Doctor Who: Dalek Dice yields predictable results

We've all been there: I was $10 away from free shipping on an online order, so I bought Doctor Who: Dalek Dice on a whim.

Expectations should be low for a $12 dice game, especially one based on a popular licensed property from a publisher with a somewhat spotty track record for this particular IP -- Cubicle 7's Doctor Who role playing game is terrific, but their Doctor Who: the Card Game didn't really utilize the license well, and their Time Clash game died right out of the gate.

On the other hand, Dalek Dice was designed by Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello, the team that has done such a great job with other games based on licensed properties such as the epic War of the Ring and the more recent Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I suppose I was holding out hope that they would come up with something more interesting than the usual press-your-luck dice game.

What they delivered was...the usual press-your-luck dice game. Nothing clever, no unique Doctor Who twist. Just a game that's boring even in comparison to other dice games like Dino Hunt Dice or Age of War. Not too surprising I suppose, but still a little disappointing.

Rating: 1 (out of 5) We will probably never play this game again, especially since we have similar alternatives that are much better games.

• Dalek Dice official website
• Dalek Dice on BoardGameGeek

Starship Duel: shooting in the dark

With a few exceptions, space combat as depicted in the various Star Trek television series and films has never been what I would describe as "action-packed." That isn't to say that it isn't dramatic: in my opinion, the original series episode "Balance of Terror" is one of the best space battles ever put on film, and the battle in the Mutara Nebula between Kirk and Khan in Star Trek II is a very close second.

Those battles take their cues from World War II submarine movies, slowly building tension rather than going for fast movement and explosions. While this makes for excellent drama, it may not necessarily translate into interesting gaming.

Starship Duel, designed by Heroclix mastermind Jordan Weisman and published by FASA in 1984, attempts to recreate the dramatic tension seen in the space battles from Star Trek II and III. To its credit, the game tries to do something different, foregoing the traditional board with miniatures or counters representing the ships in favor of a wheel that shows the other ship's position and heading relative to yours, with no accounting for distance.

Game play involves trying to anticipate the direction your opponent is going to move. Your ship has a limited amount of power, so you have to decide which side of your ship to charge the weapons and shields on, hoping that your opponent's ship will end up in the right position, and ideally that you'll catch him from a side that he hasn't charged his shields on.

On paper, it sounds very much like space combat the way it was depicted in Star Trek at the time, with ships floundering in the dark and never seeming to have enough power to fight effectively. In practice, however, it can be frustrating. It is often difficult to visualize the position of the ships, and in the end it's mainly a guessing game, as you try to put power into the weapons and shields that you hope will be facing your opponent.

It was an interesting idea that just didn't translate into a playable game, and FASA quickly abandoned it in favor of the more traditional Starship Tactical Combat Simulator.

Rating: 1 (out of 5) While we applaud the effort to try something different, we found this game to be frustrating and difficult to play.

• Starship Duel on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: October 26, 2014

Gaming in the final frontier

Star Trek in most of its forms is an optimistic story about the intrigue and adventure that go along with exploring space. More often than not it is a a character drama, with the vast majority of stories from the various television series concerning the interpersonal problems the characters encounter when they visit new planets. Even the shipbound episodes tend to be concerned with the characters solving problems and interacting with one another, with notable examples from the original series being The Doomsday Machine and Balance of Terror.

Nevertheless, Star Trek presents its characters as part of a decidedly military organization. That military flavor is a fundamental part of the series, so it's really no surprise that the majority of Star Trek games tend to be about combat between starships, taking their cues from naval war games. The most successful and long-lived of these is Star Fleet Battles, a game that is legendary for being hopelessly complicated, yet has a devoted following.

It also has an unusual (and likely relatively inexpensive) licensing deal that allows the publishers to use the starship designs, organizations, and setting from the original Star Trek series, but none of the specific characters. So the game includes Klingons, Romulans and even Tholians, but can make no mention of Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock.

I've always been somewhat interested in Star Fleet Battles, but its reputation for being overly complicated has kept me from ever playing it. This most likely makes me part of the market targeted by Star Fleet Battle Force, a card game based on the same concepts and set in the same universe. It's a game that tries really hard to be simple and accessible, but it occasionally stumbles over what I suspect are various attempts to make it mirror Star Fleet Battles.

