Our group played a 2-4 player card game called Control where players have broken spaceships in a time rift and they race to reach 21 fuel in order to escape. Once one player escapes, the time rift closes, so the others lose. This game has some elements of engine building, but the large amount of impactful effects in the game cause the game to encourage bluffing and risk management much more than traditional engine building.
Rules
The game adapts to the number of players playing at a time. For 2 players each player has their own deck and discard pile (kind of like war) and for 3-4 players the deck and the discard pile are shared in the middle between play. Then, only for 4 players, there are teams of 2 sitting opposite from each other (kind of like kent) and then players collaborate with their partner and both make it through the time rift as soon as one of the players has reached 21 (they dont combine their fuel counts)
During your turn, you choose to either draw a card, install a Fuel Cell in your area of play, burn a Fuel Cell to the discard pile, or defuse an opponent’s Fuel Cell. Fuel Cells come with varying fuel counts from 1 to 10, each equipped with distinct abilities that introduce dynamic strategies and diverse gameplay options. Fuel Cells also have 2 types: Stable and Unstable. Stable cards have a fuel count of 1-5 and there are 20 stable cards in the deck. Unstable cards have a fuel count of 4-10 and there are 28 of them in the deck. The turn of play continues clockwise after the action resolves. Once all cards have been drawn, overtime begins. Players still take actions from the cards they have in their hands, but no one can draw new cards as the discard pile is not reusable. Then Control has many mechanisms in place to ensure someone is the winner, even if no player reaches a fuel count of 21. When all cards have been played, the player with the highest count wins, if there is a tie it is broken by the player who has the most cards in play. Then if there is still a tie, the winner is the player who went latest in turn order. Additionally, the game is meant to be played in rounds with each round acting as an alternate time trial. For two or four players a player/team needs to win three time trials. For 3 players a player only needs to win two.
We felt that the rules were overall very clear and concise. There were a few points where we felt that the game left things unclear. For example, “drawing” a card is not well-defined, which might be confusing for players who don’t play card games. Similarly, “playing” a card was not clearly defined either, which led to some confusion during our gameplay.
The card art being either silver or bronze to reflect the fuel cell type was a great decision both for making the game visually appealing and making it easy to understand. Fuel cell type wasn’t a rule that we might forget about and have to check for in the corner of the card after making a misplay, it was a feature of every card that we couldn’t help but notice every time we looked at another striking piece of card art. Quickly enough, the different fuel cell types and their significance was something we knew without having to think about, which is both because of the simplicity of the rules and the visual aid in the components.
Actions/Mechanics
On each turn, a player can take one action. There are only 4 actions and all of them are simple enough to fit on a small and visually aesthetic reference card.
A player may draw. Unlike most games, this takes up the whole turn, making it a decision that players have to make. Should I draw for future potential plays or play something now to make sure I don’t fall behind the others?
Installing a fuel cell gets you closer to your ultimate goal of reaching 21 fuel. Additionally, the effects of stable fuel cells are triggered when you install them. This rule almost on its own drives some interesting decision-making since stable fuel cells generally have a lower fuel value than unstable fuel cells, but the unstable fuel cells effects are not triggered when installed. As players are asked to balance the quantitative value they get from the fuel with the qualitative one they would get from the stable fuel cell’s effect, the decision here often feels non-deterministic. The other actions don’t directly move you towards your goal, so I think it’s worth noting how this game balances them in a way that encourages players to use the other actions at all. There are two main aspects of this game that encourage you to use the other actions, which are uncertainty (more fittingly, control) and resource management. We’ll discuss these aspects and how they force interesting choices more in-depth later.
Burning a fuel cell allows you to use the effect of unstable fuel cells. Since these fuel cells usually have higher fuel values than stable fuel cells, you might be tempted to install these often. But since their effects are generally very powerful, you’re also gonna want to burn them or hold on to them to burn later. Similarly to the decisions related to installing stable fuel cells, burning a fuel cell asks you whether you value an effect or a number more. This is usually a result that can’t be calculated, adding uncertainty to many of the decisions you make on your turn.
Players may defuse another player’s fuel cell, meaning they spend one of their own with an equal or higher fuel value to remove the other player’s installed fuel cell, making them further away from their goal. In all fairness, we only played two games of Control and probably don’t have a full feel for the game yet, but this action was almost never used by us. It generally felt like a loss to spend one of your fuel cells to take away someone else’s. This feeling may have also been made worse by us playing with 3 players in a game that really felt like it was meant for 2. In a 3 player game, spending your turn pulling one player behind feels even worse when that third player is unaffected by or might even benefit from your action. In theory though, we see how this action encourages player interaction, which successfully fuels this game, but more on that later.
Uncertainty and Player Engagement
This game communicates explicitly that it wants to convey a lack of control, which it accomplishes very well through the uncertainty tied to nearly every action you perform. The outcome of all your actions are very certain. There’s no element of randomness tied to what you are allowed to do on your turn. As discussed before, the long term outcome of these actions is not very clear.
