Watergate

Watergate is a two player game about the Watergate scandal involving President Nixon. One player is the newspaper editor trying to gather evidence, link them to Nixon and expose the scandal. The other player is the Nixon administration, trying to prevent this and attempting to win by lasting till the end of the presidential term. 

The game board is a network of links with Nixon himself at the centre, and seven potential key witnesses around the edges. To win the game, the editor needs to place enough pieces of evidence to connect two witnesses to Nixon. The witnesses are initially inactive and they have to be activated. Nixon can prevent witnesses from being activated. The pieces of evidence come in three colours. They are what the two players will fight over every round. 

The track on the right is how the players will compete every round. This is done in a tug-of-war manner. There are five items on the track which all begin at the midpoint at the start of a round. Players play cards which pull the items in their direction. At the end of a round, if an item is closer to one player, this player claims it. There are three item types - evidence, momentum and initiative. There are three pieces of evidence, and they start face-down. Nixon knows what colours they are but not the editor. Whoever wins an evidence gets to place it on the board. The editor places it face-up, creating links, while Nixon places it face-down, creating walls. The red token is the momentum token. When you win it, you place it on your character card. For the editor, when you get your third to fifth tokens, you get to perform a strong action. For Nixon, when you get your fifth token, it means you have now completed your presidential term and you win. 

The editor's character card

Nixon's character card

The white token is the initiative token. Every round the player controlling initiative draws 5 cards and the other draws 4. The player with initiative plays first, and will also play last. By default, initiative switches every round. However if you win the initiative token, you will control initiative next round. So it is the player who will lose initiative next round who has incentive to fight for it.  

You usually play cards to pull items to your side of the track, but the cards have various other effects too, including activating witnesses and disabling witnesses. Some cards let you react to and cancel your opponent's cards. 

The game is a constant tug of war. You want to maximise the abilities of your cards, playing them at the best moment. Cards can be used in different ways. The same card can be used to pull evidence of a specific colour, the initiative token, or the momentum token, or it can be used for the special power written on it. It is not always straight-forward which is the best use of a card. If any item reaches your end of the track, you claim it immediately without waiting for the end of round. This is something you need to watch out for. Your opponent may surprise you by playing a value 3 card to claim a token which has only moved 2 steps in his direction. 

The game is an immersive experience. Many historical details are represented in the game. In my first game where I played the editor, my opponent Han was aggressive in disabling witnesses. I guess he had a lot of money to pay them to shut up, or many thugs to threaten them into staying quiet. He silenced 5 out of 7 witnesses. Thankfully I secured the remaining two, and they were nearby on the board, which meant less effort for me to create links. Unfortunately for me, I misread the board. At one point I thought I had linked up both the witnesses to Nixon and won. Then I realised I was still one link short, between one witness and an adjacent piece of evidence (the green one at the bottom). That was a stupid mistake. Nixon eventually completed his term and won. 

We played another game, and this time I was Nixon. This game turned out very differently. I fought hard for evidence tokens and didn't spend much effort on witnesses. I claimed many evidence tokens and placed them face-down to protect myself. I surrounded myself with a wall. However I only managed to disable one potential witness. Han convinced five witnesses to come forward. There was only one witness that both of us ignored. Despite having built a complete wall, I was not absolutely safe. In the game it is possible for face-down evidence to be flipped face-up. I still had to hurry to claim momentum tokens in order to complete my term. 

Tales of the Old Fort (勇闯旧城记)

 

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. 

Pax Pamir

Pax Pamir is a compact historical game about Afghanistan. You play local warlords supporting one of the three major powers - the loose local coalition of warlords, the British or the Russians. These major powers compete to exert influence in Afghanistan. You aren’t loyal to any one of them. You just want to be on the winning team when the dust settles. 

You will be buying and using cards in the game. Cards represent various characters and factions. Many of them are associated with one particular region on the map. Having them in play allows you to perform various actions. You raise armies, build roads, and march on those roads to fight.  Depending on which major power you are supporting, you deploy their pieces as armies or as roads. More pieces on the map means stronger presence. There is a type of piece - influence - which does not belong to the major powers, they belong to you. You also want to deploy these because if the strengths of the major powers are close, you score points based no your personal influence instead.

