The Superfly Circus

Live D&D Session With Celebrities....That I Never Heard Of...

2012-01-27T06:34:00.000-08:00

I, as a corporate lapdog, got this email from Wizards of the Coast's PR company, and they told me that there is a celebrity D&D live show where you can watch a bunch of celebrities play D&D live. It's a buck to sign in to the site, which I'm sure will be BLOATED with traffic. Here's that email:

Hi Pete -

Ever wonder how different celebrity minds, like Zach Hanks or Dan Milano, would approach a D&D adventure? Here’s your chance to find out and donate to a good cause at the same time!

On Saturday, January 28^th, Wizards of the Coast, DnDMelt and Satine Phoenix are proud to host the second annual CELEBRITY CHARITY DUNGEONS & DRAGONS GAME fundraising event to raise money for the Reach Out and Read program in Los Angeles. A slew of celebrities will come together to play the same Adventure, choosing from a short list of Characters all written by Celebrity D&D Writer: Keith Baker.

Each table will be videotaped and streamed live! By donating just $1, you and your readers can join the adventure from the comfort of your own home. You can access the live feed by going to http://MeltComics.com. Additional information can be found in the media alert below.

Cheers,

XXXXX

XXXXX XXXXXXX

On behalf of Wizards of the Coast

XXXXXXX@XXXXXXXX.com

*** MEDIA ALERT ***

“CELEBRITY CHARITY DUNGEON’S & DRAGONS GAME”

Wizards of the Coast hosts yearly event at Meltdown Comic’s in Los Angeles on Saturday, January 28 at 1:00 p.m.

WHAT:	4 tables of up to 6 celebrity gamers per table play the same D&D Adventure using Characters written by Celebrity D&D Writer/Gamer: Keith Baker.
WHERE:	Meltdown Comics Theater, 7522 Sunset Blvd. Hollywood, CA 90046
WHEN:	Saturday, January 28 from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
WHO:	DnDMelt’s CCDD event brings together a creative cast of Actors, Musicians, Writers, Photographers and Artist.
BENEFITS:	Reach Out and Read is a nonprofit organization promoting early literacy and school readiness in pediatric exam rooms nationwide by giving new books to children and advice to parents about the importance of reading aloud. Donate: viewers can watch each adventure unravel via live-stream for a minimum donation of $1 from 1pm-6pm. All proceeds will be added-up at the end of the event.
LIVE-STREAM:	Go to http://MeltComics.com Choose 1 – 4 of the celebrity tables Make a donation (Minimum $1) and retrieve a password via email Login with Donation Password Enjoy the live feed!

OK, now here's what I don't get. Who the hell thinks that Dan Milano and Zack Hanks are celebrities? If it was Vin Diesel, maybe I'd be down because I have a man-crush on the dude. Yes, I'd maybe fuck Riddick if I was drunk enough. Oh, and if I was gay. But still, I had to look up who the hell those two dudes are...and when I did, I confirmed that not only are they not really celebrities, one of them is a puppeteer for the most amazing show ever, Robot Chicken, and the other is a video game voice actor. It also appears he played some cameos on some TV shows, too.

But seriously....I am only mentioning this because I haven't put anything on the blog for a minute and this might be interesting because having a Robot Chicken guy playing D&D, and IN CHARACTER, might well be funny as hell.

Plus, it's for charity.

So, if you're interested, you're officially invited. By Ms. XXXXX XXXXX from Wizards' PR company. And she sounds REALLY exotic...that name has me turned on, just a little.

If I were Robert Florence (and I wish I was, sometimes) you'd now be hearing the Ooh Zaa Ohh bit.

Cheers,
The Management

Legend of Drizzt: Best Of Both Worlds? For Shizzle, My Drizzle.

2012-01-18T16:36:00.000-08:00

I'm convinced that there is some secret order of fantasy writers, perhaps a guild, that endeavors to come up with the most absurd character names imaginable. Maybe it's a bet, akin to Trading Places, or something. I mean, even the true classic fantasy and sci-fi novels have truly bizarre names like Bilbo Baggins, Tom Bombadil, Aes Sedai and other memorable monikers. Tom Bombadil sounds like an Indian bloke you'd be connected to after calling your credit card company or something, for example. I mean, if Jim-Bob Crank carved the balls off of Sauron with nothing more than a butter knife, would he be any less heroic because he's not named Lionheart Steadfast or some such nonsense?

The worst part is that not only is this guild of poor name creators still alive and well, they're just getting worse. Enter Drizzt Do'Urden, which sounds to me like a phrase that the Swedish Chef, of Muppets fame, would use to describe what the Urban Dictionary calls "santorum". And yet, despite the name, our beloved Drizzt is a fantasy staple, with R.A. Salvatore crafting several amazing books about the noble dark elf's adventures. All that being said, and true, this article isn't about dumb fantasy names. This article is about a game, and The Legend of Drizzt (LOD) is precisely that: an awesome fantasy game that happens to be about a character with a really dumb name.

I'm not going to belabor many of the details of gameplay, since I covered that ground with Wrath of Ashardalon and Castle Ravenloft reviews. I invite you to read those, as they're exceptionally brilliant (if I do say so myself, and I do) and explain the core mechanics of the series. In this article, I am going to talk about what makes this game different, and so much better than the both of them, and what makes the series worth owning either in part or, as I do, in whole.

What makes the D&D Fantasy Adventure System series, of which this game is the third incarnation, so brilliant is that it's infinitely replayable and totally customizable. While some people require handholding and need to be continuously led like sheep to the shears, some people have this amazing thing that only a loving God could bestow upon an entity: imagination. This underutilized gift allows some people to create incredible scenarios, fearsome adventures, and parallel worlds for brave adventurers to explore, pillage, and potentially fall to. The built-in adventures are great, no doubt, but beyond that the game series is a veritable Swiss army knife that provides the tools to develop your own adventures within the confines of the existing rule set. And it does so surprisingly well.

Ravenloft's strong points were the themed tiles, the strong, integral and cohesive theme, and the fact that many of the treasures were useful items that you could lug around to fell the evil beasts within. Everything in the game seemed to scream, "Your party is totally in a vampire's castle, hunting vampires!"

Ashardalon, on the other hand, didn't make you feel that way in some ways. It had far more of a generic theme on the surface because the room tiles were generic, but it had chits to make any room less so. Also, in retrospect, the monsters within seemed less cohesive as bears, cultists, and demons all seemed to live together in peaceful harmony, which seemed a bit weird. The monsters were certainly more interesting, they just didn't all seem to fit together. Further, the treasures were generally only situationally useful, and most were one-time use items, which kind of seemed antithetical to the idea of a dungeon crawl where you pick up items to then perpetually buff out your wee battlers.

Fortunately, Ashardalon made up for its few shortcomings by having a better system. It had a new "chamber" mechanic which allowed you to add complete rooms onto the board once the entrance was found, it supported doors, and it had a random adventure system within that allows you to create quick, fun, and mostly unique adventures on the fly without spending time authoring a "module" or campaign. Speaking of the campaigns, the true majesty of Ashardalon is that it contained a built-in campaign system complete with shops in between adventures, and all of the treasures had price tags on them. While this caused a slight conundrum because Ravenloft's items do not have price tags, not to mention that Ravenloft uses two item decks where Ashardalon uses only one, it is a minor niggle at best.

Now, what makes this iteration better than Ravenloft and Ashardalon both is that Wizards has taken some of the best features from both, namely the strong, cohesive theme in Ravenloft and the improved rules and campaign system of Ashardalon, and then mixed in its own new flavors for a wonderful game that will certainly be remembered as the best of the batch. There are some aspects that I feel they went backwards on, such as the fact that there aren't many chits that you can add to a room to make it more thematic, but they are overwhelmingly overcome by the improvements.

The first, and single most important improvement, is that the adventure book is no longer just a bunch of throw-away generic adventures. These adventures re-enact some of the great battle scenes from the R.A. Salvatore books, with some artistic license, but also have competitive, deathmatch, and "survival" mode type games. This is the biggest departure from the old formula, and it's brilliant. No longer do you have to all play do-gooders trying to win against the game; now you can attempt to race to the finish as opposing teams, and in one mission you explore the cavern until one player transforms into a disguised assassin, who then changes teams and "goes Cylon". All in all, it's great that Wizards has finally shown a little more initiative and imagination in coming up with out-of-the-box scenarios that aren't simple runs through a cave to kill a superbaddie.

Another neat change from the other games is that there are terminations and portals built right into the game's design. No longer do your maps have to be linear; now there's these "fissure" tiles which can act as portals between areas, making for more complex designs, let alone saving you table space since you can now make more compact designs rather than long, skinny hallways. The fissures also can act as "spawn points" if you want to play a survival mode type adventure, or if you want to play through an adventure where monsters are squirting out of the maw of the earth to stop you from finding the +5 MacGuffin of Great Interest. In short, there's a lot of neat tools in this toolbox that improve upon the other games in a lot of ways.

While the other games had five heroes, LOD has eight heroes to choose from. A major difference in these heroes, though, is that some have the new "stance" ability which allows them to place a marker on a card and gain an advantage during combat. It's a neat change, and adds some more strategy to the combat formula that has served the series well thus far. Two of the heroes, a mercenary and an assassin, are both playable characters as well as Villains, meaning they can be played in most games by players, but in others cannot because they're an adversary with their own Villain card who plays a role in the story the adventure tells.

Additionally, there are now "allies" which, like Ashardalon's NPC cards, can add some depth to a game. Five of the playable characters can be brought into the game as allies, complete with their own AI cards telling you how they act. Two other allies are beasts that are sidekicks in the novels, Guenhwyvar (see what I mean about dumb fantasy names?) the black panther, and Snort the warthog. Unfortunately, the rulebook literally has not a single mention of the ally cards and how these actually get played, and the Adventure Guide makes little reference to the cards as well. This is the one major oversight in this game; the allies could have been fleshed out far more in the rules, although it's pretty clear that you activate them exactly as you would monsters.

I've not actually mentioned the components yet, which I probably should at this point, so how about I do that now? Inside the box you get a couple of hundred cards, all of which are the usual awesome production value you'd expect. As far as game terrain, there are four large 2-section tiles, one of which is a start tile and three that are destination tiles, and then 32 normal tiles, most of which are fairly plain but some which are named tiles with artwork. The newest thing here is that all of the tiles are "cavern" tiles, which look like tunnels. This, unlike its 2 predecessors, is not made up of wide open layouts. This is a much more claustrophobic game. The tiles also have their own "pile" markers for monsters to use; this time it's mushrooms that act as the bone piles did in Ravenloft. Finally, the terrain has just over twenty cavern terminations, four of which are the fissures I spoke of earlier.

As for the other bits, there's a ton of chits and markers, as usual, so I won't get into them all since most are similar to the previous games, such as trap, treasure, item, and other markers. The newbies are the "Stance" markers, which are used to place on player skill cards to indicate your character has changed his stance, as noted earlier. There are no new "Conditions" in this game, only the "Immobilized" and "Poisoned" markers, so there's nothing new to learn here. One neat new thing is the inclusion of treasure chests. These can be put into rooms to be looted, and each has text on the back that indicates what you've found. It's a bit like the coffins from Ravenloft, but it does add a bit of excitement. Of all of the new stuff, though, the single best improvement is in the models themselves.

The models in LOD are outstanding. The biggest big baddie in the box is the Balor, which is a total rip-off of the Balrog from Lord of the Rings. It's outstandingly detailed, but with many keep-out areas, it's going to be a bear to paint. More bad news: It's the Legendary Evils model that costs thirty bucks if you want to buy it. In total, there's 40 minis in the box, all of which are awesome, and some are that clear blue plastic that accepts acrylic paint perfectly to allow for a translucent look. My only complaint is that the figs come in six colors, which means that unless I prime them, it will be a pain to account for the base color. If you do decide to paint, remember to use a white, heavy primer like Armory primer, and whatever you do, DON'T FORGET TO WASH THE FIGURES FIRST! I've screwed the pooch more often than I'll admit here by forgetting the simple step of dunking this style of mini in hot soapy water and rinsing well before painting. Don't follow in my footsteps.

In short, all of the bits in this game are outstanding, as usual. I especially like, or maybe dread, the big purple spider creature. The model is just plain creepy. But I love it. The parts all punch out of the sprues perfectly, with no tearing at all, and they bag up quite easily if you sort them by size and shape. It took me maybe twenty minutes to tag and bag them all, in fact. I wonder at what point I'll just get a big Plano box to contain all of the bits for all of my D&D Adventure System games, since 75 percent of the bits are common to each set.

So here we are, at the end of my article. I usually get into the rules and the feel of the game, but because this is simply the next iteration in an astonishingly good series, I'm just going to pass on that. This game plays identically to Ravenloft and Ashardalon in virtually every way, with the only real differences coming in the form of the "Stance" mechanic and the new competitive, race, and hidden traitor adventures.

I simply cannot wait until I get the chance to draft a huge campaign that starts with my nizzle Drizzle escaping the clutches of Glitterdoom the Purple Dragon (no, Glitterdoom isn't actually a purple dragon, but in this game, he's made of purple plastic) only to have to defeat Ashardalon and his horde of Cultists in order to obtain both the map to the hidden entrance to Count Strahd's keep and the Sun Sword, the only artifact known to be able to defeat the fiend.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: LODis good in its own right, as was Ravenloft and Ashardalon, but you have to look at all of these sets as an ever-expanding toolkit to craft your own epic adventures. It's D&D light, to be sure, and my only singular complaint is that I truly wish that Peter Lee, head designer of this series, would have had the foresight to design some level four and five player cards for each of the eighteen characters that are playable in the series. Being limited to level two when the game now has campaign rules just feels a little cheap.

If I play through ten adventures in a campaign, I'd like to be a little more meaty than what amounts to a squire being upgraded to a foot soldier. I understand that the games are not meant to be "Dungeons and Dragons", but even games like Mutant Chronicles: Siege of the Citadel that have been around for twenty years have the ability to buff your characters with more experience.

I'm hoping that Wizards will eventually start releasing small, twenty or thirty dollar supplemental expansions to this, complete with new characters, new monsters, and maybe even some campaign books to be used with the series, sort of like what Days of Wonder did with Memoir '44 or, perhaps more apropos, like FFG did with Descent. The biggest barrier to entry for these games rests on the fact that not everyone is looking for a toolkit.

Some people want a game that can be played fifty times, right out of the box, and they're not looking to have to invent their own scenarios. While there are always scenarios up at the Wizards site, I'd really like to see a fifteen to twenty dollar perfect-bound Player's Guide type book that has a bunch of cross-game campaigns. All of the tools are there, it's just up to them to put it into use.

What Makes Legend Of Drizzt Legendary:

- The theme is entirely cohesive this time, and the models are outstanding
- Varying scenarios make for greater replay value
- New, exciting mechanics really spice up the series and make this the best of the bunch

Why The "Swedish Chef Theory" May Be Right:

- I'd have liked more 'named tiles' or room markers to vary the Underdark more
- Too many one-time use items like wands water down the campaign "buy options"

Overall:

This is absolutely the best in the series from every perspective except theme, and that may be because I'm not a Drizzt fanboi. I think Ravenloft still feels the most thematic, but the fact is that this game stands on its own as a dark adventure through the tunnels of an underworld city. Great bits, great theme, and truly innovative design of the adventure book make this a must-buy for fans of the series as well as a solid choice for a newcomer to the series.

I'd almost recommend Ravenloft over this due to the fact I love how well the theme fits the gameplay and the bestiary for that game, but this gives you so many options on how to play that this is clearly the best in the series as far as value. All that being said, if you hated Ashardalon or Ravenloft, I wouldn't expect you to like this. I can't see how you couldn't like the series, but if you don't, then this isn't for you.

Rating:

4.75/5 Stars

Check out the game here, at Wizards of the Coast's site:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/product.aspx?x=dnd/products/dndacc/355940000

I'd also like to point out that before this article, I knew little about Drizzt Do'Urden (hurnde hurnde hurnde) so I obtained a copy of the latest book from R.A. Salvatore, Neverwinter. Wizards sent it to me along with this game. From the perspective of a guy whose only forays into fantasy novels, meaning swords 'n sandals versus spaceships and ray guns, I have to admit that the guy can write. It's a really interesting book, and I've subsequently gotten the previous book in the series as I've kind-of gotten into it. Still, I sure wish there's be a Jack Whittaker as a hero sometimes, because trying to pronounce some of these absurd fantasy names can get old really, really fast.

Check out the book I read here, because it's pretty awesome:

http://www.amazon.com/Neverwinter-Saga-Book-II/dp/0786958421

Board Games: Commodity Trading Vs. Hobby Vs. Addiction

2012-01-06T13:44:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about games as they sit on the shelf, collecting dust, as less of a "durable good" or "commodity" as much as "collector's item". What I mean by this is that, as I'm sure you know, most games have a short lifespan of "buzz" on the Internet, then appear to ride off into the sunset. I'm not sure that they end up being shelved indefinitely, but they certainly don't command the attention as they did when they were all fresh and new. Maybe that's just human nature, to want to play with the new, shiny toy even though the one you got last week is still in perfect working order and just as awesome as it was when you clicked "buy it now" two weeks back. But maybe it's not. Maybe it's because the allure isn't a "new game to play" as much as "getting something new" and having something to look forward to.

