Crowns, Glory and NERDS!!! (Warrior Knights: Crown and Glory, High Frontier)

I've neglected the blog for a few weeks, so I'll play catch-up on our last two gaming sessions.

Two weeks ago, we added the "Crown and Glory" expansion to Warrior Knights and last week we played a game that is so obviously and joyfully nerdy that it's almost cool: High Frontier.

Warrior Knights: Crown and Glory

We've played and enjoyed Warrior Knights a couple of times already, and I've been surprised at how much the "flaws" I had read about the game didn't bother me. Specifically, many people complain that the game's title is misleading and the lack of combat is disappointing. Personally I liked the mix of politics, religion and territory control that the game offered and felt the lessening of combat was a fair trade-off for the additional facets the game offered. Still, there were a few issues that bothered me somewhat. The two biggest ones were the movement limits and the anti-climactic endgame. Actually, the two are related... The lack of movement ability makes the endgame predictable under some circumstances. This means the winner can be obvious going into the last turn and the last little while can be kind of boring.

The new expansion introduces new elements that address both these issues and more. For the movement issue, a new action card allows a player to refresh and re-use an exhausted noble. For the endgame issue, hidden missions are dealt out at the beginning of the game and points are awarded for completing the objective at the end. Both these additions work very well and I wouldn't want to play the game again without them.

Other additions: Technology can be researched and developed. The mercenaries have a few special units that confer powers to the controlling noble. The mercenary track comes into play more frequently due to a tweaked rule. Town levies and fortifications have been added. All good, in my opinion. Tech is probably my favorite due to the special powers they confer and the impact that can have on the game.

The final addition is the "King" variant which grants one player the title of "King" partway through the game. This title comes with a considerable army, an advantage in gaining influence... and a huge target on your head. Suddenly, all players are out to get you to prevent you from getting the bonus influence (and to get it themselves). It's an interesting way to focus attention and keep the game from being a free-for-all. This aspect of our first play through was disappointing because the "quick game" suggested setup is too short. The game ends the turn after someone becomes the King.

In our game, I took a slight lead early and grabbed the title of King. Kozure was doing a great job of generally matching my influence totals but doing it in such a way to not attract attention. Shemp was struggling with the all the new options and had a hard time focussing his strategy. On the last turn of the game, Kozure was banned from the assembly by me and Shemp, and I took to the field with my new kingly army. My lead in influence was not great, but it didn't seem likely that anyone could catch-up. I made a mistake trying to steal a kingdom from Kozure and he exploited it... taking one of mine on his turn while I was on the road. This had the double whammy effect of losing me an influence and making me fail my secret objective. Kozure had met his goal and the game ended with a Kozurian victory. The missions had their intended effect, the last turn was NOT boring!

High Frontier

High Frontier was designed by someone who is clearly passionate about scientific space exploration. And someone nerdy. Definitely nerdy. It's about building rockets out of futuristic technologies and going out to space to explore/ research and claim planets. The map is fantastic. It's a depiction of the solar system and further galaxies and planets, and the routes to get there. A large number of 'futuristic technologies" actually researched for space travel are depicted in the available components for rocket construction. The cards feature little sketch diagrams with explanations of the way these things should work. It's all crazy and geeky and somehow awesome.

But how does it play? Well, I'm not sure. I played the game for 4 hours or so and still didn't really understand all that was going on. This is odd, because there doesn't APPEAR to be anything complicated in the rules, but the tolerances are low and it all felt somewhat opaque. You have to accumulate water tokens to purchase rocket thrusters, robonauts and factories and send them to space. The thrusters are necessary to fly, but the robonauts and factories are necessary to settle a planet. What initially makes the game hard is that you have to build your ship out of parts, and the parts have a certain weight. The better engines are heavy. Getting to where you want to go means balancing fuel capacity, fuel consumption, weight and trajectory... all the while making sure you have enough to get back! Planning your route felt a little like Power Grid to me. Lots of calculating and recalculating... only here if you get it wrong you are stuck floating back from space (this happened to BHarmer at least once). The destinations are laid out such that there are precious few, if any, easy routes. Very precise calculating is necessary. This works for simulating space travel but it's somewhat taxing in a game. Over the course of the game it's possible to develop technologies which make the game suddenly significantly easier. We may have been playing wrong, but it felt to me fairly heavy handed how dramatically the game shifts once a player has one of those advanced components. Once I developed one myself I was quite surprised how all my difficult number crunching became unnecessary. Does this mean the game is all about who gets that first tech? Hard to say... I still think we were doing something wrong. There is also a concept of producing tech from an established colony and selling it back to earth which I never did understand.

My first reaction is that the theme is executed brilliantly, the map is fantastic and the abstraction of scientific info into a playable game fascinating BUT the gameplay itself is frustrating. Is it really possible that the player that gets a particular thruster has THAT great of an advantage over the others? Are we correct that there are only a few viable early game planets? Does the first player to develop an advanced tech have such an advantage that they will automatically win the game?

