Patrick Korner: Delta Testing - Manga Manga

Hey hey once again!

Those of you who occasionally play those ‘other’ games (video, I mean) will likely have heard of Id Software – you know, Doom, Quake, etc.?  Well, I don’t think I’ve slain demonic creatures on Mars for quite some time now, but I do recall one very cool thing that Id did:  They never, ever set a release date on a calendar.  For Id, the release dates were always one thing: “When it’s done.â€?.  Boy, don’t the good folks working on the latest Duke Nukem wish they’d adopted such a mantra… but I digress.

With the board game industry becoming more and more like the video gaming industry, I think maybe it’s time for board game publishers to start adopting a similar viewpoint.  Seriously, how many games have you played in the last year or two that felt underdeveloped?  Not quite finished?  A little unbalanced?  Graphically rough around the edges?  If you’re like me, way more than you’d care to count.  And what makes it difficult for me and my groaning shelves is that many of these games hold enough promise to make me want to keep them instead of sending them out into the cold.  Which means I need to buy more shelves, which means I need to do more nice things for my wife to let me buy more shelves, which means less time for gaming, which means more unplayed games, and eventually the sheer inertia of it all causes me to crack and turn into a blithering idiot who tends to write in run-on sentences.  Good thing that hasn’t happened yet.  Whew!

So every once in a while, I’ll be turning portions of my column over to you, gentle reader, for something I’ll call Delta Testing – you know, the testing phase beyond Beta, which is when the testing really should have been completed.  I’ll pick a game I think has design flaws, and I’ll list what I think those flaws are.  Then it’s up to you to suggest fixes and workarounds – almost like house rules, but the scope here can be much more far-reaching.  Think that Goa’s board should have had space for action counters?  You’re not alone.  Join in and let’s see if some of these ‘cracked’ games can be made whole!

Delta Testing – Manga Manga

First up is a game that badly, badly needed some additional playtesting.  Manga Manga, one of the four games that marked the launch of Kosmos’s ‘very small box’ line (to distinguish them from their small box line, of course…) is a real-time Manga-themed game where you try to rid your hand of cards before anyone else.  Win and you get points.  Lose and you…still get points?  Yup.  Something to think about tweaking, no doubt!

I’ll summarize the rules here so that y’all have a place to start.  Each player gets a hand of cards – each card is of a colour and also has a coloured dot in a corner.  Then, real-time, players try and rid their hand of cards by matching their card colours with the dots that show up on the cards that get discarded.  In other words, if the card played has a green dot, then a green card comes next.  If that green card has a red dot, then red comes next, etc.

Added to the mix are Dragon cards (which are wild) – you can play them at any time and any colour can follow them.  Okay, so far so good – this is a themed variant on Speed, mostly.

And then the problems arise.  First, no player can play two cards one after the other.  So for a Speed-like game, there’s a lot of waiting around.  Secondly, when nobody can play legally, a card from the middle gets turned over – another way for the game to slow down.  And finally, as alluded to above, the player who finishes a round last also gets something – which can occasionally be 50% as good as what first got – so where’s the incentive to win, really?

Oh, one more thing:  When you start play, you’re supposed to yell “Action Power!â€?.  Yeah, I have issues with that too.  I keep thinking of the old Arctic Power detergent ads, with the burly water polo players cavorting in freezing water while the 98-pound weakling hot-water guys shivered about… But then, perhaps not everyone is cursed with my photographic pop-culture memory.  Shudder.

So, let’s hear some ideas!  The cards are pretty and the Speed idea is good, so where did this game go wrong?  What fixes it?  I have some ideas but I’d like to hear yours first!

Game Played - Railroad Tycoon

I won’t spend too much time on this, but I did want to comment a little on my first play of Eagle’s new Railroad Tycoon – The Boardgame, the revamped and graphically-amazing version of Martin Wallace’s excellent Age of Steam design.

Cut to the chase, right?  Okay – the game’s good.  Really good.  Enough changes and tweaks to make it play differently from AoS, but with enough rules and mechanics left over to make many of the AoS gameplay decisions relevant here as well.  In general, the “Droverizationâ€? of the game has resulted in a sleeker, more streamlined game that’s more friendly to casual gamers and newbies.  Gone are the punishing economics – you can now issue shares any time, and the income track moves more quickly to numbers that let you actually show profits.  Gone too is the die-roll to determine production – now, all cubes start the game on the board, making it much easier to survey the game state and figure out where to try and build to.  There are other tweaks as well – some graphical, some mechanic-based, all of which add some more luck and free-wheeling feel to the game.  And you know what?  Most of the time, that’s exactly what this kind of game wants.  AoS is a great, great design, and I will gladly play it – but with the right crowd.  Railroad Tycoon takes that great design and makes it accessible to the masses – in other words, you can bring it to game night and rest assured that everyone will have fun, instead of having to schedule a specific group and time to play AoS since playing with newbies can be quite devastating.

Thanks to Eagle for providing me with a copy of the game – a full review will be coming once I have a chance to play the game a couple more times (including at least once with a full crew of 6 players).  I hope those plays continue to highlight the game’s merits!

And that’s all I have to say about that.  I know I promised game day dirt – sorry, you’ll have to wait until next week for that!  Although I will say this: AoS did make an appearance…

pk

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