This is a game I bought at the Kaohsiung City Museum in Taiwan. Tales of the Old Fort is the name I give it, an approximate translation of the original Chinese name. I bought this game more as a souvenir than as a boardgame. The old fort refers to Zuoying, a district right next to the city of Kaohsiung. This was a military base, from the Ming Dynasty up to the Second World War. Tales of the Old Fort is real history being presented in boardgame form.
Back of the box
Game board
Action cards
These character cards are used only in the advanced rules. There are two modes of play. In the basic mode, you play a cooperative game. You construct the walls and the buildings together, and do your best to survive the historical incidents. As a team you try to score as many points as possible. The advanced game is competitive. Instead of working together on a team score, you have individual scores. You score points in different ways, and you win by scoring more than everyone else.
Event cards
There are four types of building materials. They must be built in the right order - green, grey, yellow then red. You can skip some of them, even directly going to red. However there is a game mechanism which discourages you from doing too much skipping.
These are some of the buildings you need to construct. Grey means not yet built, and orange means completed. The requirements for constructing a building are in the bottom left corners of the building tiles. The requirements are in the form of what the two adjacent wall sections must be made of. The game board is divided into four quadrants, and each quadrant is adjacent to two wall sections. To construct a building, you don't need to pay resources. You just need the two adjacent wall sections to fit the requirements. This is why you will often be constructing walls without skipping colours.
Here you can see the player pawns, a gate, damage tokens, and an era token. Event cards in the game are generally bad. Usually you get attacked from one or more directions, and the enemies attack at specific strengths. If the walls are not strong enough to repel the attackers, they get damaged, and buildings in the fort may get damaged too. Damaged walls have zero strength, and when a wall piece takes a second damage token, it is destroyed. Damaged buildings score no points. You need to repair them to remove the damage tokens.
Box front
A game is set up like this. You have the four gates, but no walls yet. All fourteen buildings are placed in their designated quadrants, with their not-yet-built side showing.
You set up four sets of event cards. The lighter back cards are regular events, and the darker back cards are major events. Each game you will use all the regular events. There are two or three major events for the four eras in the game. You randomly pick one for each era face-down, so you don't know yet which one it will be.
This is one part of the game I want to complain about. The setup rules say four stacks of regular event cards, but the game comes with regular event cards of only three eras. There are no Era 4 regular event cards. I checked the component count section of the rulebook, and it says 18 cards. There are indeed 18 regular event cards, six each for Eras 1 to 3. So I believe this is an error in game and product design, not in manufacturing or packing. My solution is I divide the regular event cards into four decks as evenly as I can.
You draw an event card whenever you construct a building. So you should prepare yourselves well before constructing buildings, i.e. get some walls up first. There are four large buildings in the game. When you construct one, you draw a major event card, and you also proceed to the next era. That means the next time you draw a regular event card, it comes from the next deck. These regular event cards will have stronger effects. Brace yourselves!
Your have a hand size of two action cards. The action card deck is a countdown mechanism. If it runs out, the game ends. This is just one way the game ends, and this is the bad way. It means you run out of time. Normally you want to end the game by constructing the last large building and triggering the final major event.
Most actions in the game require playing or discarding a card, and then drawing one. You have some time pressure to get as much done as possible before the deck runs out. Player pawns can only stand at the gates. Depending on which of the four gates you are at, you can work on either of the walls next to the gate, or buildings in the two quadrants next to the gate. If you want to move to an adjacent gate, you have to discard a card. Cards are mostly building materials, with a few special action cards which only take effect if you discard them for movement. To use a building material card for building or upgrading a wall, you need one action to place the card next to the wall site, and then another to actually build. Repairing a wall or building costs one card. Ironically constructing a building doesn't cost any card. You just need to make sure the wall type requirements are met.
When I first read the rules, I did not have high hopes. I had a nagging feeling this was amateur. It didn't seem like a game made by experienced gamers. The rulebook was not clear on several things. Now that I have played the game, it is not a complex game, but when I first read the rules, I felt I kind of know how to play, but I wasn't 100% confident.
I played with my daughters Shee Yun and Chen Rui. I thought the game was going to be a breeze, but we failed pretty spectacularly. The first building we constructed was a large building, because it had a special ability. This meant triggering a major event, and it also meant progressing to the second era, where the event cards are stronger. Needless to say, constructing that large building was a horrible move. We weren't thinking straight. We were overly keen to construct buildings with powers. We found out the hard way that this is a game about raising walls and preparing yourselves well before you construct buildings and allow events to happen. Events only trigger when you construct buildings, which means you can delay them.
We had tons of damage tokens on the board. We also found out we played several rules wrong. Perhaps I am partly to blame, because I am not used to reading rules in Chinese. Most of my games are in English. However there are certainly some parts where the rulebook and the components are ambiguous. For example some cards say the attack is from "west / north", and some cards say "west north". Does that mean in the former we get to choose? Or does it mean I must pick whichever is worse? We encountered a few situations where we couldn't find a clear ruling, and we had to decide ourselves how to interpret the rules.
Since we had a horrible first game, we decided to go again. Now that we had learnt our lesson, we did our planning better. We knew where we could expedite wall construction to skip some levels, and we knew where we should keep some basic walls for a bit longer. We delayed constructing buildings as far as we could, so that our defenses were stronger. The game is not as easy as I had originally expected, but now that we understood it, we were able to do quite well, and with ease. We have kind of solved it now, so it doesn't offer much further replayability. However I have yet to play the advanced rules, so maybe that's worth checking out. It becomes a different game because it will be competitive and not cooperative.
Some parts of the game are interesting. This is not just a random assortment of common game mechanisms. Buildings being constructed for free, only depending on the adjacent wall type, is certainly something I haven't seen before. There is a spatial challenge in how the quadrants are positioned. Buildings in a quadrant are dependent on two walls, but these two walls are attached to two different gates. If you want to construct these two walls quickly, you need player pawns on both the gates.
Most buildings have no function other than being worth 1 point. Only large buildings have powers. Two of the large buildings let you build a regular building for free. That's something you can plan around.
I don't like that it is too easy for players to control the events. You can just hold off constructing buildings. There is no imminent threat. Yes, the dwindling deck is your time pressure, but being able to control when events happen is, in my opinion, too powerful. I'm saying all this from the perspective of an old timer. The game might be too easy for old gamers like me, but I'm probably not the target audience for this game. For normal people, the difficulty is more appropriate, and the game will have better replayability. Well, at least I still got two games out of it. It was still a puzzle I needed some effort to work out. I may still get more plays out of the game by trying the competitive version. Come to think of it, designing a cooperative game is actually very difficult. For experienced gamers, it needs to be pretty hard to ensure replayability. For casual gamers, you can't make it too hard because it would be disheartening.
Tales of the Old Fort is a nice memento. The game components are atypical. The game mechanisms too. The buildings in the game are all based on real buildings in Kaohsiung and Zouying. The events are historical incidents. I'm grateful it gave me time with my children to explore its mechanisms. That's something worth celebrating. It is like having played an escape room game. You may not be keen to play again, but you've had fun. Next should be the competitive mode.
There is a Tian Hou Temple in Kuala Lumpur (Temple of the Heavenly Goddess). There is one in Zuoying too. The one in KL was where I did my registration of marriage in 2000.
No comments:
Post a Comment