Larry Levy:  Czech Mates

I’m sure many people assume that anyone who writes regularly about games is inundated with free review copies from publishers desperate for any words of approval.  ‘Tain’t so, McGee.  My output is about one tenth that of luminaries like Greg Schloesser and Tom Vasel, so very few freebies have found their way to my door.  (And I’m just as glad that’s the case—I’d hate to feel obligated to try out a bunch of mediocre to poor games just because they were sent to me gratis.)

So it was a very pleasant surprise when I got a Geekmail about a month ago from Petr Murmak.  Petr is one of the principals behind Czech Games Edition, the new company publishing professional productions of the latest designs to come out of the Czech Republic.  He wanted to know if I’d be interested in receiving prototypes of the two games CGE will be selling at Essen this year.  My response was an enthusiastic “yes”, so a couple of weeks after that, I was accepting a carefully wrapped package from a slightly apprehensive UPS delivery man (who was probably wondering what bizarre and illicit items could be arriving from that corner of the world).  Both games were played last Saturday, so here’s an early look at these new arrivals.

Galaxy Trucker
Galaxy Trucker has a very attractive theme—the players are space-age truckers down on their luck, so they have to build the ships they’ll be piloting for their deliveries.  However, even without that theme, it would have attracted attention, because of its designer:  Vlaada Chvatil, fresh from his IGA win for his brilliant Through the Ages.  Needless to say, this is a very different kind of game than TtA, which makes the package even more intriguing.

Galaxy Trucker is a real-time delivery space game, so the obvious parallel is last year’s Space Dealer.  Actually, it has next to nothing in common with that game.  If you’re looking for a comparison, Factory Fun is a closer one, but this design really does have a unique feel.

The game consists of three rounds and each round is composed of two parts.  In the first part, the players use tiles to simultaneously construct their ships.  In the second part, the ships encounter both good and bad events to see how well they fare.  The object is to earn the most space credits over the course of the three flights.

In the first part of each round, the tiles are spread out face down and the players will grab them one at a time to see if they want to add them to their ship.  There are different types of connectors on each tile side and they all have to match up (like the tiles in Carcassonne).  This tends to be the major complication, but you also have a limited amount of space and there’s all sorts of features you’d like to include in your ships.  Different tile types include cabins for crew, engines for speed (and for eluding any bad guys you encounter), cannons to defend yourself against the aforementioned bad guys, shields for protection against meteors, batteries for powering up the three previous items, and cargo holds for toting around the goods you’ll be selling at your destination.  Cramming all of these in sufficient numbers in your ship while also dealing with the connection issues is a genuine challenge.

Complicating this, of course, is the fact that you’re in a race with your opponents to get your ship finished first.  Those who tense up when time pressure is involved shouldn’t be overly concerned.  The game does use an egg timer (I wonder if anyone actually uses these to time eggs anymore), but the final flip of the timer can only begin after one of the players has finished constructing his ship.  So if all of the players are struggling a bit, there won’t be too much time pressure to get a reasonable ship built.  Of course, as the players get better, time will become more of a factor, because you really do want to be as close to the front of the line as possible.  But Chvatil’s method of dealing with the real-time aspect is a very nice compromise between moving things along and not making people crazy with an absolute time limit and it works very well here.

There’s yet another way of spending your time during this portion of the turn, but first let me describe how the flights are conducted.  A small number of cards (8, 12, and 16, for the three rounds) is dealt out.  These are exposed one at a time and the effects of each one carried out.  The way the players built their ships will determine how much they can take advantage of the good events and how severely they are trashed by the bad ones.

What’s nice, though, is that each player can partially review what these cards will be as they’re building their ships.  Most of the cards that will be used are available for the players to look at during the first portion of the round.  The problem, of course, is that this takes time and your opponents are merrily adding tiles to their vehicles while you’re checking out future events.  It’s another nice balance to be considered.