Uncertainty comes in large part from the card effects in the game. Most of these are related to screwing over your opponents rather than helping yourself directly. They include sending one installed fuel cell to the bottom of the deck, ‘nope’ cards that negate someone else’s card on their turn, a card that destroys all stable fuel cells, and a card that destroys all unstable fuel cells. In our game, we had those last two cards played back-to-back, leading to a complete board wipe that we were all equally devastated and amused by. Even the card that allows a player to peek at the top two cards, choose one, and return the other, has such great potential to give the next player a card that you know they don’t want. With effects like these, installing a fuel cell or burning an effect now rather than later is intimidating. Maybe an opponent is holding onto a card that could wipe half your board in the next turn. This element of uncertainty in the long term outcome of our actions clouded every decision we made in a very engaging way.
From the perspective of a player who isn’t taking their turn, these card effects drive player engagement. Since turns last only one action, they were very fast, mostly avoiding situations where I felt bored waiting to take my turn. But more importantly than that, most actions that a player took added information to the play area. Since so many of the card effects in my hand were related to affecting other players’ play areas, every action they took made me reconsider how worth it would playing one of my card effects be. For example, when one player installs an unstable fuel cell with a very high fuel value, the qualitative value of a card in my hand that destroys all unstable fuel cells has suddenly gone up. Every other player’s turns had a very direct impact on mine, incentivizing me to stay engaged throughout the whole game.
However, there is one action that felt mostly void of uncertainty and player engagement. Drawing a card felt like the safest and smarter choice most of the time. Again, we may change our minds as we play more games of Control, but towards the end of our gameplay, we found that drawing cards was more important than we initially thought. We think this is mostly because there are very few effects that affect a player’s hand. There is only one card that affects the hand, and since there are 4 of each card, there are 4 cards that do this. This effect causes a player to discard 2 cards, one of which they get to choose. With a hand limit of 7, this punishment felt too few and far between to discourage us from drawing cards and hoarding them in our hands where they were safe. To make this worse, having multiple turns in a row where each player draws a card is very unengaging since no one is adding visible information to the board that we can consider destroying. These turns are each very fast, which mitigates this problem, but it’s still worth noting as a problem that would be far more pronounced in a longer game. While an overall small problem in the game as a whole, drawing a card and the safety of the cards in your hand stood out as a weak point of this game that led to some uninteresting decisions and unengaging moments.
Progression
Progression in this game felt a bit strange. Intuitively, players progress towards their goal every time they install a fuel cell. They have added that fuel cell’s fuel value to their total. Once they reach 21, they win. Although most cards have effects, these are usually effects that are activated immediately, or only make sense in very specific situations, so this game lacks the sense of engine-building that you might expect from games where you add cards to a play area. Since other players will very often affect your board states, as discussed earlier, progression never felt certain either. I could be at a very high amount of fuel this turn, but by the time it’s my turn again, I may have lost two of my installed fuel cells, leading to a sudden drop. Progression was much more like a wavy line with one player having a large spike near the end of the game that happens to be greater than 21.
The strangeness of progression is part of what makes it so exciting. Every player has a chance to win at all points in the game. Even if one player is at 20, you may have an ability that could wipe out half of their installed fuel cells. We didn’t have any situations where a player felt like they had fallen too behind, because anyone could fall behind drastically at any moment. Even more than that, we, the players, are the ones who decide whether someone else will fall behind. We were in control enough to decide whether we play a game-changing card effect. So this lack of a traditional sense of progression is a large part of why we felt engaged at every moment, even during another player’s turn.
However, it led to a somewhat unsatisfying resolution. During the game, we were all caught up in how to best prevent each other from winning since trying to win ourselves more directly felt so uncertain, which was a great feeling that had us engaging with other players and making many interesting yet mechanically simple decisions. The end of both our games usually came about when one of us realized “wait I can probably just win in like two turns,” and the other players were either unable to stop them because they didn’t have good enough cards in their hand or they just didn’t notice how close they were to winning. This felt pretty unsatisfying, even for the player who won because it felt more like the other players accidentally let you win rather than you fought your way to a hard-earned victory. This may be due to our lack of experience with the game as well. I would imaging with more experience, we may try to bait out certain cards from each other or pay more attention to when someone is close to winning, but then we suspect the game might further encourage drawing and hoarding cards as you want to save your best cards for later in the game when you know everyone else’s strategy. Still, we haven’t played the game enough to critique this part in particular accurately, so it would be worth paying attention to as we play more games.
Overall, Control was a very engaging short game that had us making a lot of interesting decisions. We think this is in large part due to the card effects that add uncertainty to the only action, installing, that directly helps you work towards your goal. Since working towards your goal feels so unpredictable, we were incentivized to mess with other players instead, making for an experience centered around the players rather than numbers on a board. This game wouldn’t be as fun as it was if it weren’t for the lack of control.
Written by Louis, Catherine, Dylan, and Jacob