Players are dealt a number of ship cards which begin the game in play, either on the front line or in reserve. They are also dealt a hand of action cards from which they mainly play attacks and defenses. The attack cards must be matched up with an attacking ship's weapons, so you can only play a phaser attack if your ship has phaser cannons, a plasma attack if your ship has plasma weapons, and so on.

This core game mechanic is straightforward enough, but for me it causes the game's main thematic flaw. Since all players are drawing from a common deck, you will often have a hand of attack cards that require a wide variety of weapons in order to use. But if your ships are all from the same faction (Federation, Klingon, etc.) they tend to have the same types of weapons, so a lot of the cards you draw aren't going to be usable.

The game compensates for this by having each player's starting ships dealt out randomly, so that all players will most likely have a mix of different ships with different weapons. This is great for game play, but bad for the theme as each player will have a mixed fleet of ships from different factions, which seriously disrupts the theme of galaxy-spanning empires going to war with one another.

Star Fleet Battle Force used to be our laundromat game, since it takes up relatively little table space and doesn't take too long to play, but it suffers when compared to less random and more thematically solid games like Star Trek Fleet Captains or the Star Trek Customizable Card Game.

Rating 2 (out of 5) The core game mechanic isn't bad, but everything about the game is too random to be immersive or strategically interesting.

• Star Fleet Battle Force official website
• Star Fleet Battle Force on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: August 3, 2014

Star Trek: the Adventure Game is another game from before The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager expanded the Star Trek universe into the vast place it is today. But what it lacks in scope it makes up for in theme, as it is a game about traveling to different planets and having adventures, where each decision is crucial to the welfare of the quadrant (or at least, the score of the player).

While it's great that this game is about exploration and story rather than just being another ship combat game, what it amounts to is a two-player Choose Your Own Adventure. As a player reaches a new planet, their opponent reads from a book that describes the situation for the encounter on that particular planet, and offers several decision points that are influenced by the abilities of the crew tokens present, eventually arriving at an outcome that will move the score tracker in one direction or another.

One thing we noticed with this game was that once a player had a few bad encounters it was really difficult for them to recover, so that by halfway through the game it was pretty clear who the winner was going to be, to the point that it barely seemed worth playing to the finish.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) We enjoyed the novelty of this game when we first tried it a few years ago, but it seems dry and superficial when compared to similar games like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective or Star Trek Expeditions. The relatively poor quality of the components doesn't help mattters any.

• Star Trek: the Adventure Game on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: August 16, 2014

Star Trek: the Card Game is something of an anomaly for a licensed collectible card game. It was published during an unusual "break" in the licensing agreement for Decipher, Inc.'s Star Trek Customizable Card Game. While Decipher was renegotiating their Star Trek license, which at the time only covered The Next Generation, another publisher managed to grab the rights to make a CCG based on the original series.

Whether by design or by accident, Star Trek: the Card Game is as different from Decipher's game as possible, opting for a much more abstract approach to game play. Players compete to construct stories from Mission, Plot and Discovery cards. Crew cards are used to overcome Challenges played by your opponent, and in an unusual twist for a collectible game, the three main characters are common cards played to the center of the table and usable by both players.

It has some interesting ideas, and I like the idea of playing cards to construct episodes of the television show. Unfortunately, the game is seriously bogged down by a nearly incomprehensible scoring and payment system involving placing and removing counters. It also suffers from some poor design choices that make many of the cards difficult to read.

Decipher eventually renegotiated their license for their Star Trek Customizable Card Game, and even expanded it to include material from the original series, so this game was largely forgotten.

Rating: 1 (out of 5) Even without comparing it to many much better Star Trek games, and even with a few unusual ideas, this game is mostly an unplayable mess.

• Star Trek: the Card Game on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: August 16, 2014

I reviewed the Doctor Who version earlier in the list, and I really don't have much more to say about Star Trek SceneIt. It's an enjoyable trivia game, with some fun visual puzzles in addition to the usual tests of knowledge. The Star Trek edition definitely has a lot more source material to work with (Doctor Who SceneIt only covers the first three seasons of the new series), but that can be a down side too, as it has a fair amount of material from Enterprise, which we haven't seen a lot of (we'll debate the relative merits of the different Star Trek series at another time and place).