There’s about a dozen different types of cards and their effects are varied.  You can land on planets and pick up goods which can be sold for space credits should you make it to your destination.  Each of these cards has multiple planets listed and the player in the lead (originally, the one who finished building their ship first) gets first pick.  There are also opportunities for picking up fast cash if you have sufficient crew.  But space is a wild and bitchy place, so there’s also meteors to dodge, smugglers to swipe your cargo, slavers to steal your crew, and pirates to battle.  The ability of your ship to use its shields, cannons, and engines effectively determines whether you get smacked or whether you can actually make a profit out of these travails.

Many of these eeevil cards will send projectiles at the tiles of your ship (where exactly they will hit is determined randomly, but they affect all the players the same).  If you can’t defend against these, the first tile they hit gets blown away.  Of course, if this tile was connecting other tiles to the rest of your ship, you’ll be losing multiple tiles.  Poorly constructed ships will soon resemble Swiss cheese, much to the delight of your opponents.

If you manage to hang on and survive all the cards of the trip, there are rewards.  Each finishing player gets a cash bonus, with the lead players getting the most (several of the cards can affect the players’ relative positions, so the leader at the start won’t necessarily be the one to pick up the biggest prize).  Any goods you’ve gathered can be sold—those who didn’t make it to the end still get half price for their goods.  Unfortunately, you also lose money for all the tiles you lost off the ship (up to a set limit), so you’re not even guaranteed a profit.  But no one ever said being a space trucker was the way to riches.  That’s a ten-forward, good buddy.

After each round, all the tiles are returned to the middle of the board, new adventure cards are dealt out, and we start all over again.  There are three different mats for the three rounds, with the maximum size of the ships increasing with each round.  At the end of our three galactic convoys, we all total up our space credits and the biggest chunk of change wins.

Galaxy Trucker is one of those rare games that are just as much fun when you’re getting hammered as when you’re doing well.  Even without a huge amount of time pressure, building your ship can be a bewildering experience at first.  I mean, the rules are simple enough and you know what you want to do, but trying to construct a balanced ship while getting the connections right is a real challenge.  It’s far too easy to find a whole section of potential growth cordoned off because of careless building.  Or maybe you’ve filled up all your spaces, but were never able to squeeze more than one battery tile in, severely limiting your actions during the flight.  Because of the real-time aspect, what could be a frustrating experience is instead a frantic and fun one.  You’re cursing while you look for the perfect tile, but you’re laughing while you’re doing it.

And if you think that was crazy, wait until you send your makeshift vessel to infinity and beyond.  When those meteors start zooming in and the space pirates begin using you for target practice, it can really get hysterical.  The location of these strikes is determined by a dice roll, so there’s always the chance that they’ll miss you or hit a well protected spot.  But when the one weak spot gets clobbered (as it invariably does), it’s just plain funny to see crucial parts of your ship float away.  Needless to say, on the very next card, those are the very components you needed to prevent yet more losses.  It’s just a lot of fun.

As you get more experienced, you learn to build better and these disasters are replaced with more successful play.  At this point, I suspect that the time factor comes into play.  Yes, I can now build an effective, balanced ship, but if my opponents can do it just as well in half the time, I’ll still be sucking hard vacuum.  It remains to be seen what the replayability factor of this game is, but given the variety of adventure cards and the number of levels of play I’ve already identified, I see no reason to think this will be a problem.

I’ve played twice (with four and two players) and kibitzed on another game.  In my first contest, with three other newbies, many mistakes were made and the hilarity was great.  It didn’t help that we encountered an unusually high number of harsh cards, although in a way, that only added to the fun.  The winning score was one space credit—and we were very happy that one of us actually finished in the black!  In the four-player game I observed, the cards were kinder and the winning score was in the seventies, but the players enjoyed it just as much.  Finally, in my two-player game, I really saw the value of experience.  There were still some frantic moments, but I was doing much better with the building and won with 96 credits!  But in future games, I’m sure I’ll have to be just as efficient in a shorter period of time.