But let's start with the original thought: What is the useful lifespan of a board game? I used to think, probably in a minority opinion, that games are to be kept and played often rather than played a lot for a short period and then shelved, only to be re-investigated sparingly to quench a particular hankering. But now that I'm laid up, and my friends are pretty much out of action or disinterested, I'm starting to see things from the perspective of someone who doesn't value the idea of getting new games often, but from someone who wants to play games that I have, and enjoy, more often. Because I've been playing video games more often, I've started comparing board games to other types of interactive entertainment, and the realization has been pretty eye opening.

When you look at a video game, especially an RPG game, for instance, there's maybe one or two "plays to completion" in the game. That said, with each play consuming 20 hours or more, and 100 hours or more in some cases, the fifty bones you drop on a video game may be better spent than the fifty you spent on a boardgame that will be played an average of 10 times before shelving it, with each play being two hours. The difference is that with video games, you generally play the hell out of them until completion, whereas with a board game, you'll likely play it four or five times in rapid succession, then sporadically, and then rarely after, if ever again. I'm not even sure that this has to do with the quality of a game as much as the human condition, especially when it comes to collectors and OCD completists.

Then look at a first person shooter, like Halo was or like Battlefield 3 or COD: Black Ops is. People spend hundreds of hours a MONTH playing those games, and honestly, I'd say it's more in line with a boardgame since they're both forms of entertainment that require other people to utilize. So, when looked at under that lens, you can see that board games are not nearly the value, when looked at from a use perspective, as some of these games might be. I mean, even the most die-hard Heroscape guy can't say that he plays Heroscape as much as a FPS enthusiast plays online shooters. Thus, it's certainly arguable that the board game hobby itself isn't about the actual play value as much as the collecting aspect, and certainly not about the lifespan of a board game as a durable good.

Let's go back and take a look at board games when viewed as a durable good. What is the lifespan of a game? And should it be judged by that? At what point does one accept that they will never play a game again and the only reason it's still sitting on the shelf is sentimentality? I'm not very sentimental or nostalgic in this regard, so as a pragmatist, it's a very, very short time for most of my games. Some games, though, such as El Grande or Space Hulk, have such a high probability of being played that I cannot envision arbitrarily dismissing them.

By that rationale, I'd have to say that for most games, their viable lifespan is not all that long. As noted, this doesn't include a very few games, arguably "the classics" or games you particularly love, that may see use for years and years. And in my research for this article, which was comprised of talking to a great many folks without telling them why I was asking the question, it appears that I am correct in assuming that "value" isn't the real motivator, and that people hold onto games not primarily based on their interest in playing the game a lot. Primarily, the motivation they almost universally offered was that they wanted the 'experience' of playing the new game.

What this exercise has shown me is that my original view that a board game is really not that different from other forms of entertainment as I once thought. You go out and buy a DVD not because you plan to watch it four hundred times, but because you believe that you will watch it enough times in the long-term to justify its price, and you want it to always be available to you. You buy video games going into it for the experience as well, not really taking into consideration how long the game will last, or how much value-per-hour you're going to receive for your money.

So it's not really about the value of the game as far as how many times you will play it, it's about feeding your desire to have something available to you, on demand, and the experience. Boil that down, and it appears to be about instant gratification. But with board games, it seems, the mental justification often is there for the purpose of allowing the purchase rather than justifying it based on value terms. In other words, the person getting the game has no real anticipation of playing it so many times that it would justify the purchase, but simply owning it is justification and reward in and of itself.

What I find interesting about board game collecting, or should I say collectors, are the parallels to substance addiction. I've talked to, and read Internet forum posts from, ample people who brag about ordering something online and how the waiting is unbearable; how they look outside at the post box, praying their wee parcel of goodness will appear. It's akin to the guy who calls his dealer up looking to score, and how he can't wait for the black-on-black Maxima with 20" rims to appear in his driveway. Continuing with the corollary, the game will most certainly prove to be a short-term fix, like that eight ball of coke, because before long, the "new game smell" will have worn thin, and the guy will be back at BGG researching the next purchase to ease their need for a new game. If you then pair that with the desire for the "experience", irrespective of the value received or the cost, it really starts looking like an addiction.

I'd point out that there's nothing wrong with this in and of itself for many people. People tend to need something to do with their time, and collecting boardgames is certainly far less destructive than drug use, or at least to one's health. But what I am saying is that, like drug use, the enjoyment tends to manifest more in the researching and collecting than the playing. Sure, playing the game is great fun, but the fact that the game gets stale so quickly and becomes perpetually shelved so soon after purchase would support the idea that "having something to look forward to" vis-a-vis waiting for a parcel to arrive is the real draw. Sort of like a kid's anticipation before Christmas, waiting for the special day that they can open the presents. It's not so much the present as the anticipation and the act of opening it.

So, the question then becomes, does the quality of the game really matter all that much, in the long run? There are some truly great games out there, but there's far more games being churned out by the Euromills that are simply re-themed versions of other games with almost identical mechanics, or worse, the nebulously themed mash-up games. Yet, these games seem to be consistent sellers just as the great games are, although their buzz dies on the vine far sooner than a good game's buzz would.

If the draw is in the collecting, and the anticipation, then the answer becomes clear: a great game will see the table more often, but in the grand scheme of things, mediocre games that are played 5 times and then sent to the bench are just as intrinsically valuable because they feed the need to collect, or the need to perpetually anticipate an inbound game. Maybe the "bragging rights" of having a great game on your shelf is nice, but were it the primary motivator, people would have nothing but the greats, with the chaff being sold or donated off, which is simply not the case with many, many board gamers.

But let's get back to the idea of collection versus playability...if a game is poor or average, and so many games are superior, why keep them? Why have a collection in the mid hundreds if the games will very likely never see a table again? This is the one thing I just can't seem to figure out. Maybe it's the pain of having to sell and ship games, maybe it's the unappealing idea of spending money on something and then selling it for less shortly thereafter.

Maybe it's because the only viable alternative is BoardGameExchange, where you can rent them. There simply is no "Gamestop" for Board Games as of yet. Some FLGS stores provide a buy-back service, but again, this isn't utilized often because every FLGS I've been to, and there have been a great many of them, there is almost never much "used game" inventory with respect to board games. A lot of Magic cards and miniatures, but very few boardgames. Thus, I'm let to believe that the demand for such a service doesn't truly exist, or all FLGS would be doing it, and it would be the norm.

This is compounded by the fact that unlike video games, boardgames are far more expensive to dispose of via the same means normally available to other entertainment venues. Shipping them is expensive, which is hampered by the fact that most online sellers offer free freight upon initial purchase, and therefore upon sale, the price must generally be exponentially decreased in order to attract buyers. It's a real pisser, in short. Sure, few games will actually appreciate, but those games are generally the ones that the original purchaser is most inclined to keep.

Even when you consider trading games online, there are significant barriers as you are losing the price of the initial purchase, the initial shipping price, and then the price to ship the game to another person, all of which adds up to a snowballing financial loss for each game that is traded. There are obvious deterrents to buying mediocre games, available for all to see, yet people for some reason are compelled to continue buying crap games by the bushel, only to perpetually store them.

Whatever the case may be, it surely appears to an outside observer that boardgame collecting is just as addictive as crack or tobacco, and provide the same fix as a junkie gets with virtually the same cycle: the continual craving for more, the anticipation of the arrival, the use which results in euphoria, and then, finally, the crave hits again and the 'user' goes back out 'doctor shopping' on BGG to find their next fix.

But, the question remains: If it's not an addiction or mental issue, why would one continually buy mediocre games and shelve them, knowing they'll be hard to sell and thus will cause financial loss? Why not simply buy only the best games, and forgo the poor ones? The only conclusion I can come up with is that it is indeed either an addiction or mental disorder along the lines of 'hoarding'. I'm sure there's a minority of aficionados who want, for idealistic reasons, to collect every single boardgame ever made, but I'd argue that it's a very, very small and quiet minority. The majority just seem to want more and more, and it doesn't matter how much the games get played or how fun they are.

This idea is cemented by the fact that I cannot tell you how many people I know that have bought hundreds of dollars in games that are sitting, right now, on their shelves with the shrink wrap still on them. And it's likely that they will ALWAYS sit there, with the shrink on. So, what purpose could that serve? If you buy something and haven't even bothered to open it a year later, let alone actually use it, it's a good bet that you might have an addiction. Now, I'm not saying that EVERYONE is like this. I know plenty of people that use weed or drink a lot, and are productive people that aren't addicted. What I am saying is that there's a definite subculture of addicts, or at least those who exhibit addictive behavior. I think it's fair to say that this is the core constituency of "The Cult Of The New".

My conclusion really comes down to the idea that boardgames, more so than video games, are not actually a durable good or commodity. They are, for many hobby gamers, a consumable item prone to few uses before being discarded, but that happens to be collectible. Sort of like a Pez dispenser, really; they're used several times, then set aside as a decoration. But for other folks, the game will sit on a shelf for many, many moons, maybe even in the shrink wrap having never been played, because the goal may never have been to play the game at all; that was the simply subtext to justify the purchase. The real goal was to have something 'precious' sit on your doorstep when you come home. In both cases, though, the useful lifespan of virtually all boardgames is incredibly short, and the fact that the game sits eternally on a shelf makes it no less discarded, it simply redefines the garbage bin.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T14:37:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to all of you, well, unless you're Chinese. If so, then I'll reserve my elation until the 22nd or so. I've always liked dragons, so this year is especially exciting. Oh, and if you're Jewish, well, I'll reserve my Rosh Hashannah greetings until September.

Anyhow, I'm sure you're wondering where I've been. Where is this Drizzt review? Where is ANY review? Well, I'd love to tell you that I've been busy having an assload of fun, frolicking naked in the dandelions and whatnot. Well, no. I was in the ER on Christmas, and then again on the 27th. I even got to stay overnight! I've been stuck with shitloads of needles, irradiated both in and out, and subjected to the worst thing imaginable, a no-caffeine diet.

Good news is that the medical establishment has certified that my heart is as strong as an 18 year old linebacker's, my lungs are as clear as a non-smokers (which I now am, as of Christmas, which is coincidental, not reactionary to my internment at the ER; my present to myself this year was to quit pissing my money away on cigarettes), and my brain is hemorrhage free.

Yet, I am still sick as fuck, and they have no idea why. No, I'm not blaming vaccines.

So, that's why there has been no update to the site in the past week or so; it's that I've been sick as a fucking dog. A sick dog, too.

But, I'm committed to getting some reviews out shortly, so keep an eye on your inbox.

Cheers,

Pete (The Management)

Caveman - Prehistoric Swingers Engaging In Risky Behavior

2011-12-21T09:08:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay, Circus goers, in getting reviews out. I haven't played many games in the last month due to my normal group not being able to meet for a variety of reasons, the least of which is my dear friend's poor, but improving, health. So, forgive the lags in between reviews for a while as it's getting hard to get people together. I'll try to get more out in the near future. I had planned a "Holiday Buyers Guide" and have the template made, but I missed the timeline pretty heavily and so I've cancelled it. Finally, I'll have a 2011 recap done this week. Onto the fun!

This week's review subject is a 2007 game out of Germany, from MAG Games. I know, you're thinking, "What the hell do I care about some German game from 5 years ago that I never heard of?" Well, it's my stated goal to bring you news about games you may not know about that are worth your time. Well, Caveman is that game. It's got painted dinosaurs intent on chewing your brain stem out. It's got half-naked cave-chicks who will, without compunction, have sex with cavemen at the drop of a hat, provided there's another man or woman involved in the act. That's right: the game not only encourages threesomes, but you can't really advance without them.

The upshot of the menage-a-trois action is that you have kids who more often than not will die without so much as a whimper. And the best part, there's an opportunity to chuck spears at each other, or at the dinosaurs. It's simply a really fun little game that really amounts to a sort of set collection game with a healthy infusion of "essence of Ameritrash". There's even custom dice, and if you have a pulse, you should like custom dice.

The idea behind the game is that you play the part of a tribe of Cretaceous humans who are struggling to emerge from the Stone Age through technological advancements. The players are tasked with winning through two possible paths: players can develop five stone age technologies or can grow their tribe to eight adults. The board is strewn with randomly placed chits that depict animals, berries, caves, trees, and flint, each of which must be landed upon in conjunction with one another to discover technologies.

Alternatively, when a man and woman of a tribe is on the same space and another woman is on berries or another man is on an animal, the paired up lovers produce a cave kid. Kids can, at the end of a turn, be converted into adults via a die roll. The "die roll" is aptly named, too, because in many cases, the kid never grows up because if you don't roll well, he dies. The game ends immediately upon a tribe growing to eight adults or when a fifth technology token is earned.

The components are top-notch as well, with the box art being quite attractive and the chits being very well illustrated. I mean, the box art alone just begs you to buy the game. Inside the box you'll find several custom dice in green, yellow, and red, with each color being used for something different. Also inside are a big pile of cards that ship with a plastic cigar band sleeve to keep them from flying all over the place.

Inside are six tribes' worth of people chits, with men, women, and children represented, not to mention the five technology chits used to track a tribe's progress toward civilization. A neat thing about the people chits are that the chits representing the men are larger than the women, which in turn are larger than the children, so that the nature of a stack of people is easily identified. On top of that, there's a big pile of resource chits which are used to populate the board's resource locations, allowing each game to have a different layout. This aids replayability greatly, but it also can unbalance the game a bit because you can end up having a slew of goodies in close reach of one tribe over others.

Beyond that, there's a rulebook that is written in several languages, yet is one of the worst-organized I've ever seen. I mean, it's all over the place, even for as short as it is, and several reads would be required had they not included some of the best reference cards ever. The cards alone allow you to completely understand the flow of the game, and using them alone is the best way to play.

The board itself is actually very nice, with nice illustration and is easy to play on. The last bit worth mentioning is that the game shipped with an baggie of prepainted dinosaurs that look really awesome. I mean, the game wouldn't be nearly as fun without tangible, carnivorous beasts vying to chomp you or squish you in between their feet like Godzilla did to soap during the third step in his recovery. All things considered, the game is has remarkably good production value, although miniatures for the tribals would've been nicer, a little. Still, it is well worth the price I paid for it.

So now you know what it looks like, but how about gameplay? Let's explore that, and I'm fairly certain that you won't be disappointed.

To set the game up, simply choose a color of tribals, shuffle the deck of cards and place it on their volcanic resting place on the board, shuffle and place the resource chits on their board locations, and finally, choose and place your three dinosaurs in their start positions around the volcano. After that, you're ready to play. The whole process should take around five minutes, at the longest, which is in my opinion the sweet spot for all board games.

Gameplay is quite simple, which makes this game all the more fun because while the method of playing is simple, the strategy is actually quite deep if you choose it to be. You can win through procreation, which is always my first choice, or you can win through developing the five required technologies, each of which provide you a bonus or ability upon development. Random events occur which can augment or stymie your chances of success as well, which throws a bit of an "X Factor" into the mix as well, so nothing is absolutely certain, and sometimes timing can be critical.

On your turn, you simply pull a card from the deck and resolve it. Cards are split into two sections, with the top section giving your tribe an allocation of movement points to share amongst your people, and the bottom section has either an event or allows you to move a specific dinosaur a certain amount of spaces. You must first use whatever movement points you wish, and these points can be used to bring new tribals into play by placing them in your start zone. Adding new tribals can only happen if you have three or less in play, so once you've hit your fourth you can only expand your tribe through engaging in threesomes with your adult tribals. Apparently the game is OK with polygamy and bestiality, but draws the line at incest as children can not procreate.

To procreate, you have to have a woman on top of a man tribal, which makes sense, but you also need to have one of two conditions met. The first condition is that a different woman has to be grabbing some "berries", and the second is that a man has to be on top of an animal. So, it really does take three to tango in Caveman. If the conditions are met, you can place a child on top of the man and woman who were the principals in the mating process. The only restriction is that there is a stack limit in play, so if you have too many people engaging in the orgy or too many children around, you can't effectively make babies.

At the end of a turn you may choose to advance the children into adults which, like life, pretty much amounts to the roll of a die. You roll the special die to determine if your child survives and becomes an adult, and be advised that the deck is stacked against you due to the distribution of the icons. If you've developed the "fur" technology, your odds improve, as does the advent of developing fire. King Louie had it right. If you make a successful roll, the child chit is removed and a man or woman chit is placed in its stead, but if not, the child simply ceases to be and is removed. On top of that, children must always be accompanied by an adult, so if you elect to abandon one, it immediately dies.

Developing technologies is done by having your tribals sitting on different resources at the same time, such as having two different tribals on flint resource chits simultaneously, which allows you to develop the spear technology, thus giving you a stronger fighting ability. Develop the fire technology and your kids run a better chance of survival, and develop the wheel and you gain a +1 movement rate on each subsequent turn. There's also a cave skill that you can develop that allows you to hide out in caves, earning sanctuary from attacks. The only restriction in developing these technologies is that you can only develop one technology per turn, so there is no hope of placing your people on a bunch of chits and getting a windfall of technological breakthroughs. The only thing missing is a monolith chit which would allow you to develop all the technologies at once; apparently the designers aren't Arthur C. Clarke fans.

Once you're done moving your tribals, you may be allowed to move dinosaurs, depending on the card you pulled, which may end in bloodshed. This is epic, because while each dinosaur has a different aptitude for gnawing tribals' bones into meal, all of them are more lethal than your average tribal. Getting into combat, seeing as it makes sense to do so now, there are different rules for combat depending on who is involved. To initiate combat, you simply need to share a space with an enemy tribal or a dinosaur. While all cave dwellers roll the green dice, the thunder lizards get to roll their own red die, which has a higher hit percentage. It's got the Heroscape combat system, essentially, where each success counts as a hit, with opposing hits cancelling one another out. Killed dinosaurs respawn at their start position, but tribals who die go back to the owner's pile to be put into play later.

