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Re: [Board/Tactical Game]: Android, reviewed by Tom Vasel (5/4)
I was pretty underwhelmed by this in play, despite how gorgeous it was.
The main issue was the light/dark cards - basically, each player has a set of dark cards, which have to be played on them by the opponents. Each card has a trigger condition - eg, you visit a particular place, or acquire a particular advantage, or some other condition. The cards are often extremely annoying, and have things like 'miss your whole turn' on them.
In practice you want to play as many of these as possible as you need the light points to play your own cards, and you've paid opportunity costs to get the dark cards you have.
So, during other people's turns, you have to watch them like a hawk to see if they do anything matching a particular condition, and play the card immediately. There's little choice in what you play - it's just a case of dumping whatever you can whenever you can, since it's rare for a condition to come up.
In a game like this, missing a turn really sucks - and having it just appear out of nowhere unpredictably is painful.
If you read all your dark cards in advance, you can minimise the impact of the cards, which is frustrating for two reasons: one, you kind of have to do this to compete. If I read my cards and keep notes, and you don't, you're at a major disadvantage. Two, your opponents are stuck holding dark cards that rarely or never come into play - but they still have to waste all their attention watching what you do in case you do actually trigger the condition. This means that optimal play *aggravates* the main issue with the cards.
I think this could be fixed by moving dark cards into your own hand somehow - that is, you traded off the pain of dark cards with the bonuses of light cards yourself, rather than moving them artificially off to the other players.
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