Knights of the Cardboard Castle

We had a session at Carcasean recently for which we forgot to take along our camera, so no photos were taken. Since we only played a series of lighter games during this session, I’ll just combine them in a post detailing some of my thoughts on them rather than writing extended reviews.

Airships

• Seriously good dice game. I really like the idea of building up a toolbox of dice of different types, various bonuses and fixed value dice and using the toolbox to gain scores.
• It’s a dice game so some measure of randomness is to be expected. But it’s surprisingly restrained. For example, the white dice have 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 on their faces, greatly restricting the range of possibilities. It’s also very neat how failing a roll gets you a +1 token and three of these things can be cashed in to get another rolling attempt.
• It’s by the same designer, Andreas Seyfarth, as Puerto Rico! I didn’t know that when we played.
• Apparently the differently colored boxes are meant to represent the various components that make up an airship but I don’t get the impression that there’s any meaningful distinction between them. I don’t really see that the game fits the theme either but at least it’s a rather unique and cool theme.
• The cool factor alone makes me feel tempted to buy this but it’s really not the best game for two players. I can totally see the appeal of playing this with more casual players however.

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Just some quick thoughts on this as I feel that I really need to play it some more to decide what to think about it. I’d have waited for later but Sean seems quite insistent, plus it’d probably be a while before I get to play it again.

• The low quality of the components are a real turn-off. I thought I’d be able to deal with this better but this game reminded me that a significant portion of the enjoyment of playing boardgames stems from the tactile pleasure of handling quality components. I did buy animeeples from Sean for Agricola after all.
• More than anything else, the gameplay reminds me of Power Grid. I found it to be very dry, consisting mainly of straightforward, brute force calculations. As in Power Grid, the costs of whatever it is you want to do is mostly fixed with the only source of variation being the auction at the beginning of the turn. In Power Grid, you’re auctioning for power plants whereas in Age of Steam, the auction is for turn order and consequently the choice of special advantages for the turn. But the effect feels much the same to me. Age of Steam even punishes you if you get your maths wrong and issue more shares than you need funding for in a turn.
• Much like Power Grid as well, there’s an element of area control in this game. I failed to appreciate the significance of the patch of water on the map and how it constricted the space available for rail networks to traverse the horizontal length of the map. Knowing how to build a network such that goods are able to be shipped the longest possible distance is important too. I tend not to be good at games with this element as I’m slow at processing all that visual information.
• For all these reasons, I’d say that this game is extremely vulnerable to analysis paralysis. Trying to make sense of the map once it has multiple rail networks crisscrossing it is a daunting challenge indeed. As I sat on one edge of the map, I tended only to pay attention to my side of the map. Woe betide you if you actually want to put effort into anticipating where new goods might pop up and adjust your rail network accordingly.
• Overall, I have to say that it does strike me as a very good game for people who like this sort of thing. It rewards very detailed planning and meticulous calculation. I think I prefer games in which you have to go more by gut because it’s harder to break down your decisions into such nakedly straightforward terms, such as Agricola and Le Havre. The extended calculations needed for games like Age of Steam tend to wear me out so I barely even try to win. Surprisingly my wife, despite being not much of a gamer, is better than me at Power Grid and Age of Steam, as the cost and benefits of various decisions are easier to grasp for her.

EDIT: I forgot to mention one last thing. During our game, Sean talked about how the creator of the game lost control over it due to a lawsuit. I briefly went to read up on it and it seems that the amount of money in dispute comes to only about USD$10,000. That’s really not a very significant sum at all and it rams home for me how small the boardgames industry is. For example, the creator of one recent Flash game, Steambirds (which reminds me a lot of the Wings of War boardgame, but with special powers), just revealed some details about his finances and said that he received USD$25,000 just from one website for the first right to use his game on it. While I have no doubt that really monster-sized hits like Magic: The Gathering rake in cash by the truckload, I have to conclude that most games don’t really make much money at all.

As a gamer, one way to tell when you’re getting old is when you hear all the kids talk about some cool new game but you have absolutely no idea what it’s all about. I’m referring to Defense of the Ancients here, a Warcraft 3 mod that has since taken on a life of its own, far outstripping the base game in popularity. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s considered a must-have game in Malaysian cybercafes. Since the original DotA was a mod and not a commercial release, various companies have tried to mine this new genre and one of the first of such attempts to be released was last year’s Demigod.

Many veteran gamers, me included, were dismissive of DotA when it first appeared, calling it an RTS in which you control a single unit and a click-fest. It didn’t help that the multi-player community around it was composed mostly of rude adolescents who were only too ready to dish out profanities to any noobs trying the game for the first time. The point of Demigod was to deliver the gaming goodness of DotA in a commercial release with high production values and hopefully attract a more mature community. After all, it should be noted that one reason why DotA became so successful was because it is free.

