Jason Frey
Everyone is trapped in a void outside of space and time, and they must escape. The first to do so survives. That’s the aim of Control, a more minimalist card game which requires careful resource management and an everyone-for-themselves approach. As a fan of both science fiction and narrative-driven games, I was immediately hooked by the theme. Additionally, the card artwork, done in a hand-drawn style, evoked a sense of surreality that removed the player from the present on Earth and more easily transported them to a location outside of space and time. In the same way that animation may be the most preferred mode for producing a TV show that would otherwise require heavy use of CGI to effectively portray the narrative, the aesthetics of Control lent themselves to the intended motif of being untethered from reality—with advanced technology being the only avenue to get home.
The setup for this game is simple. For 2 players, create two decks of equal size. For 3 players, shuffle all the cards in one large deck. For 4 players, create teams of two with a single large deck in the center. Then, shuffle the decks and deal each player 4 cards. To me, it is a bit odd that the play style flips from competitive to semi-collaborative as soon as one more person is added to the group, because it changes the entire strategy of the game. I would be interested to see if 4 people could play Control while retaining the 100% competitive style of the 2 and 3 player version. If this wouldn’t work, then what mechanic would have to change for it to succeed? Should the creators have revised the mechanics to make the 4 player experience more similar to the 2 and 3 player experience? If this would work, then why did the creators decide to switch to a collaborative mode in the first place? To me, this rule change seems a bit unpolished and creates a problem of the game mechanics straying too far from the narrative. If everyone is fighting to be the first to escape the void, and there are, ostensibly, dwindling supplies such that only one person could feasibly escape, then how does player collaboration fit into the premise?
In terms of the physical arrangement of the game, I love that Control’s hand management is not limited to the actual “hand” of cards but also incorporates a personal tableau in front of each player. For many of the simpler card games that I’ve played throughout my life, it is not often that I’ve seen the hand-tableau arrangement outside of games played with a standard 52-card deck. This multi-tiered composition adds an extra dimension to a game and forces the player to strategize when to play a certain card in front of them and when to keep particular cards in the hand. I found that the “early and often” strategy for playing cards onto the tableau (aside from the Nova card, which has the highest number of points) was typically the most fruitful, because playing too cautious of a game can lead to rapid advances by your opponents within one round and can cost you the win. With respect to Control’s win condition(s), I was not the biggest fan. For one, the game offers two different avenues for winning, depending on the number of “rounds” (which is an ambiguous term in this game) that are played; I am of the mind that there should be a single, clear win condition. For another, since this game seems to be an adaptation of Cuttle, it makes mechanical sense that the win condition would be reaching 21 Fuel Cell Charges (or points) before anyone else. But narratively, I was not compelled by this goal at all. Is my survival really just dependent on a collection of quasi-meaningless points? The game could have done a better job of tying in the number of “points” you are trying to earn with narrative milestones in fixing the space-time transporter.
Fundamentally, Control is a card game that asks the question, “what would happen if the race to escape a space-time void were polite?” The turn structure allows for a reasonable action economy (one card draw and one card action from the hand) and for some level of interaction with the opponents’ tableaus; however, while the cards were designed with player interaction in mind and the game successfully created tension in action, I found four primary problems with the in-turn mechanics that facilitated too little aggression amongst the players. First, there were very few, if any, card actions that allowed a player to mess with another player’s hand. At times, the cards in the hand felt untouchable, and I was hoping for a bit more threat to create an incentive for players to take risks in their actions. Second, there was not enough flow between the hand and the tableau. Once a player placed a card from their hand onto the tableau, it would stay there or be discarded, with no mechanics for moving the cards in the tableau into anyone else’s hand or onto anyone else’s tableau. This made the game feel a bit too rigid. Third, there were too few reaction cards. Only one type of card could be played out-of-turn, which made the turn order feel strict and not dynamic enough, especially when it was crucial to prevent an opponent from playing a critical action. Fourth, the “Defuse” action came into play almost never. This is one of the four possible actions on a turn, and yet it is both too costly and too weak to ever be incentivized in play, and it feels like the game relies too much on that one mechanic to attack other players even though it is unbalanced.
Overall, Control was enjoyable to play for a few rounds, with a compelling theme, even if the endgame did not hold up under the narrative. To make this game better, I would want to see mechanics that increase the dynamics of hand-tableau, hand-hand, and tableau-tableau movement, and it would be interesting if a player’s tableau were not always fixed to the original owner—could it shift throughout the game, like “hopping ships”? I would recommend giving this game a try, even if it just acts as narrative inspiration.
