Bored? Game! – Destination Neptune + Quartermaster General

Destination Neptune

Destination Neptune is a sci-fi game about exploring our galaxy in the not too distant future. But before you grab your plasma rifles, note that the game claims to present an ‘optimistic vision of commercial space exploration’, so it’s less Battlestar Galactica than Star Trek. More specifically it’s less an episode featuring the Borg or Klingons, and more one of the filler episodes where Starfleet plays nursemaid to a primitive civilisation. Destination Neptune is definitely firmly in the ‘thinky Eurogame’ quadrant of known board gaming space and revolves around a mechanic of resource management; specifically the two resources of fuel and credits that you’ll need to ship your construction teams around the solar system to colonise various planets and moons.

The core mechanic, which sees you playing a card on your turn that gives you an action and everyone else a lesser version of it, is a potentially very interesting one and has been used to great effect in such classic games as Puerto Rico and Glass Road. Balancing your needs with those of your opponents can be a fun challenge and this mode of card play keeps everyone involved at all times. It’s a shame, then, that the cards in Destination Neptune aren’t really that exciting and, although the game takes place over 4 phases each represented by a deck of cards, the cards are exactly the same in each phase (although with a slightly different distribution), giving a sense of repetition that even Star Trek Voyager fans might tire of. By the end of the game we were just going through the motions and the ending itself was fairly anti-climactic.

There’s also the problem of first mover disadvantage. Being the first to hit a planet is expensive, and anyone following you there can do so at a discounted rate, piggy-backing off the trailblazer. In our game the guy who hung back and concentrated on controlling the tech tree crushed us all. Sure, this is realistic (late adopters taking advantage of established tech is how often industry works after all), but it’s also odd that a game based on exploration rewards players who hang back and behave like the Ferengis and punishes those who attempt to boldly go. I’m not arguing for a rubber banding catch up mechanic, so much as suggesting that different strategies should be more or less valid.

Destination Neptune isn’t a bad game by any stretch, and no aspect of it is completely beyond redemption, but it fails to become more than a sum of its parts, and is just a bit dull in total – kind of like an away mission during a mid-season lull, in which Data comes to a greater understanding of human nature. It’s a decent enough early effort for designer Ian Brody and new publisher Griggling games, but I’m sure they have better to come.

Designer: Ian Brody
Publisher: Griggling Games
Core Mechanic: Card Play, resource management
Number of Players: 2-4
Play time: 2 hours
Complexity: Medium

Quartermaster General

And that ‘better to come’ may well be Quartermaster General, Ian Brody’s other large effort (we also reviewed his Celestial Rainbows recently), which provides an interesting twist on the war game genre that feels fresher than Destination Neptune. Up to five players control nations during World War II: Germany, Italy and Japan on the Axis side; America, USSR and Britain on the Allied side. Each nation has a unique deck of cards, which not only provide a selection of historically appropriate faction specific abilities (for instance America is very good at using its economic might to damage enemies from afar), but contain varying amounts of cards allowing you to deploy troops or ships (Britain, for instance, has an emphasis on building a large Navy and can very quickly build up sea mastery, whilst Germany’s Blitzkrieg strategy is embodied in its ability to pump out troops to keep the war going on two fronts). Quartermaster General will let you rewrite history, but only within limits. Consequently players might feel confined to a strategy the game wants you to play; with ten cards fewer than most players and most of its special cards dedicated to helping Germany, Italy isn’t likely to conquer Asia anytime soon for instance.

Most interestingly, this is a war game that lies the emphasis on the most vital aspect of combat, often ignored in other games: supply. If at the end of your turn a unit can’t trace an unbroken line back to a supply centre, then it is removed from the board, and you can use this to your advantage by breaking an opponent’s supply line in a crucial location. In Quarter Master General, combat is really a formality: either play a land or sea battle card and remove an adjacent enemy unit from the board. Players with a fondness for rolling dice in war games will likely be disappointed by this utterly deterministic system, but it really works nicely and keeps the game light and fast, which is unusual for the genre. But that’s not to say that the game isn’t without randomness. As a nation what you do on a turn is utterly dependent on which cards you draw, and you can be royally stuffed if you don’t draw well. I was Britain in one game, and despite the amount of ‘Build Navy’ cards in the deck, I didn’t see one for the first third of the game, leaving Germany to sprawl out over Europe uncontested. Although it’s entirely possible to argue that this system represents the chaos of war – no plan ever survives contact with the enemy and all that – but it’s not half frustrating when fate decides to flip you the bird.

It’s important to note, also, that this is absolutely a game for six players, making it difficult to bring to the table. Sure you can play with less (two also works well, but with each player managing three nations, gets a little complex), but because of the way the game is balanced, the way the sides divide up will leave some players with a lot more to do than others. The game is at its most lopsided with three players, where one player controls the entirety of the allied side, another Germany and Italy, and the final player gets to control… Japan.

In short, Quartermaster General is a fascinating twist on the war game that keeps things light but still highly strategic and focuses on an element of warfare too often ignored. It’s also got some of the nicest graphic design I’ve seen in ages, leaving you little uncertainty what the function of each card is. It’s unusual for a new designer to found his own publishing company to release his games and for them to be any good, but Ian Brody may well be bucking that trend with Griggling Games, making him a designer to watch.

Designer: Ian Brody
Publisher: Griggling Games
Core Mechanic: Card Play, War Game
Number of Players: 2-6 (Best with 2 or 6)
Play time: 2 hours
Complexity: Medium