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I first heard about RoboRally back when I was still playing Magic: The Gathering. The story was that Richard Garfield was shopping the boardgame around various gaming conventions and brought along the card game as a filler. To his amazement however, it was the card game that became a hit. The success of MTG is by now the stuff of legend but judging by the number of expansions Wizards of the Coast released for RoboRally over the years, this game has its share of fans as well. Even if only to satisfy the spark of curiosity that was first kindled over a dozen years ago, I felt that I should play this game at least once.

RoboRally is a racing game in which each player controls a robot and must guide it through a warehouse to reach a series of flags. This is done by issuing orders to the robots using program cards. There are cards for moving forward between one and three spaces, for rotating in a particular direction, for making a complete U-turn and for backing up one space. During each turn, each player is dealt a total of nine cards and must then select five of these cards to be executed in order by placing them face down on his control mat. Once all players have done this, they uncover the cards one by one and carry out the actions simultaneously. When two robots are close enough to bump into one another, you need to compare the numbers on each program card. The card with the higher number takes effect first, followed by the other card.

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The Princes of Florence is one of those games from Alea that have always struck me for how classy their boxes look. The colors, artwork and general style look so stately and luxurious that they wouldn’t seem out of place in a university library. The actual contents of the boxes however tend to be more underwhelming and in the case of Princes of Florence, a bit bland. The colors are very muted, perhaps to make them look like pieces of an ancient parchment. Personally, I’d have preferred a more vibrant look as the Renaissance was a hotbed of innovation. After all in a game in which you’re supposed to be creating works of great artistic and scientific merit, you’d expect something with a bit of grandeur.

In this game, the players take on the roles of Renaissance princes who compete with each other to win prestige by creating magnificent works. The game is old enough that explaining the rules in detail would be a waste of everyone’s time but the basic idea is that each player develops his own city on his own personal board, sort of like Agricola. They then play profession cards which are worth a varying number points depending on whether the requirements on the cards match what the players have in their cities.

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So Blizzard apparently made over USD 3.5 million from selling the Celestial Steed mount at US$25 a pop over two days. That’s probably more money than what most AAA-rated games earn and since it’s just a silly mesh, nearly all of that is pure profit. What surprised me even more is that there was actually a queue for them because Blizzard simply can’t take their customers’ money fast enough. At its peak, the queue was over 140,000 according to WOW Insider.

Anyway, it’s been over two years since I last played World of Warcraft. In fact I didn’t buy Wrath of the Lich King and never even reached the level cap in Burning Crusade. But I’ve been keeping an eye on the announcements about Cataclysm and there’s a good chance that this will be the expansion I’ll come back for. One thing is that the class revamps will completely change the way they’re played. Hunters for example will lose whatever melee abilities they have left but will now start with a pet right from the first level. The mana system is being overhauled so that mages will do more damage with Arcane Missiles depending on mana level etc.

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A few quick notes on this toy-like game that Sean had us try. This is one of those cutesy games that I’d never have picked out to play on my own in a million years. After all, the theme is about herding sheep of all things and the game comes with a set of them, made not of cheap plastic, but finely crafted ceramic, complete with fluffy fleece and a solid, heavy feel to them. The rest of the components are more conventional: a board laid out with all of the orders available for each player, another board that serves both to record each player’s score and to track the herd’s progress through the different paddocks, player-specific markers, dice etc. But it’s still hard to look past the cute bits and take this game seriously.

Yet Shear Panic does turn out to be a surprisingly tactical game. The basic idea is that there’s this flock of sheep freshly off the truck and headed for the shears. Each player controls two of the sheep in the flock and gains points according to a different formula depending on which paddock the sheep are currently in. Since sheep are pretty dumb, the objectives don’t really make much sense. In the first area, the same-colored sheep want to stay next to each other. In the second area, they all want to be in front, close to Roger the Ram (yes, he even has a name!) In the third area, they all want to be close to the black sheep. The last area is where the shearing takes place and here they all want to be at the back to get away from the nasty scissors.

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We played Tutankhamen a while back and Samurai only recently but since both games were designed by Reiner Knizia, I thought I’d cover both of them in one post. Though I’d consider both games to be fairly lightweight, Tutankhamen is the simpler of the two by a fair bit. The game has a rather ostentatious Egyptian theme and Sean’s version comes with a cardboard pyramid that you put at one end and a series of trapezoidal tiles that you link together to form a path that leads to the pyramid.

These tiles represent various artifacts that the players are out to collect and the object of the game is to collect sets such that you have more of the same type of artifact than the other players. Everyone starts with the same score at the beginning of the game, which varies according to the number of players, and the object is to get to zero. Once all artifacts of the same type are gone from the path, you discard points equal to the value of the set, which is the same as the total number of tiles of that type in that game, provided that you have more of that type than any other player. The game is over when all players reach the end of the path.

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