Dungeon Petz: the first board game I’ve played that has elicited screams of “NOOOO! I have too much poo!”

In my defence, this was part of what I thought was a winning strategy. Dungeon Petz is all about raising monsters to sell to evil overlords. The two evil overlords I could sell to in the last round really, really, really liked monsters that pooed a lot. Like, to the extent that for every poo card I played I got nine points. Unfortunately after they’d made their purchases and exited the shop I realised that slipping laxatives into the monster’s meals for the last few days had left me with the smelly byproduct of a couple of monster cages that were filled – filled – near to overflowing with monster poo, which incurs a big penalty at the end of the game if you can’t clean it up. The few imps I could spare had had to spend all of their time playing with the monsters to keep them happy – and you can’t clean up poo when the monster is in the cage unless you have special poo-cleaning equipment. Forcing my monsters to poo everywhere to increase their value seemed like a good idea at the time, but in fact probably ended up losing me the game.

So you’ll finish your first game of Dungeon Petz having learned that excessive amounts of poo = bad. But Dungeon Petz is about much more than poo management and disposal. Dungeon Petz is the latest game from prolific game designer Vlaada Chvatil (see Through the Ages, Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker etc.), and it’s a second swipe at what I consider to be his only failed idea: Dungeon Lords. Dungeon Lords was a fairly good worker placement mechanic looking for a decent game; you’d spend up to half an hour deciding how to order you actions and cranking through the results, and what you’d get for your labours amounted to one trap card and a new dungeon tile. Dungeon Lords’ payoff wasn’t anywhere close to being proportional to the amount of effort put into playing it, and I think Vlaada Chvatil feels the same way since Dungeon Petz is the same thing but with some hefty design changes that make the game leaner, faster, and actually fun to play.

It’s still a worker placement game at heart – and one which definitely reminded me of Dungeon Lords – but it’s been simplified so that you don’t lose whole minutes thinking “Well if he does that and goes there and then she does that and goes there I’ll have to go there but if she doesn’t go there I’ll go there instead and murgle flurble bloop” until your brain explodes. In Dungeon Petz you control a family of imps which is buying and raising monsters so that they can sell them on to evil overlords for a profit. To do this, they need to go out and get the monsters, build cages to hold the monsters, buy food to feed the monsters etc., and there’s a whole host of ancillary actions like buying potions to make caring for them easier, buying artifacts that provide general persistent bonuses, upgrading cages, reviving imps that have been injured by rampaging monsters and going to the auction house to increase your victory point take from selling the monsters. There are five rounds in the game. At the start of each round, every player has a sheet of card in front of them with six slots into which they place their available imps and gold (some actions require an imp and a gold, some actions require two imps). The exact placement of the imps is kept secret from rival players, and when everyone is finished the screens concealing the imps are dropped and one of the players screams in horror as they realise they’ve massively overpaid for that one action they thought was critical.

There’s no set turn order in Dungeon Petz, you see. There’s a start player to break ties, but otherwise the player who stuffed the most imps and gold into a single slot gets to take the first action – and they can take any action they want as long as they have the minimum amount of imps and gold to pay for it. Then the player with the next highest number of imps and gold gets to take an action even – and this is the clever part – even if it’s the same player who took the first action. So you can either frontload your imps and overpay drastically to be sure of taking the first action, or else spread them out a little more evenly; you’ll probably be taking actions later on in the turn when some of the sexy ones have gone, but you’ll be able to take more actions in total and it gives you more flexibility re: taking care of your monsters.

Buy a monster and it goes into one of your cages. The cages are all different – some are better at keeping ferocious monsters, some are better at keeping magic monsters, some have in-built features like a playground for pets that want to play and some sort of auto-poo cleaning feature (I did not have this in the game I played) – so matching the correct monsters to the correct cage is crucial. How do you know what the correct cage is? Well, printed on the bottom of the monster piece is a certain number of either red, purple, green or yellow cards. You start the turn with one of each, and when the time comes to actually care for your monsters you draw however many more as are shown on the monster. On the play mat in front of you is a breakdown of what cards are likely to be; for example, yellow cards are overwhelmingly likely to be play, but also have a reasonable change of being a magic surge and a very, very small chance of being ferocity or feeding. Green cards on the other hand are very likely to be feeding, but could also be poo. Purple cards are predominantly magic while red cards are predominantly ferocity, but they have similar breakdowns.

