As per my last post, I decided to have a crack at the Doctor Who Solitaire Story Game this week in honour of the the Doctor's 50th anniversary. The game comes with numerous era-specific expansions, and given that my favourite Doctor is the Seventh (Sylvester McCoy), I decided to play with this expansion. The Seventh is, perhaps, one of the more complicated of the Doctor's regenerations. The first season of Seventh Doctor stories played on McCoy's comedic roots, and called upon a number of well-known stars from the UK variety scene who were completely incongruent with regard to the feel and image of Who : Ken Dodd for instance, and of course Bonnie Langford as the Doctor's companion. At this point, Who had truly lost its way. However, during the second season of McCoy's tenure, something remarkable happened. Langford was ditched, the explosives-obsessed Dorothy McShane - better know as Ace (and played by Sophie Aldred) - was introduced as a new companion:
As was the infamous Cartmel masterplan. The latter radically and darkly re-envisioned the mythology of Who (in ways which are still impacting on the current reboot). McCoy shifted from being a clownish prankster to a manipulative master planner who was always one step ahead of his antagonists, and seemingly all too willing to sacrifice his companions as pawns in a complex game of cosmic chess.
Here the juxtaposition of McCoy's earlier slapstick performance in the previous season contrasted brilliantly with this darker, more sinister re-envisioning of the Doctor.
So, as you can imagine my disappointment when, after beginning my first game of the DWSSG playing the Seventh Doctor, I ended up with Melanie Bush as my companion...
In any case, the DWSSG takes the classic rpg-lite choose-your-own-adventure format, develops it, and throws Doctor Who into the mix. In theory this sounds like a wining combination. However, my first encounter with the game proved otherwise.
In the game, you take the role of the Doctor (your characteristics and companions depend on which incarnation you use). You then have 12 turns to identify your enemy, reveal their plot, and defeat them. Of course, a whole range of classic Whovian monsters come in to play as potential antagonists, and typically thematic Whovian plots, locations and situations are also likely to arise as a consequence of the choices (or andom die rolls) you make. As the Doctor, each turn you are allowed to take one of a number of actions - although the choice of actions may be limited by what you have already achieved in previous turns. On taking an action, you role either 1D6 or 2D6 to resolve it - this will often direct you to another paragraph in one of the various game books which, in turn, may lead to additional (also randomly determined) options. Two problems emerged early on in the game with this process: firstly, you have to make use of a minimum of four different gamebooks during your adventure - not a massive issue, but it can be quite time-consuming and take you out of the moment if you have to stop and think which book you need to turn to. Secondly, on a given turn, there is a significant likelihood that the only action allowed to you is exploration (particularly early in the game). The problem here is that the die-roll bell curve (2D6) relating to exploration means that there is a significant chance (a roll of 6 or 7) that you will achieve the result of 'nothing', meaning that you have wasted one of your 12 turns. In the game I played, I ended up rolling a 'nothing result' six times during the game, which vastly limited the possibility of successfully completing my mission. On two other occasions when I was able to undertake different kinds of actions, I still ended up rolling 'nothing happens' results. So, for the better part of the game...nothing happened. In addition, my companion Melanie Bush (albeit in classic Whovian style) kept getting in trouble so that the Seventh Doctor had to resecue her, which wasted more of my time and ultimately led me to losing the game. Stupid Bush.
Even so, I did have the sense that this game offers the potential to mirror effectively the narrative feel of a typical episode of Doctor Who. It also has a very interesting and open-ended solitaire engine. Given that narrative immersion is my principal interest where solo gaming is concerned - and being a huge Who fan - I'm willing to give this one another go, even if initial experiences of gameplay were not particularly engaging.
Gaming Self-Abuse Scale (tm): 5/10 - but I shall be revisiting this, as I think that there is greater depth to this game, and suspect that I have ended up experiencing a particularly unfortunate first play session.
Next up: I will be stroking the haft of my mighty axe in anticipation of confronting Z-Man Games' Yggdrasil...
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