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Children of the Fire: A Mini-Review
Nov. 10th, 2006 01:59 pmLast year BlindLuck Studios put out a few different games: American designs in the German style. I had the misfortune to play Caravans of Ahldarahd and it was one of the most mindnumbingly bad games of 2005. I in fact said that it was my worst new game of 2005, though I admitted that might have been because the scarring was still fresh when I wrote up that list.
Last night I played BLS' other Eurostyle release, which was Children of Fire, and in contrast it was an entirely OK game.
Summary
Children of Fire is a blind-bidding and resource-management game. Each player has a hand of 7 cards which each have a value and sometimes special powers. Over a turn four pools of resource material are put up for bid (one each for four different colors) and then players take three actions, each time either bidding on one of the four resources with their limited hand of cards, bidding on first player, or else using resources that they've already acquired.
There are four influence tracks, each of which runs from point "A" to "B" (e.g., "greedy" to "generous"). The markers on each of those tracks starts in the middle and is moved by using the appropriate resource. Each player's ultimate goal is to put each of the markers toward their preferred side (A or B), and to also have a specific marker be the first that's "locked" in place, and a specific marker be the last one that's likewise "determined".
The Good
First Player. The best element of the game is the first-player mechanism. The issue of "first player" is often a falling down point in games, which try and equalize turns or equalize the amount of times each player goes first in order to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake. This game instead takes that inequality and balances it by letting players make one of their scant three bids on first player.
And, there's hard choices here, because the first player gets the first opportunity to move the influence tracks each turn (because each can only be moved once), but the last player gets the last chance to bid, and thus knows what everyone else has done and also doesn't get undercut by special powers. Chris absolutely won our game by staying on top of first player, but it was a sometimes costly strategy because it slowed down his opportunity to have much other affect on the game.
The Rest. The core systems of blind bidding, resource management, and card management work pretty well. There was nothing amazing, but they allowed interesting decisions.
The Bad
Harsh! I'm not fond of games where you can totally screw yourself over with bad moves, and this was one. I made a couple of bad strategic moves at various points which cost me badly. Mind you there's the flip side that there is actual strategy, and this ultimately comes down to an issue of personal preference. However, some of this harshness was just due to bad development.
For example, of your hand of 7 bidding cards, you use 3 on a turn. Then those go out of play and you use 3 from the remaining 4 on the next turn. Then your old ones come back, and you have 3 of 4 again, etc. This means that you're making a relatively critical decision on your first turn, since the 3 cards you choose will largely set what's available in future turns. But, you also have the ability to slowly correct it. Except there's one card you can destroy for a special effect, leaving you with 6. At that point your 3/3 get entirely set, and if you choose badly, you're screwed for the rest of the game.
Influence. The influence system ultimately didn't work for me.
The biggest problem was one of balance. Each player had their secret A or B goal for each influence track. We had 5 players. That means that for each track 3 players wanted it to go one way and 2 the other. We looked at things at the end of the game, and 3 of the 4 influence tracks had been pushed the way of the majority. The 4th had not, only because one of the 3 players with that goal purposefully pushed it in the opposite direction in order to meet his first-or-last goal instead. Now, the game was clearly set up to have orthagonal victory conditions, direction or timing, and that's kind of clever, but I suspect it's not enough to offset the innate unfairness of unequal numbers of players trying to accomplish inverse things.
The back and forth also got really dull at the end. Granted, that might be because the game was already going long with everyone (myself included) taking too long of turns on what should have been easy decisions. But seeing the same influence token go back and forth around the middle over a few turns got pretty annoying. If I played the game more, I might consider it a gamebreaker, but I wouldn't go that far after a single play.
Overall
Children of Fire had OK components, though not particularly high quality. I give them a 3+ out of 5 using the RPGnet scale, primarily because they were bright. The game likewise was a bit above OK, which I'll call another 3+. I'd be entirely willing to play it again, especially if we were able to play it faster, but it's not something I'd go out and buy. For a letter grade, that comes out to a B-.