Additional explanation for the hard-of-thinking: you see those green and yellow icons on the bottom of the monster piece? That’s how many green and yellow cards you draw from the green and yellow decks during the monster upkeep phase. It is also how many green and yellow cards you have to play in order to take care of that monster during the monster upkeep phase. What stops this being a straight draw and play is:

• The four cards you always have (one each of red, purple, green and yellow) which can be swapped out for any of the cards you draw.
• You can also swap them for any green and yellow cards you draw for a second monster — everything goes into a common pool, from which you then pick the cards you’ll play for a specific monster.
  

So you have a certain degree of flexibility that allows you to try and avoid escaped monsters and injured imps. Emphasis on the try.

Now, in order to determine and attend to your monsters’ needs, you have to play as many cards of as many colours as are shown on the monster piece and deal with the various outcomes.  You can exchange the cards with the four you were already holding at the start of the turn so you have some flexibility, but it’s not much. If you play a feeding cards you have to feed the monster with either meat or vegetables according to its type. If you play a play card you have to send in a imp to play with the monster to keep it happy. Ferocity or magic mean it’s attacking the cage somehow; the cages can absorb a certain amount of punishment but if the number of magic cards exceeds the magic rating of the cage by one the monster mutates, decreasing its sell value. Exceeding the ferocity rating of the cage by one means you have to send in an imp to contain the rampaging monster, who then gets injured and sent to the hospital.  Exceeding either by two or more means the monster breaks out of the cage and escapes into the wild. Poo cards means the monster poos, and a poo token is placed in the cage. You can have as many poo tokens as you like in there, but if you play a disease card while there is poo in the cage the monster gets ill and incurs a suffering token. Most of the penalties for not carrying out the action on the card involve accruing these suffering tokens, and they are very bad because they drastically decrease a monster’s victory point value.

But how do you score victory points in the first place? Well, there’s two ways of doing it. First, there is a chance for you to exhibit a monster every round; this scores a certain number of exhibition points depending on the types of card you played for the monster that round, but the people viewing the monster do not like to see them suffer and they don’t like shit-encrusted cages either, so those are negative points. The person with the most exhibition points at the end of the round scores eight points, second scores six, third four, and fourth two. This is chump change compared to the real meat of the game, however, which is selling monsters to various buyers. Selling them works much the same way as exhibiting them in that it’s dependent on the cards played – some buyers like vicious monsters, some buyers like playful monsters, some buyers like monsters that poo and poo and poo – but you get two or three times the points as you would for exhibiting. The drawback of this is that you have to part with the monster at the end of the round, and also that you have to deal with the messy consequences of, for example, playing five poo cards in a round at some point.

So Dungeon Petz is a worker-placement game with much more up-front flexibility than its progenitor, Dungeon Lords. Allowing you to fine-tune the number of imps you want to commit to each action makes things simpler and yet at the same time way more interesting, since you’ve still got that element of looking around trying to guess what other people will need and wondering how high they’ll bid with their first action but with the added safety net that you can probably outbid them, if you’re willing to sacrifice your other actions. It’s just a matter of deciding how much you want to do this. It’s also got a lot more going on than Dungeon Lords for far less effort – the players have to juggle buying cages, buying monsters, caring for them and selling them off, while also getting as many cage upgrades, potions, artifacts etc. as they can in order to make their lives easier – and the cunning card-based caring mechanic ensures that you will be doing something every round, even if that something is wailing in horror as your monster suffers an explosive bout of diarrhoea and paints the walls of his cage an interesting shade of brown. And as a final, comprehensive screw you to its predecessor, the whole thing takes about ninety minutes to play if you know what you’re doing and I reckon you could probably get it done in under an hour if you didn’t have anyone who suffered from analysis paralysis.

It’s funny, really. When the Creative Assembly acknowledged they’d screwed up with Empire and released the much-improved Napoleon a year later there was widespread caterwauling that they’d charged twice for the same game, and after having such a dire experience with the former it took me about six months until I caved and bought the latter while it was on sale.. That’s essentially what Vlaada Chvatil is doing here, but somehow I don’t resent it at all. In fact, I’m actually pleased he went back and fixed up his game so that it actually worked because I really did see Dungeon Lords as a wasted opportunity rather than a fundamentally broken experience. Dungeon Petz is simpler, quicker and much more fun, and while I might not particularly be moved to shell out Board Game Money for it (i.e. £50 or thereabouts) I’m certainly not going to veto it next time it’s mooted as an option for our Wednesday evening games session. In the end, that’s just about the highest praise I can give it.

