{"id":20033,"date":"2019-06-03T12:57:28","date_gmt":"2019-06-03T17:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20033"},"modified":"2019-06-03T12:57:28","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T17:57:28","slug":"game-report-professor-evil-and-the-citadel-of-tim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2019\/06\/03\/game-report-professor-evil-and-the-citadel-of-tim\/","title":{"rendered":"Game Report: Professor Evil and The Citadel of Tim"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Our latest game is Professor Evil and The Citadel of Tim<\/a>\u2014we picked it up because we liked the box, and because we have been enjoying cooperative games, generally. We\u2019ve played it twice so far, and have really enjoyed it. It\u2019s basically a more complicated version of Forbidden Island<\/cite>, by which I mean that the gameplay is absolutely nothing like Forbidden Island<\/cite>, but it helps to have Forbidden Island<\/cite> in mind when you sit down to play this one. Like that game, your team (who each have special abilities) is trying to loot four treasures before Tim runs out. There are, however, a lot more moving parts in the Citadel, so there\u2019s a lot more to do, and a lot more option for how to do it.\r\n

The main problem with co-operative games of this kind, for me, is that I am tempted to attempt to dictate everyone\u2019s actions all the time. I am aware that this is not good for the MFQ, but then, if I\u2019m spending the whole game biting my tongue to prevent myself hectoring the table then that\u2019s bad for the MFQ as well. At this point, playing with YHB\u2019s own household, it\u2019s not bad\u2014for one thing, my progeny are now better at these games than I am, which helps. But I would hesitate to suggest any of these games for any group that did not have form playing together. And for a group that wanted to try a game of this kind, P.E.&tCoT<\/cite> is certainly not the game to start with. But for a group that knows they enjoy Forbidden Island<\/cite> but is a bit bored with the mechanics and gameplay, this is an excellent game.

I am impressed by how well the game hangs together\u2014there are twelve rooms in the titular Citadel, and each room has three doors to other rooms which can be locked or unlocked as well as a device which can be switched on or off, and may have a treasure as well. There is also the titular Professor, who is Evil, and who moves through the rooms locking doors and switching on devices, and then there\u2019s Tim, whose inevitable march around the clockface determines victory or defeat for each treasure. This all seems very fussy and overly elaborate, but it fact, we didn\u2019t have difficulty grasping how all the bits worked together.\r\n

Speaking of Tim\u2014another thing that P.E.&tCoT<\/cite> has in common with Forbidden Island<\/i> is an attempt to create a mechanism that creates a sort of time pressure (or Tim Pressure) which is (imao) extremely good MFQ. It\u2019s not actually time\u2014each individual turn can take as long as people like, and the group can choose to talk out all the possible moves or to move ahead with dispatch, without worry about having to rush. Nor is it a specific and arbitrary number of turns, as it might be accomplish this in twenty turns<\/i> or some such. There\u2019s a mechanism that has an element of randomness, within some fairly complicated constraints, such that it\u2019s not possible to tell at the beginning of the game exactly how many turns are available, but as the game continues it becomes somewhat clearer approximately how many turns are left, and then with a few turns left, it is pretty obvious that there are<\/i> only a few turns left to accomplish the remaining tasks. This sparks something of the immediate pressure of a timeclock without the unpleasant aspect of having to rush the decision-making. And it also means that the game is fairly brief, and doesn\u2019t drag, as if there are a couple of turns without much to do to immediately achieve a target, it\u2019s simple to move on quickly.\r\n

The downside of P.E.&tCoT<\/cite>, as far as I\u2019m concerned, is that I have some difficulty seeing the entire board, and it\u2019s important to remember the location of some fairly small icons scattered around it. It\u2019s not terrible, but during each game I wound up spending a couple of turns standing up at the table so that I could take in more of the tabletop. I could easily imagine it slowing down the game play a lot, if all the players have to keep scanning the table frantically to make sure they have found all three of the little cameras or locks or whatever. The icons are well-designed, I think, but my eyesight isn\u2019t all that good and the board, when fully set up, is a little ongepotchket. That said, they don\u2019t move around very much, so I suspect what I really need is to put some effort into remembering \u2018the lasers are in the cellar and the gallery\u2019 at the start of the game, and then I wouldn\u2019t need to do so much scanning the board later on.\r\n

Other than that, the design is pretty good. For such a complicated game, there aren\u2019t very many pieces, and the setup isn\u2019t terribly laborious or time-consuming. The part that takes the longest is the placing of the devices, and since that\u2019s a large part of the strategy of the game, it doesn\u2019t feel tedious.\r\n

Also\u2014we\u2019ve played both games on \u2018easy\u2019 mode, one of which was a crushing loss and the other of which was a squeaky victory. It seems likely that the game will continue to be challenging and interesting as we get better at it. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s likely to be a game we pull out for years to come, but I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if it takes a couple of dozen times through to get to the point where we have definite tactical ruts.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger supposes that there was only enough room on the shop's bar code label for 37 characters, not 38, but really, that e is silent, so why wouldn't you leave it off?","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[210],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20033"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20036,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20033\/revisions\/20036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}