I continuously felt like I was missing something. Like something wasn't quite adding up. How can the game possibly work with 4-5 players if the viable options are so few? We'll have to explore this one further, if only to see how the whole thing gels together. I confess I didn't really enjoy our first game, but I find the game fascinating nonetheless. I really WANT to like it. The map alone makes me want to OWN it. I find it mind boggling that what we played was the SIMPLE game and that an ADVANCED game ships with it right in the box!

God is jam, and the apostles are jelly! (Warrior Knights)

This week we played Warrior Knights for a second time. Since I didn't really give a very good overview of the game last week, I'll do a quick one now:

Warrior Knights is a very ambitious conquest game that attempts to weave many facets into a single game. In addition to the typical combat for territory, players must also consider religion, politics, mercenaries and expeditions!

On the surface, things seem very much like a RISK clone. There is a map with regions and some castles. Players place between 1 and 4 Knights on the board and start trying to expand their territory.

The structure of the game cleverly manages to reign in the complexity and makes the game play surprisingly simple. Players have 2 copies of 6 different cards in their hand, each representing an action they can take (gaining votes, gaining faith, moving units, hiring mercenaries, etc) . Each game turn, they must select 3 pairs of cards and put them in three different piles. After everyone has selected their three pairs of cards, "neutral actions" are added to each pile and each pile is then individually shuffled. Once this is done, the cards are resolved one by one. In other words, players know that they will get two actions in each "pile" but they don't know in what order they will come up.

When the neutral cards come up, different kinds of things can happen. An expedition to a far away land might be launched, and players have an opportunity to invest in it. A random event might be drawn from a deck (often assigned to a player by the current leader of the church). An opportunity might come up to reinforce the cities on the board or recover some casualties. etc, etc.

A third important mechanic is that one a card is used, it goes to one of three special discard stacks, either "taxation", "assembly" or "wages". When these discard stacks equal twice the number of players, they triggers special phases such as gaining money from your cities, having to pay your troops or having to gather at an assembly in order to vote on issues.

All together, there is a lot going on but the gameplay is not that complex (as long as at least one player knows how to handle the administration of the game). On the flipside, having so many different things going on at once means that each individual aspect of the game sees little development in a session. The game has a significant luck/ chaos factor to it (events can have a big impact, combat is decided by card draws, turn order is decided by card draws, the items to vote on at the assembly can favour one player more than another). Still, there are typically ways to mitigate the luck so it's up to the players to put the odds on their side.

Overall, I felt the game was quite engaging and fun. My biggest complaint would be that the last turn feels quite anticlimactic because there is very little worth doing except conquering yet only a fraction of the cards you have allow you to do that. Further, the limited development in the game means that if you are not close to winning there is very little that can be done to come back in the game.

In this session, Shemp and I managed to get into a spat before we had even placed all our pieces. I had placed at a port town near his fortress so he placed near mine. He attacked my knight on the first round and destroyed him and his army. In retribution, I attacked the town he was holding and won. Luckily for both of us we decided to put our differences behind us and try to focus on the two others that were benefiting from our combat.

As the religious leader for most of the game, I was able to direct several bad events to the players that displeased me. Before we had made our truce, I had Shemp declared a heretic (apparently because he said that God was made of jam) and then declared again (because he said the apostles were made of jelly). Shemp controlled the assembly for much of the game. Meanwhile, Kozure and Bharmer were accumulating influence faster than we could because they hadn't yet suffered any losses.

As the game drew to a close, we all decided that Kozure was going to win and tried to take him down. We hurt him, but not bad enough... Kozure won by a point.

If I had to compare Warrior Knights to another game we have played I would tend to pick Conquest of the Empire. The gameplay is quite different, but that game has also made an effort to incorporate events, politics and combat. Between the two, I'd say I prefer this one. The political aspect work much better, for one.

Anyway, looking forward to playing it again, hopefully not too far into the future!

Kenigets (Warrior Knights)

Last week we played Warrior Knights for the first time. This is a game I received in a math trade, and a stellar example of what I look for in such a trade: lose a game you don't like for a game you are interested in but would never buy. Warrior Knights was too long and opinion is too divided for me to spend money on it, but a trade was perfect.

We are playing again tomorrow evening, so I will wait until the next post to go into detail but I will say this: Warrior Knights is an extremely ambitious design. It mixes RISK like conquest with religion, politics, negotiation, drafting armies, events, exploration, and I'm sure I'm missing a few. The obvious downfall of this design direction is that there can be too little of any one thing to feel satisfying. In our first play, I'd characterize my opinion as mixed. It does everything more successfully than I expected, but there is a sense that some aspects of the game feel underdeveloped (not in a game design sense, but in a game development sense... though I suppose one leads into the other). There is significant chaos in the game, but some design choices help to minimize it's impact. All in all, I'm cautiously optimistic that this game will find a permanent place in my collection.

In this session, Bharmer started with all four of his knights, whereas Kozure and Shemp had three and I only played two. All approaches seemed feasible, and in the end Kozure and I were tied for influence and Kozure won on the tiebreaker.