(Side-note to the wise: BLS hasn't put out a game since 2005, and their web page is now being squatted upon. They also don't show up in my newest Games Quarterly Catalog. So I'm not entirely sure they survived the year and their first releases.)
Last night I played BLS' other Eurostyle release, which was Children of Fire, and in contrast it was an entirely OK game.
Summary
Children of Fire is a blind-bidding and resource-management game. Each player has a hand of 7 cards which each have a value and sometimes special powers. Over a turn four pools of resource material are put up for bid (one each for four different colors) and then players take three actions, each time either bidding on one of the four resources with their limited hand of cards, bidding on first player, or else using resources that they've already acquired.
There are four influence tracks, each of which runs from point "A" to "B" (e.g., "greedy" to "generous"). The markers on each of those tracks starts in the middle and is moved by using the appropriate resource. Each player's ultimate goal is to put each of the markers toward their preferred side (A or B), and to also have a specific marker be the first that's "locked" in place, and a specific marker be the last one that's likewise "determined".
The Good
First Player. The best element of the game is the first-player mechanism. The issue of "first player" is often a falling down point in games, which try and equalize turns or equalize the amount of times each player goes first in order to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake. This game instead takes that inequality and balances it by letting players make one of their scant three bids on first player.
And, there's hard choices here, because the first player gets the first opportunity to move the influence tracks each turn (because each can only be moved once), but the last player gets the last chance to bid, and thus knows what everyone else has done and also doesn't get undercut by special powers. Chris absolutely won our game by staying on top of first player, but it was a sometimes costly strategy because it slowed down his opportunity to have much other affect on the game.
The Rest. The core systems of blind bidding, resource management, and card management work pretty well. There was nothing amazing, but they allowed interesting decisions.
The Bad
Harsh! I'm not fond of games where you can totally screw yourself over with bad moves, and this was one. I made a couple of bad strategic moves at various points which cost me badly. Mind you there's the flip side that there is actual strategy, and this ultimately comes down to an issue of personal preference. However, some of this harshness was just due to bad development.
For example, of your hand of 7 bidding cards, you use 3 on a turn. Then those go out of play and you use 3 from the remaining 4 on the next turn. Then your old ones come back, and you have 3 of 4 again, etc. This means that you're making a relatively critical decision on your first turn, since the 3 cards you choose will largely set what's available in future turns. But, you also have the ability to slowly correct it. Except there's one card you can destroy for a special effect, leaving you with 6. At that point your 3/3 get entirely set, and if you choose badly, you're screwed for the rest of the game.
Influence. The influence system ultimately didn't work for me.
The biggest problem was one of balance. Each player had their secret A or B goal for each influence track. We had 5 players. That means that for each track 3 players wanted it to go one way and 2 the other. We looked at things at the end of the game, and 3 of the 4 influence tracks had been pushed the way of the majority. The 4th had not, only because one of the 3 players with that goal purposefully pushed it in the opposite direction in order to meet his first-or-last goal instead. Now, the game was clearly set up to have orthagonal victory conditions, direction or timing, and that's kind of clever, but I suspect it's not enough to offset the innate unfairness of unequal numbers of players trying to accomplish inverse things.
The back and forth also got really dull at the end. Granted, that might be because the game was already going long with everyone (myself included) taking too long of turns on what should have been easy decisions. But seeing the same influence token go back and forth around the middle over a few turns got pretty annoying. If I played the game more, I might consider it a gamebreaker, but I wouldn't go that far after a single play.
Overall
Children of Fire had OK components, though not particularly high quality. I give them a 3+ out of 5 using the RPGnet scale, primarily because they were bright. The game likewise was a bit above OK, which I'll call another 3+. I'd be entirely willing to play it again, especially if we were able to play it faster, but it's not something I'd go out and buy. For a letter grade, that comes out to a B-.
(Side-note to the wise: BLS hasn't put out a game since 2005, and their web page is now being squatted upon. They also don't show up in my newest Games Quarterly Catalog. So I'm not entirely sure they survived the year and their first releases.)