Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I received a retail copy of this game years ago back when I was still buying physical copies of PC games. Nowadays, due to the convenience and discounted prices of download services like Steam and Impulse, there’s no real reason to buy from retailers any longer. I didn’t even buy Dungeons & Dragons Online. Pcgame.com.my simply threw it in for me as a free gift with my stuff. That’s a clear sign of just how poorly the game sold. I never even opened the box until I noticed it sitting there during the Chinese New Year holidays. The game has since moved to a free-to-play model so the box now has zero value, so I thought, what the heck, and decided to bring it back with me to Kota Kinabalu. I knew I wouldn’t want to play it for long but I might as well check it out before it gets shut down completely.

The installation and inevitable patching up process went surprisingly smoothly, especially when compared to the horrible experience I had with Champions Online. Activating the game with the retail copy automatically gave my account VIP status for a month, giving me access to the Monk character class. I tried that for a bit and found it very easy to solo, but I was too lazy to learn all the details of how they implemented the monk abilities and eventually settled for a cleric instead. The online version uses spell points that you’re allowed to spend to cast any of the spells you have memorized, but otherwise everything is fairly faithful to the pencil and paper version.

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Shan’s eldest niece is currently staying with us and decided to go with us on our usual Saturday evening outing to CarcaSean, so Sean had to think of some simpler games for our session. On the one hand, this meant that we couldn’t play some of the meatier fare that we were looking forward to, such as Le Havre, but then it was also a chance to play some stuff that we ordinarily wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves.

We started with Um Reifenbreite, a game that I was very surprised to learn was first published in 1979. It apparently even won the Spiel des Jahres in 1992. I guess standards weren’t very high back then. It’s basically a roll and move game in which each player controls a team of four cyclists in a race. The track is divided into spaces and rolling a pair of dice lets you move a number of spaces equal to your result. To make it more of an actual game, you also get a hand of energy cards which can be played in lieu of rolling a die to let you move spaces equal to the card’s value and there’s a rule allowing riders immediately behind someone to trail along his wake without needing to roll dice.

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Being the sucker for card games that I am and still feeling vaguely enticed by the prospect of being able to build decks once again, I grabbed Warhammer: Invasion over the Chinese New Year from Toybox. While I was there, I also bought the Skavenblight Threat as it was the only one of the battle packs left. Apparently these things have been selling quite well even in Malaysia. As someone who was heavily into Magic: The Gathering during the old glory days, I’ve been very curious about Fantasy Flight’s LCG format and wondered if it would truly be able to solve the problem of CCGs being huge money sinks while successfully retaining the core mechanic of customizing decks. This would therefore be my chance to find out for myself if it works as advertised.

As everyone knows by now, this is a card game that is supposed to simulate battles between the different races of Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy world. The basic Core Set comes with four decks for the Empire (humans), Dwarves, Chaos and Orcs. A companion set is supposed to be released later this year to add decks for the High Elves and the Dark Elves, but the Core Set already includes a handful of cards for each faction plus twenty four neutral cards that can be used to customize a deck. What surprised me was that the set also includes twenty cards used only to support a variant drafting format but aren’t actually included in playing decks. In addition, the box contains a large number of tokens to help keep track of resources and damage as well as a Capital Board for each faction. The boards aren’t strictly necessary but they do look nice and help to keep the playing area organized.
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When Champions Online was first announced, I thought I’d make it the only MMO I’d play since World of Warcraft. However, its reviews all round were pretty terrible when it finally got released and most people actually thought that the older City of Heroes was the better game, so I ended up not playing it. Nowadays it’s clearly an MMO in decline. I signed up for the demo available on Steam anyway just before I left for the Chinese New Year holidays because:

1. It was free.
2. I didn’t want to buy and start a new game for a few days and then be forced to stop playing while I was away.
3. I’ve always liked the idea of creating and customizing your own superhero and was curious to see what I could do in this game.

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I meant to post some brief thoughts on this before I left for the Chinese New Year holidays, but ended up being too busy. I didn’t have access to a PC at all while I was away, so I had to wait until now to write this. It’s not a terribly complex game, so I’ll be brief:

• The idea of having each player play two different roles, that of game publisher and game buyer, feels a bit clumsy to me. The rules and mechanics are fine. It just feels a bit odd that at one point you’re a game publisher and at another point you’re a game collector, but you need to do well at both portions of the game.
• I ended up winning the game because I think I tried to accomplish both of these goals. Sean did very well at the buying part, successfully completing five sets of games. This was pretty amazing as he would have needed to spend 15 buy actions to do that and you only had 18 buy actions throughout the entire game. I managed to complete four sets but had a significant lead on Sean because I manage to sell more of my own games.
• I’m somewhat surprised at how little buzz this game actually has on BGG, given that it’s named after the site and was made to commemorate its tenth anniversary. It’s nothing special or anything but I don’t think it’s a bad game at all. It takes a while to understand how it works because of the dual roles thing, but once you do, there’s some decent strategy in deciding how many games to put on sale and in which shop. The decisions about which games to buy are relatively simple in comparison.
• Obviously the major draw are the innumerable references to other games. It doesn’t do much for me but I’d imagine that dedicated players of Euro-games would get a kick out of recognizing all the references.
• I normally dislike memory-based games. The BoardGameGeek Game uses screens to hide each player’s game tiles so that some memorization ability is helpful, but I don’t think it’s that critical here so that aspect didn’t bother me much. There’s an element of randomness when determining which player can buy at which store so you can’t really control for everything, further reducing the utility of memorizing everything that everyone else has bought.