It is immensely satisfying to combat against tribals with dinosaurs. They are, without a doubt, the most efficient way to reduce an enemy force quickly. The T-Rex is the baddest of them, with three red dice to chuck against the meager tribals' one die per chit. Luckily, the tribals can help even the odds with a spear, which allows the spear symbols to cause a hit as I alluded to earlier. The fighting is truly intense, because with limited resource spaces on the board, killing an enemy tribal before who is sitting on a resource can cripple them momentarily, giving you the momentum to surge for a win. You not only deny them the ability to use the resource, you also wipe out people, which sets them back on that front as well.

Going back to the cards, it's about a 50/50 ratio between allowing dinosaurs to move and events. The events can be downright nasty, such as forcing all players to lose a technology, while some can be simply annoying, such as not allowing use of caves for a turn or not allowing children to advance to adults for a turn. The random events aren't so pernicious that it's distracting or unbalances the game, but the fact that you always have to be wary of them does make you think, especially after five or six games where you know most of the events.

The game ends immediately when a player either develops his last technology or converts enough children to adults to hit the eight adult bogey. In the games I've played, it's usually tense right up until the climax, and if anything about this game is truly well done above all else, the balance of keeping a runaway leader from emerging is it. It's a clawing, teeth-gnashing good time the whole way through, and thus far I've never experienced one player truly being the leader from the start and staying in the lead the whole time, even when the resources are stacked in his favor. It's just a fun game, albeit a little on the random and simple side.

Why Caveman Is A Jurassic Park Full Of Awesome:

- Nice art and brisk gameplay make this a fun ride through the stone age
- It seats up to six players, and is fun playing from three to six equally
- An hour and a half is the perfect sweet spot for a game like this, and it's right there
- The reference cards are brilliantly executed and the game can be played solely by using them
- The game encourages prehistoric threesomes involving bestiality

Why The Game Exudes A Steaming Pile Of T-Rex Turds:

- Random events can be brutal in rapid succession, extending the game by as much as forty minutes
- Growing children into adults can be an exercise in frustration
- The rulebook seems to have been written by actual Neanderthals

Overall:

While this is a really good game, it's not a great game. It's definitely a game that sees the table quite a bit at my place due to the fun factor, and it's playable by anyone from about 8 years old and up, although that may be too young as you'd likely have to explain why a mommy and daddy caveman need to have mommy's sister with her hand on daddy's berries in order to make a cave kid. Barring that issue, though, it's well worth the price of admission. I'm certainly glad that I own it, and I'd say that very few people wouldn't enjoy playing this well-produced game a great many times.

Rating:
4/5 Stars

I'd usually say that you can learn more at the publisher's website, but for some reason, they don't really seem to give a fuck: http://www.jklmgames.com/gamessin.php?game=238

You can't read the rules, either, which may be a blessing. Just look at the photo of the reference card below to see how to play, it's really the only way to go.

For those of you who didn't know what I meant when I referenced Godzilla, see Joe Lansdale's "Godzilla's 12 Step Program" here...it won't disappoint: http://www.revolutionsf.com/fiction/godzilla/01.html

The Stated Policy Of The Superfly Circus On Language And Metaphor

2011-12-09T12:19:00.000-08:00

After much soul-searching and deep meditation, I am inclined to specify the policy of the Superfly Circus as it relates to the use of language and metaphor in our blog postings. I hope this clears things up for those that might take offense to some of the things written here.

This Is How We Dooooo It

2011-12-02T08:02:00.000-08:00

Someone referred to "my ratings" a few days ago, and it kind of hit a note with me that I haven't explained very well how this whole "Circus" thing works.

It's not just me. Not remotely.

I'm just the guy who writes the bad jokes and foul language. The Circus is actually a group of people, and there are guidelines on how I review the games that appear here. With little exception, the rules are adhered to strictly, and the games we review are reviewed in a manner that allows us to have little room for error. Well, at least that's how we see it.

SUPERFLY CIRCUS RATING METHODOLOGY 101: The 8 Commandments

Each game reviewed must be played a minimum of three times.
Each game must be, if possible and appropriate, played by at least 3 unique people.
No game can be rated based upon the minimum number of players advertised.
Scores are based on a 1-5 "star" scale, with fractional accountability to 0.25
Scores are an average of all games played and all scores received
The game's rating is based on actual plays, and if we get the rules wrong, write better rules next time.
Reviews are representative of Pete's view alone, but will likely contain feelings from all the Circus Players who played the game.
If you send us the game, we're reviewing it. And you may not like the outcome. So beware.

This allows ratings to be given based not on one guy (who is arguably a complete douchebag), but on a vast array of ratings, which minimizes the "one guy manipulates the market" or one guy's opinion alone.

THE GOLDEN RULE: Thou Shalt Not Be Bribed
At least 75% of all review copies received must be given away, donated to charity, or otherwise disposed of for free, and the site is forbidden, forever, from advertising or being profitable in any way, shape or form.

What all of this does is allow the Superfly Circus to give well-rounded scores based upon one thing alone: FUN. As we make no money, get no benefit, and get no "compensation", we are completely unbiased, and we do our thing as a wholly philanthropic venture.

So, now you know how it works. It ain't just me, it's many people.

Live long, and prosper.

The Circus Cast (regulars):
Mickey
Shawn
Bailey
Clayton
Melissa

The Circus Roadies (not so regulars):
David
Jason V.
Mark
Rob
Jessica
Chris
Tim

The Perfect Job And Income Inequality

2011-11-16T12:35:00.000-08:00

Imagine this job, and tell me it's not perfect:

* You join one of two unions, who will pay for your application fees.
* You spend several months in the interview process, and you get to beat up on the other union members.
* You can say anything you want, true or untrue, and you have a 50/50 shot of getting the job.
* The job is almost always guaranteed for 4-6 years.
* You're hired based on what you said during the interview process, but your employers have no real avenue to fire you if you didn't do what you said.
* The expectation is that whatever you do, either way, you'll fail.
* Even if only 9% of the decision makers that employ you like what you're doing, you'll still keep your job.
* You have a review every 4-6 years, and while the interview process is generally arduous, you have better than an 80 percent chance you'll keep your job.
* On the job, companies (clients) will pay your interview fees, and do much of your work for you, provided you simply agree with their point of view.
* Some companies will offer you a job to fall back on if your current job doesn't work out.
* You can vote with other union members to NOT increase your salary annually, but if you don't, it will automatically raise.
* Almost all of your expenses are paid.
* You're offered a full staff to handle your day to day work.
* You're given a private bodyguard.
* You're paid in excess of $150,000 a year.
* 47% of your co-workers are millionaires.
* The job affords you the right to break certain laws, such as insider trading, or sexually harassing one of your staff.
* Your job's only requirement that you only show up at specified times, and during those times you are required only to vote. You are allowed to abstain from the vote, but you need to be there.
* If you don't like the rules in the employee handbook, you can rewrite them and vote on them as you see fit.

Yes, I'm describing the US Congress.

While Wall Street may turn a blind eye to the protesters who are clearly piss mad about income inequality, I'd expect that Congress would not. After all, Obama himself stated that "We should spread the wealth." But do we really expect that Congress will act? I mean, why would Congress not see what's going on in the streets, or at least examine whether there is an income gap, and how to stop it?

Well, for starters, look at who enriches Congresspersons' "re-election campaigns" the most. Well, wouldn't you know it....the Financial industry as a whole is the #1 campaign donor, with a whopping $122,000,000+ going into the political machine. Let's do some math...there's 535 members, plus the President. So, $122,000,000 divided up by 536 people...let's see here...that's $227,611 for each and every elected official. And that's just in 2008. And that's JUST from the Financial industry.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/index.php

But wait, there's more! Besides all that Federal "donations" (read: bribes) there's also lobbyists. People that go wine and dine people, offer things in return for votes or sponsorship of bills. Best part? Many of the guys who got fired from their "perfect jobs" get to come back and talk with their old friends who kept their jobs. "Remind" them of the fact that when they were sitting in the front row that they made "compromises", and use those "reminders" to help steer the "still employed" Congresspersons of their "responsibilities". Guess how much gets spent on Lobbying. Guess! How about $3.51 BILLION ($3,510,000,000.00) dollars in 2010. I mean, if you go back to the 536 guys....that's $6,436,567 per person! Six and a half million dollars was spent to help "persuade" Congress. But it's not bribery, right? No, these are men and women of honor. Their character is above repudiation; above the stain of bribery, right?

The argument I hear from Congressional apologists is that while the lobbying industry is there, they don't really change votes. There's no graft. But, the question is this: if it wasn't effective, why would industry and special interest groups spend three and a half BILLION dollars in a year? Who would spend that kind of loot on "persuasion", persistently over the span of decades, if it wasn't effective? Only Congress spends money forever on wastes of time like that, right? Yeah, lobbying is effective or it would've been replaced by a different system long ago.

But, let's take a step back. Get back to the "perfect job" and ask why these Occupy Wherever people aren't getting noticed in Washington. Let's note that it's not remotely conjecture to say that there is income inequality in the United States. It's proven. It's verified a trillion times over. The wealthiest top 1% of Americans control 40% of the money. I can live with that. I'm sure that it's been earned. But, moving forward, don't you think that "Trickle Down Economics" has proven to be an abject failure? Time and time again we've proven that giving federal dollars to the richest people doesn't spur economic activity. We're in a terrible recession, for the second time in ten years or so, due to the failed policies of spending money we don't have, giving it to the people who need it the least.

So, let's get to the 1% theory. Does it hold water? Seems to be.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/10/income-inequality-america

But do the Occupiers, as many occupying forces before them, really believe they can change hearts and minds? You bet your ass they do, and it's the idealism of youth that fuels that incredible belief. The problem is that they forget psychology. Most people, when faced with a decision, will choose to do whatever they perceive benefits them the most at the time. And while they're getting "donations" from bankers, the banks will never be held responsible for the carnage they've wrought upon the world economies.

As every occupying force should know, there's only two ways to break the will of an occupied people: win their hearts and minds (Bush Doctrine), or cause them so much pain they give up (Chuck Liddell Doctrine). Unfortunately for the Occupiers, they have no power to win the hearts and minds of Congresspersons (read: racketeers) making millions in the protection business, and they sure as hell can't cause them more pain than the local constabulary can cause them; they have no super-humanly strong overhand right coming from a crazy angle.

On the flip side, most people think Occupiers are nothing more than a bunch of homeless, lazy, dope fiend, radical hippies. Therefore, no heart-string pullers in hand and no mind control devices. No leverage, no power. Not a snowball's chance in the coolest part of hell of getting anything more than an occasional bone, stripped clean of the marrow, to appease the great unwashed masses. When Congress has a 9% approval rate in the middle of a huge, calamatous recession and yet virtually all of the electable incumbents are re-elected, it's clear that it isn't working.

In other words, go home. It was a nice try, and I commend you fine folks for exercising your First amendment rights. But until the system changes, nothing will change for us 99%. It's not in their interest to change. When it comes right down to it, they ARE the 1%. In fact, they're above the 1% because they have the power to take from the 1%, and everyone knows that if you have something that can be taken, you never really had it in the first place. And Congress has the power to make anyone an offer they can't refuse.

Panic Station - I Never Knew Passing Gas To Thwart Alien, Parasitic Buttworms Could Be So Awesome

2011-11-13T08:49:00.000-08:00

You enter the computer room and run a station-wide heat scan, only to find that two of your former team members are not what they seem. Their heat signature indicates that they have have been infected by an alien creature, and the infection has spread through the station at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, you have no idea who is infected. Every room you enter with one of your fellow team members runs the risk that they will attempt to infect you, and the only defense you have is either to attack them to keep them back, or to pass gas. Yes, this infection is most certainly rectal. This is the core principle that I learned while playing Panic Station: Beware the insidious buttworms.

Panic Station is a new game from my favorite artist-turned-designer, David Ausloos, who previously reskinned "Survive! Escape From Atlantis" for Stronghold Games. It's a four to six player romp through a remote mining station that quite skillfully recreates the events depicted in the 1982 horror classic, "The Thing", which is not only one of my all time favorite horror/suspense flicks, but has been called "the scariest movie ever made" by many. It has all the elements that one could hope for in a suspense game; thrills, tension, fast turns, tough decisions, and the single most important hallmark of any game, it is absolutely a blast.

Upon hearing about the Essen release of Panic Station, I was optimistic, as I always am, but I was also quite skeptical since this is Mssr. Ausloos' first published design. Turns out that I had nothing to worry about. I've played this game six times now, and after pre-ordering it from Stronghold, then giving it away to a friend, and then re-preordering it from Coolstuff, I have to say that this game has absolute Game of the Year potential. There are some problems with the design, especially if you're the kind of asshat that needs to be spoon fed every possible scenario in the rulebook or a 30 page FAQ, but to the groups I've played with, it's one that has been perpetually requested and has been universally enjoyed.

The concept of Panic Station is fairly simple: up to six teams of two characters enter a complex that has been taken over by an alien parasitic life form, that has the unique attribute of looking like a big freaky worm, and the object is to torch the hell out of its hive, thus clearing the base. The challenge is that each two-character team consists of a human, who is inexplicably trained to use flamethrowers but not firearms, and an android who is programmed only to use firearms and not flamethrowers. You explore the station by expending action points, whose number is determined by the health condition of your team, to do such things as move, shoot, and expand the footprint of the base by adding room cards to the table. The trick is that every time you enter a room occupied by anyone else, you must trade a card from your inventory with them, or shoot them.

It all sounds pretty simple, but there's a catch: there's hardly any ammunition in the base to shoot people with and when you trade cards with someone, if they pass you an infection card, you're immediately infected and change allegiance. What's worse, the only way to stop from being infected is to pass them a card depicting a gasoline can. Did I mention that you're not always going to have a gas can, and to win, you have to have three gas cans in hand when you reach the hive? The game is just plain nasty, challenging, and instills absolute paranoia in everyone playing, especially if you play with some imaginative friends. I've even been known to paraphrase a dear friend, Simon Müller, by stating in-game, "Who invades my ass at this early hour!?" Fear the nefarious buttworm infectors.

Let's talk about the bits for a second. The first thing that you'll notice is that the game comes in an embossed metal tin, which sounds awesome if you're looking for a new dope stash box, but in reality, the box is non-standard size and thus you will have some heartburn trying to find a proper place on your shelf for it. Once you look inside the box, you'll find a sticker sheet, a bunch of wooden disks in many colors, a big pile of cards, a D4 die, a index card sized cardstock board, and a rulebook. Everything is quite nice, with the exception of the rulebook. While it is easily readable and understandable, the organization could have been better, and it could've used a couple more pages of explanations of key points to defuse the "rules lawyer nerdrage".

I found it to be quite an easy game to learn and play, but if you look at the Boardgamegeek forums you'd think the rulebook contained no words and only a pair of stick figure depictions attempting coitus. Such is the nature of nerd-dom, I guess. Anyhow, everything, including the rulebook, was great in my opinion. My only gripe is that the tin is not a standard size, and is embossed, which makes it harder to store than most games. All that being said, the designer has put out an updated rulebook and FAQ document which alleviates any concerns that one might have, so you can download either and you're even more prepared to take on the buttworm menace.

Before you can play the first game, you need to apply stickers to the disks, which takes 10 minutes or so. After that, the game is good to go, and you can begin to set up. Setting up requires you to pull three cards from the room deck: the hive, the terminal room, and the starting room. The rest are shuffled, with the terminal room put somewhere in the middle of the deck and the hive being placed somewhere in the last five cards of the deck. Then, each player is given three infection cards in their color, their two character cards, two status cards, and their two player disks. You must then pull the Host card, one gas card per player, and two random item cards per player less one. Shuffle these, and hand two each out to each player. Once all of this is accomplished, set the starting room in the center of the table and set the status board off to the side. You're now ready to catch, or torch, some buttworms.

The game is taken in two phases, with the first being the parasite phase. Except on the first turn of the game, any buttworm parasite tokens that are on the board all move in one direction, which is determined by a die roll, and then wound anyone in a room they end up occupying. I'm assuming rectal incursion followed by hemorrhaging is the method of attack. After this has been resolved, the players may begin their turn.

Each player, in turn, may then use their allotted action points to perform tasks, and the action points allocated to them are determined by how healthy their characters are. The default is Actions allowed are determined by what items they have in hand, which room they're in, and other specific instances. A neat thing about this game is that each player has two characters in the game, and the action point allocation can be used by one character or the other, or both.

First, players can explore, which consists of drawing the top card from the room deck and placing it adjacent to either of their character tokens. The room cards are double sided, although the sides indicate the status of the room rather than having unique sides, and thus the players always know which room will be next to be placed. Some rooms have icons on them which depict areas rich with items, rooms that cause buttworms to appear, cabins that allow you to perform actions on a station terminal, and other things. Any room with any icon can be searched, allowing a character to draw items from the item deck, and this is the only way to bring new cards into the game.

Another action type allowed is to move into an adjacent room with one of your character pawns. Even this can be dangerous as some rooms have a buttworm icon which forces you to bring a buttworm token into play. Also, if you enter a room occupied by another player's token or tokens, you must either trade cards with one of them or attack one of them. This is the mechanic which causes people to become infected and the primary way to gather information on your team. Every room has openings on the card that indicate viable passageways, and some doors are security doors that require you to have a keycard to pass through, although a special room will allow you to open all the security doors for a round. More on that later.