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Being the second half of a roundup of the various deckbuilding games you can buy these days. First half here.

This half of the piece was supposed to segue straight into A Few Acres Of Snow and Thunderstone, but in the light of a recent horrifying experience I had I’d like to amend today’s agenda. Before we talk about the good deck builders I’d just like to devote a few column inches to a Five Minutes’ Hate of a game I had the misfortune to play last weekend called Quarriors.

Quarriors is what you’d get if some sick mad scientist – Dr Moreau, perhaps, or maybe Krieger from Archer — looked at Dominion and decided that it’d be a much better game if only the central gameplay mechanic revolved around random dice rolling instead of cards. I’m not inherently opposed to dice games. I really enjoy both Roll Through The Ages and Blood Bowl for the risk-management aspect that their dice-rolling provide. But adding dice to Dominion is possibly the only way you could have made it worse. The appeal of Dominion, to me, is that while the cards you get on a hand-to-hand basis are fairly unpredictable what you get over the course of the deck is entirely predictable. If you have ten money, then you are guaranteed to get ten money during one run-through of the deck; you just don’t know when. This is the key element that allows a certain element of planning and strategy in Dominion, and it is this key element that Quarriors crumples up and throws in the incinerator.

In Quarriors you buy dice instead of cards. The range of dice you can buy is randomised in the same way that the range of cards you can buy in Dominion is randomised, but once you’ve bought a dice you’re not guaranteed to get the effect of that dice.  Each dice is split into a range of outcomes; usually two money, two normal monsters, and two good monsters. You need to play monsters and keep them alive to score, which makes it just a little bit irritating when the expensive cost-seven dice you bought continually comes up with a money result rather than a powerful monster that could win you the game.  And by irritating I mean that if somebody says “Play Quarriors again or we murder your family,” I swear to god I’m actually going to have to think about that one for a minute for two. Even if you have a fetish for the click-clack of rolling dice you should avoid this piece of crap; there’s nothing you can get from Quarriors that you can’t get from a few moments spent smashing your knuckles repeatedly with a claw hammer.

Right, now that that’s out of the way: A Few Acres Of Snow.

A Few Acres Of Snow is a two-player game set in the French and Indian War of the 1750’s, so it automatically gets points from me for picking that as a setting rather than “Outer Space” or “World War Two” or any one of a hundred overdone fantasy/sci-fi clichés. Acres is a deck-builder with a twist: you actually have a game board with a map of Canada and North America on it that you build settlements and towns on using your deck. This adds a properly strategic element to it: which way do you expand? Is it worth grabbing the victory points there, or are you just making yourself vulnerable to Indian raids from your opponent? It gives what you’re doing with your deck some much-needed context and it works very, very well.  The starting areas for each player (the French have the region around Quebec, while the British start out from the built-up New York area) are asymmetric requiring different strategies to make the most of them, which is good because the cards each player can add to their decks are asymmetric as well.

Each side gets a deck of “Empire” cards. These are a selection of cards that can sifted through at any time and, if a player finds one which they like, bought as one of the turn’s actions. All the cards are available from the start of the game provided a player has the cash to pay for them, but the French and British Empire decks are slightly different in ways which reflect the different playstyle each side has. The French, for example, start with a fur trader – since their economic engine mostly relies on settling provinces with furs and then selling them off – and a bateaux card they can use to travel the rivers and lakes of Canada and settle nearby areas. By contrast the British get more ship and settler cards, reflecting their need to expand along the coastline and send trade convoys back home for money.

As ever with deck builders the efficiency question comes into it as well. Each territory can only be settled if you have a territory – and thus a territory card – linking to it by ship, boat or wagon. Settling a new territory gets you the card for that territory. However, many of these territory cards are useless other than as stepping-stones for settling further-flung areas; once you’ve done that they just sit there clogging up your deck. Gobbling up a lot of territory may score points but it’ll also give you this enormous, unwieldy deck stuffed with awful cards. Players need to keep an eye on what they’re settling and where, and they need to use the Governor card each side gets to get rid of useless cards every single time it comes up otherwise they’ll lose the efficiency game.

