Knights of the Cardboard Castle

We played Descent again for the first time since September last year, or at least we tried to. Though Sean and the others went on to play the other maps, we only ever played the first introductory scenario, so we moved on to the second map for this session, with Sean again playing as the Overlord. Suffice to say, we as the adventurers failed abjectly not once, but twice, without even managing to clear a significant portion of the dungeon, making it a short session indeed.

In retrospect and after reading up a bit on the game on BGG, it’s fairly clear what we needed to do to win. Heroes with low damage potential should give up on the idea of doing damage at all and just act as runners to activate glyphs and snag treasure. Some people even suggested not equipping runners with weapons at all, taking instead a pair of shields for example. Monsters should be avoided whenever possible and the party should focus purely on the objectives.

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I’m still playing Star Trek Online and paid up for another month (though in typical fashion, Cryptic messed up and charged my credit card twice!) Sadly due to my limited playing time and intermittent connectivity problems, I’m still just a Lieutenant-Commander but I’ll likely hit Commander is a couple of days. Since I’m about to move to a new rank and with it, a shiny new ship, I thought I’d write some stuff about how character progression works in this game.

Note that this won’t be a comprehensive strategy guide. There are far better guides out there on the net already. It’ll just be explanation in plain English about how things works in this game, especially for people who might be curious but don’t actually want to play the game. Star Trek Online has no statistics like Strength, Agility, Intelligence etc. that you find in most RPGs. Instead, every character starts the same, but choosing traits, whose availability is linked to the choice of races, can give character-specific bonuses. Each character has four traits but up to two of them may be fixed depending on your race. Like everything else in the game, traits are either ground-based or space-based. Ground-based traits, skills and abilities never help in space combat and vice versa.

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We actually first played Le Havre quite some time ago when Sean first got his copy. Since both of us like Agricola quite a bit, we were both eager to try it when it arrived but found it to be quite a bit more complex and were left somewhat confused. Our initial impressions were still favorable as there seemed to be a lot to learn and experiment with but for various reasons, we weren’t able to play it for a second time until recently.

Le Havre shares many superficial similarities with Agricola. For example, buildings act much like action spaces in the latter and you can place a worker in one to execute the associated action immediately. At the end of every round, each player also needs to pay increasing amounts of food as a form of upkeep. And since its also an economic game, it comes with a bewildering variety of chits to represent resources and the main board serves mainly just to record which resources and cards are currently available and whose turn it is.

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Just a few quick and much belated notes on another one of the games that Sean had us try while Shan’s nieces were here with us. The game we actually played was Bluff, but it’s just one of the many implementations of a classic design that according to Wikipedia has been around since the 16th century. Interestingly, this particular version is from Richard Borg, who also designed Battlelore. I’d heard of and read about Liar’s Dice before of course, but this was the first time I’ve actually played it though Sean tells me it’s a popular game to play in bars.

The basic idea is pretty simple. Each player has a pool of five six-sided dice and rolls them secretly such that no one else can see your results. In the version we played the dice had a face that acted as a joker result. The starting player must then make a bid, claiming that there are at least a certain number of a certain result around the table, for example, there are at least 10 dice showing ‘4’. The next player must then either call the bluff, asking for everyone to uncover their dice and count up the totals or raise the bid. The latter means either increasing the number of dice of the same face, e.g. there are at least 11 dice showing ‘4’, or keeping the number the same but raising the face value.

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I feel guilty just for admitting that I like Star Trek Online. It’s a game by Cryptic and suffers from the same connectivity and server stability problems that I hated so much in Champions Online. It also has the characteristic Cryptic issue of launching with too little content. I’m just a Lieutenant Commander in the game at the moment but even at this early stage I can see the how many of the missions are just variations of the same theme: scan X number of targets, destroy Y groups of enemies etc. It also sort of craps all all over the mythos. This is definitely not the Star Trek that Roddenberry envisioned.

But none of that matters. The moment the game launches and the familiar Star Trek theme starts up, I’m hooked. I can’t say that I care much about the tutorial that pits you right off the bat against the Borg, but once I’m set loose in the galaxy in my own ship, I’m like a kid at the playground. I love watching the different classes of Federation ships fly by in Sector Space, hailing Starfleet to report the successful completion of a mission, engaging in space combat against enemies and even get a kick out of hearing Leonard Nimoy’s voice congratulating me every time I gain a level.

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With all three nieces in town, we had to think of some simpler and not too time consuming games to play. With the youngest niece being only 13 years old, trying to find a game that would accommodate all six of us wasn’t an easy task. Continuing our string of racing-themed games, Sean decided to try Hare & Tortoise first, or at least the German version of it that features a hedgehog instead of a tortoise.

Unlike both Formula D and Um Reifenbreite, this game doesn’t use a roll and move mechanic. As in the fable, the players are rabbits who must race each other to reach the finish line. Rabbits are of course fueled by what else but carrot-power! Each player starts with the same supply of carrots, represented here as cards of various denominations, and must spend them to advances along the spaces that make up the race track. During his or her turn, the player simply decides how many spaces to move, consults a handy chart to see how many carrots are needed to move that many spaces and discards carrots up to that value. The more spaces you want to move in one go, the more carrots you need to spend.

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Sean arranged for us to play Formula D apparently after reading about my wish to try out the game in my report about Um Reifenbreite. I was originally interested in this because from what I could see in various photos, the board looked huge and it has a bunch of very cute bits. But after playing the cycling game, I was also curious about how other racing games use dice to determine movement. We played a four player game including Shan’s niece, Xin, on the day-side of the board with one car apiece. We only did one lap though Sean told us that two laps would be more fun. He was probably right as only one lap didn’t threaten to cause enough damage to the cars.

Like Um Reifenbreite, Formula D is still basically a roll and move game. You don’t even get Energy Cards to use in lieu of rolling the die. A number of features however make this the more strategic game. First, each car comes with a cool-looking control panel that tracks what gear it’s currently in and how much damage its various components, e.g. brakes, tyres, body, body, etc. have taken. Your car gets taken out of the race the moment any of the components are gone. The current gear determines which of the seven different dice you roll to see how many spaces you can move. This ranges from a four-sided die to a ridiculous die with thirty sides, which is a die I’ve never seen before. Naturally, higher gears mean more sides for your die.

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Another thing that I did over the Chinese New Year holidays was to dig up my old collection of Magic: The Gathering cards gathering dust at my mother’s house. I had a vague idea of cannibalizing the worthless common cards to use as supplies for a game prototype I’ve been sporadically working on. However it turned out that all of the crappy stuff were either lost or thrown out long ago. The only cards I could find were a couple of cheap decks that I kept around for teaching purposes, my old Type 1 deck and assorted cards that I considered trade-worthy.

Now, I’ve always known that my cards had some value but I’ve been too lazy to sort them and try to estimate a valuation for them. I do know that a couple of times in the past when I joked about selling my cards on LYN, I continued to receive PMs from interested parties for up to a year after the posts. So this time armed the knowledge that Malaysia now had an active forum where players trade MTG cards, I finally took the time to sort them, type them up in a spreadsheet and look up valuations for each card on various websites.

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