Now, as I noted, each player but one starts the game with three infection cards, and two item cards. Chances are that most people picked up a gas can card, which is both a key to winning the game as a human and one of the only ways to defend against a rectal incursion from another player. I mean, since the creatures look like worms and the only way to defend against an infection is by passing gas to the infected player, I've deduced that they are indeed buttworms. I guess I could've explained that earlier, but this is a suspense game and I wanted to keep the suspense going for you. Because of the initial distribution of cards, one player is guaranteed to be the Host, which is the primary antagonist in the Panic Station. His goal is to infect as many people as possible, create as much strife and paranoia as possible, cause as many parasite tokens to enter play as possible, and to attempt to thwart the other player's exploration and subsequent uncovering of the hive location.

Trading cards has some restrictions, though. A player may never trade an infection card of his color unless he is infected, and a player may never reveal his hand to another player unless forced to do so by another player using the hand scanner card. A player may also never trade an infection card of another player's color unless he has absolutely no alternative. The one omission in the rules that caused me frustration is that even in the updated version of the rules, there is no mention of what to do if a player has no cards other than their own infection cards to trade. I can only surmise that the player is forced to take a card and give none in return, thereby completely leaving them defenseless. I like that option the best because it's the nastiest, and the game's spirit is all about nastiness.

Moving on, the next action type you can take is to search a room. To do this, you must simply be in a room that depicts any icon, and draw a card from the item deck. There are all kinds of useful items in the deck, such as heavy weapons which have a higher rate of fire than the norm, ammunition to power the weapons, hand scanners that allow you to look at another player's deck, medical kits that heal your characters, armored vests which defend from attack, combat knives which allow for attack without using ammunition, and finally, gas cans which are truly the coin of this realm. There are also "parasite alert" cards which immediately cause a new buttworm to spawn in or around the searching character's location.

When a room is searched for the first time, you must flip the room card over from the grey, normal side, to the red side. When a room's status is red, if the room is searched again, parasites spawn when the room is searched any subsequent time. This is a very slick mechanic because it allows infected players to simply seem like they're loading up on goodies, since there is no hand limit, when in reality they are trying to force other players to spawn parasites by changing all the rooms to the red side.

The next action you may take is to attack an opponent or a roving buttworm. While a player's Android token is the only one who can use firearms, both characters on a team are capable of using a combat knife. Using firearms requires you to not only have ammunition, but in order to play a card to the table such as ammunition, the knife, or a heavy machinegun, you have to have at least five cards in your hand, plus those you wish to play to the table, at the time. Ammunition cards are four-sided to indicate you have four bullets, and each time you use them you have to rotate the card to the appropriate number to indicate how many bullets you have left. Guns always hit their intended target and always do one point of damage per bullet.

Knives, however, do not require ammunition, and unlike guns, knives require a die roll with a 50/50 chance of scoring a hit. All characters only have four life points, and when any character's life is halved, so is that character's action point donation to that player's action point pool. Thus, a player who has an android with two life and a human with four is allowed three actions per turn instead of four. This allows infected players to whittle away the humans' ability to gather items and explore while allowing humans to weaken the suspect players' ability to cause chaos.

Aside from using weapons, some item cards can be used as an action, and those that cost action points are marked with an appropriate icon. Using the hand scanner, which allows you to look through another player's hand, costs an action. Healing one of your characters costs an action as well. Some items do not require using an action to use them, so they are essentially free.

The final action type that you can take is room-based; in other words, it depends on which room you're in. The rooms with icons in them perform different functions, such as the medical bay that allows you to heal a character. One room allows you to draw three items rather than one when you search, and the icon that has a magnifying glass allows you to search it with others, allowing others in the room to take items without themselves initiating a search. Of all of the rooms available, the most useful are the terminal rooms. These allow you to do one of three things, all of which are critical.

The first is to allow all security doors to remain open until the end of the round. This allows free passage of all players through the doors, which is incredibly handy if all of the keycards are at the bottom of the item deck. The second thing you can do with the terminal is remotely explore, allowing you to place the top room in the room deck in any legal space adjacent to any existing room. The last thing you can do, which is the most important as well, is to run a station-wide heat check. The heat check mechanic allows all players to know precisely how many infected players are in the station.

The heat check mechanic works a lot like a mechanic in the Indie Board and Card game, The Resistance. Each player puts a status card on the "true" area of that little board you set to the side at the beginning of the game, and then puts the other status card in the false pile. If you're infected, you have to indicate that you are by placing your infected card on the true pile. The initiator of the scan then rounds up all the true cards, shuffles them, and reveals the number of infection status cards to everyone. After doing so, the player rounds up the false cards, shuffles them all together, and then hands one card of each type back to each player. Nothing adds tension like the simultaneous realization that someone was infected and not a soul at the table noticed it.

The end of the game comes when one of several situations occurs. If the base has been completely overrun by the aliens, as determined by a heat scan, the Host and his minions win. If an uninfected player has three gas can cards in his hand and on his turn has his human character in the hive room, the uninfected players win. There's another endgame scenario involving being the sole uninfected player and not having the ability to gain the required three gascans, but I can't really see that happening; I think it was put in to avoid a stalemate situation. One thing to note: I immediately houseruled that only the host wins for the infected team so that players have no impetus to get infected, since if you're a douchebag who "has to win", you might decide to just seek out the host and change teams when it's convenient.

All things considered, this is a really tense, fun game. We didn't stumble one bit the first time I broke this out, but the second time I forgot to tell my friends that you can't pass someone else's infection cards during a trade unless it's the last option, and it cost me. I was the host and attempted an anal probe attack, but was blocked by the dreaded passed gas. Unfortunately, when the player I tried to violate was up, he traded with another player and passed my infection card.

Subsequently, both players knew that I was the host, and it reduced my chances of winning to roughly zero. I gave them a run for their money, though, because I kept announcing loudly and with conviction that those two had just traded, and one was the host while the other was the new minion. I almost had them believing it, right up until the next player used the terminal room to verify how many infected players there were. It was right then, that very moment, that I knew I was fucked. Still, it's a lot of fun to be the host.

The only downside of being the host is that you're alone in your quest for malfeasance, and timing of trades is incredibly important, as noted above. Attempt infection too early and you tip your hand. Attempt infection too late and the chances of having your infection blocked by passed gas. The flipside is that if you successfully infect another player, both their android and their human is infected, and the newly-created infected team has three new opportunities to spread their ill will due to that player's three infection cards.

I played another game where I, as the host, expended all of my infection cards without successfully infecting the enemy, all the while convincing the other players that the person I tried to infect was actually attempting to infect me, both through loud protest and spending all my actions attacking that player or "searching for ammunition", which was simply a ruse to buy me time while I turned all of the grey rooms to red.

Being uninfected is fun, too, and far more tense from the beginning on, where the tension only starts for the host when he attempts his first infection. The human player really needs to watch everyone, observe both their demeanor and their board action, and trust absolutely no-one until later in the game. And even then, watch your buddy like a hawk, lest he be turned to the buttworm side of the Force while you're not looking.

Why Panic Station Mines Awesome Sauce:
- The tension of this game is unbelievable
- Great artwork throughout makes this look nice on the table
- Fast turns allow you to play a 5-player game in an hour and a half and offers surprisingly little downtime
- The promo cards from preordering add a TON of cool stuff to the game, unlike the usual "collector" garbage
- You get to make jokes about defending against buttworm attacks with passed gas

Why Panic Station Has Been Buttwormed:
- The rulebook was a little muddled, although highly serviceable
- Tin? Really? Did nobody think that it might be nice to have a box that fits on the shelf like the other hundred?
- If you didn't get the promos, well, sucks for you, because they rock

Overall:
This is a truly fun, very easy to understand, fast-playing game for anyone who likes suspense, tension, and absolute, unabashed fuckery of the highest order. Lying, accusing, treachery...it's all in the tin. All I can say is that it's just a slick, bad ass, nasty little game.

Rating:
4.375/5 Stars

Learn more about Panic Station at Stronghold Games, here: http://strongholdgames.com/store/board-games/panic-station/

Here's the latest rulebook, which will be packed in the second printing, or so I am told: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/72382/panic-station-rules-v2-1

Thanks To Those Who Serve Us All

2011-11-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

From all of us at the Superfly Circus, our thoughts are with those of deployed to the various sandboxes of the world, sitting in scorching heat, catching incoming mortar fire while you're just trying to make it home. Our thoughts are with those at Ramstein Air Base, Walter Reed, and other military hospitals where you may be recovering, or if you're taking care of America's finest. We're thinking of you if you're just sitting at a desk in a Quatermaster's office, making sure that the supply of tobacco, whiskey, and ammunition makes it to where it needs to go to keep our men and women supplied. We're with you in spirit if you're standing guard at the South Korean DMZ, sleeves rolled up in 10 degree weather, proving you're tougher than those sons of bitches across the no-man's land.

The Superfly Circus supports each and every last one of you. While we may not always like your orders, and we know you may not either, the fact is that having the courage and honor to do what you do every day, on my behalf, on behalf of my wife and little girls; the sacrifices you make, the lives put on hold, all of it...we're damned proud of every last one of you.

Someday, maybe, the world will be at peace and we won't need Minuteman missiles, F-22 Raptors, the Charles Vinson, A-10s, and M-4 Carbines. Until that day, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts because without you manning those weapons, without the steel resolve required to stand firm when every instinct in every facet of your soul tells you to run like hell and get the fuck out of there, YOU are the difference between me being able to live a free man and living under the tyranny of a dictatorial regime that would do us harm. YOU are the reason our cities aren't being devastated by the madness of power-hungry megalomaniacs and idealogical zealots.

So we thank you.

And we also thank the families of the folks who serve our country with honor and distinction. The fathers who raised their children to love freedom, and to have the courage to send them off to dangerous jobs in dangerous places. To the wives and husbands who cry alone at night that they may never see their loved one again. To the children who go without a father or mother because their parent is a true American patriot. To those of you, we say thanks.

And even though it's an American holiday, we say thanks to our allies' troops that, in many cases, don't even have a dog in the hunt, so to speak. Folks that have no business being embroiled in conflicts that their countries sent them to primarily to appease American politicians. To you, your families, and to your nations, we thank you for what you do for us. While political alliances come and go, individual alliances are not so easily forgotten. To the British, the Poles, the Japanese, the Canadians, and all others who serve your countries and fight alongside Americans, you will not be forgotten. And we thank you.

Thank you all for what you do. Thank you for making the world less chaotic so that free societies can exist, and individuals are free to seek out their own, personal brand of happiness. Without the sentries at the gate, without good men and women who knowingly choose to stand watch against the oppression of hate and madness, we would surely perish. We'll always be in your debt, and we'll always owe you more than we can ever repay. The best we can offer is a true, heartfelt thanks, and knowing that we honor you not just as soldiers, seamen, airmen, marines, and coasties, but as individuals who are truly the finest representatives of what freedom means: The choice to make a difference in the world, no matter the personal cost.

Thank you.

King Of Tokyo - How A Giant Bunny Robot Stomped The Eldritch Quiddity Out Of Recent Dice Games

2011-11-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

From GenCon 2011 until just recently, companies have decided that dicefests are the new deckbuilders. We've seen Elder Sign, Quarriors, Bears!, Martian Dice, and now King of Tokyo come to fruition, and I'm quite excited that publishers are finally realizing that deck building has been done to death. I'm a huge fan of tossing overstuffed handfuls of dice at unsuspecting tables, so the fact that dice games may be the 'next big thing' gives me great joy. The only problem is that the games, thus far, have either been too light, too abstract, or just totally, unabashedly retarded.

Enter King of Tokyo, a game that has more "personality" than Minka, succeeds where the inexplicably popular Quarriors miserably fails, and costs about half to boot. The game is a big, wet tongue-kiss to the glans of anyone who wants a dyed-in-the-wool Ameritrash game that doesn't take 2 hours, isn't incredibly deep, isn't sadly shallow, and can seat from two to six players. It's totally a Goldilocks game that hits the balance just right, and for 25 bucks, it's a total no-brainer.

The concept of the game boils down to six big baddies doing big baddie shit in the capitol of the most infamously unlucky place on Earth, Japan. Not enough that America nuked them not once, but twice, not enough that they've recently nuked themselves once, not even enough that Katsuhiro Otomo nuked them. No, apparently every big bad monster in the known universe wants to devastate Tokyo as well. I truly weep for the people of Japan.

Anyhow, each player rolls dice and can heal, hurt, score points, or gain energy which is used as the currency of the game to buy cards which represent mutations and events which change the game. These little green cubes have colloquially been known by my friends as Energon Cubes, for what it's worth. Players can be eliminated, and the only way to win is to earn 20 victory points or to kill off every other big baddie in the game. In short, it's awesome.

Not only is the gameplay slick and polished, the bits are damned fine as well. First, the art is really campy, but not sloppy, and fits the theme very well througout. Then there's the cards, of which there's a metric assload, which all detail cool things that your monster can buy or do. On top of that are six standies, six standie holders, and six character cards with two wheels a piece to track stats. While the cards are a little on the thin side, the standies are really stout cardstock and the character stat trackers are superbly executed. The last little bits are the eight dice, two of which aren't always used, the energy cubes, and a eight inch square board that represents poor Tokyo and Tokyo Bay, the two locations that monsters can attack.

Now getting into the rulebook, I don't even think there's 5 pages. It's a very simple game, and some of the more wonky powers that cards represent are given as examples in the book to allay any confusion. While it's easy to read and understand, there's some terms that aren't covered in the glossary, such as "neighbors", and some of the card timing could've been explained a little better, especially the card that provides you wings that allow you to pay two energy and avoid damage. All this considered, unless you're a fun murdering, rules lawyering asshat, this game is totally playable without a single point of contention.

Setting up is a breeze, which is awesome as well. You set the board in the middle, pick whichever creature you want to play with, get the standie in its holder, take the stat sheet, and make a pile of cards. Three of these are laid face up, and these are the ones that players can buy initially. That's it. Choose a first player, and begin the assault on the proud Japanese homeland.

Each player, on their turn simply rolls the dice and decides what to do from there. Each die has a one, two, three, heart, lightning bolt, and claw on it, and each performs a different function. Numerals, when rolled in triplets, score you that many points, and for each additional numeral you get that matches your triplet gains you one additional point. For example, if you roll three twos, you get two points, and one extra point for each additional two you roll. Lightning bolts earn you one energy cube each. Hearts heal your monstrosity one point each, up to the maximum of ten, provided you're not in Tokyo. Claws hurt players that are in Tokyo if you're outside of Tokyo, and hurt all players outside of Tokyo if you're inside.

You can reroll any dice you wish, with three possible re-rolls allowed per turn, and once you either stop rolling and keep the results or run out of rolls, you resolve them. The trick is that if you wound someone in Tokyo, they may choose to yield the city, and you have to enter. While you may choose to leave, you are required to enter if the city is vacant or recently vacated when you roll even a single claw. This simple mechanic makes King of Tokyo one the daimyo of press-your-luck dicefesting, because if you accidentally roll a claw and are forced into the city when you're on the verge of death, you are unequivocally fucked because it's a sure thing that your opponents are going to beat you down and take you out of the game.

The good thing about being in Tokyo is that you earn a point for just entering the city, and if you manage to stay there for an entire round, you earn two points for not abdicating your position. While two points doesn't seem like much, most of the games I've played ended up with a couple of players low on health with 17 or 18 points, battling it out for a win. Now normally there's only one monster at a time allowed in the city, but if there's five or six monsters still in the game, one monster may occupy Tokyo while another occupies the Tokyo Bay location, doubling the chances of being hit when you're outside the city, but allowing you to tag two enemies at a time as well.

At the beginning or the end of your turn, but not any time during, you may purchase powers using cubes. The cheapest power we've seen was valued at three, and the most expensive was valued at seven. These powers are so various that I could not possibly list them all, but my favorites are those like the "Two Heads" card that allows you to do an extra point of damage and the Nova Breath that allow you to do damage even if you didn't roll a claw. Other notables are those that allow you to re-roll numerals for free and those that heal.

Some cards, however, are not mutation buffs, they're events that can do various things. One card allows you to buy it and immediately heal two points of damage. Another causes fighter planes to come swooping in and hit you for several damage points but grants you an immediate five point boon. Another cool thing about the cards is that if you don't like the cards that are showing or want to deny a power to someone, you can pay some energy and change them all out.

The end-game comes when either all players but one are dead or when any player gets their twentieth point. It's always tense, always climactic, and always a total blast. I was one of the first to pooh-pooh this as yet another dicefest in Chancetown without merit, but I have totally eaten my words. This game rocks like Kiss and AC/DC playing together at a birthday party at the Playboy Mansion. I was shocked to find out how much I enjoyed it. This is a game that may even knock my old big monster favorite, Monsters Menace America, from the top slot in Monsterland. While it absolutely does not have the epic feel of taking over a city block by block or territory by territory, this game is the best game with an oversized monster theme I've ever played.

Why King of Tokyo Is The King Of Dice:
- Fast turns will not allow asshats to play on their Iphone between turns
- Great art, bits, and outlandish monsters really get you in the mood to destroy Tokyo...again
- The game's all about tension, important decisions, and fuckery that would make a senator blush (or take notes)
- The replay value's immense...I played this twice in a night and wanted to play two more times that night

Why King of Tokyo Should Be Exiled:
- The rules could've had a little more meat to explain the more exotic cards
- The box says 2-6 players, but I'd not play less than three at a minimum

Overall:
This game is phenomenally fun if you like a lot of randomness that is mitigated by important decisions. It's just a truly wonderful hour-long romp through Chancetown, and the fact that every single action you take is crucial, from deciding to vacate Tokyo or not, which card to buy, or when to roll or stay with dice. This is twice as fun as many 50 dollar games I've bought, and this will surely hit the table more often than most. This game trumps Elder Sign and Quarriors, so if you only wanted one of the current generation of dicefest games, this is without a doubt the one.