That being said, it’s not absolutely essential that they do this. I was the French in the first game of Acres I ever played. I played it very, very badly, not even buying a Governor until the mid-game and expanding way too fast into too much non-scoring territory. My British opponent played extremely efficiently and had a lean, mean deck of only the best cards available to him. However, I still won the game. This was partly because I had invested in a military and my opponent – because he was going for efficiency – had not. Partly it was down to my reshuffling my draw deck on the very last turn of the game and getting exactly what I needed to win a siege I was prosecuting. Sadly, though, it was also down to the fact that the asymmetry in A Few Acres Of Snow, while making it a very interesting game with a lot of replayability, has come at the cost of making the game genuinely unbalanced in favour of the French. They start with fewer victory point scoring locations available to them, but they don’t need them because they’re sitting on top of Quebec which scores as much as New York and Boston combined. The VP locations they can get to do not need settler cards to capture; this means the French player is free to develop his cities and forts while the British player has to scrabble through his deck looking for settler cards just to maintain parity with the French scoreline.

Still, that the game is a little unbalanced doesn’t diminish the fact that Acres is excellent, as far as deck-builders go. As long as the players go into it knowing about the French advantage (the weaker player should play the French, obviously) it’s still possible to have an evenly-matched, thrilling game where the winner is never clear until the points have been tallied up at the very end. I definitely recommend it.

Finally, there is the king, the messiah, the game that restored my faith in the deck-builder as a viable boardgaming medium: Thunderstone.

At first glance Thunderstone looks very much like Dominion. Indeed, it pretty much is – you have a set starting hand, you have a supply of cards in the centre of the table which you can buy and add to your deck, and there’s a row of victory point cards along the top you’ll need to win the game. The key difference lies in the way you acquire those victory point cards: every single one is a monster that lives in a dungeon. The cards in your hand represent a typical RPG party of heroes and their equipment that can be sent down the dungeon to kill the monsters. Despite being essentially the same game, Thunderstone is far, far better than Dominion because of the way it effectively connects with its theme and weaves it into its gameplay.

Of course it’s not quite as simple as that two line description. Your starting cards are mostly junk, consisting of six militia – useless except in very, very specific circumstances – some rations and some torches. The militia can be upgraded to real grown-up heroes, but this costs a disproportionate amount of XP that is better spent upgrading the heroes themselves (which can be bought as-is from the village) so one of the first things you want to do in Thunderstone is kill every single militia card you have so that it’s not gumming up your deck. Even then it won’t be totally efficient; every monster slain is also added to your deck, and while the monsters are often worth gold and victory points they have no utility whatsoever when you take their rotting, foetid corpses down into the dungeon with you. This provides a fairly nice counterbalancing mechanic as well as a strategic consideration similar to that of A Few Acres Of Snow: killing a lot of low-to-mid value monsters can get a lot of points for little outlay, but it’ll also make your future dungeon forays far less effective since your hands will now mostly be composed of those monster cards. The player in the lead is also at a disadvantage as he has more of them than anyone else. It’s nice and elegant and provides players with the risk/reward element that’s sorely missing from Dominion, which all too often devolves into everyone ignoring the one and three point victory cards and concentrating solely on the high-value six pointers in order to preserve deck efficiency.

There are other factors that keep the game interesting. Some monsters are only vulnerable to magic attacks. Some monsters are immune to it. Some monsters inflict nasty status effects on the heroes fighting them, up to and including autokilling them if they’re of the wrong type and they don’t have the right items. Fighting a monster that lives deeper in the dungeon without enough light (in the form of torches and other items) will incur a hefty combat penalty. And every time a monster gets to the front row of the dungeon they can inflict a Breaching effect on every player in the game; only a few monsters have these, but they’re all genuinely nasty and cause players to prioritise and kill the breaching monsters before they reach the front of the dungeon queue.

It’s all nicely set up so that there’s lots to do, the game never gets boring, and even players who are doing badly can amuse themselves by playing to the RPG theme. Thunderstone is not immune from the persistent plague of expansionitis that afflicts deck-builders, but even this is ameliorated by the number of bullshit mechanics introduced to the game being kept to a minimum. Most of what the expansions do is what expansions should do: add more cards – and thus more variety – to the game while keeping any other crap the developers might want to add purely optional. The upshot of all this is that I have yet to get tired of Thunderstone in spite of having played it just as much as – if not more so – than Dominion. It’s probably the safest suggestion anyone can make during the what-game-shall-we-play game my boardgaming group has to go through every Wednesday evening, as while we’d rather be playing something new, of the games we’ve already played to death Thunderstone has aged by far the least and is far lighter and more accessible than something like Agricola. It’s something that excels at what the deck-builder is supposed to be: light, disposable fun that is over in forty-five minutes. And that’s all I ever asked from the genre, really.