Two rows of cards are available to be purchased. Cards on the left are cheaper than those on the right, so players will tend to buy from the left and then cards will be shifted leftwards, dropping in price. Cards on the right are effectively a preview of what is to come. They allow you to plan ahead. There are limits to how many cards you can have in hand and in play. You need to buy and play cards in specific suits to increase these limits. So this is another challenge the game poses to you. 

What factions, characters and actions become available in each game depends on the order cards are drawn. You will be competing with other players to grab a combination of cards which work well together. The feeling is you are somewhat at the mercy of situation, i.e. history. You are going to learn much about this period in the history of Afghanistan. The option to switch support is interesting. If your current win condition is difficult to achieve, you might as well try something else.

Those thick discs are your influence pieces

Like other games in the Pax family, this is a game about manipulating the board situation to fit one of several possible end conditions. It is not a game about accumulating victory points. 

My game ended quite abruptly, while I was still trying to fully figure out what was going on. this is not a simple game. The board and the pieces look minimalistic, but it is quite a challenge to manage the cards you are going to buy and play. Your most important actions come from the cards you are able to play. Despite the simple structure, the game is complex because most of the details are on the cards themselves. You need to manage your tableau of cards. You also need to be aware of what your opponents can do.

I need to play this game again because I am still figuring out the strategy. 

A Gest of Robin Hood

The Game

The first thing I learned from this game is a new word. Gest. It means story or adventures. This is a COIN game - counterinsurgency. Normally these are set in modern day or close to modern day situations. Seeing this applied to a medieval era scenario is certainly refreshing. This is a two-player game, one playing Robin Hood and the other the Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin fights for justice, while the sheriff wants control and order. This is a tug of war. In the game there is a track for justice vs order. The players try to pull the marker towards their end of the track. When the game ends, the position of the marker determines who wins. 

The map shows the town of Nottingham, Sherwood Forest, and the surrounding regions. Each of the seven regions can be obedient (blue) or rebellious (red). Robin tries to instigate rebellion while the sheriff wants to keep things calm. However the sheriff will force people to pay tax, and that makes people rebellious. One thing which the sheriff does is to fill a carriage with taxes and then escort it back to Nottingham. If the carriage reaches Nottingham, the sheriff gains order and money. If Robin manages to rob the carriage, Robin gains justice and money. Yes, everyone wants money. The tricky part is a carriage might be a trap set for Robin and his gang. It might be better armed than expected and Robin's team might all get captured if they can't defeat the guards. 

Robin is the red piece. In the computer implementation he is presented this way to the Robin player. In the actual game, Robin is a green piece just like any of the merry men. You can tell him apart only by the icon on it. The merry men pieces can be face-up or face-down. When face-down, it means they are hidden, and it also means the sheriff doesn't know which one is Robin. To be able to capture the merry men, the sheriff needs to first expose them. The grey triangular pieces are the sheriff's henchmen. 

The game uses a simple initiative system. The first player picks one of the three action spots, and then the second player can only pick from the remaining two. The actions are then performed from left to right, and the initiative for the next round is also determined by whoever has his token on the left. The first action spot only allows one action. The second spot allows executing an event. A different event is drawn every round so this action changes every round. The third spot allows two actions. This basically means if you want to do more and do the more powerful actions, you will likely go later in the next round. 

The Robin player has a selection of actions to choose from, some called Plots and some called Deeds. The sheriff has a different selection. Many actions require spending money. Robin needs to rob either the carriages or some other poor travellers to maintain a decent cash flow. The sheriff too needs to collect taxes. If you run out of money, you will become very restricted in what you can do. 

The success of robbery attempts depends on several factors. The number of merry men vs the number of henchmen is one. Whether the region is rebellious or not is another. You need to roll a die to determine the outcome, so there is some luck. When robbing a traveller, you can decide whether to take a higher risk for a higher reward. 

The number of merry men and henchmen is limited. You can't recruit if there no more in the supply, so you need to manage your people well. 

The Play

This is very much a cat and mouse game. I played Robin Hood. I had to recruit merry men and cause trouble. The challenge was whenever I robbed, my merry men would be exposed, and we would be at risk of getting caught. I needed to quickly move and hide ourselves to stay safe. I needed to go about inciting revolt, because having the people supporting my cause was helpful. Carriages was something I could not ignore, even if I suspected they were traps. I was caught in such a trap unfortunately. I did not have a big enough group and we were captured. Things went downhill very quickly for me. I didn't have enough men, and I was arrested several times myself. Robin could always sneak out of prison, but doing all this took time and actions. Playing Robin Hood was not at all fun and adventure. It was very much about spending money wisely, gathering support from the population as much as possible, and keeping the pressure on the sheriff and his henchmen. You need to be a military strategist specialising in guerrilla warfare, not an action hero. Our game was rather short, Han as the sheriff achieved an instant victory because he reached more than 5 on the Order track when there was a royal inspection. Robin Hood's little gest was cut short significantly. 

