The Battle at Kemble's Cascade Review

Sometimes, a game's description elicits only one sensible reaction: "Huh?" Let's take The Battle at Kemble's Cascade as an example. It's a top-scrolling arcade shoot-em-up game in the tradition of R-Type or Gradius except it's reformatted as a card game in which the players move little plastic spaceships over rows of cards all laid out across flimsy plastic troughs, occasionally piling smaller cards on top of them. It's a slow-paced, tactical turn-based game in which you're trying to farm a magical space resource called "Bellonium" to buy ship upgrades and power-ups, although the only thing that really matters is blowing up pieces of the final boss to score Glory points. Oh, and it's a competitive game with PVP combat and a crucial bid for turn order at the start of every round.

Huh?

Okay, forget everything you just read. Here's the digest version: Kemble's Cascade is an 8-bit arcade space shooter in board game form. As far as I'm aware, that's never been seriously attempted before, at least not with this degree of fidelity, yet co-designers Olle and Anders Tyrland pulled it off with panache, envisioning some damn clever ways to simulate a twitchy, constantly scrolling barrage of bullets and asteroid chunks with nothing more than cardstock and moxie.

For instance, to simulate a vertically scrolling battlefield, the Tyrland brothers made use of "scrolling trays," which look like ugly strips of tire that are beautiful in function if not in form. These adjustable plastic trays hold the Space Cards that make up the game map. At the end of each round, one player lifts up the bottom-most scrolling tray and tips it, dumping the used Space Cards into a neat discard pile. They then move the empty tray to the top, pushing all of the existing rows down, before refilling it with new Space Cards from the draw pile. Given the frequency with which the battlefield scrolls, I don't even think this thing would be playable without this clever hardware hack.

Even more clever is the game's take on removing dead enemies and snatched power-ups from the map. Whenever an enemy ship goes boom, it gets covered up with a face-down Sensor card, the same cards the players use to determine turn order every round. Since the backs of the Sensor cards match the pixellated starfields of the map, they blend seamlessly. This may not seem like a big deal, but there's no replacing that satisfying feeling of clearing half the screen a single powered-up blast of your Gamma Ray.

Behind all this cleverness a question lingers: "Why?" If it takes all this fiddly hardware to translate a game like this to cardboard, why even bother? Some players might never find the answer to that question; they'll abandon the game as soon as the novelty wears off. A game this strange can't please everybody. But those who accept its eccentricities will find a surprisingly engrossing tactical puzzle beneath the hood of this cross-medium aberration.

When you think of Gradius, "tactical puzzle" probably isn't the first phrase that comes to mind. While Kemble's excels at mimicking all the superficial aspects of a fast-paced shoot-em-up, the game itself isn't fast paced. Each round of play represents a frozen moment of game time. After playing their Sensor Cards in a blind bid for turn order (think of this phase as deciding which player at the arcade cabinet has the fastest reflexes), it's time to stare quietly at the board, mapping out the series of moves that will yield the maximum benefit to you while denying points to your opponents. Strip away the theme, and it's surprisingly reminiscent of Five Tribes in a vague sense. Alternately, once you've blown up enough enemies to gather a good cache of Bellonium, you might Power Down, spending your entire turn shopping for upgraded weapons and ship parts. Your choice of upgrade path is the biggest strategic choice you'll make in the game, and it provides a lot of options, from quick-firing lasers to explosive missiles, engines and shields.

Timing these Power Down actions requires careful finesse due to the effects of Threat, the game's abstraction of a screen full of bullets. Nearby enemies and other objects generate Threat, which will damage you at the end of your turn, draining your ship's Energy. You can "dodge" the Threat by moving during your turn, but if you Power Down, you don't have that option. If your Energy ever hits zero you go kaboom, giving everybody else a big pile of points- even more so if they've spent previous actions firing on you in PVP.

Since it is one of the only ways to score Glory in the early and mid game, PVP is a reliably lucrative strategy, but spending your limited shots on the other players instead of enemy ships means ignoring opportunities to earn Bellonium and upgrade your weapons. And without upgraded weapons, you won't even dent the level's randomly selected boss, which is the other most important scoring opportunity. This makes PVP, like everything else in the game, a mostly tactical decision that must also be weighed against the chance to earn Achievements by performing out-of-the-ordinary maneuvers.

From its old-school "Operation Manual" to its screen-filling bosses, Kemble's Cascade captures the arcade shoot-em-up vibe perfectly. However, despite some whizzbang gimmicks, its actual gameplay is far removed from the twitchy pattern memorization the visuals imply—but that's not necessarily a bad thing if you like games that let you optimize your moves and undercut your opponents.