It’s important to recognize what this game is not.  It is not a high strategy design.  You can try to plan for eventualities, but that’s limited by the tiles you reveal and the speed of your fellow players.  There’s a good deal of skill in the building, but your fate also rests greatly on the cards that are dealt and the luck of the dice.  It’s not a game you should take too seriously, but it’s hardly a piece of fluff either.  It successfully combines real-time mechanics, planning, and the hilarity of a chaotic experience game in one unusual and very approachable package.  Is it as good as Through the Ages?  Of course not, but in its own way, this is just as audacious an undertaking and Chvatil has pulled it off remarkably well.

The main reason CGE split off from Czech Board Games (the company that produced Through the Ages) was to publish more professionally produced games.  Since I’ve only seen a prototype, I can’t say how completely successful this will be, but I certainly liked what I saw.  I’m pretty sure the prototype uses the art from the final version and it looks very nice.  Of much more significance, the art on the tiles is easily distinguishable (even from across the table) while still resembling the items being portrayed.  So the drawings assist with the gameplay and the final product kind of looks like a spaceship.  A very nice job by Filip Murmak, who was also responsible for the solid artwork in Through the Ages.  The cards, the maps, the displays:  all are both functional and quite attractive.  Then there’s the rulebook, which presents all the rules clearly, is easy to read, and is very funny.  Mixing information and humor is tough enough, but to maintain it through a translation process is almost miraculous.  Kudos to Chvatil (who I believe wrote the rules) and translator Jason Holt for a job very well done.

Galaxy Trucker is about as far removed from Through the Ages as you can imagine, but there are still some telltale indications that they come from the same hand.  Both games are very well balanced and playtested.  In both, there’s a lot you want to accomplish, but getting it all done takes skill and experience.  And both work outside the usual gaming envelope, giving them an innovative and unique feel.  Clearly, Chvatil isn’t afraid to take on big challenges.  He’s taken us back into antiquity and forward into outer space.  Who knows where this talented designer will take us with his next game?

League of Six
The other CGE prototype we tried out was League of Six, by first-time designer Vladimir Suchy.  Eric has provided a very thorough description of the game’s mechanics here, so I won’t bother repeating it.

This one, unfortunately, didn’t fare as well with us as Galaxy Trucker did.  It’s by no means a bad game and there’s much to admire about the design.  The town selection mechanic, where the players “bid” their guards, works nicely.  The way you collect goods, with the rotating tax hex, is clever.  And the goods delivery system makes you think.

But sometimes the whole is less than the sum of its individual parts.  I had two main complaints about our five-player game.  The first was that there didn’t seem to be a terribly tight correlation between the goods you gathered and the victory points you got for them.  I had several turns in which I didn’t think I did well in obtaining goods, or in which I went for replenishing my guards, rather than getting good stuff.  But then the fellow on my right would pick a row which enabled me to cash in a cube for good veeps, or I’d be able to get a nice bonus despite picking low in the turn order, and before I knew it, I’d have a nice turn.  Often as good as one in which I thought I got great goods.  Very likely, more experience will lead to better judgment, so this may be the consequence of a first game, but it was still disconcerting.

The second issue is probably more serious.  The game felt very processional.  Each of the six turns seemed very much like the others.  Similar actions, similar goods, similar rewards.  The last couple of turns at least featured a more intense race for the civic leaders, but that was about it.  The mechanics are interesting, but not enough to be doing the same things turn after turn.  The game seemed to be totally lacking in a story arc.  I can see the first problem possibly being resolved with more experience, but the other one seemed more endemic to the design.

Consequently, none of us were too thrilled with the game.  It lasted 90 minutes, not too lengthy, but longer than the 60 minute listed duration and, frankly, longer than we wanted to play.  No one hated it, but there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

I’m reluctant to throw too much cold water on a game after a single playing.  Eric seems to have had a better first experience than we did and Aaron Haag of the Westpark Gamers rated it an 8 (higher than his rating for Galaxy Trucker).  So we may have missed some subtleties.  But based on my experience to date, I really can’t recommend League of Six.  If you’re going to Essen, try it out yourself and see what you think.

More Gaming:  Patrician
We got to try another new game last week:  Michael Schacht’s latest game from Amigo/Mayfair, Patrician.  This did not go well.  In fact, just about everyone hated it.  Now I must hasten to add that we played with five and I’ve seen several opinions that this plays best with two or three, so this data point may not be too relevant.  But I’d sure have to say that with five, this is a stinker.