Lots of event cards add colour, story and flavour to the game. 

At one point most of the merry men and Robin Hood himself was thrown in prison. What a disgrace!

The Thoughts

A Gest of Robin Hood is a serious wargame. Not a complex one among wargames, but it is a serious take on the folklore, very much unlike what I remember of the Disney animation movie. This is not a simple game and it takes some effort to learn. It is interesting to see the COIN mechanism applied to this setting. Too bad I was a lousy outlaw and I didn't really experience the full game. 

Molly House

The Game

Molly House is set in 18th century London. It is a game about people with unconventional tastes and desires. The rulebook isn't very explicit in explaining this. I interpret it as gay and lesbian circles. Yes, you're gay, and in that day and age homosexuality is not generally understood nor is it accepted. You are going to hold parties, have fun, and ultimately you want to create awareness and promote acceptance. Now things can go bad because some people in power do not like this and may clamp down on such inappropriate activities. If you are one of the notorious, you may get arrested and punished, possibly ending up getting hanged. The game can end in different ways. If the community becomes accepted, the person who is most prominent wins. However if the community is persecuted, then only those who betray the community and become informants may win. The third way the game ends is when neither happens by the end of the fifth round. Everyone loses. 

My first thought upon setting eyes on this game board was this. Is someone going to ask me "Is this like Monopoly?" - that most dreaded question of boardgamers worldwide. I must admit this does remind me a little of Monopoly. That track around the edges is indeed for pawns to move along. The four corners are important locations - molly houses where you hold parties, score points and create awareness about the community. In the middle of the four streets (i.e. the equivalent of the railroad stations in Monopoly) are shops where you get to acquire tools. 

The cards come in four suits, each representing one of the four molly houses, i.e. your party venues. A game round ends whenever you exhaust the deck. At the end of a round, the police does their investigation, possibly closing down shops and arresting people. They investigate the gossip discard pile. There are two discard piles in the game - the gossip pile and the secret pile. Gossip is bad and secret is good. Secret means you hold your parties discreetly. Gossip means you are being careless and bold, and this can endanger the community. Under different situations, used or discarded cards go to one or the other discard pile. This is something you need to be mindful of.

The basic actions on your turn are simple. You roll the dice and move, not unlike Monopoly, mind you. Then you get to perform an action depending on where you land. There are two types of icons on the dice - card and boot. They mean discarding a card from the general display, and moving one step. You must use one or both dice to move. You may move clockwise or counter-clockwise. You will move between 0 to 4 steps. Using this photo above as an example, you may choose to either not move or move one step. Depending on where you land, you may take a card, acquire a tool, or hold a party. You can also decide to do nothing. 

Parties are the most important part of the game. It is the main way you score points. You may score points for yourself, and you may help the community in general score points. This means the community is getting more understanding and acceptance by society. If you land on one of the houses, you may initiate a party. To have a successful party, you must be able to make specific card combos using the cards contributed by players. As host, you must contribute 2 cards. Cards are drawn from the deck as well. Others may decide how many cards they want to contribute. After all cards are played, the strongest combo is picked, and whoever has contributed to that gains something. If the cards from the deck are involved, then the community scores points. If there are two or more best combinations, as host you get to choose whose cards to use. In case you can't make any valid combo, the weakest cards will be used. As host, you will lose points. The community loses points too. A dull party is bad. 

These are the combos you want to make when throwing a party. You need four cards to make a combo. The first one is a straight flush. The second a Q plus three of a kind. The third a J with a straight. Before you decide to hold a party, you can ask whether the other players want to join you, and what cards they have. They can't show you their cards before the party, so they might lie. They may promise to play certain cards, but promises are not binding. Parties can be a form of collaboration, since everyone whose cards are used gets something. However, beware of people who encourage you to start something but eventually never contribute. Wait... why does this sound familiar? 

