A game review from a currently-sekiro-enjoyer Yiming Su.
Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game is a turn-based board game based on Portal (the video game). In the board game, your goal is to acquire as many cake slices as possible by commanding your “test subjects” and activating “test chambers” with GLaDOS. This board game shows strong connections to the original video game and provides an original experience for both new and experienced players of the series through its mechanics and rules. However, for someone as a new player, whether they have played the Portal series before or not, it might be difficult to get started playing and understand some references to the video game.
To set up the game, players, up to 4, need to assemble the 3×5 board with the hexagonal test chambers. The left side of the board is called the “new edge,” and the right side is called the “old edge”. Players then deploy the test subjects on the new edge. Players progress through the game by moving the test subject towards the old edge and activating GLaDOS on any of the chambers on the old edge to gain cake slices, action cards, companion cubes, etc.
*** Spoiler Alert for Portal I ***
In the original game, players play the silent protagonist and test subject Chell and solve a series of puzzles while GLaDOS monitors her and gives her directions. Eventually, Chell found out that GLaDOS wants to kill her. She successfully escaped the death trap and destroyed GLaDOS, but only to find out that the entire process, from the start to the end, is a meticulously designed and successfully executed experiment by GLaDOS.
*** Spoiler Alert for Portal I ***
The original video game provides one perspective into the setting of Aperture Science: a rather lucky test subject who survives all the dangerous tests and escapes death. The board game, however, provides another perspective: the administrators of the laboratory where the goal is to obtain as many cake slices as possible by killing the test subjects. To gain cake slices, players need to dominate a chamber with cake slices as rewards on the old edge by having more test subjects in the chamber than all other players. To achieve this dominance, players can either simply place as many test subjects in a test chamber as they can, or use certain action cards to destroy their opponent’s test subjects or move them away. They then need to activate the chamber with GLaDOS. Their cake slices are then delivered to the new edge of the board. Afterward, the test subjects are destroyed (moved off the board) and the test chamber is recycled by flipping it and connected back to the new edge of the chamber. Here, different from the video game, board game players actively cause death to the test subjects instead of trying to escape from death to win the game. This forms a contrast with the video game in terms of mechanics and gives the players a great amount of autonomy and power. As the players get more used to the game mechanics and rules, “test subjects” stop being “real humans” and become tokens for the players’ purpose. This accurately recreated how GLaDOS perceives their test subjects, as pawns and tokens, if Chell never made it out.
Apart from providing a different perspective than the video game, the board game loyally sticks to the video game in terms of visual and language aesthetics and mechanics. Every player takes one colored portal gun card as their player card. Besides moving test subjects and activating GLaDOS, players can affect each other by using the action cards and temporarily adding to the game’s rule with the back side of the action cards. Having cards with titles like “cake” and “repulsion gel” can greatly enhance players’ immersive experience.
Similarly, for test chambers, the hexagonal shape and the special, isometric design of the test chambers not only allow a satisfying tiling experience but also accurately reflect the coldness and cruelty of the test chambers in the video game. The test subjects themselves are real-life manifestations of the little stick figure “bendy” in the cut scenes between test chambers in the video game.
Although the board game’s mechanics provide a unique experience to the players, one cannot overlook the difficulty for new players to understand the rules and play the game. The rule book of the game is 20 pages, though the last 25% (pp. 16 – 20) of the book is marked “additional rules,” the players cannot fully understand and play the game without reading through them, such as “Carrying Cake” and “Earning Companion Cube and Turret Rewards.”
On each page, there is an amount of reading of each point of mechanics or rules.
It took me about 20-30 minutes to completely understand the game and be able to play it rather smoothly without going back and forth between the game and the rule book. The time it takes to understand how and where to move a player’s test subjects, how to use the action cards, and how to win the game is significant in the first playthrough. The rules themselves are rather simple: at each turn, a player (1) either deploys an action card or two portal tokens, (2) moves their test subjects, (3) activates GLaDOS, and (4) recycles the activated test chamber. The presentation of the rules in portal-series-specific languages makes the rules a bit difficult to understand. If a player has played the Portal series video game before, it would be a delightful reading experience since the rule book constantly refers to the video game, such as “whoever has the most Cake Slices wins” or a player cannot gain rewards from a test chamber with a companion cube since the test subjects are distracted by it. However, for a player with zero prior knowledge of the portal IP, it would be cumbersome to understand the game rules through the portal jargon.
As an extension of the original Portal series, Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game serves as a great continuation of the Aperture Lab story with an alternative perspective. Players become the administrators of the laboratory and compete for the most slices of cake while actively causing death to the test subjects, providing a unique experience to all players, regardless of whether they have played the Portal series before. However, understanding the rules of the game by the rule book has posed an indispensable challenge to players, especially if they have not played the series before, due to the Portal jargon in the rules.