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Probably the best Star Trek video trivia game out there, limited only by the fact that in the end, it is just a video trivia game.

Date played: September 1, 2014

I wanna be a cowboy

I love the western genre, and I love a good collectible card game. So far, Deadlands: Doomtown is the only game to successfully combine these things, and it has such a huge supernatural horror element to it that it is really more like a fantasy setting with western trappings than it is a true historical western.

So I was very interested when Wizkids (publishers of Heroclix) announced High Stakes Drifter in 2005, their first collectible card game, and since the CCG market was starting to dry up at the time, there wasn't much competing for our attention.

It was nearly 10 years ago, but I remember liking High Stakes Drifter. It had a purely western setting, with no fantasy elements at all. It used historical photographs for the card illustrations and included characters from history such as Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. In addition to the cards, the game used custom poker chips printed with text that affects the game.

We hadn't played the game since 2005, and after our re-examination of it, it was pretty clear why. Thinking back, I recall that a lot of the marketing for this game attempted to cash in on the Texas Hold'em poker craze that was sweeping the nation at the time. True to that marketing, the game uses several poker elements, including playing character and enhancement cards face down and players betting on whether they will win the round or not.

In fact, the game uses so many elements from poker (and so little else) that I found myself wondering why I wasn't just playing poker, a game which would give me much the same experience without having to purchase more than a $3 deck of playing cards.

As my good friend Robb put it, "playing poker is more fun than whatever it is HSD was trying to do."

Rating: 1 (out of 5) If you know how to play poker you should have no use for this game, and if you don't, poker is easier to learn.

• High Stakes Drifter on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: February 6, 2014

It's a city...and they fight

Fight City was Cheapass Games' attempt to create a collectible card game without creating a collectible card game. By that, I mean that I'm sure they never had any intention of releasing hundreds of cards in random booster packs, but it was their shot at a game with customizable decks and a CCG-style rules set. It was originally released as two separate decks (one for each player) and later released in a "deluxe" two-player edition with both decks in one box.

The game system does its best to avoid being a clone of Magic: the Gathering, with a completely different way of using resources to pay for cards as they are put into play. Some cards provide resources in the form of white symbols in black circles, positioned strategically along the sides of cards. Other cards have similar symbols, but reversed with black symbols on a white background. To pay for a card, you have to line up the symbols, so the physical placement of the card on the table makes a difference. Cards that require resources will often provide others, so you end up with a mosaic, and losing a card from the middle can be catastrophic if it provided a needed resource.

Other than the resource system, Fight City's game play is pretty unremarkable. Characters have speed, attack, and defense values which can be augmented by equipment cards. Each turn a player chooses to either play cards, draw cards, or attack, and this is where the game starts to fall apart. In our games, we often found that one or the other of us would have a hand full of cards we couldn't use due to a lack of the right kind of resources. This would force one player to keep taking draw turns, allowing the other keep making attacks, which take away resources, which makes it even harder to get cards into play. In our games we found that it was very difficult to recover once you start losing in this way.

The cards are peppered with Cheapass Games' usual sharp humor, and feature many in-jokes and references to other Cheapass Games, but it doesn't really have a setting or storyline to speak of, which is something essential to most games of this type.

The game might work better if players had the opportunity to build custom decks and strike a better balance with the resources, but that isn't really possible with the 108 cards that come in the box. I imagine that if the game had been successful there would have been more decks released, providing a larger card pool to customize from, but we were unable to have a satisfying game with what came in the box.

Rating: 1 (out of 5) What could be a clever game system is marred by frustrating game play and a lack of depth in terms of strategy or story.

• Fight City on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 25, 2014

It just doesn't feel like Doctor Who

Doctor Who fans often talk about the show's "undefinable magic." The vague something that makes it such a great television series, that inspires incredible devotion among its fans, has consistently defied all efforts to, well, define. Personally, I think it has something to do with the way Doctor Who manages to pile unique idea on top of unique idea. Its malleable format allows for an incredible range of stories to be told, free from the constraints of series with more conventional settings and characters.