The early plays didn’t seem important at all, at least in terms of board position.  You’re probably better off grabbing double cards, but if you don’t have the cards to let you take these, there really isn’t much to do for the first half of the game.  Then, just like that, the game enters its final stages.  That doesn’t seem possible, but that’s the way it appeared to us.  With five players and only ten areas, there probably aren’t many areas where you stand a chance to score points.  So by the end stages, you’re either pretty sure to get your desired position or you know that anything you do can be undone by a player going later in the turn order.  Either way, the tension is low and the frustration high.  So the latter stages of the game didn’t impress us any more than the opening.

Schacht is known for raising the angst (and usually the skill) in his games by limiting player choices.  The setup here is similar to Web of Power, in that the players have a very small hand size and only one function per card.  But in WoP, there are only five card types, thanks to the wise decision to use two countries per color.  In Patrician, there are ten types of cards.  So there’s a very good chance that you won’t be able to pick up the card you so desperately need.  It doesn’t help that it’s sitting there and you know exactly what you have to do to select it, but the sequence of plays is probably too impractical to succeed.  At one point, I worked out an elaborate series of picks to give me the one crucial card I needed.  Needless to say, someone grabbed it a turn before I could.  The lack of control is palpable and frustrating.

I haven’t heard this complaint from anyone else, so I have to wonder if it’s valid, but it sure seemed as if the players going early in the round were at a significant disadvantage.  Considering so much depends on getting the last play in, the players going first or second really seemed to be behind the eight ball.  Maybe this is only a problem in the four or five player games and no one plays with those numbers.  We also saw that there was a fairly good chance for some kingmaking, a rather infuriating possibility for such a simple game.

The final indicator that this game may not be intended for five was its duration.  The box says it should take 50 minutes, but our game took less than a quarter of an hour.  Even with fewer players, though, it’s hard to see how it could take that long; there just aren’t that many turns in the game and the choices each turn are very limited.  Usually, I would say a short snappy game is a plus, but this one seemed to be over before it even began.

Based on other reviews, I’d really like to try this with three before I totally write it off (it isn’t the kind of game I’d enjoy with two players).  Our first attempt was so poor, though, that this may be hard to achieve.  If it does get a second chance, I’ll let you know how it goes.

The IGAs
Finally, let me congratulate Vlaada Chvatil, Bruno Cathala, and Ludovic Maublanc for their wins in the IGA voting that was announced this week.  I had thought that the multi-player vote would be wide open, but Through the Ages actually won fairly easily.  I guess the real lesson is that with such a small group of judges, it’s really hard to predict how things will go.  Anyway, I’m thrilled that this wonderful game managed to capture such an important award and I hope that the many anxious players who haven’t had the chance to play this yet will be able to experience it first hand once the new edition is released.

Mr. Jack’s victory might have been even more surprising, since BattleLore figured to be such a strong competitor.  But just as Ticket to Ride’s third game (Marklin) failed to get a nomination, the third time proved to be a jinx for the Command & Colors games.  Maybe there’s just some weariness from the committee once the third version rolls around.  Whatever the reason, this is another excellent choice.  Both games, by the way, come from tiny publishers which were totally unknown last year.  Terrific job by the IGA to not only nominate these games, but choose them as their favorites, giving them the recognition they deserve despite their minimal coverage.

Speaking of two-player games, I got to play Knizia’s Medici vs. Strozzi again this week.  What a tremendous design!  Every turn, you’re faced with a tense, crucial decision and you get the feeling that one lapse in judgment could prove fatal.  There are so many layers of subtlety in the choices you have to make and the pressure starts on the very first turn and doesn’t let up until the very end.  It’s not a game for everyone, but for those who want a tense, cerebral mano a mano battle, it’s hard to top it.  Truly one of my favorite two-player games of all time and one I can’t wait to get to the table again.  I was pleased to see this got some strong support from the IGA committee, so there are some other players who appreciate this great game.

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