Overall, apart from its tie-in with BGG, it’s fairly unremarkable but it’s not bad at all. I do find it amusing that its theme is clearly meant to appeal to serious geeks but its actual mechanics seem more appropriate for casual players.

I actually first played Space Hulk over ten years ago while studying in Tours, France. Looking over the information on BGG, it must have been the second edition of the game. I was a regular at the Temple du Jeu branch in 1996 and 1997, much to the detriment of my university grades. Just across the central square was also an official Games Workshop outlet but all I ever saw there were endless sessions of miniatures wargaming. Even at the Temple du Jeu, the main thing people played were CCGs. Magic: The Gathering was of course by far the most popular, but there were also small groups into things like Netrunner (still my favorite CCG design), Middle-Earth, Battletech etc.

This meant that I only played Space Hulk a few times but it remained a very memorable experience in my mind. So Games Workshop’s announcement of the new edition of the game not long after I’d just gotten into boardgames grabbed my attention. Now, there’s no chance of me actually ponying up the cash to buy a copy. The days of me being careless with money enough to buy stuff just for the sake of having them are long gone, as I’ve learned my lesson after buying crappy CCGs like The X-Files and Doom Trooper. But I was interested enough to go ogle at all the pretty pictures of the updated miniatures.

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Steam had the entire X-COM collection on sale for a measly US$2 over the weekend and I bought it despite knowing that I most likely will not make a serious effort at actually playing any of the five games in the collection. This is because the first, and widely considered the best, game in the series, UFO: Enemy Unknown (the names are a bit confusing because the games were sold as UFO in the UK but X-COM in the US) was first released in 1994. This means that I first played it when I was 18 years old, and darn if I don’t still remember it as one of my best gaming experiences ever.

Sixteen years later while the core gameplay is as good as ever, the graphics are a muddy mess and most importantly, user interfaces have improved by leaps and bounds since then. This is why as much as I love the game, it’s hard to replay it now. While I can just about stomach the graphics, it’s too much work nowadays to do trivial stuff like manage the inventory levels of your soldiers’ ammunition, to flip between different screens to manufacture stuff and look up their stats etc. The game seriously needs streamlined management screens, right-click mouse functionality and lots of mouse-over tool-tips.

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I played Galaxy Trucker again on Friday night, asking Sean to add in stuff from the Big Expansion this time around. I ended dead last by a significant margin and had to endure much jeering from both my wife and Sean. This was because two of my own Evil Machination cards ended up hurting me more than them, especially in the last flight where I had to pay for 24 broken components! Shan actually built smaller and simpler ships than me but still did better. I still enjoyed the game and I think I’d like to buy it eventually, but it sure is expensive for not a very complicated game.

Some thoughts:

• Adding all of the stuff from the expansion all at once was probably a bad idea. Both Shan and me had a tough trying to remember what all the new component tiles did while trying to build our ships to take into account the Evil Machination cards and the special rules for some of the ship boards.
• I really like the variety of ship boards in this game. Yeah, you’re still building your ship using the same pile of components but the different ship boards do add lots of interesting and unique challenges to the layout. Stuff like ships that can be turned to face any direction and having two ships flying side by side are fun!
• I’m a bit lukewarm on the Evil Machination cards. As it turns out, not all of them are that evil and I feel that they are far too random and their effects vary so much that having one of them show up feels completely arbitrary. One of the cards Shan played simply gave a payout based on the flight order.
• I like the Rough Road cards. Their effects can be huge as well but at least you get to see them before you start building your ship so you can plan for them. One card we got gave each of us a pool of tiles each that we had to use as much of as possible. That was fun and felt like a unique variant of the original rules, even though I did the worst of us three. One of the cards that we drew seemed like it would be a big deal. It allowed the ships at the back to shoot the ships in front. But it turned out not to matter too much as except during take-off, only the second ship could shoot at the first ship and only when a new ship became first. It would have a bigger effect all the ships at the back could shoot whenever any ship changed position.
• Since the Big Expansion stuff is supposed to make it much harder for the ships to survive the flight at all, it seems to me that engines are less valuable than other stuff like guns and shields. If so, obviously the aliens that boost engines are devalued as well. I remember that in our first game without the expansion, using the engines to jockey for position in order to be the first to arrive at planets with cargo and to arrive at the destination for the cash payout, was quite important. But since even being able to arrive is going to be tough, it makes more sense to make sure that you have enough guns and shields to survive the trip before thinking about putting in engines.
• Playing this with more players would probably be more fun. I understand that a maximum of five players is possible using the expansion. Since building the spaceships is simultaneous, it wouldn’t make the game much longer and having lots of people grabbing stuff from the common pile of components would become more hectic and hence, fun. It would also increase the chances of something truly catastrophic happening, providing entertainment to all.
• Euro-games have a reputation for being non-confrontational and being multi-player solitaire games. Theoretically players should not get too upset when they lose due to the impersonal nature of such games. I’d say Galaxy Trucker counts squarely as a euro-game, but despite fitting both descriptions, it would be a very bad game to play for someone who gets upset about losing games. I can very easily imagine someone crying or throwing a fit of rage if their ship gets blown up. Despite the toy-like aspect of this game, I really don’t think that you should let children play this game unless you really hate the child or something.

When I talk about games, I like to refer to the quote from Sid Meier about games being a series of interesting decisions. Plus Hiew likes the Reiner Knizia quote about games being fun when you play to win. I don’t think either of these quotes is true for Galaxy Trucker. After all, there were times when I could have earned a better score by giving up and selling my goods for half price, but where’s the entertainment value in that? It’s not deep or cerebral, but it manages to hit all sorts of emotional high notes over the course of a session, and that makes it a great game.