Tunnels of Doom

I’ve been trying to organize a monthly game day since earlier this year. It hasn’t been wildly successful as I had hoped, but considering the amount of tabletop gaming I get done under normal circumstances, anything is an improvement.

This past weekend was the second one I’ve managed to organize; each game day has its own theme and this one was space-themed games.

Star Commander

My buddy Thom brought Star Commander along and we played it first. It’s a card-driven resource management game with a light space theme (the metaphor could easily be anything: Pirate ships, truck driving, etc.) where you attempt to build a complete set of cards by wrangling the key resource in the game, which in this case is crew members. Each ship type has a set number of crew that it can hold (and indeed needs to have in order to win the game). You pay sufficient crew cards to purchase the ships (10 for a scout ship, 20 for a cruiser, and so on) and then play additional crew to staff them up. Essentially it takes 20 crew to buy and then staff a scout for example.

The trick is that you can shuttle crew members between the ships in your fleet so you can use crew from one stocked ship to stock or help buy another. The idea is that eventually you must purchase and staff a full fleet of ships (two of the scouts plus a cruiser, a dreadnaught and a base) in order to win. But of course the whole while your opponents are doing the same as well as trying to slow you down by attacking your ships with missiles and lasers. There are counter cards to the attack ones, like evasions and shields, plus defensive ships have a chance to fight back if they aren’t destroyed early so combat can be a risky proposition. And of course there are a number of special cards that allow certain rules to be changed like spies which permit non-combat destruction of ships with the help of a sabotage card and convoys that help you protect your most valuable ships.

I ended up winning the game in spite of it being my first time playing, mostly due to the fact that when given the opportunity late in the game one of my opponents didn’t attack me but focused on someone else instead, claiming a higher percentage chance of victory. It may or may not have been a valid tactic but in any case it allowed me to continue drawing to find the last crew card I needed to fill the base and win.

Overall I liked Star Commander; the open-ended combat system was novel and fun in a modified War kind of way, and the turns were quick enough to avoid having the game drag too much. However, I had a few key complaints that prevented me from really loving it. One was that I felt the card distribution in the deck was off: There were too many times where people sat around for five to ten turns just waiting for a crew card to show up, staring at a handful of fairly useless combat cards. Meanwhile, you can’t actually attack without a mandatory Engage card which were also frustratingly rare. Since you needed one or the other to really do anything useful, it felt like there should have been more of each. It seemed like very often people in Crew card droughts would draw an Engage card and pick a fight with someone just because combat was a good excuse to empty cards from your hand and you got to draw back up to 7 once the combat was over. We did find out toward the end of the game that you can replace your hand on your turn for a whole new one once per game, but that didn’t seem like enough to really counteract the poor card balance.

The other complaint was that the crew level was marked by having the ship card cover up the higher crew levels on a thin board that represented your fleet, except the boards were prone to bumping and if the card shifted it was easy to forget how much crew had really been on the ship. A simple solution to me would have been to stack the (copious) Crew cards under or near the ships which would have allowed them to be audited later. I also wish there had been some more thought put in to the theme which as I mentioned was pretty exchangeable. The closest they came was the shields/fire system/laser combo in combat, but it certainly wasn’t an integral part of the game or even the combat system. Maybe something along the lines of specific maneuver cards or a sense of putting the ships in a formation for the purposes of convoys might have helped.

Sector 41

A few months back I took my daughter to a flea market being held at a game store within reasonable driving distance. I picked up a couple of games while I was there, none of which I had heard of but I gave them a shot just because they were bargains and looked interesting. Sector 41 was apparently developed by a local guy and Thom had actually participated in the testing of the game early on.

Basically it works like this: You set up a grid of 81 tiles that represent the titular Sector 41. Each player has a mothership tile that moves along one edge of the grid, one or two spaces per turn. On the mothership are three scout vessels which can be deployed to search the sector by flipping over the tile as you land on it and, depending on the type of tile, either continuing your move or ending your turn. There is also a mechanic-based token called the Wanderer who starts in the middle of the board and is moved by the current player to an unexplored tile to help speed the exploration of the sector along (Thom said the Wanderer had been added since he tested the game, probably in response to feedback that the game was in desperate need of a faster pace).