EDIT: In response to popular demand:

Nightfall.

VULKO. AH AH AH.

The post Battling Boardom: Deck Builders, Part Two. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is the beginning of an infrequent column on board games. It won’t be weekly like my other stuff since I’m nowhere near as sure of myself as I am when I talk about video games or science, and since I tend to only play individual games once or twice it’s tricky to assess whether they’re good or not. This makes it rather hard to come up with decent material for a column, so I’ll only publish them as and when I can think of something to write about.

Ah, the deck-builder. It’s a game type with a relatively long and venerable history, but one that has recently come into vogue in mainstream boardgames with the advent of what I’d describe as the “disposable” deck builder. Previously in something like Magic: The Gathering you’d build your deck of cards before the game and be stuck with those cards and those cards only for its duration. The Magic approach allows players to fine-tune their deck according to a certain strategy which makes it a fairly deep game, but it also has a major problem thanks to its payment model, which is similar to the payment model used by social media games the world over. In Magic you can buy fixed decks which have the same cards in each type of deck, but these are only intended to start you off – the free sample, as it were. The real meat of Magic is to be found in the so called “booster” decks. This is where the most interesting cards live, but what you get in an individual booster deck is almost completely random. In order to perfect a certain strategy you’ll probably need a certain booster card, but getting this card is a complete crap shoot unless you happen to be rich enough to either keep buying booster decks until you luck into it or else buy it off another player who already has it.

Thus Magic is an inherently asymmetric and uneven game – and not in a good way, either. It pretty much invented the concept of “pay to win” now taking shape amongst the various free MMOs you can find on sites like Facebook; the more money you invest in the game, the more stuff you can do and the better the chance you have of winning. What distinguishes the recent generation of deck-builders from something like Magic is that they attempt to level the playing field by making players build their decks from a common supply of cards as the game progresses, while also introducing various other mechanics to ensure the game retains some degree of replayability. In theory everything you need to play multiple games will be included in the game box, with no other additional investment required, resulting in a light, disposable game you can play in forty-five minutes at the end of an evening without it ever getting old.

In theory.

Dominion is the game that kickstarted the current trend for deck-builders. It won a whole crapload of boardgaming awards on release and more-or-less set the paradigm for the deck-builders that came after it – everyone gets the same starting deck of some money and victory point cards, and they use the money to buy more cards from the supply in the centre of the table. This supply is randomly determined by drawing nine cards from a draft deck of about forty, with ten cards of each type drawn being placed into the supply. Once the game begins every player is free to build their deck in any way they choose provided they have the money in hand to buy new cards. Bought cards go on the discard pile, and once a player runs through their deck the discard pile is shuffled and forms a new draw deck.

Mechanically, Dominion is a work of genius. (It should be seeing all the imitators that have been released in the years since). Since your deck will recycle every time you run through it you’ll see all the cards in it multiple times, but how often you see them depends on how many cards are in it and how quickly you can run through it. If you’ve bought a really expensive card from the supply but your deck is filled with dross cards and you only run through it every five or six turns, then you will only get to use that card every five or six turns. This gives players a strong motivation to do one or both of the following:

• Remove weaker cards so that the deck becomes leaner and more efficient; you can’t help but draw good cards every single turn if that’s all your deck consists of.

• Get lots of cards that speed up the cycling process; many cards in Dominion allow you to draw more cards into your hand when played, allowing you to run through the deck more quickly.

The catch is that you can’t get rid of all your useless cards – at least assuming you want to win the game at some point – as the victory point cards have no function other than to be scored at the end of the game. Every victory point card you buy is potentially clogging up your deck with dead cards, making it bloated and inefficient. This is a neat mechanic which forces the player to strike a balance between total efficiency and actually scoring enough points to win the game, which is good because Dominion has nothing else going for it whatsoever.

Full disclosure time: I liked Dominion the first time I played it. I still like the central mechanic. It’s a very nice piece of boardgame design. Unfortunately Dominion makes no further effort to hook in the player. Many of the blog pieces I write tend to bang on about world-building in video games. It’s a quality I value very, very highly, and the same is true of board game themes. I can enjoy mediocre – or even downright bad – boardgames as long as they have an interesting theme that meshes well with what I’m doing as I play it, but Dominion’s problem is that it has a theme that doesn’t match the gameplay at all. The idea behind Dominion is that you’re supposed to be a king building a kingdom, and so all the cards are things you’d expect to find in a medieval town – village square, market, town walls etc. I forget what specifically is in the game, but that’s understandable since what the card is has precisely bugger all relation to what it does. The kingdom building theme is completely divorced from what is going on in the game, and to make matters worse this is a card game so you don’t even get the basic boardgame thrill of putting pieces down in front of you to get some visible sense that you’re developing your position. All Dominion has left to invest you in the theme is the card art, and this is by turns staggering bland and utterly dire. As a result it quickly becomes apparent that Dominion is an utterly soulless cipher with no joy or sense of fun to it whatsoever – that you are mechanically carrying out the same actions over and over again in the name of greater efficiency, which is a little too much like the real world for my tastes.

