There are many boardgames that would benefit greatly from a computer game adaptation. Ticket to Ride is not one of them.

This isn’t the fault of the developers. Their adaptation of TtR is a decent facsimile of the boardgame; it was originally developed for the iPad and it shows in the controls, but for once this is entirely reasonable as it’s a fairly intuitive representation of what you’d do when playing the boardgame. The problem is that Ticket to Ride itself is far too simple. It’s a light boardgame designed to be played in an hour or so with very few rules and components to keep track of. The great strength of computer game adaptations is that they automate the rules and components side of boardgames, but if that side was pretty much non-existent in the first place then automation adds little to the experience — and in Ticket to Ride’s case it actually detracts from it because it exposes the simplicity of the game for what it is.

Ticket to Ride is a game about drawing pretty coloured train wagons from a deck of cards and then using sets of similar coloured wagons to lay track down on the playing board, which looks like this:

You can do one of three things every turn: draw two wagon cards, either from the set of five revealed cards in the top right or blind from the deck; play wagon cards to lay track; or take new tickets for new routes to fulfil. The eponymous tickets are – predictably – what drives Ticket to Ride. You pick one or more tickets from a selection given to you at the start of the game, each of which names two cities on the board. Your job is to join up these two cities with a single continuous track. If you manage to do this you score the number of points printed on the ticket. Joining up two cities which are close together will only score five or six points, whereas connecting two cities on opposite sides of the board can score twenty or more.

However, there is a catch. Any tickets in your hand which remain unfulfilled at the end of the game (which rolls around when somebody runs down their stock of 45 track pieces) will have their points value deducted from your score, making every ticket in your hand a potential liability. And if you elect to take more tickets during the game, you have to take at least one of the three presented to you, even if they’re all cities on the other side of the board well away from your established track network. Taking more tickets is therefore decidedly risky, and becomes increasingly so as the end of the game approaches and you have less and less time to build the required track. Balanced up against that is the hope that you might be lucky enough to draw some tickets which you’ve already built the track for (this happens a lot, especially if you’ve built a track all the way across the board), in which case the new tickets are pretty much free points.

This risk/reward mechanic that’s tied up in the tickets is probably the most interesting part of Ticket to Ride. The actual process of laying track is almost absurdly simple. Potential routes you can build will be picked out in segments of a particular colour, or else in anonymous grey chunks. Each segment represents a wagon card you have to play to lay track on that route; four orange segments separating two cities will require four orange wagons to link those cities up. Grey segments can have any colour wagon played to lay track there, with the only requirement being that four grey segments will require any four wagons of the same colour. There are joker cards in the deck which can stand in for any colour wagon, and the lack of any hand limit means it’s entirely viable to keep drawing cards until you’re ready to start laying track along your desired route.

That is, unless some other bastard has laid track there first. Ticket to Ride can accommodate anywhere from two to five players, and with five players the board starts to get positively crowded. Some routes have double track allowing two players to make a connection and it’s almost always possible to find an alternate route to your destination, but this will take time; time you almost certainly do not have if you want to win. So there’s a balance here: do you start laying track early, grabbing the best routes but possibly tipping off other players as to where you want to go? Or do you bide your time, amass a good stock of cards and then blitz your way across the board in a flurry of track-building? The flipside to that is that one of the destinations on your tickets may be cut off entirely by other players, ensuring you take a big points hit for your tardiness.

That’s how the boardgame version of Ticket to Ride plays. The computer version sharpens this simple gameplay down further to a brutal nub of efficient routefinding, but if you’re playing against the AI several weaknesses in the formula become apparent. First is that the AI is reasonably competent but has no concept of advanced human play like blocking other players, meaning it’s pathetically easy to strangle the computer’s routes while driving your trains wherever the hell you want them to go. I have won every single game I’ve played against the AI, and while it regularly gets within 10-20 points of my score it’s always 10-20 points below me. There’s little challenge to be found in the solo play here. There is a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from breaking the game to your will – my current record after a couple of hours of play stands at ten fulfilled tickets – but after a while you start wondering what’s next. And the answer to that question is: not much. The single map of Ticket to Ride is something that’s taken for granted when you buy a board game. In a computer game it seems like a ridiculous limitation since after your tenth play you’re going to have seen pretty much everything that board has to offer, and when each game takes just 10-15 minutes that’s not a huge amount of playing time. There are other, more complex boards available as DLC – you get the Europe board for free if you buy before the end of May, which provides a slightly meatier playing experience – but even these don’t prolong the game’s lifetime that much. I suspect that if you want to get your money’s worth out of Ticket to Ride you’d have to venture online to play against other humans; however, it definitely loses something when you can’t see the other players and revel in their despair as you block their trans-American express with a single purple wagon.

Simplicity can be a boon for a game – hell, it’s the sole reason Minesweeper has managed to endure two decades as a Windows freebie – but there’s also some level of depth required that I’m not sure Ticket to Ride has. It always seemed like light, end-of-evening fare to me; a palate cleanser after playing the more demanding games, and I’m a little puzzled as to why it’s the palate cleanser they adapted and not those more demanding games. Automating those would make them more accessible since I wouldn’t have to fiddle with three centimetre-thick rulebook and a zillion a little counters, but here? Here it seems somewhat redundant. Worse, it actually seems counterproductive. Despite the excellence of its virtual presentation Ticket to Ride loses a lot of its charm when you take away the physical experience of handling the board and the playing pieces, and it’s not something with the variety to stand up to extended play in the way that, say, Through The Ages or Agricola* probably could. It does have one great advantage over the boardgame version: it costs £7, whereas the boardgame will set you back £25-30. However, like the boardgame it can only ever supplement the more substantial games in your library. It cannot replace them.

*Actually this would be the worst thing ever. I love Agricola but it doesn’t need to be made more clinical than it already is.

The post Thoughts: Ticket To Ride. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

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.