Rating:
4.5/5 Stars

Check out the game's site here, but you'd better speak French if you go: http://www.iello.fr/index.php/iello/Nos-produits/Jeux-de-société/IELLO/King-of-Tokyo

Or, you can check the BoardGameGeek.Com page, which is more useful:

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70323/king-of-tokyo

Solution: The Welfare Program And Energy Security For America

2011-10-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

I've heard over the years that poverty is cyclical because people who grow up in poverty tend to be in poverty most of their lives. That the "vicious cycle of history repeats itself" over generations unless something changes. I don't see a problem, I see unrealized opportunity, because I'm a opportunity kind of guy. Where others would throw money at the problem, I throw solutions.

You see, many people think of spending tax money on Welfare checks and food stamps is simply wasting money. I disagree. I see it as investing in our future energy security as well as creating jobs and a healty lifestyle to the empoverished. You see, with General Motors being owned by the taxpayer and General Electric's CEO being 'friendly' with the current White House, I think the time is ripe to capitalize on the amorous relationship between the poor, corporate chronyism, and the Government.

The key to all of this is in putting Welfare recipients back to work. Republicans are always lamenting the fact that men need work to retain dignity and that welfare is a form of modern slavery, so let's put that mentality into action. Let's give those on Welfare a reason to be proud, a sense of national pride, so to speak, knowing that they're contributing to the energy independence and security of the nation.

We feed them healthy foods through the Food Stamp program, we provide them shelter through Section 8 housing, and we provide them cash for everyday needs through the Welfare program. But thus far we don't provide them anything to do in those houses, while eating that food, in their government-subsidized housing. Let's explore how all of these seemingly distant factors I spoke of above can be tied together to create a better future for everyone involved.

First, General Electric should develop portable battery cells for the new Chevy Volt, a taxpayer-funded electric automobile. These batteries should be easily portable and as simple to install as your everyday double A battery. This would allow service station workers to swap out the batteries on-the-fly at newly created swapping stations. This would be the first step in creating jobs, since engineers and United Auto Workers union members would now have a new project to work on, let alone all of the newly-certified Government Auto technicians that would be hired at the swapping stations.

The next step would be to use TARP construction money to build warehouse-sized power generation facilities that have several drive-through bays. This would put unionized construction workers back to work on building thousands of these new buildings. Union electricians, plumbers, carpenters, framers and roofers would have a windfall of newly created jobs to work at. These facilities would be state-of-the-art accomodations, complete with beds, and televisions that are programmed for Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, and Judge Judy. Why, you ask? Let's get into that.

Michelle Obama is all about talking up healthy eating and lifestyles, so let's put her ideas into action. Her husband was keen on mandating health insurance for all, so let's take it a step further and mandate healthy lifesyles and food for those who require government intervention in their lives. You see, every person who receives government assistance through any of the above programs will be required to report to government-controlled medical centers for health testing for the purposes of determining their suitability for exercise. Those deemed unfit for an hour a day of exercise would have their Food Stamp allocation cut if they are too fat, and if they're simply out of shape, they will be sent to the government warehouses for a Richard Simmons exercise program to get them into shape. Those with medical conditions outside that would preclude them from exercise would, of course, be exempt.

Those who are worthy to exercise, though, would report to their assigned warehouse swapping station where they would perform an hour's labor on a stationary bicycle that is mounted with a high output battery charging dynamo. These systems would, of course, be built by General Motors and General Electric, all funded by taxpayers either through the bailout money (GM) or through tax avoidance and tax breaks (GE). Each station will simulate the experience of being at home, on Welfare, where they will have comfortable easy chairs and the aforementioned television shows piping to their station all day. The only noticable difference would be that they would be pumping away on the dynamo pedals for an hour at a time before being offered the opportunity to take a nap in the resting areas.

But what of those who have young children, who need care, and would deny some Welfare recipients from being able to perform an hour of work? Got that covered. In these same warehouses there will be Teacher's Union approved teachers working at the government Day Care centers. This keeps unionized teachers working, and allows those who have several (or several hundred) children to earn their Welfare checks through an honest day's work pumping away on the cycles.

So, you see, this is the perfect solution. It puts "shovel-ready" jobs into the market, spending only TARP money that's already allocated, it makes electric cars viable, and it puts tens of millions of people to work doing labor that not only supports energy independence, but it also creates an entire new industry. The best part is that while the system can be copied in places like China, there won't be any outsourcing of jobs to Mexico, India, or China. It's real Americans doing real work, and it will establish America as a leader in national good health, environmental protection, and the fight against Global Weather Weirdness. Truly, it is a remarkable plan.

But how, do you ask, can you ensure that these Welfare Patriots(TM) will actually show up, since they're often characterized as lazy? It's simple - provide their daily allowance of Welfare cash right there at the service station where they show up to pedal their way to American energy security. The upshot of all of this is that once the entitlement-minded folks that had always received Welfare money for nothing will now understand what it means to have a purpose greater than themselves, to understand national service, and to understand that if they can pedal a bicycle for money, they can go out and start new small businesses such as owning their own bicycle courier companies. This is not even beginning to touch on the national savings on healthcare costs from people getting several hours of exercise a day and seeing doctors regularly.

Long and short: Vote For Pedro.

Note: This is a satire piece. If you can't figure that out, you're probably retarded.

Ascending Empires - Proving That Converting Men Makes Both Empires And Trousers Ascend

2011-10-20T09:06:00.000-07:00

As pretty much everyone knows by now, I love most dexterity games, but even more than that, I truly love science fiction. Even more than that, I truly love 4X conquest games, so when I heard about Ascending Empires, it immediately folded space into the forefront of games I wanted to buy. Well, now that the remodel is done at Superfly Circus headquarters, I had some spare change lying around, and five clicks later, Ian Cooper's masterpiece was hurtling toward my house at sub-light speed. And by 'sub-light speed', I mean in the back of a U.S. Post Office tractor-trailer, on I-75, at about 65 miles an hour. It was accompanied by Chaos in the Old World, and after many, many lusty nights, Survive! Escape From Atlantis. Oh yes, there would be blood.

Ascending Empires is, at its heart, a 4X empire building game that tells the story of up to four intergalactic peoples exploring, building, advancing, and mercilessly subjugating one another. While the concept is not remotely new, what is new is how the game unfolds, or rather, doesn't. The board itself is made up of nine Swiss cheesy puzzle pieces that lock together less-than-flawlessly, wherein you place toilet paper roll sized discs in the holes, representing planets. The most novel thing about the game, though, is the fact that to move ships, which are represented by small discs, you flick them in a Crokinole-style fashion across the board, hoping not to have a mechanical failure during the flight, which is represented by careening off of one of the seams on the board, which as I mentioned, do not fit together seamlessly as I'm sure the designer intended.

Even with the improperly tested FTL drives, this game is hands-down one of the best games I've played in a long time. I'm totally biased, since not only did I drop the cash to buy it, but I knew going in I'd probably like it because it ties so many things I like into one game. Heck, it could've sucked ass, but luckily, it didn't, not in any way. All but one of the other players I've played with also loved the game based solely on its own merits, none of whom are sci-fi or 4X nuts like I am. The one guy who didn't dig it as much said he liked it, but just didn't understand it. That's understandable, since it was midnight, and he had done both radiation and chemo therapy earlier, let alone the fact he was loaded with enough morphine and percocet to make Timothy Leary seem like a straight-edge kind of guy. Truly, this is an incredibly fun, unique, and challenging game that will most assuredly go down as one of the most unique and remarkable games of the year.

Opening up the box, you're going to be met with nine well illustrated puzzle piece boards, a truly well-written and well-organized rulebook, some plastic men, two pre-cut sticker sheets, and roughly a metric assload of wooden bits in various shapes and sizes. I will note that if you've ever owned a Columbia Games block game before, you'll totally relate to the suffering you'll endure when you place the veritable billions of stickers on the myriad disc-shaped blocks in the game. That being said, the art for the planets is really dope, and the ships, while a little bland, are still decent. On top of this stuff, there's four player boards that track all of your technological advancement as well as how many units you have available at any given time. Finally, there's a bunch of tokens which represent victory points, 16 tokens which stay with the players, four each, for use on the technology track, and four range rulers to determine firing distance in combat. All in all, everything's really nice, with the planets and player boards being the coolest looking of all.

To set up the game, you first have to assemble the nine-piece board, which takes quite a soft touch, and needs to be done in a specific order. Pressing too hard will cause major mangling of the edges, which will truly bollocks your future experiences. I've realized after many plays that the corner pieces are almost identical, but they fit better in certain spots. So, I've marked the back side of the boards with little arrows so that the board gets put together the same way each time, and now I don't have a problem putting them together. I also considered taking a Dremel cutting wheel and shaving the edges so they fit more loosely, which would alleviate a lot of the problems regarding the tight fit, but I'm not sure it would make the problem easier.

To understand why this is important, and a real pisser of a problem, I need to jump ahead a bit. Each piece is almost a foot square, and to move ships in this game, you flick them across the board like a Crokinole disc. If there's ridges that form from repeated misalignment or too much pressure, when ships cross the threshold from one board to another, they can catch the lip and careen off into uncharted space. One current explanation is that while faster-than-light engines exist in the game, they have not perfected their telemetry technology, and thus certain areas of space are littered with more micrometeorites than others. To cross these planes is eternally dangerous, and impacting a stone marble travelling at millions of miles an hour causes near-instant death and dismemberment.

Why does this matter, other than inconvenience? Because if you go off the board, your ship is killed. If you inadvertently, or purposefully, crash into any other spaceship, both are killed. So, these ridges seriously test your manhood because to truly excel at the game, you need to have the balls to attempt very long-distance travel, and over dangerous terrain such as the ridges, it's a 50/50 proposition at best.

Back to setup. Once you've got the board assembled, you refer to a chart and illustration to set the planets into the holes in the board. These are randomly distributed, but there's a set amount of each of the four planet types and asteroids per quarter of the board, so no player has an advantage in their home system. These are set face-down, so you need to explore the galaxy to uncover the planet types, which is a big deal down the road. After this, you need to pull a set amount of VP tokens from the box in accordance with how many people are playing, and these act as the game timer, since once they're gone, the game ends.

Once the stage is set for galactic warfare, you hand out the four player boards, the ships, troops, research stations (cubes), colonies (tiny discs), and cities (rectangles). Here's the catch, though, when it comes to the bits: the structures always stay out of the bag, but you only keep six troops and two ships on your player board to begin with. As the game progresses, you earn more expansion ability, but initially, you have very limited resources to work with. The two ships are immediately put in orbit around your home planet. Each planet has a printed ring around it on the board, and this delineates the planets' orbits. As long as a piece is touching that ring, it's considered to be in orbit.

That's all there is to setup. Provided the bits have been bagged by player color, this should take all of about five minutes. One of the neatest things about the setup of this game is choosing the first player. Unlike German games where the oldest player goes first or American games where it's a roll-off, the game asks the player "with the most compelling reason to go first" to begin. Seeing as my good bud has cancer, he always trumps us by stating, "This may be the last game I ever play, so I'm going first." Can't really argue with that logic.

On each player's turn, they may take almost exactly one action. Of these actions, they can choose to build a structure, advance a technology, mine for VPs, recruit new troops, or make movement actions. Building a structure requires certain things, such as having a certain mix of things on a planet, at which point you remove those things and put a new one down. An example is that you have to have a troop and a colony on a planet to build a city.

This is a huge strategic decision since you may never have more than three items on any planet at any given time. To mine for VPs, you simply remove a certain amount of troops from a planet and take a certain amount of VP. Recruiting troops calls for you to pull a certain amount of troops off of your board and put them onto planets you currently control, meaning there's already something on the planet.

Now movement, well, that's an entirely different animal, hence the reason I noted you get "almost exactly" one action. You get a certain amount of movement actions when you choose the move action, which can consist of any combination of launching ships, landing ships, and navigating ships. The former two actions, launching and landing ships, consist of converting a ship in orbit to a troop on a planet, or vice versa. Hell, pretty much all of the actions in this game consist of converting one thing to another, and almost all of those actions require the conversion of your men.

Movement is simple, really, in theory: pick and flick your ship. If it hits a planet, it's not actually hitting a planet, it's careening off of the atmosphere's gravity well, swooping around the planet and launching off into a different direction per the "Star Trek IV" slingshot move. That being said, if you hit any other ship, be it an enemy or your own, you're not only dead, but you take you're partner in collision with you. While I initially thought this was a bad thing, in reality, my 10 year old successfully had a comeback near victory due to her implementing this "crash and burn" strategy.

At the end of your turn, if you have ships in combat range, which is determined by using the ruler, or if your ships are in orbit of a planet, combat may ensue. In order to blast an enemy ship into atoms, you have to have two of your own ships within firing range. No die roll, no ace pilot defying the odds and winning the battle. You simply cease to be. If you're in orbit of an enemy planet and there are no enemy ships in orbit to defend that planet, you may well be able to free the planet from the tyranny of your opponents.

It is at this point that I should discuss the fact that structures have defense values, and if you want to nuke them from orbit, just to be sure, you have to have a stronger force attacking. Colonies and troops have a defense value of one, and cities have a defense value of two. So, if you wanted to involuntarily vacate an opposing planet with a city and a troop, you'd have to have four ships in orbit to do so. Furthermore, to attack a planet, there cannot be any enemy ships in orbit.

One other thing to note is that ships may only initially attack one ship at a time, so if you have two enemies within range of two of your ships, you can only choose one to decimate. I haven't mentioned it, but anything that is killed, blown up, or converted goes back onto your player board, not back into the box, so you're only temporarily hosed. Also, you get a VP for every ship, unit, or structure you waste, so it's as viable to be a bloodthirsty galactic emperor as much as it is to be a peaceful explorer.

The last little thing about ships and combat I'm going to mention are the battleships. Battleships are twice the size of normal ships, there's only one battleship per player available, and can only be acquired through technology upgrades. These are essentially treated as having two ships in the same space, and having one of these means that you can send them into the far reaches of space to annihilate people more easily. It is also far more immune to bad flicks than their smaller counterparts, so when you get the battleship you are far less susceptible to FTL drive malfunctions and micrometeorite impacts than the little guys.

In addition to being able to blow planets up, if a ship is in orbit of an enemy planet, but can't wipe out all life on the planet for whatever reason, the ship automatically blockades the planet. This means that the player who has units or structures on the planet can't do anything with them, such as launching ships, recruiting, or using research stations. This is a hell of a strategic option if you want to stop enemies from developing technology or building structures, and it also works as a stalling option to allow you some time to get other ships there to bombard the planet into the stone age and don't want the player to launch ships from the surface.

The last aspect of gameplay is the technology tree. There are four planet types, and in order to develop technology, you need to build a research station on whatever type of planet you're hoping to upgrade. There are four levels of each, and in order to increase the level, you need to have research stations on multiple planets of the type. For example, if you want to have level three orange technology, you need to have earned level two as well as have three research stations on orange planets. You can have two research stations on one planet in your entire empire, but beyond that, you have to have multiple planets in order to upgrade your technologies. Once you've developed a technology, though, you can use it even if all of your research stations are destroyed.

Technologies do different things, and the technology trees are pretty linear within each type, although each type is much different than the next. Grey technologies revolve around movement, orange around warfare, purple is devoted primarily to defensive issues, and brown is primarily around troop development. Each of these levels also offer a very important bonus in that the first person to develop any level of technology gets a VP bonus equivalent to the level, not to mention that the first person to develop an entire row of technology through diversification gets a hefty bonus.

After each turn, you may also scan one planet that you're orbiting, which consists of secretly looking at the planet type by flipping it up and then placing it face down again. This is a quick way to determine if it's a planet you'd like to colonize on later turns as well as a way to feint opponents out of wanting the planet with an outburst of "how many damned asteroids are in this game??"

The game ends when the last available victory point is taken, at which point everyone gets one last turn to soak up the gravy as much as they can, taking more VP tokens from the reserves left in the box at the beginning of the game. Players tally their VPs, then add one VP for every occupied planet, one VP for every colony, and two VPs for every city. Finally, players check for some special conditions like having cities in three or four quadrants. The winner is the person with the most VPs at the end of the game, simple as that.

That's pretty much all there is to the game, in a nutshell. Flick, kill, develop, harvest, and win. What makes this game so neat is that there are so many different viable strategies to win, not to mention the base mechanics which absolutely rock. You can spend all your time developing technologies, earning points, or you can spend your time making war. You can develop the technology that allows you to recruit more troops, and then convert them to VPs by mining, thus creating a little economic engine. There's just so many different strategies that you simply cannot get sick of the game. Or, at least, I haven't so far, and I don't anticipate doing so.

Why This Game Has Ascended To My Top Ten:
- Great mechanics and fast turns make this an exceptionally intense and exciting game
- One of the best rulebooks ever, with little left to question
- The ship movement aspect of this game adds all the randomness the game needs
- If you sit for more than a minute between turns, even in a four player game, someone is doing something wrong
- This is one hell of an intense game

Why Ascending Empires Has Failed The Emperor Of Mankind:
- The edges of the puzzle board can really piss you off when your ship catches them and careens off to its death
- The art on the ships is a little on the bland side, and all of them are the same aside from the color
- This game could've really had 8 pre-made races with variable player powers to make it more unique

Overall:
This is truly one of my new favorites. I've played the piss out of it, and I cannot wait to play it again. Once all of my home repair and remodelling projects are complete, I'm kicking back into the full swing of gaming, and this game will most assuredly be one of the first played. Truly an astoundingly great design, and I recommend it to any gamer, Euro or Ameritrasher. Just an excellent game.

