Saturday 27 July 2013

While the cat’s away

... the cat will play.

Sam’s on holiday, but left me with the task of feeding his cat, Finn, for one day until his neighbours can take over. I decided to take the opportunity to peruse the games cupboard and look for a little gem for solo play.

Lords of Waterdeep was sadly missing, but I checked on BGG and saw that Macao had a one-player version. I downloaded the rules and sat down to play.

Instead of having some kind of AI or rule-set guiding a dummy player, it was a version of Macao where you had to score as high as possible. In your way is a number of new conditions and rules to bear in mind. It really is a terribly boring experience. Macao already has quite a lot of rules, and it really doesn’t need any more. Playing this was like listening to someone trying to convince you that the 100m sprint would be better if everyone had to wear a duffle coat and corduroy trousers. It was just a series of annoying new obstacles to overcome. I gave up in round four after I had that epiphany that all board gamers dread: the realisation that I was just moving bits of wood and cardboard around a table for no good reason.


After this, as an antidote to Macao’s regophilia (love of rules? Is that right?) I got down Ascending Empires and played it, removing all of the rules completely. The idea was to hit each planet once (flip it over once you've hit it). If you hit two planets with one flick, score a point. Miss a planet, or go off the board, minus one point. Hit a friendly spaceship, and you upgrade to a bigger spaceship - all the way up to using a home planet as a ship (or a Death Star, as I imagined it). Hit an enemy ship, and go down to a smaller ship.


It was simple and fun and my best score was minus 1. You see, rules turn toys into games, but too many rules will turn toys into work.

2 comments:

  1. Solo Macao sounds like a nightmare. Perhaps we should invent an AI version?

    Had a few games of Cube Quest in cornwall, and introduced my niece Anna to Lords of Waterdeep. We drew 158-all!

    Then we both threatened the Arthur clan with The Resistance and they all pretended to be tired.

    Thanks for feeding Finn.

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  2. Thinking about it, it might have been more fun to just play a straight game of Macao and try and get a high score that way. An AI version would be good, though.

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