That "undefinable magic" may be what makes the show so compelling, but it could also be the very reason why no one has managed to create a Doctor Who game that really feels like Doctor Who.

Cubicle 7's amazing Doctor Who: Adventures in Space and Time role playing game may be the one exception. Perhaps a free-form game format like a role playing game, as opposed to the more constrained nature of most board and card games, is the only way to get the feel of the Doctor's adventures onto the table top. Nevertheless, when Cubicle 7 announced that they were releasing a Doctor Who card game, I had high hopes.

Doctor Who: the Card Game is certainly an interesting game. Players put location cards into play, which they must then defend from their opponents. Monster cards are used for attacks, and the Doctor and his companions are used for defense, thus allowing each player to play the heroes and the villains. Successful defense allows a player to place a "defended" token on his location, and a successful attack means the opponent's monster stays at the location. A player wins if they ever has five "defended" tokens or five monsters in play at the beginning of their turn.

The game manages to avoid the trap that a lot of card games fall into, where a player's victory rides on getting the right combination of cards, by virtue of a "pass the trash" game mechanic that requires each player to end their turn with three cards in hand, which they then pass to their right before drawing two new ones. It's fast paced and features some great artwork of the Matt Smith Doctor, companions and monsters, but I can't help feeling that the theme is secondary to the game's mechanics.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) While the Doctor Who theme feels a bit painted on, the game itself is pretty engaging.

• Doctor Who: the Card Game official website
• Doctor Who: the Card Game on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: December 30, 2013

The Doctor Who Collectible Card Game, published in 1996, features characters and photo images from across the original series' 26 year history. However the game itself is an unremarkable attack and defense numbers game similar to Magic: the Gathering which, while not uninteresting to play, doesn't really feel like Doctor Who. I suspect that this game was developed with no particular theme in mind, just waiting for whatever licensed property happened to come along.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Not a bad game by any means, but fairly uninspired, and the only thing about it that really calls Doctor Who to mind is the card images.

• Doctor Who Collectible Card Game on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 1, 2014

Apparently, Doctor Who: the Game of Time and Space from 1979 started out as a fantasy treasure hunting game. Games Workshop bought the game design and decided that it would work for the Doctor Who license they had purchased but weren't using. Featuring many monsters such as Astro-Rats that are nowhere to be found in Doctor Who, and a few bizarre illustrations that look nothing like the characters they are supposed to be (in some cases their names are even spelled wrong), this game clearly used Doctor Who for brand recognition rather than inspiration.

Rating 1 (out of 5) Dull to the point of being unplayable, yet it remains in the collection for nostalgia's sake.

• Doctor Who: the Game of Time and Space on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 1, 2014

It is a testament to its "fill in the blanks" nature that there is a Monopoly set for every conceivable licensed property, and despite its utter lack of any connection to real estate investing, Doctor Who is no exception. The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary edition of Monopoly is a mixed bag. The board is actually quite lovely, and the traditional Monopoly properties have been replaced by episodes of the series with recurring monsters, which is an inspired idea. The text on the "chance" and "community chest" (here renamed "Gallifrey" and "UNIT") cards displays a fair knowledge of the show. But the playing pieces, which are supposed to be Doctor Who artifacts like the fourth Doctor's scarf and the sonic screwdriver, just look like bland lumps of metal.

In general I don't really like Monopoly, but playing this one I found myself having a good time, for a while at least. Unfortunately, we soon found ourselves just passing money back and forth across the board, and the game's fatal flaw as an elimination game that takes way too long to play reared its ugly head.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) As good as Monopoly can possibly be, but at the end of the day it's still Monopoly.

Date played: December 25, 2013

Doctor Who SceneIt was probably the most entertaining of the Doctor Who games on our list. I like trivia games, but I often find that the questions are a bit too easy if the subject is one I'm obsessively familar with, as I am with Doctor Who. However, in addition to the standard questions on cards, SceneIt adds unique video challenges where puzzle solving and reaction time play as much a part as trivia knowledge.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) More fun than your average trivia game.