To make matters worse Dominion has compromised its major strength – that it is a standalone deck-building game with no additional investment required – by releasing a veritable horde of expansions, every one of which has somehow made the game worse in some way. These aren’t necessary as such, but if you’re getting tired of the base game and you want to get some new cards then you have to contend with ridiculous new mechanics like brewing potions and pirating ships. My breaking point came after the Seaside expansion, when I found myself staring at a game mat with my doubloons on it and thought “What the hell am I doing here?” The new cards came at the cost of making the game even more incoherent theme-wise, which is very bad for my continued interest in a game.

So I don’t play Dominion any more. When people ask me about it I refer to it in the same hushed tones that Alyx uses to talk about Ravenholm in Half Life 2 – it’s now this horrible, shambling, headcrab infested corpse-town that I don’t intend to ever visit again.

Race For The Galaxy (RftG) is a game that appeared just after Dominion, and couldn’t be more different. Where Dominion had a putative fantasy theme, RftG is decidedly sci-fi. Where Dominion insists on everyone having the same starting setup, RftG injects some unpredictability into the mix by giving everyone a unique starting homeworld that will, to a degree, dictate what strategy they pursue. Where Dominion allows players to pick and choose what they add to their deck, RftG has them drawing off of a single face-down supply so that they have no idea what they’re going to get. And where Dominion has discrete cards that are used for money, in RtfG every card is used for money. In fact RftG is a game that owes more to the action-based mechanics of Puerto Rico than it does a genuine deck builder like Dominion, but while it’s an interesting attempt to play with the format it is also ultimately a failure.

Starting from the top, the major hurdle facing a new player of Race for the Galaxy is the vast array of bewildering symbols that adorn every single card. When your game is so complicated that you can’t communicate what a card does on the card itself and have to resort to a collection of symbols that requires an A4-sized player aid filled with very small writing to decode, you know you’ve got a problem. You have to learn this highly specialised and esoteric language before you can even think about playing Race with any sort of ease or comfort, and that’s something that justifiably pisses many people off before they can get into the game.

(I just pulled the reference sheet from BoardGameGeek, and it turns out it’s actually double-sided.)

Once you’ve decrypted the symbols you’ll discover that RftG is actually a fairly bad game. I mentioned that every player gets a homeworld that dictates their strategy, but the problem is that in RftG “strategy” is a thing that is impossible. Any strategy you came up with would, at the end of the day, rely on you getting certain cards out of the random draw. Not only does this mean that you pretty much have to memorise the entire deck to know what is and isn’t possible, but it also makes winning contingent on a disproportionate amount of luck – especially since you’re not guaranteed to see a given card in the course of the game. Even if you run through the entire deck someone else might have used it as currency. The central draw supply ensures that the game is mired in this perpetual fog of uncertainty that makes it impossible to come up with any sort of coherent plan. It’s the deck building equivalent of blackjack.

I suppose one good thing about the game being so bad is that I was only mildly offended that there were cards included in the base game that basically didn’t work unless you bought (sigh) expansion sets. Despite this, though, I enjoy playing Race more than I do Dominion, and this is because Race connects with its theme far more effectively – you get to watch your space empire grow as you put planets down in front of you, and all these cards actually do something. I am not going to outright condemn a game which lets me pretend to be Emperor of the Galactic Imperium and send in the Space Marines to eradicate the Rebel Homeworld even if winning it is based entirely on the luck of the draw. So if somebody ever puts a gun to your head and forces you to choose between playing Dominion and playing Race for the Galaxy, pick Race for the Galaxy. It’s a rubbish game, but a better experience just so long as you don’t take it too seriously.

That’s the two awful deck builders dealt with. Next week I get to tell you all about two deck builders I actually enjoy: Thunderstone and A Few Acres Of Snow. Bet you can’t wait.

The post Battling Boardom: Deck Builders, Part One. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.