Ever since I first learned to play Magic: The Gathering more than ten years ago, I’ve been a big fan of card-based games. Using cards allows games to get away with a relatively simple core ruleset while adding additional rules and exceptions to the established rules as needed on the cards themselves. This means that while a good player will need to have knowledge of all of the cards and their possible effects, a beginner can start with just the core rules and add to his or her knowledge by reading the cards as they’re played. With a large enough library of cards, you get unparalleled dynamism from all the different card interactions, including many even the original designers didn’t predict, and hence a continuously fresh experience.
One of the things that I’ve always admired about Magic is the abundance of what I like to call meta-cards in the game. Most of the cards in Magic represent summonable creatures, castable sorceries, forgeable artifacts and all of the other accouterments that one would expect in a game depicting a duel between powerful mages, but the meta-cards are none of these. Instead, these cards have effects that manipulate the deck itself, allowing the user to among other things, draw additional cards, retrieve cards that have been discarded, and even go looking into their library for specific cards to put into their hand.
CarcaSean received a shipment of new games last week so everyone was eager to try them out. Of these, Heroscape: Rise of the Valkyrie was easily the most visually impressive with its Lego-like terrain pieces and pre-painted miniatures. The most unusual however was the new edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights which is barely a game at all and can be best described as a more advanced version of the old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Each player takes the role of one of the famous characters from the stories from One Thousand and One Nights and sets off on a grand adventure. The point of the game is not to win per se, but to see what crazy scrapes you get into.
As a game that’s all about telling stories, there’s little in the way of rules. There are no statistics for the characters for example and everyone starts the same except for gender. Everyone does choose three skills to start the game with but that’s pretty much it in terms of differentiation. Victory is determined by collecting Destiny and Story Points over the course of the game and a neat little twist is that each player can secretly decide how many of each they need to win before the game begins, so long as they add up together to 20 points. Due to the randomness and unpredictability of the game however, this is obviously meant more to give an ending to the game rather than awarding victory to a player in the traditional sense.
Being somewhat of a fan of superhero comics, I’d noticed the Marvel Heroes box sitting on a shelf on the very first day I stepped into CarcaSean. It wasn’t until much later that I ventured to ask Sean about it. At that time, he told me that he had only played it once himself and didn’t quite understand what the point of the game was. He recommended that I get our resident Ameritrash expert Han to teach the game to me. Even that was quite a while back and only this week did I get a chance to play this out-of-print game with Han, Sean and my wife.
Initially I had the mistaken impression that it was some sort of miniatures-based battle game, perhaps something similar to the Heroclix system. That was incorrect of course as I soon realized after getting into the habit of looking games up on BGG. Instead, pre-painted miniatures notwithstanding, it’s actually a rather abstract strategy game in which the players race against one another to score victory points by resolving various crises. The miniatures aren’t used to track tactical positioning at all and I’d say that the miniature for each team’s mastermind villain doesn’t even have any gameplay purpose.
The title is what you get when I try to combine a post about the Starcraft boardgame with a game about zombies. Last week’s in-fashion game at CarcaSean was Starcraft which some of the hardcore regulars played multiple times over the course of the week. I only managed to play once which admittedly isn’t enough to form a good opinion of such a complex game. As its title implies, it’s a boardgame based on Blizzard’s popular video game. As in the original PC version, all three races are represented in the game and there are two rival factions for each race, so that up to two players can choose the same race. Lore-wise, everything is fairly faithful. The two rival factions for the Zerg for example are the Queen of Blades and the Overmind who as any Starcraft fan should know, have little love for one another.
The board for this game is actually made up of interlocking tiles representing star systems that each player takes turns to lay down, which is reminiscent of Twilight Imperium 3. Each system is subdivided into separate areas, each of which offer different resources or conquest points for the player occupying them. The resources, minerals and Vespene gas as in the original game, is spent to purchase technology, build bases and upgrade them and of course build new units. Naturally, the higher tier units can only be purchased once you own the appropriate production building.
Or it was until recently on the BoardGameGeek rankings anyway. Agricola is currently our favourite boardgame, but since it only recently displaced Puerto Rico from the number one spot which it had previously held for quite a while, I’ve been itching to try the older game. Sean was kind enough to teach to us and join in even though he’s played it plenty of times already. His copy of the game certainly has the wear and tear to show it!
Since we’ve already played Twilight Imperium 3 and Citadels, we’re already familiar with the central mechanic of choosing roles, so we found it to be a fairly easy game to learn. Basically there are a number of roles which gives both the player who chooses the role as well as all other players in the game a specific action. The active player does get a small bonus for choosing the role. Every round that a role doesn’t get picked, money gets added onto it and whoever later picks that role gets it as a bonus.
We made an extra visit to CarcaSean in the middle of the week for a session of Struggle of Empires. With six players in all, I do believe that it’s the biggest gaming group we’ve had yet. Our group was led again by Han who taught us the rules which took about half an hour out of our total playing time of four hours. This game’s basic gameplay reminds me a lot of Risk, though it’s obviously a much more subtle and complex game.
The main area of the board depicts Europe while the smaller boxes to the left side and bottom represent the areas that the European powers can colonize. The object of the game is to gain as much influence as possible and this is accomplished by conquest. You move ships and armies around the board to strike and defend as needed while spending your own population to raise new forces. You can also use your actions and money to buy special tiles which confer various advantages and abilities over the course of the game.
We’re currently re-arranging our daily schedules a bit so as to be able to play boardgames more often, perhaps making our CarcaSean visits a twice weekly rather than weekly affair. The highlight of last week’s sessions was Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, which was kindly taught to us by Han. As its name implies, it’s a boardgame inspired by the PC-based Civilization series and attempts to abstractly simulate the competition between rival civilizations from ancient history to the modern age. Since this was our first game and due to time constraints, we only played up to Age 2, skipping the third and final age.
The keyword here is abstract as my first thought when all of the components were taken out of the box was “Where’s the map?” Indeed, there isn’t one. The main board basically serves only as a handy way to track the many different variables the game needs, including the Cultural Points that the players need to accumulate to determine victory. Without a map, any civilization is assumed to be able to attack any other when necessary. The only territory that the players fight over are the Colony cards that confer various advantages to the civilization that manages to win them.