When examining the gossip pile, you categorise the cards into two, threat cards and normal cards. Each of the four suits are checked separately, to see how much investigation the authorities are making. Let's use this photo above as an example. Let's look at the yellow cards. That card in the middle is a threat card. Those two beside it are normal cards. With 1 threat card and 2 normal cards, the investigation value is 1 x 2 = 2.  When a molly house accumulates 7 points of investigation, it gets raided, and the best known patrons of that house get arrested. You may be sentenced to lose points, or possibly death. The punishments are meted out only at the end of the game, because during the game indictments may get pardoned, if you turn traitor and help the authorities clamp down on fringe activities. 

This is an indictment card. At game end you roll a die to determine the outcome. Dice are 10-sided, from 0 to 9, so 6+ means 40% of getting hanged. If you still hold this card by game end, it's either losing points or dying. 

The cubes represent investigation. When a house gets seven, it is raided and shut down. No more parties here. Shoo! 

You use these markers to decide whether you are going to betray the community. If you ever play the black one on the board (face-down), it means you intend to become an informant. You will ever play at most three of the markers. Other players who catch you can flip one of your markers. By doing so they are accusing you of being a traitor. If the marker they flip is the black one, you are exposed and they score points. However if they reveal a white one, they lose points. If you are indeed an informant and you get caught by a fellow player, it becomes difficult for you to do anything at the particular house you have planned to leak information about. If the game ends with the community being persecuted, only traitors have any chance of winning. They win only if the information they have provided actually help the authorities in making arrests. When you see the situation become hopeless and society is not ready to accept you, you may well need to consider turning traitor. 

The Play

Molly House is a challenging game to learn. It uses several unconventional mechanisms, which make the game feel unintuitive. It tries to convey a story and the dynamics behind it. When you understand that underlying story, the game mechanisms make more sense. Still, there are many special situations and corresponding rules for each of them, and this can be overwhelming. There are three ways the game ends, and under different scenarios, the measure for victory is different. The game is immersive. You and your fellow players are part of the same community, and you want what's best for the community. Yet you are also competing to be the most popular. When the authorities start clamping down, the option to turn traitor becomes hard to resist, especially when your life is on the line. This is not a cooperative game, yet there are many aspects in which you need to collaborate. 

Many of Cole Wehrle's games have this kind of dynamic. A big part of the game is about manipulating the way the game ends. You can't just simplistically pursue points, because there are different types of points, and depending on the game end situation, some points become irrelevant. You need to know how the game ends so that you put your effort into what matters. This is not easy to manage. You are watching how the situation evolves, evaluating how you are doing compared to your opponents, and trying to steer this all in a direction that benefits you. 

There is an interesting tension between competition and collaboration, for example when you need to hold parties. You want to leverage on the resources of other players. You want to collaborate with others frequently because that will help you. You may not want to run too far ahead, because if you are doing well and the community is doing well too, someone will probably sabotage the efforts of the community and steer the game towards doom. If you are doing well, you may want to allow your opponents to trail only slightly. Give them hope and encourage them to help the community, so that when the community wins, you win too by being the gayest of them all. 

In the game we played, I was the most prominent when the first molly house was raided. I became public enemy number one. The indictment card I drew could get me the death penalty. Now I had to decide whether to betray my friends. I thought it would be too obvious, and someone would quickly confront me, so I decided to stay loyal to the cause. My thinking was someone would come accuse me, only to find that I was loyal, and he would lose points. However to my surprise no one bothered. Sigh... I should not have bothered. I should have turned traitor. The clamping down became more severe, and eventually the community lost. Had I turned traitor, I could have won. All of us lost. Our only consolation was at least we lost with dignity. 

The Thoughts

Molly House is a game with a lot of character. I love the art and the components. I consider this a historical game. I certainly learned something from playing it. This is not an easy game to learn. Expect to refer to the rules frequently. This is the kind of game seasoned gamers will enjoy exploring. I like how daring the designers are in coming up with their own ways to convey the story. Just be prepared it takes some effort to play. 

A big part of the game is manipulating how it will all end. You always need to keep this in mind. For the first half of the game, you can't be certain how things will turn out, and you can't be certain which of the actions you take will ultimately matter. That's a little unsettling. I enjoy figuring out the game and the dynamics among players. This is ultimately still a competitive game. However as you get immersed into the story, when you eventually decide to backstab your mate, you will feel a little guilty, and dirty.