The point of the game is to search for ore-producing planets marked with numbers that contain the desired resource called Glynnium. The numbers indicate how many resource tokens appear on that planet. Each player then struggles for dominance over the planet (and the resource) by using the explored tiles and a mechanic called space folding that allows the mothership to skip lateral movement for a turn in favor of pushing the tiles in its current stack forward, pulling the furthest tile back to the near edge. The player who ends up with the most Glynnium wins.

Where the game really works is in building the sense of space exploration, with all its likely hazards, pitfalls and serendipitous chance, and conveying the sense of competition between warring mining companies trying to race to find but also cleverly outmaneuver their rivals to emerge as the victor. Exploring is always fun and the space folding mechanism makes for some really amusing and interesting strategies.

Here’s where the game lacks: Primarily the production of the game is flawed in that it can’t be played without a reference sheet. There are dozens of tile types and many of them do some unusual things but they are represented on the tiles themselves by an often abstract or indistinct illustration and nothing more. Constantly having to check the manual to determine what each tile does is tedious and unnecessarily slow when the problem could have easily been solved by including the tile effect text on the tile itself. It may not have looked quite as nice, but it would have made it much more playable.

The second issue is that combat in the game is boring. As in, barely worth bothering with boring. Sure, it can be strategic, but literally the attacker always wins, no matter how many defenders there are. Since there is no risk vs. reward element, and the end result is typically a matter of replacing an occupying explorer with your own, often combat goes back and forth for turns while players use a combination of combat and space folding to wear each other—that is, each player—down until someone gives up. That sort of design should never make it out of the planning phase. This is curious to me as well since the box I got came with a space-age looking dice that isn’t used anywhere. I assumed there may be some alternate rules somewhere that allowed combat to be a bit more intriguing but why it wasn’t included in the base game I can’t fathom.

In the end, I won this game as well, largely due to several fortuitous Glynnium deposits being close to my starting position and the fact that Thom and Aaron spent a large part of the mid-game playing cat-and-mouse over a stash of the resource in their adjacent corners. It’s one of those games that I find myself very much enjoying while I play but as soon as the game is over I want to grouse about some of the dumber design decisions. I think it bugs me that it’s so obviously flawed when it has the potential to be really good.

Race to the Galaxy

With time running short toward the end of the day, I broke out Race which I play about once a year. The problem with it is that it’s the kind of game that you really need to play a bunch in order to have the flow work well or you have to have everyone playing be at about the same comfort level with the rules. Since I’m typically playing with people who are much more familiar with it than I am I almost always feel flustered and behind, like I’m holding up the show. I never get enough chance to develop a strategy and when the game is over and points are being counted I often feel lucky to have any VPs at all, sometimes even wondering how I managed to get as many as I did.

I doubt I’ll ever play it often enough to memorize the cards or get enough of a standard strategy to know what to look for if my starting world is X or if I draw Y early in the game but it would be nice if I were at least familiar enough with the basic play so that if people wanted to add the expansions I didn’t practically tremble in fear because I can barely handle the base game.

As it was I found it amusing that everyone else playing was remarking how different the game was without the expansions they had become accustomed to and I was thinking they all needed to slow down so I could have a chance to figure out what my next move was going to be.

I still had fun—no matter what I really do like the game—but Kristi won by a very large margin mostly due in part to her getting a VP combo going far earlier than anyone else as we scrambled trying to get some resource production in place. I think a good time was had by all.

Looking Ahead

I think the second Game Day was successful overall. We got three games finished in about six hours including time for pizza and rules explanations for a couple of the games which is a good rate I think. Next month I’m planning for fantasy-themed games: I would really like to have my Talisman minatures painted for that but I also have Runebound and DungeonQuest as fallbacks. Meanwhile there are plenty of fantasy games I haven’t tried or only tried once like Warhammer Quest or Descent. Ideally someone coming next month will have something like that they want to bring and if I don’t get to play Talisman with painted minis, I can at least try something new.