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Review: HeroCard: Cyberspace |  |
HeroCard: Cyberspace is the most recent addition to TableStar Games’ HeroCard series of board/card games. The fundamentals of the card battle system are the same as in all of their previous offerings (read this if you’re unfamiliar with the basics), though there are a few new (and very interesting) rules introduced via some characters. The board game, however, is pretty different from any of their other HeroCard games, and is both strategic and engrossing. I feel, at this point, like I should mention something: Cyberspace has been, for a while, the HeroCard game that I’ve been least excited about, so I felt some trepidation when I sat down to review it. My opinion has, in many ways, reversed, however, as I’ll explain in this review. It’s not that Cyberspace is without its faults; like all the HeroCard games, this game is not perfect. However, like the other games in the series, this is a very good game, both in its own right and as an addition to the series as a whole.
Characters and Card Play
Cyberspace introduces four new characters, and this is actually somewhat of a departure. In the other three current HeroCard titles, the core game comes with two heroes, while you can purchase two additional heroes for each as expansion decks. Not so with this game; all four heroes come packaged in the core box, and there are no expansions. The game includes the Bouncer, the Sinner, the Bioengineer, and the Cryptomancer. Thematically, there are some problems here. The game takes place in cyberspace, a virtual world; however, only the Cryptomancer really seems to embrace this idea; all of the other characters rely on attacks and blocks that are thematically physical or social, rather than virtual. I suppose it could be argued that these characters are simply virtual avatars, and that their attacks and blocks are imaginary constructs, representations of their manipulation of the code of cyberspace. This, to me, takes a bit too much justification on the part of the player, though, and I’m not sure everyone is willing to meet the designers halfway on this.
Despite these thematic problems, though, some of the characters are really interesting to play, and the Cryptomancer in particular provides a dramatically different way to play the game. The Bouncer relies heavily on attacking, attacking, attacking, and is the only character who has restricted base attacks; this means that he is (barring some fancy card-play) the only character who can attack twice in a single turn. The Sinner has a lot of card-denial abilities, forcing her opponent to discard cards and, thus, weakening her opponent’s position. The Bioengineer has cards that allow you to twist your opponents’ attributes, making them unavailable until he discards three cards from his hand, as well as a particularly nice card combination that allows you to play a card, then clear it from your attribute stack, then get it back in your hand, then play it again. The Retrovirus, Bioremediation, Recycle, Retrovirus combination is particularly devastating to an opponent, effectively twisting two attributes (which requires a total discard of six cards). It cripples an opponent’s attack and defense for a turn or two, which can be pretty nasty, and you don’t even have to be in the middle of an attack sequence in order to use it.
The Cryptomancer is probably my favorite of the four; most of his cards are deployed first, then played; this means that you lay the card face-down on the appropriate attribute stack instead of playing it immediately. A deployed card can’t be played in the same turn that it’s deployed, so you have to plan ahead, but it frees up room in your hand and the cards themselves are incredibly potent. Myofibril Spasms, for example, clears all of your opponents’ block mods and reduces his block total to 0, meaning that he has to play more block mods in order to have a hope of fending off your attack. Relay allows you to duplicate an attack aimed at you, aiming it at the player of your choice. First you resolve the attack aimed at you, then you attack your target with the same base attack, playing whatever attack mods you want on top of it. So, you get to attack on someone else’s turn, and it doesn’t use your exclusive action for the turn. Malware is a +9 attack mod, for only 4 mind points (all of the deployed cards have a cost of 4). The fact that 80% of the Cryptomancer’s cards are deployed cards means that you absolutely have to plan ahead, but it also means that, if you do plan ahead, you’ll have some really nasty surprises lying in wait for your opponents. It’s a new and interesting play style that I really enjoy.
The Game
The Cyberspace board game is actually a tile-laying game, with passing similarities to games like Carcassonne. The game comes with 24 triangular tiles, each containing a client or a server, as well as connecting pathways and sometimes nodes. Connecting pathways have to line up with each other, and you place tiles in order to form networks, essentially chains of clients and servers. Servers are required to control a network, and you can’t score points without them. However, servers aren’t worth any points on their own; only empty clients are worth points at the end of the game, and only if you control one or more servers in that network. Nodes are the endpoints of pathways, and you can place links or firewalls on them.
The game doesn’t introduce new types of cards like previous HeroCard games have, unless you count the program card. Each player gets a program card and three program tokens, small translucent disks. The program card consists of nine circles: three idle circles and six program circles. Your program tokens start on your idle circles, and you move them to your program circles when you execute those programs; each turn, you can execute three programs. You can probe cyberspace, allowing you to draw a new tile and lay it down on the board. You can remap, allowing you to move an existing tile somewhere else, provided that tile is a ‘pendant’ tile (a pendant tile can only be touching one other tile, not two or three). You can spawn avatars (each player can spawn up to three). You can login, which is a pseudo-techie way of saying ‘move’; you can move an infinite number of spaces, but intervening objects (like other avatars) block your path. You can create a link with one of your three link tokens, allowing you to move between different networks as if they were connected. Finally, you can create a firewall (again, with a link token), which blocks both movement and attacks. You can also attack and perform other card-based actions, as you normally would be able to in other HeroCard games.
Cyberspace is all about building a network, and then securing it as best as you can. If you get a secure enough position, you can think about expanding into other peoples’ networks, but doing so from the outset is a surefire way to wind up in a bad situation (which I found out on my first play session). True to its theme, it’s extremely difficult to protect a network once it’s in place; there are any number of things that hackers can do to worm their way in, and the larger your network is, the more difficult it becomes to protect it. There are often dilemmas during play, as well. It’s much easier, for example, to protect a network with no (or few) nodes than one with many, but you need nodes in order to close the network (because a closed network is worth more). However, those very nodes make your network vulnerable to other players linking to it. So, you can place your own links or firewalls to block them, but you’ve only got three link tokens to use, so you have to budget them. It’s a very strategic and cerebral game, and the person who out-thinks and out-plans her opponent will usually win.
Things I Liked: The strategic depth of Cyberspace is really apparent a few turns in, and some of the characters are a lot of fun to play. I like the tile-laying aspect of the game, as well as the fact that you can move tiles already in place. The game becomes extremely tense in the last few rounds of play, as everyone tries to take as many networks as they can and devalue their opponents’ networks as much as possible. Thematically, the fact that networks are so vulnerable once they’re truly established is very true to life.
Things I Didn’t Like: Some of the characters seem at odds with the theme. While they’re certainly based off of standard cyberpunk tropes, they’re not necessarily thematically appropriate in cyberspace. Also, the game uses a sort of faux-anime style that just doesn’t sit right with me. I think I’d rather they had used computer-generated graphics, as they did with Galaxy; I think it would have been more in keeping with the theme, and probably would have looked a little better. Finally, the figures and tokens are made of a strange, very pliable, somewhat sticky plastic-rubber substance that looks like candy. I have no particular problem with this, except that it seemed to lead to some of the figures being bent out of shape when I opened the box.
The Bottome Line: While Cyberspace was the HeroCard game that I was least interested upon reading what was available on the website, after playing it I actually like it a lot. It’s not apparent how deep and fun the game is just from reading the rules; you have to actually play it to really see. I’m a fan of the HeroCard series in general, and if you’re not, I’m not entirely sure that this game will convince you otherwise (though the manual does provide a variant called ‘bit duel’ that eschews card duels in favor of flipping a coin when you attack). If you liked the other HeroCard games, though, you could do much worse than to buy this game.
