick when it comes to sushi and mmorpgs goes for me when it comes to racing games and the game that changed my opinion was Grid.

It wasn’t for lack of trying that I never got into racing games for a very long time. I distinctly remember messing around with the original Test Drive, first released in 1987, and over the years I’ve checked out various installments in the Need for Speed series, but nothing really clicked for me. Then I played Grid and everything came together. This is why even though I’m still not generally a big fan of racing games, I paid attention to subsequent releases by the developer Codemasters and immediately bought Dirt 2 when it went on sale.

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