Board Gaming - part two

At the conclusion of part one of Board Gaming, we'd just found out the rule book was a monumental 45 pages thick. At least, monumental compared to the original board game of choice, Jenga. Jenga probably doesn't even have a rule book - just has a slip of paper which reads, "Don't knock the tower down you cretin." If you need to catch up, hit up part one - otherwise, read on!


45 pages of this.
Over the next three hours we take turns reading through the rules while we set up the game board. Our learning is hindered somewhat when we turn it into a drinking game – any time the rule book repeats something or tells us something blatantly obvious ("Area = Part of the planet where troops can land") we drink.

We finally begin a game, slowly going through each rule. The game plays like a hybrid of Magic the Gathering and Warhammer – you move your units about the map, using combat cards to attack the enemy.

You choose your team from the three classics – Protoss, Zerg and Terran – and randomly choose two planets. One is your home world, where you build your base, while the other is up for grabs.

I love it when a plan comes together
Once you’ve built a base, you start playing. A game of Paper, Scissors, Rock decides the first player. Each turn consists of three phases, with each phase having a number of steps. Phase one is Planning, and you simply prepare for the second phase. You work out your coming moves and place them on the board. You have six move tokens – two each for building, researching and mobilising – and you can place four upon the board. To start this is just a matter of biding time, but further into the game it turns in to an area where you can really work over your opponents.

Phase two, Execution, is where the action typically occurs. Each player flips over a move piece – whether it’s their move or not – and it’s performed. This is the phase where you can research technology, build units and attack people – attacking others obviously being the main key.

This is what it's like when worlds collide
Building and researching simply means allocating workers to acquire whatever resources – minerals or gas – you need to pay for them. Buildings sit on your faction card and effect what units you can buy. Purchasing technology adds new cards to your combat deck, either as frontline combat or as reinforcement cards.

If you choose to mobilise against the enemy, you enter combat. The attacker chooses what units fight what, and the outcome is declared using cards – if the cards you play match the units you’re using, you’ll have more attack points and more health points.

After you’ve executed all your attacks you enter the Regrouping Phase. You replenish your Combat Deck, get back any workers you spent and re-establish which planets and resources you control. You finish a round by passing the “First Player” token on to the next player, and the next round begins.

The rounds repeat until you have a victor – either through total annihilation of your enemies or by meeting certain victory conditions. The victory conditions severely restrict the length of the game, and after our first game we decided to never use them again. Still, I’m proud to say the mighty Protoss won – for Aiur you could say.

For some perspective - Command & Conquer 3: Kanes Wrath
So – what did we learn from StarCraft: The Board Game? We learned while a board game can’t replace a whole LAN it could replace a game or two, we learned about half the rules of the game. And we learned that even in a board game adaptation, Protoss are way, way overpowered.