Rating:
4.5/5 Stars

Check out this awesome game at the Z-Man games site here:
http://www.zmangames.com/boardgames/ascending_empires.htm

And check out the rulebook too, if you'd like: http://www.zmangames.com/boardgames/files/ascending_empires/AE_Rules.pdf

News: Drizzt Release!

2011-10-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

The Legend of Drizzt board game, the latest offering from Wizards of the Coast, released today and joins a Neverwinter suite of products and programs that include a new novel from New York Times best-selling author R.A. Salvatore, a comic mini-series, organized play sessions and digital games.
A thrilling cooperative style board game, The Legend of Drizzt is designed for 1–5 players and is based on the Drizzt Do’Urden character – a dark elf created by R.A. Salvatore. Players take on the role of the legendary drow ranger or one of his famous adventuring companions, battle fearsome foes, and win treasure and glory. The game is the next installment in a successful series of board game releases from Wizards of the Coast that include Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon.
In addition to The Legend of Drizzt, Wizards of the Coast will be releasing two additional products in the coming weeks - Brimstone Angels, a Neverwinter novel by Erin Evans due out on November 1st, and the Dragon Collector’s Set, a limited-edition box set containing five of the most iconic evil dragons in D&D, on November 4th.

About Legend of Drizzt

The adventures of Drizzt Do’Urden, as told in the New York Times best-selling Forgotten Realms novels by R.A. Salvatore, come to life in this thrilling board game. Take on the role of the legendary drow ranger or one of his famous adventuring companions, battle fearsome foes, and win treasure and glory.

Designed for 1–5 players, this board game features multiple scenarios, challenging quests, and cooperative game play. The contents of this game can also be combined with other D&D Adventure System Cooperative Play board games, including Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon, to create an even more exciting experience.

Components:

• 42 plastic heroes and monsters

• 13 sheets of interlocking cardstock dungeon tiles

• 200 encounter and treasure cards

• Rulebook

• Scenario book

• 20-sided die

For more information, visit www.DungeonsandDragons.com.

About Wizards of the Coast

Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS), is the leader in entertaining the lifestyle gamer. The company holds an exclusive patent on trading card games (TCGs) and their method of play and produces the premier trading card game, Magic: The Gathering, among many other trading card games and family card and board games. Wizards is also a leading publisher of roleplaying games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, and publisher of fantasy series fiction with numerous New York Times best-sellers. For more information, visit the Wizards of the Coast Web site at www.wizards.com.

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Ikusa - "Ronin" Roughly Translates To "Waiting In A Bowl Of Rice To Pop A Cap In Your Ass"

2011-10-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

I don't know what's gotten into Hasbro and its subsidiaries lately, but I'm digging it. Maybe there just aren't enough "Dudes on a Map" games on the market or something, but with Avalon Hill's release of Ikusa, the second renaming and reprinting of the epic GameMaster series game Shogun, not to mention the recent release of the awesome Conquest of Nerath and the upcoming release of the groundbreaking Risk: Legacy, they seem to be wanting to be wanting to own the epic conquest game segment. Luckily, they do it really well, and the treatment they did to Shogun to remake it into Ikusa is nothing short of phenomenal. Thanks to Wizards sending me this copy for review, I can tell you all about it.

If you've never played either the original GameMaster series Shogun or the first remake, Samurai Swords, allow me to tell you what they're about. The game is a territory conquest game taking place in feudal Japan, several centuries ago. You command your generals, or daimyo, and provincial soldiers who defend territories, with the goal of expanding your influence to a pre-set number of territories to win, or you can just stomp the brakes off of your opponents and subjugate their armies and cities.

What makes this unique is that there's so many different mechanics that come into play, from blind bidding, hidden resources, variable units, spying, assassination, daimyo experience upgrades for valor, and hidden mercenary reinforcements in the form of Ronin. All the mechanics tie in flawlessly for what can only be called the best depiction of epic warfare in Edo-period, feudal Japan that I've ever played, let alone a very solid war game.

Ikusa has absolutely breathtaking art throughout, and paired with the overall production values this can only be considered to be the ultimate version of the game. While the miniatures are unpainted, and there are almost 500 of them, they are unique looking and come in seven colors to represent the five players, the Ronin, and the ninja. In what can only be an ode to multiculturalism and racial harmony, there are no yellow figures in the box, which pisses me off because I really like to play yellow when I can.

This is due to an injury I suffered long ago, causing dark colors to blend together quite a bit in anything other than bright light; I suspect color blindness is similar. Most of the player colors in Ikusa are of the darker variety, so I wish they'd stuck with the colors used in Shogun, which have bright blues, reds, and a yellow figure that I could most certainly differentiate. Seriously, nobody is going to call Avalon Hill racist for putting one player's worth of yellow figures in the box simply because it's a Japanese themed game.

Another thing changed from the original is the wee katanas that were used to designate player turn order in Shogun. This isn't a big deal because the originals were of a brittle plastic that always broke, and now they're cardboard chits with numbers on them, so I think this is an augmentation rather than a detraction. I guess I can no longer try to stab an opposing player with the little swords, so maybe that could be counted as a downside, but all things considered, I have ample knives around the house so I suppose I could improvise.

Other than those small things, the components are pretty much the same in quantity, although everything is of a better quality. The millions of plastic miniature people are of the same quality and detail as those in Conquest of Nerath, which is awesome, and they're all easily distinguishable from each other when it comes to the model shapes themselves. There's riflemen, archers, spearmen, samurai, and all kinds of other guys.

There's even a ninja in the box, who is my favorite as his sole job in life is to spy on things and murder daimyo as they sleep. On top of that are five player dishes, which are used to house players' forces, money supplies, and to bid and purchase things. It comes with a neat player shield that sits on a groove in the dishes and provides a rules reference as well as little indicators that hover over the depressions in the tray which are used to place coins to take certain actions.

Included also are a bunch of cardboard chits that are all well designed, a bunch of plastic coins which are detailed and durable, a sheet of stickers with which to label your flagbearers, a bunch of cards that match each territory on the board, a bunch of plastic pagoda buildings and fortification pieces that the pagodas sit on to indicate they are fortified, some dice, and finally, a well written rulebook. All in all, you definitely get your money's worth when it comes to the bits and pieces, because everything in this game is absolutely perfect. All other games from here on out should look to this game as a guideline for what game components should look like; they are truly that good.

I'm not going into my usual "how to set up and play" with this because you can look back to any review of Shogun and Samurai Swords, or to the rulebook at the bottom of this page, in order to learn how to play this. Nothing has changed at all from previous versions, aside from inclusion of short game rules in the far back of the book. I may be wrong about this, because I don't recall reading any before, but this version has some neat little rules that allow for shorter games as well as two player games.

Now, by shorter rules, I should mention that this is a relative statement, and shorter in this context means "not five hours". The nature of the game is such that it takes considerable time to develop your strategies to their fullest, and this is a very long game, even by epic conquest game standards. The short version brings it to around three hours, as I noted, which is much more manageable.

I will, since I have more time to waste and more thoughts to confer upon my beloved readers, go into what I really, truly, and unabashedly love about Ikusa. First, I'd like to talk about why the Ronin mechanic is so bad ass. In most conquest games, you buy people, place people on the map, and proceed to slaughter one another wholesale. While I'm fine with that, the Ronin change this substantially and add a huge cool factor due to the fact that Ronin are not simply more dudes to add to a territory, they're invisible, Predator-armor wearing mercenaries for rent, waiting in a bowl of rice to pop a cap in your enemies' asses.

Ronin, essentially, are paid for and temporarily rented by the player during the purchase phase. Instead of putting them on the map, you place them on the cards that represent territories in the map, and the cards are placed face-down, so your vile enemies will never know where you're actually deploying them until it's too late. This adds an awesome surprise attack mechanic that, when well used, can change the game exponentially.

Alternatively, you can use them to feint and have an enemy believe you're augmenting a garrison to make them delay an attack on one of your provinces. To top that off, there's only a set amount of them available at any time, and they're taken out of the pool in the player order for the round, so if you want to be extra nasty, the first two players can conspire to take the lion's share of them to stop another player from taking them. It's brilliant.

The next mechanic that I love is the fact that your daimyo get experience as they win battles. This doesn't change your battle effectiveness in that you get more dice or something, it changes the amount of spaces that the entire army that serves under that daimyo can move. Thus, a battle-hardened daimyo may take several territories in one fell swoop or travel long distances to engage their hated rivals instead of puttering along as they are forced to do before building experience. This also makes them huge targets because they are potentially fragile, since once their army has fallen they are quite easily killed, even by a lowly yari-wielding peasant.

Another cool mechanic is the units and battles system. There are a wide variety of units, from bowmen to samurai, and each has its place in your armies. Bowmen and Gunners fire before all else, and thus players that have diversified well have a decided advantage over those who simply bought piles of foot soldiers to act as chaff.

Finally, the ninja mechanic is a very clever way to keep enemy strong daimyo-led armies in check. The highest bidder in a round is the only one who gets to keep the ninja for that round, with all others losing their money, and the winner may use him to either kill a daimyo by declaring an attack, or they can hold him in reserve until the beginning of the next round where he can peek an an enemy's expenditures and see what that player plans to spend cash on.

For the former, you can declare who you want to kill and roll the die; if you roll a nine or higher, they cannot move, attack, or defend this round. So, it's not really so much killing as maiming, which is actually more valuable in war as time has told. The downside is that if the assassination attempt failed, the opponent can retaliate and, if successful, maim one of your own daimyo in a similar fashion. It's a truly vicious mechanic, and it's yet another thing that makes Ikusa truly unique when weighed against its peers in the epic war game spectrum.

Now there are some things that a people will be turned off by when it comes to any iteration of Shogun, be it Ikusa or Samurai Swords. First, the game phases can be a hair unwieldy to some because while some actions are simultaneous, others go in player order. In short, the gameplay can be viewed as choppy, or not quite streamlined. Second, the game can be very, very long. It's like Risk, in that regard, but with far more complexity. Four player games can run as long as four to five hours, and even longer if you're playing your first game.

Finally, something that may turn new Ikusa players off is the fact that there are none of the "new standards of Dudes on a Map" included in the game, such as variable player powers, mission-based scoring, robust economic models and things of that nature. At its core, it's a game about sending troops down the line, dismembering your enemies, forming and breaking alliances, and capturing their territories.

Beyond the above complaints which have haunted Shogun and Samurai Swords all along, as well as some new ones, I think this is an awesome game. If you had not considered buying this paying the outlandishly high prices that have been spotted on Ebay for Shogun, or less so for Samurai Swords, jump on this. If you dig Japanese culture like I do (so much so that I married into a Japanese family) and love conquest games, this is a no-brainer. I have yet to find anything that captures the spirit of Japanese warfare like Ikusa does.

For some, Ikusa may appear too simple, but in reality there's tremendous strategic options available, so I don't take too many points away from Ikusa for not being "modern" or updated. New stuff might've been nice, but part of the charm of Ikusa is that it is very straightforward to learn and play, without having too much stuff going on in it that it becomes unwieldy or overly complex. Part of me wonders if this was reprinted because the original designer, Mike Gray, who is still with Hasbro, has had some new ideas on how to update this through an expansion down the road.

Why I Want To Be A Feudal Daimyo When I Grow Up:
- This game's art is rivalled only by Cyclades, which I consider to be the pinnacle example of art in a game
- Outstanding production values from the plastics to the cardboard also contribute to the stratospheric "pretty" factor
- The inclusion of game-shortening rules was a smart way to ensure the game will get to a table near you
- The awesome mechanics of experienced daimyos, hidden ronin, and the Ninja aren't found anywhere else I know of
- The player interaction in Ikusa is the equivalent of a katana to the scrotum, which is awesome

Why The Ninja May Disembowel Avalon Hill:
- No yellow player pieces? Seriously? C'mon...it's not controversial, even in ultra-liberal suburban Washington
- If you cannot handle sitting in one spot for four hours, this is NOT the game for you
- It may be too simplistic for some people, especially considering some of the more modern epic conquest games

Overall:
This is, simply put, the finest iteration of one of my favorite conquest games of all time, but if you didn't like the other iterations, you probably won't like it now. It's not for the faint of heart, and it's not for someone who wants to play a game for an hour and be done. This is for armchair generals who wish to tread upon their enemies' bones for hours on end, giving nor accepting mercies, and those who wish to engage in a epic game of strategy, intrigue, and elegant warfare. For me, it's a must-have, but I really like these kinds of games, and with the Japan factor, this is at the very top of my list.

Rating:
4.25/5 Stars

You can learn more at the Wizards/AH page here, and the rules are at the bottom of the page:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=ah/prod/ikusa

Risk Legacy: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Sharpie

2011-09-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

I'm going to tell you up front that I'm a huge Dudes On A Map worshipping, GameMaster Series adoring, Cyclades Loving son of a bitch. I love conquest, I love to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of their women. But, that being said, I hate Risk with a passion. If you asked me to play Risk, I'd probably get up and call you a fun murdering cunt. It's the weakest of all of the DoaM games I know of, and by a long shot. So let's set that straight right up front. Fuck Risk, in the ass, with no Astroglide and a handful of sand. Sharp sand.

Now I've heard all this jazz about Risk: Black Ops, Risk: Godstorm, Risk: 2210, Risk: Lord of the Rings, Risk: Halo Wars, and all the other Risk games being so much different than any of the others, but I hate Risk so very, very much I've never played them, or had any desire to play them. So, when I got this press copy of Risk Legacy from my buddy Chris, I told him that I'd better send it back because I'm NOT the guy for it. I'd destroy it and tell people how shitty it is, just like the original Risk.

Undaunted, he explained that it is so unlike any other Risk game that I would have no choice to sit at its altar and sacrifice my children to it. Yes, that's a paraphrase. So, I cracked it open, wary that I'd have to shit on a dear friend's first published project. Luckily, he was right, it's not like any other Risk game I've ever played. It doesn't suck, not a bit. In fact, it's rocks out with its cock out, and it's going to change what "hidden information" means to a gamer, forever.

The concept of Legacy is that scientists got sick of Global Warming, Global Climate Change, overpopulation, food shortages, sex trafficking of underage Indonesians, Sean Penn, and all the other ails of the world. So much so that they found a way to make completely new copies of Earth to escape the madness. Unfortunately, people are people and shortly after the five evil corporations that run the world sent their people to New Earth #00010542 they got sick of each others' shit and decided to do what man always does: kill one another with reckless abandon using the most efficient killing machines available at the time.

In short, it's about killing and subjugating, which is my favorite pastime. But, unlike normal, shitty Risk, you're not trying to wipe enemies off the map so much because the object instead is to earn four Red Stars, which are points that can be started with, bought, or earned through conquest, and are represented by both tokens and headquarters pieces. If you get four Red Stars, either by controlling headquarters and tokens or just with tokens alone, you immediately win the game.

Looking to the components, there's an assload of wee miniatures in five colors and in two styles per faction that represent individual troops and three troops, a bunch of cards that represent the territories and some that have coins pictured on them, five dice, a rulebook, two sheets of stickers, a sideboard with some areas to stack cards, and a huge, truly well-designed map. On the map are all kinds of icon-based helpers that make it really easy to remember what does what, and when. On top of that, there's a bunch of tokens that have missiles depicted on them, and some tokens with stars on them.

The final bits are a set of nearly poker-sized cards with more stickers on them, and five cardboard faction cards. All in all, everything is Hasbro quality, and the miniatures, while not super detailed, are very good. They're easily the quality of Conquest of Nerath, which I think are pretty damned good, especially considering the diminutive size. I should also mention the art, because it's wonderful. Each faction has its own look, and the art is on par with Eminent Domain, which I consider to have some of the best sci-fi artwork not made by Games Workshop. Really, truly pretty.

During the initial setup the owner, presumably, will place some coin stickers onto some of the resource cards that represent the territories. This buffs them up so that when you earn one of these, it's more valuable. During the following 15 plays, some of these may be buffed with stickers further, and some will be torn into little rippy bits. Further, during the game there will be stickers placed onto the board as permanent alterations, stickers placed into the rulebook to change the rules forever, and shit written onto the board that forever changes it. In short, there's a lot of things that are going to change between play one and play fifteen, and that's just how it is designed.

Now, there's this big Internet controversy about people not wanting to "destroy" the game by writing on it, changing cards, all that jazz. Well, folks, let me set you straight. Do you bitch about ruining your pristine bottle of Citadel paint or cry about tainting your Warhammer 40K Space Marine when you paint it? No, Internet geniuses, you make it AWESOME. Do you lament ruining a condom when you bust your load into it inside of your lady (or guy) of choice? No, you accomplish the desired effect. This game is designed specifically to be changed permanently, and it's for good cause. It makes the game better, and it's meant to be done.

So, in short, get over it. Revel in the experiences that life rewards you with and stop worrying about return on investment. The investment is indeed paid in full with interest via the experience. And, it's not like the game goes in the shit can once you've unlocked everything. It's far better than when you opened the box, anyhow.

There's also another aspect to changing the game that people have tended to overlook, and it's from a philosophical perspective. A decision that is easily mitigated or can be reversed is not a powerful decision. It's a throw away. It has no real meaning, and there's no lasting repercussions. In this game, the decisions are as real as they get, and more emphasis and weight is duly applied to them.