Date played: January 2, 2014

At the end of our list of Doctor Who games are two versions of Top Trumps; one from 1978 and one from 2006.

The first one pits Doctor Who (a crudely illustrated Tom Baker) and the Legendary Legion, a bizarre group of fictional and historical figures, including Lord Nelson, Sherlock Holmes and Annie Oakley, against the Alien Attackers, a motley collection of monsters pulled from the first 15 years of Doctor Who. It's a simple game, but the descriptive text is surprisingly accurate, both for the monsters and the Legendary Legion.

As you might imagine, the 2006 edition is much slicker, with crisp images from the new series and somewhat overdesigned borders. The game is basically the same, with the cards divided equally among the players, who then compare statistics such as intelligence, darkness and courage, with the winner keeping the losers cards and play continuing until one player has all the cards. Great for a playground game, but a little juvenile for us.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) An overly simple game, although to be fair, we aren't really the target market.

Date played: January 3, 2014

Three Cheapass card games

James Ernest started Cheapass Games in 1995 with the idea that most gamers already have all the dice, counters, and other playing pieces they need, so giving them more with each new game was a waste of resources. If he just gave the rules, boards and cards, they could scrounge the rest of the components they needed and  he could sell his games for a lot less.

It's a great idea, and it certainly let a lot of games see the light of day that probably wouldn't have otherwise. Most of the games published by Cheapass were based on gag ideas like a hapless millionaire wandering the halls of his mansion while his guests try to kill him, or zombies working at a fast food restaurant. Many were extremely clever, probably just as many fell short of the mark, but all of them were informed by Ernest's sharp wit, superb graphic design sense, and frequently ingenious use of public domain clip art.

In Before I Kill You Mr. Bond (later re-titled James Ernest's Totally Renamed Spy Game, and still later, Before I Kill You, Mister Spy, for what I can only assume were legal reasons), players are supervillains who use cards to build elaborate lairs and score points by luring spies there to taunt them. The more drawn out the taunt, the more points, but also the greater risk of the spy escaping and destroying your lair.

The game's core mechanic relies on whether or not one of your opponent has the counter card to the taunt you are using, so we found it to be rather abrupt with only two players. We tried it out with five players and it played a little better, but it was still more of a race to see who could build the biggest, most indestructible lair and score points from taunting spies. The mechanic of countering opponents' card plays and letting the spy escape never really seemed to get off the ground.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Clever and humorous, but the game play never really seemed to get moving.

• Before I Kill You, Mister Spy official website
• Before I Kill You, Mister Spy on BoardGameGeek.com

I have to imagine that The Big Cheese is a reflection of its designer's ongoing frustration with corporate culture. Each round a card is turned over, representing a meaningless corporate task. Players bid a number of their workers (each player has ten), and the high bid wins the project, which then takes a number of rounds to complete based on the number of workers on it (in true corporate fashion, the more workers on the project, the longer it takes to complete). When a project finishes it pays off a number of points based on a die roll, with some projects rolling smaller or larger sided dice, for a greater range of possible points. The first player to get to 40 points wins.

Rating: 1 (out of 5) Our group seemed to like this one the least. The bidding mechanic was interesting, but the theme (simple cartoons of rats, poking fun at corporate life) failed to grab us.

• Download a free print and play copy of The Big Cheese from Cheapass Games
• The Big Cheese on BoardGameGeek.com

The Big Idea, a game about presenting absurd new product ideas to venture capitalists, was definitely our favorite of the three. Players play two-card combinations of objects and descriptions to create bizarre and unlikely new products such as Dangerous Drink, Frozen Tool, and the extremely questionable Laptop Lotion. There is then an elaborate bidding process to determine whether the products are successful or not. This is initially a popularity contest based on each player's sales pitch for their silly product, but in later rounds it becomes more strategic as players invest in products that look like they're going to pay off.

The player with the most money at the end wins (of course). This isn't necessarily the one who had the most successful products, but the one who invested the most wisely.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) With decent game play and a very amusing premise The Big Idea was easily the best of these three games.

• FunForge published a deluxe, color edition of The Big Idea with somewhat altered rules, but it currently appears to be unavailable
• The Big Idea on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: December 2, 2013