There's more angst, more tension, and more power wielded by the choices because the decisions are both game-changing and permanent. That's the single most novel thing in this game; it forces you to take all decisions seriously, and think about the long-term consequences of the things you do, the rewards you take, and the powers you wield because they are irrevocable. It's a brilliant way to force players to invest themselves into the universe's setting and the inhabitants therein.

But let's talk a minute about the hows and whys of changing the board. First, when you win the game, you get to name a continent, add a major city that only you can start at during future games, create helpful or hindering terrain for future games, or make some territories more or less valuable. The game itself is a work in progress, and everything ties in seamlessly.

Have a player who put a city in Brazil, thereby giving him a potential advantage in subsequent games? Skullfuck him when you win next time by tearing up his 3-coin Peru card so that continent is inherently less attractive to start on in future games. Factions become more powerful as the game progresses, and have new, unique powers, and these stay with the factions forever, and that alone is awesome.

The naming mechanic is awesome as well. For example, I was playing last night with my very good buddy Mickey. He attacked me with eight troops, and I had only one wee little Halo marine-looking dude there to defend it. I only took it so he couldn't get a bonus when he got reinforced. Anyhow, that lone dude, who incidentally was named Master Chief after that game, killed five of his people before succumbing to his barrage of tanks.

I asked him if it was worth five legions of his people to get a measly couple troops bonus, and he declared "That Mandingo mother fucker had to die." Well, he won the game, and as his reward, the continent is permanently named "Mandingo MoFo." That, and in future games, if he controls that continent, since he named it, he gets an additional bonus troop during reinforcement.

You just can't get that kind of long-term, epic revenge that completely redefines the meta-game in any other game on the market. Ever. And that's just a small sampling of how the game is not just a one-off skirmish, but a long-term epic war that rages on, right where it left off, with all the battle scars and founded cities and fortresses being there every single time you play from that point on. It's as if at the end of every game, once rewards are doled out, the game gets put on pause until the next time people sit down and play it.

Those aren't the only things that change, either. The first time you completely murder an entire civilization, you crack open a sealed envelope that adds new stuff to the game. New rules, new powers, new stuff. When you found the ninth minor city, same thing. When you place thirty troops in a single turn and have a missile token, same thing. When three nukes are fired off in a single battle, same thing. The game changes every single time you play it, just like how the landscape of our world changes every time there's conflict.

Don't believe me? Afghanistan has more civilian deaths due to landmines and unexploded ordinance than any country on Earth. Why? There's been perpetual war there for as long as I've been alive. Shit, longer. So, this game is the first game I've ever played, seen, or heard of that actually remembers the sins of governments past, and although I'm sure the game isn't meant to be a political statement, there sure as hell is a lesson to be learned from it.

But all this can be written off as a gimmick by the uninformed. A money grab. A scam. Of course, those sentiments are complete bullshit, but I can understand why people might think that if they don't know any better. Like a kid picking his ass and licking his finger, right? Here's the thing: how many games do you own that you bought expansions for, and how many times after getting the expansions do you go back and play the base game?

The one thing that really chaps my ass about this whole debate is that people who are the first to buy the "Smallworld: 4 Bits And A Box For 25$" expansion are the first to bitch about "defecating on my new game", but this game has at least six expansions built right into the fucker, and included for the initial purchase price . If you can't see that, you're beyond my help.

That being said, let's assume that this game had none of this, and talk about the game above and beyond the "unlockables" and modifications. Why is Legacy any good? what makes it better than the old-school Risk, and what makes it any better than any of the games on the market in the genre? Let's explore.

Legacy is an very neat DoaM game on its own, without the unlockable aspect. Thankfully, only some gameplay aspects have remained from the original Risk game, such as the movement mechanic, the dice mechanic, and the lack of unit differentiation from the perspective that there is only one kind of troop per army with all armies essentially acting the same way.

The rest is a sweet melange of the unique player powers and missions found in Nexus Ops, terrain modifiers in Small World, and the resource accumulation in Axis and Allies. It's a really, really tight design and there's really not that many rules to it. The best, most refreshing part is that a five player game can be over in under two hours. Hell, I don't even think you could make this game take much longer than that if you tried.

"But how, my good writer, do you play the fucking thing?" Well, allow me to give you a short version. First, to set the game up, pick a faction, and then you must simply place your headquarters building and eight troops onto any unoccupied, unmodified territory or a territory with a city you founded previously. If you've never won on this Earth, you get a free Red Star coin, which is a victory point, but if you have won before, you get a missile token for each time you've won.

Speaking of factions, there's five of them, and all are completely unique with respect to their figures and their special power. Each faction starts with one special power, but during the game's expansion there can be up to five unique powers per faction. There's barbarians, armored suit wearing folks, Fremen-looking sand chicks, Imperial Guard looking folks, and Halo marine looking dudes. Again, all the models are unique and look really cool. I especially dig the Fremen chicks because their little car figures remind me of Westwood Games' trike units from the PC RTS game Dune 2000. Anyhow, moving on.

Once you're all set up, the battle begins. Each player takes their turns, completing phases in order. The first phase is reinforcements, whose number is calculated by counting all of your territories, adding the value of any cities you control, and dividing by three. It sounds wonky, but it's actually a cakewalk. On top of that, you can spend resource coins, which are earned through conquest, to buy more troops.

You can place them on any territories you own, in any denomination. If you had all of your troops killed on your last turn, if there's an open, legal territory, you place four troops on that space and start from there. If there's no legal space, you are out of the game and, the first time someone is eliminated, you crack open a secret envelope and immediately do what it says to do. Sorry, no spoilers here.

Next, you can expand your domain by moving your troops, either taking vacant territories or fighting an enemy. As in old-school Risk, you can never abandon a territory, so if you enter a new territory and want to expand further, you have to leave at least one troop as a garrison. If you want to fight, simply declare the battle, and roll the dice to fight. Some terrain modifies the rolls, such as ammo shortages and bunkers, which can give +1 or -1 to a die roll. It's the same Risk formula, with a twist, essentially. Additionally, if you've won on this map before, you'll probably have a missile token which you can play, and it makes your highest roll an automatic six, which cannot be trumped, although ties always go to the defender.

Once you're done crushing rebellions and whatnot, you can make one final repositioning movement, which allows you to move figures from one adjacent position to another to reinforce a front line. This is how you get troops from one friendly position to another, and one faction initially has a power that allows you to move troops from any friendly territory to another, not just adjacent ones.

The trick is that you initially only get to reposition once per turn, so placement and strategy are critical here. I initially thought it was total bullshit to not allow troops to reposition during your movement phase since if there's tanks and giant mechwarriors on the board, someone surely had invented a C-130, but after screwing around with that just to see how it would play, it was immediately apparent that the game would last forever if you could persistently fortify any position you wish anytime you wished. That, and a lot of the strategy would disappear.

If you happened to snatch a territory from an opponent, you earn a resource card. These, as I noted, can be used to buy troops, but more importantly, if you trade in four of them, you earn a Red Star. Some territories are worth more than others, based on how many stickers are on them, and if there's any territories that you own in one of the four slots, you can take your pick of them. If you don't, you simply take a one coin value card instead.

That's all there is to the core game, really. Fight, kill, get four stars, and win. As the game expands itself through play, much, much more comes into play. Random event cards are drawn. Secret missions abound. The game just keeps getting deeper and deeper, more interesting and more devious with each new play. It's fucking awesome. Every time some new packet opens, it's like Christmas, even when bad shit happens.

Now that you know what I like, here's what I didn't, since it's not all strawberries and cream. First, if you play this with a bunch of regulars and a new guy comes along, he's in an odd position. The new player will never have built a city, meaning he can't take advantage of the benefits of having a one or two value city, essentially denying him one free troop per turn in many cases. That's mitigated, and to a degree overcompensated for, by the fact that players who haven't won yet get a free starting Red Star token, meaning that with their HQ they're halfway to victory from jump street. But it also means that there's fewer safe havens to respawn from if all of their troops are killed.

While it's as well balanced as it could be, I still think it's uneven because the new guy gets to start with a quarter more victory points than the opponents who have won before, and potentially fewer advantageous positions than anyone who has built a city, which is any player who lost a game but wasn't completely wiped out. And if it's a mature game, there's a shitload of cities, which reduces the legal starting places exponentially. Sure, other players can't use them, but when you start out with less options than anyone at the table, and its a persistent disadvantage, it can never be quite on par. Matt Drake and I disagree on this point, and you should read his review as well to get his thoughts on the game. If ever an honest broker lived, it's he.

Second is the fact that all the troops are the same. I would've really liked to see Legacy enter Axis and Allies, Smallworld, Nexus Ops, and Conquest of Nerath territory by having differentiation between units. In Legacy, you have the one unit marker and the three unit marker, and that's it. With the cool models in the box, I'd have enjoyed having a giant robot figure shoot big plasma bolts that destroy cities, have the little trikes be able to reposition for free, or maybe have the big bear-riding barbarian bits be able to get a new unit for free by eating three enemy troops or something. As it rests, it's just plain old Risk in that regard, and that's not something I look upon with great endearment.

So, at the end of the day, while Risk Legacy is not the best game I've ever played, it's hands-down the most unique and completely revolutionary game I've ever played, not to mention exceptionally fun. The persistent warfare aspect of the game is stunningly brilliant, and it is absolutely mind-blowing in its potential. I've still not unlocked everything, and I may never, even with 15 plays where the game is locked and continues on in its final state forever. I currently have several cities, such as "Pickle Pus", a small village in the Ural Mountains, "DNS City" (an ode to Pulp Fiction) in Greenland, "Cheyenne" in Eastern Australia, and continents called "Craquilonia" and "Mandingo MoFo".

And while I like the game as it is, every time I crack open the box, I don't know what the hell is going to happen next, what event will totally screw us all, what will be unlocked or what rule will change, and that's something I can't say with virtually any other game. Very, very cool.

Why The Legacy Of Risk, And Perhaps Board Game Design, Has Been Upgraded:
- The "Achievement Unlocked" aspect is just too fucking cool for words
- The game, even without the unlockables, is tight and well designed
- The art is truly wonderful without exception
- It's the only Risk game I've wanted to play more than once
- Each game played makes it better, and even after 15 plays the game is playable in its final form

Why This May Be A Risky Purchase:
- If you can't hack modifying your game, first, I pity you, but also, this may not be something you can handle
- The lack of unit differentiation is a huge bummer for me
- Playing a mature game with a newbie feels unbalanced if you have lots of drifters in your group

Overall:
This is definitely one of the better DoaM games that has come out in the last few years, and not only for the unlockable and persistent aspects of the war, although those features are what catapult it from a really good game to a great one. There's a few things I don't like, specifically the lack of unit differentiation and the newbie factor, but those are meager bitches when weighed against how truly fucking awesome this game is when viewed in its totality. This game will undoubtedly spawn knock-offs of the 'evolving game' mechanic, but I suspect that these charlatans will not have the jacobs to force players to make permanent changes to the landscape. And that's a shame.

Rating:
4.25/5 Stars

Read the rules here, because there's some minor bits I left out, and you can see the art for yourself:
http://www.hasbro.com/common/documents/dad2886d1c4311ddbd0b0800200c9a66/00D721465056900B10A16E11F8F54E7F.pdf

One More Important Point:
I have not opened all the sealed pouches, so I don't know EVERYTHING that is in store. I can only base this off of five plays, and I can only talk about what I know. What I do know is that I want to open those pouches almost as much as I want to have sex tonight, and since Aunt Flo just winged her ass back to Uteropolis after an unwelcome stay, I want to have sex very, very badly. Very. Just sayin'.

Nitro Dice - Racing For The Finish, But Only To Get It Over With

2011-09-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

I got this copy of Nitro Dice from Minion Games at the same time that I got Five Fingered Severance, and I specifically requested it from them because it looked really cool. It has the stereotypical "Fast And The Furious" crowd; the big-boobie blonde wearing too-tight clothes, the asian chick with a plaid schoolgirl outfit, and even a juggy little skank on the front of the box, holding a hanky to start the race. The concept was cool, too: a light, racing card game with some screwage that was short enough to play at the beginning or end of a night. Everything seemed perfect...right up until I was reminded of my late friend Frank Hatton.

Frank was one of the best friends I ever had. He was a pill-popping, smack shooting, alcoholic mess. Half the time he'd be sitting in his garage, watching Sin City or Van Helsing for the 300th time, talking to himself or laughing at something for no apparent reason. He was an older guy, and as 'country' as cornbread, hailing from Harlan, Kentucky. Salt of the Earth kind of guy.

Anyhow, the reason I thought of Frank was that he had a penchant for wordsmithy, and at one point we were headed to the liquor store to go get something to replace the Scope he'd been drinking, all minty-breathed, and we saw this woman. At the time, there were no words to describe this terribly unfortunate-looking woman. 'Fugly' didn't even begin to describe her. Not remotely.

Anyhow, Frank, in his generally incoherent manner, said, "Oh my God! She's TERROCHEROUS!" To this day, I can only surmise that it was a mixture of 'terrible' and 'treacherous'. But the context was dead on. This woman was indeed terrocherous. And the ghost of my dear friend Frank was summoned by Nitro Dice after the second play, where I looked at the other players and had to ask, "Does this suck as bad as I think it does?" The answer was, in all cases, of the affirmative kind, with the exception that my buddy Mickey, who knew Frank, said, "Pete, that was fucking terrocherous. I never want to play that again." And sadly, I have to concur.

Getting into the concept of the game, it's essentially a card game that uses dice as cars, set at a street race. The D10 die that represents your car also represents your "gear", which is the same as speed, and it tells you and everyone else at the table how fast your car is currently moving. As you cruise on the tracks, which are simply a bunch of poker-sized cards with track sections illustrated thereon, you must play cards that match the type of section you're about to enter in order to enter them without taking damage.

You can also play cards as your car leaves a track section, replacing the section with one that has an obstacle, in order to make your opponents' time harder. There's even a damage tracking card and chit that tells players how bad their cars are beat up, thereby limiting their speed. All in all, the concept sure sounded neat.

Getting into the art and components, the box itself, as noted, has a little red-headed chick on the box with 3/4 of her tits hanging out of a tube top, with 2 race cars in the background. It's all done in the "new" anime style, with a computer-drawn look to it. It's actually quite nice, really, all the way through the box, and the copious amount of cards that represent the track really look great.

In addition to the many cards are six D10 dice in unique colors, and six matching card stock tracks and chits to keep track of damage as well as some nitro tokens you can use to give yourself a speed boost. If you were to rate this game just on the look and bits, it really is quite good. The rulebook has some little ambiguous spots, but after re-reading it a couple of times you get all of the mechanics down; it's just not laid out incredibly well.

To set up, you simply place the track cards in a row for a drag race, or in any configuration your mind can conjure. You can add a pit stop too, if you wish, which allows you to fix your car once it's been damaged. Deal out nine cards to each player, and once you're done with that, you simply roll off to see which starting positions the players begin in. You're off to the races.

Playing the game is simple, really. At the beginning of each round, all players set their speed by adjusting the value of their die. You start the game at zero speed, and can adjust it up or down one point for free, or two points if you discard a card. The damage track has a value of one through nine, and this indicates your maximum speed, so you can never adjust your speed higher than the the speed indicated on your damage track.

This is where the game begins to piss me off. Because the numerals on D10 dice aren't sequential, it means that as you speed up and slow down, you have to take the die off the track, find the number you're looking for, and put the car back. It would be OK if that was something that wasn't done often, but until you get to the top speed, you're pretty much changing the die every turn.

After the first play we abandoned that idea and used the damage tracker to indicate speed, using the die to indicate damage. That alone took fifteen minutes off of the game time, and it stopped all arguments about "where was the car before you picked it up" which occurred several times during the first play.

Getting back to the actual racing rather than the fiddling around with dice, once everyone has set their speed, the person who is moving fastest may move their car first, and in the case of a tie, the player who is furthest ahead gets to go. In what is the smartest part of the game, movement is done not only by simply moving your car forward as many spaces as is indicated by the speed value on your car die, you can also change lanes and perform advanced manoeuvers by discarding cards.

You can zip in between cars and drift around corners in this manner. While this is neat, the actual practice of doing so is really wonky and anti-instinctive because of how the movement takes place. The illustrations in the book help, but even after three plays I was constantly going back to the book to make sure I was doing it right.

Additionally, every time you enter a new track section, you must discard either a matching card type, or any three cards, in order to do so without taking any damage. Not having the right cards is a real killer in this game, and it's important to make sure that you don't inadvertantly discard cards you'll need on later turns in order to move around the track, even in a straight line.

Another neat aspect to this game is that you can draft other cars. If a car is directly behind you in the same lane on a straightaway, and you're moving at the same or a greater speed, you pull that car forward one space for free. While you normally wouldn't want to help an opponent, you can use this to pull the opponent's car onto a hazard, causing damage, or better yet, over the threshhold of a new track section, causing that player to have to discard a card as normal.

If you're moving too fast or a previous player screwed you over, you can brake to slow down. Simply discard cards to reduce your speed by one per card, and then record the new speed by changing your die. Like I said, you're messing with that die a hell of a lot in this game. Alternatively, if you're on a straightaway, you can use the nitro tokens to move two bonus moves, although this doesn't change your die.

There's also a copious amount of screwage in the game by changing the track on the fly. This is truly the one saving grace of this game. If you have a card that matches a track section, you can discard the track section and replace it with the one in your hand. This is a hell of a way to remove an obstruction from in front of you or put obstacles in front of your opponents, forcing either damage or lane changes, and sometimes causing collisions. The only real restriction is that the track section to be replaced must be free of any cars when you do it.

Speaking of wrecking out, there's a fair amount of damage dealt in the game. This can be from hitting obstacles that you can't avoid, from not having the right cards or enough cards when entering a new track section, and from hitting other players' cars. Each time you hit someone, both cars take a damage point, and if you rear-end someone, you immediately must reduce your speed to match theirs. If you've taken too much damage, you can go into the pit stop, which allows for you to spend your speed points to regain health. You can't enter the pit going faster than five speed points, and you regain one health point for every movement point you give up on your turn.

The last thing you do in a round is replenish your hand. Depending on your position, you take either 5, 4, or 3 cards, with the leader taking the least and the slacker taking the most. If you're in the pit at the end of a turn, you get a freebie as well. All in all, managing your hand is the single most important aspect of the game, and if you run short of cards at the wrong time, you're completely and unabashedly fucked. The winner is the player who crosses the finish line first on the last lap of the game.

Some games can be one lap, others as many as you wish. The game is quite flexible on length, but while this is advertised as a fast-playing game, it's not. It's very slow, very tedious, very fiddly, and not a whole lot of fun. I would recommend having as few track sections as possible in a small circular track for the learning game as well, since there are some tricky bits to understand, such as the drifting and swooping between cars.

Overall, I would not recommend this game to anyone who likes Formula D, Powerboats, Snow Tails, Rush n' Crush, or any other racing game. This feels much more like a dry piece of toast than a fast and furious racer. It's just so damned fiddly that you never seem to get into the groove of the game, even knowing how to play and having played before, and the whole die-is-speed mechanic totally and utterly fails.

I'm sure there's people who would appreciate this game more than I do, because it's well-produced and the design is pretty slick, but like so many games that look great when you read the rules and fall completely flat when you actually play, this game just sucked ass for myself and every one of the six people I've played this with. And thanks to Frank and Mickey, the final assessment of this game can be pared down to one simple word: terrocherous.

Why Nitro Dice Is High Octane Racing Fuel:
- The art is really nice all the way through and the production value is quite good
- There's some smart stuff in the game, with cool screwage mechanics being foremost
- Hey, everyone loves skanks and juggies

Why Nitro Dice Exploded Into A Fireball Of Pain And Death:
- Incredibly dry, fiddly and torturously boring gameplay killed this for me
- The dice being used as the speed was an epic failure
- Odd drifting and slotting rules made it harder than it had to be

Overall:
I, and all of my friends, unambigously hated this game; it took over a month to get through three plays. I went into each of the games I played with an open mind, but at the end of the day, this is a terribly boring game. I mean, boring beyond all comprehension. For $22.00, maybe you can try it and see if it was just us, but I think you'd be better served getting six D10 dice and a copy of Cherry Pop Tart instead. The one thing I got from this game is that I should add "terrocherous" to the Urban Dictionary.

Rating:
1.5/5 Stars

You can read the rules at BGG, and check out the Minion Games site if you wish here:
http://www.miniongames.com/nitro-dice.html

Chaostle - One Part Adventure, Two Parts Chaos, And Four Parts Awesome

2011-09-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

It's a rarity that a roll and move game is anything but an effort in futility, and even rarer is it fun. Chaostle, the new game from upstart publisher Chivalry Games, has managed to not only create a game that defies the odds, it also defies reason. It's fucking brilliant. It's as if Mark Jacobs, the designer of Chaostle, reached back 20 years and took all that was good about Sorry!, Talisman, and D&D, and threw it in a blender of awesomeness to create something so unique, unexpected, and just plain fun that you're simply not sure how the hell it took so long for something like this to come out. I met the designer at Origins this year, and by GenCon, I had gotten a review copy from him. I'm glad that I did!

The concept of the game is simple in that it's essentially a roll and move with combat, with the object being running around the semi-linear path to get to the castle, designated by a space in the center of the board, in order to destroy its defences and move a set amount of your characters to the sanctuary within. While the concept is simple, the game is actually a fairly deep hack-and-slash light RPG when you boil it down.

There's no exploration, as it were, such as you might find in Prophecy or Talisman, but instead there's totally random events that can help or hurt you, and all of them are highly thematic. It should also be noted that each character is completely unique, with unique weapons and powers, which can be upgraded throughout the game either by events or by battle victories.

To get into the components, it bears stating that the production values are superb, which is truly unexpected from a first-time entrant into the world of board game publishing. There's a bunch of great plastic figures, all of which were designed by top-tier sculptors such as Kevin Contos, but there's also a ton of big plastic castle walls that were designed by one of my personal heroes, Bruce Hirst. The other art is outstanding as well, with it being illustrated by well-known artists such as Tom Sorenson and Paul Abrams. In short, everything looks exactly how it should, and all of the parts are beautifully intertwined to produce one hell of an awesome package.

For the specifics, though, there's a decent amount of stuff in the box, especially by the standards set by the overproduced FFG hundred dollar boxes. There's sixteen unique models in the box complete with character cards, there's the board, there's the twenty or so pop-in style castle wall segments which are numbered to match the numbers on the board for easy identification, and then there's the two fate cards and a castle card. Aside from that, there's a bunch of metallic pegs to use in the cards, which note changes in the characters such as upgrades and life and finally, sixteen colored snap-rings with which to mark your characters' bases for easy identification.

All in all, everything is truly superb, with my favorite aspect being the peg-in-card system that's reminiscent of Formula D or Claustrophobia, which makes tracking your statistics very, very easy and chit-free. The rulebook and fate sheets are also awesome, with great art, an interesting yet clichéd back story, and all kinds of illustrations to both explain things and spice up the reading. The flavor text alone with the powers is enough to make it a fun time reading the powers.

If I had to nitpick about one thing, it's the game board itself. While the art on the character cards is exceptional fantasy fare, the board itself is just a hair on the under-illustrated side. It's not that there's not enough on it to spice it up, it's more that it doesn't compare in resolution or color to the magnificent art found virtually everywhere else in the game.

Setting up takes all of about two minutes. You place the castle walls on the board, draft your army of up to four characters, get the cards set in front of you, and that's that. Players need to agree beforehand on how much damage the castle can take before death as well as how many characters need to reach sanctuary to win, and then you're ready to choose a patron, then you're good to go. The choice of patron, King or Queen, makes a difference because if you choose a King, you're going to be headed one direction around the board, and the opposite if you choose a queen, not to mention that the patrons also define which color you choose.

Once you're all set up, the game begins. The game revolves around rolling a die and moving one of your characters that far. But, there's a twist. Many of the die values trigger events, such as when you roll a "lucky three", you get to take another turn. Roll a one or two, and you can put a character into play on your patron's space. Roll a five...and you may be fucked. "Fate Fives", as they're called, cause events to occur. After moving, you roll the red die and two white dice, and check the chart to determine what happened.

There's both "Doom" and "Happiness" fates, and all of them will affect you greatly. You may end up in a shark pit, or you may end up with two of your weapons upgraded. You may end up having all of your rolls count as ones until you roll a six, at which point your rolls revert to normal. Hell, you may even have one of your characters betray you, losing them forever to the player to the left while the player to the right has to give up a character to you. The game was named aptly, because this fate mechanic absolutely is the epitome of chaos. Totally salty, fucked up shit can happen, but on the other hand, you can get totally hooked up; you just never know.

Back to movement, though, for a moment. Moving around the board on the outer track is the longest, yet easiest path to take. There's three levels of the castle, with the board representing level one, and the third being the highest and most difficult to navigate. If you decide to take the high roads, which are shorter, you end up facing jumps which are not always simple feats. You may only jump from one level to another space on the same level, and you have to roll at least as high as the distance between where you are and the nearest space on the same level.

In some cases, you need to hit the space exactly, and therefore it's very hard to make the jump. The good news is that with four characters in play, you generally always have a valid move to make, and if you can't or don't want to go forwards, you can always go backwards. With the exception of rolling a four, though, you must always make a valid move if one is available. On top of that, each character has a movement value which can be added, optionally, to your movement, although it doesn't change the roll itself; it's above and beyond the roll. If you get all the way through one section to the next king or queen start space, you get to place a peg on your card indicating you start at a new spot if you go out of play; it acts as a new spawn point so you never have to start all the way back at your original starting space.

Besides moving, there's also killing. After moving, you can choose a character to attack another character or characters, or even sacrifice your own in order to buff your attacking character up. Attacking is random as most things in this game are, because while each character has six weapons available to them, they don't get to choose which to use. Players roll a die, and that determines which weapon was used. If the weapon's range is equal or greater than the distance to the target characters, it's a hit. Simply subtract the damage rating from the attacked character, less any defense rating, and that's that.

If a character's life points drop below zero, the character is killed, although in Chaostle, all that happens is that the character is taken out of play and may re-enter play with a roll of one or two by the owner on his turn. The victor gets to choose an upgrade for themselves, and with all the options here, there's little chance of completely buffing your characters up to the maximum in all categories.

Speaking of the categories, it should be mentioned that each character has three unique skills, both bizarre and powerful, that can be upgraded, with some being active powers that can be used at certain times, such as the Arrow Dynamics skill that allows a free attack at very long range, and others are passive skills that are automatically available under certain circumstances, such as the Protection skill that adds armor points to your character. Those I just mentioned are the simpler, more sane ones, but there's others that are just nuts, such as drinking Dragon Spit to gain some protection in battle or the Time Travel skill that allows you to go back in time and bring a "Glow In The Dark Gamma Melting Pistol" with you to fight with. And those are part of what make the game so awesome.

The end of the game comes when the castle's defenses have been beaten and one player has the predetermined amount of characters in the sanctuary. All in all, the game can last anywhere from an hour to four, depending on how many players you have. There's been talk of shortening the game by neglecting one quadrant's worth of spaces, and I tried it, and it does indeed shorten the game by a good amount. Alternatively, you can play with fewer characters, but in my experience three characters a piece with a goal of two characters in the Sanctuary as a win condition is the perfect balance in a game size between three and five players.

Why I Embrace The Chaos...tle:
- Great art, awesome minis, and Bruce Hirst castle pieces make this glow on the table
- Action RPG elements make each character unique and interesting
- Crazy random events make this a beer-and-pretzels gamer's dream game
- The whimsical theme takes liberties with fantasy stereotypes, big time
- You get a lot of wicked cool plastic for US $60.00

Why The Emperor Of Mankind Wants To Crush Chaos...tle:
- Some random events really crush your hopes and cause serious frustration and angst
- Combat is a little too random for my tastes, I'd have liked to be able to choose weapons
- The length can be a little long for the style of game, but this can be altered to taste
Overall:
I'm the last guy to get into a roll and move game. I'm not a big Talisman fan primarily due to the fact that the movement mechanic is very frustrating. For some reason, though, it's fun in Chaostle. Each die roll counts for something, and since you have so many characters to move you're very rarely stuck in neutral, just waiting for a specific die roll to happen. That, and the stuff that the die roll does, like granting free turns or causing fate to screw or help you, makes it seem so much less futile. If you're looking for a beautiful beer-and-pretzels action RPG style game, this may be a winner for you.

Rating:
4/5 Stars

You can learn more about Chaostle at:
www.chaostle.com

There's a new expansion coming out in November or December, and there's new player reference stickers you can pop on the back of your cards:
http://www.chaostle.com/Resources/ChaostleSpecialSkillsAvery8162.pdf

And for those who were early adopters, the Fates were updated to make it less frustrating to be in the Shark Tank or other traps:
http://www.chaostle.com/Resources/Happiness_Fate_References_Lite.pdf
http://www.chaostle.com/Resources/Doom_Fate_References_Lite.pdf

Ninja: Legend of the Scorpion Clan - "All Warfare Is Based On Deception"

2011-09-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

I met with Todd Rowland during GenCon 2011, at the AEG "Game Night" event, to talk to him a bit about what AEG was up to of late, and after he gave me the skinny about their awesome 2011 lineup he offered me a copy of Ninja: Legend of the Scorpion Clan (Ninja) for review. I was ecstatic as it was on my radar for a while since I'm an unabashed theme-monger, and this game has theme swinging off of the box like a stealthy assassin off of a pagoda's roof. Not only that, but it's a game that's quite unlike any I've ever played before, which had me more than a little intrigued.

What made the concept of this game so appealing to me was that while one player has his guards sitting all over the place on the board, the other's movement is done purely on a printed sheet that has an image printed thereon. In short, the bad guys in the game are invisible, and can only be detected through the guards listening, or just stumbling blindly upon them, however unlikely that may be. Sure, Fury of Dracula and Scotland Yard have hidden movement, but honestly, the mechanics of Ninja are such that it's an entirely different affair. The object is to have the intruders find their individual mission objectives and escape the map without being killed.

Sure, it sounds simple, but it is incredibly difficult for both intruders to get the goods and escape just as it's near-impossible for the guards to catch and kill both intruders.Four plays later, I can tell you that it's an incredibly interesting game. Played with the right person, or people, it can be exceptionally tense and engaging. That being said, you have to accept that one side is pretty much doing most of the active playing and the other is mostly scribbling notes behind a shield, occasionally playing a card and muttering something about inebriating or killing a guard. It almost has a "Battleship" or "Marco Polo" quality about it, where the guard side will ask, "Did I hear something?", with the intruder side indicating whether or not the sentry or patrol in question did or did not.

Looking at the components, from the box to the cards, the art is absolutely outstanding. There's 36 great looking cards for the guards to use, and 22 for the intruders, as well as six large, cardstock mission objective cards. On top of that, there's some outstanding miniatures to play with; 2 lanterns for tracking status, 20 guard figures in two designs, three "drunk guard" figures, and finally, a ninja and traitor figure. Beyond that is a rulebook that is moderately well written and organized, four player shields that are used to obscure your notes, a game board that is very nicely illustrated, and finally, four reasonably thick pads of paper with images of the game board printed thereon. All in all, the components are what I've come to expect from AEG, meaning they are wonderful.

I have a few gripes, though, about the complete package. My first and very minor complaint is that the folds on the board can cause initial confusion in a very limited number of zones on the map, making one section appear to be two. This is easily overcome, though, after your first play when you realize that the folds are, in fact, folds and not lines. The bigger bitch is that the player shields, while nicely illustrated, are sterile and serve very little purpose other than blocking wandering glances. With the large surface area the shields have, I'd have far preferred that player references had been put on them, such as an explanation of how specific cards work or a short reference on how to take notes as the intruders. It is an incredible waste of space, and a missed opportunity in my opinion.

Finally, the biggest complaint I have is that the intruders' card back design is inverted from what would make sense. There's a prominent red or black symbol on them, which one would immediately convey to mean that they are associated with the figure of the same color. Instead, the color of the card back which is far more subtle, is what matches the figure. That was definitely a design failure, but fortunately, after several times grabbing the wrong deck, you won't make the mistake again. Other than those three relatively small whines, I'm completely content with the physical aspects of the game, and AEG did an outstanding job.

Moving onto the gameplay itself, let's start with the setup of the game. Because I prefer the two-player game, I'm going to tell you how to play that version. Honestly, there's not all that much difference between the two player and other sized games, but I like the idea of playing a 'side' rather than an individual intruder or set of ten guards. Anyhow, setup consists of placing the lanterns on the timer and alert tracks, taking one player pad per player, and putting up your player screen.

Once those steps are done, while the intruder player is noting the starting positions of the ninja, traitor, and the entrances to the secret passage between any two zones, the opposing player is placing eight guard models on any of twelve guard starting positions, placing three "patrols" of two guards on any patrol track spaces, then marking where eight sleeping guards are passed out on any of six barracks positions that are marked on the board.

Each player will then draw cards from their decks, with the guard receiving a whopping 24 of the original 36 to play from and the remainder acting as a draw deck. The ninja and traitor, however, only take eight or seven, respectively, and the remainder are put back in the box. Finally, the guard player marks six mission objectives, two hidden guards, and two traps on their maps.

The mission objectives are lettered A through F, and correspond to mission objective cards, of which one is drawn by each of the intruders at the start of the game. The cards need to be assigned to individual characters, and the easiest way to track which character is associated with a character is to put the player's action cards on top of the mission card so that the missions never get confused by the intruder player, especially as the guard player will not know which mission is whose until the game's end.

Once you're all set up, the game can begin, and each turn is played in four phases. The guards always go first, with the guard player first checking the alert status, which allows for card draws and free card play if a guard is alerted, then reducing the alert level by one. The alert level only increases when an event causes it to do so, such as a guard hearing something, being gutted by the ninja or traitor, or stumbling upon an enemy. There's only three levels of alert above the normal zero alert level, and each level allows the guards to pull a card from their draw deck and either play them immediately for free, or he can put them into his hand for later use.

It's an important point to understand that almost all of the guards' cards fall into two groups and then, beneath them, two types of actions granted. The two groups that the cards affect are sentries and patrols, and the two types are listen and search actions. Sentries are defined as individual guards where patrols are two or more guards whose bases are adjacent and in the same direction. Listening actions force the intruder player to respond whether or not one of the intruders has been heard, which has its own subset of conditions, and search actions simply allow the guard player to move a patrol or sentry up to two zones, with the intruders being forced to reveal their location if they have been stumbled upon.

Listen actions are the most effective at finding enemies, and the effectiveness of the action is wholly dependent upon how far the enemies moved. For instance, if an enemy moved 3 spaces on his turn, he can be heard from 3 spaces away. The trick, though, is that the card is played upon an individual patrol or sentry, so you have to either have an idea of where an enemy is, or get damned lucky.

There are counter-actions that the intruders can use as well, such as the "It was a cat" card, which allows the intruders to simply play the card and smugly note that while the guard did hear something, it was only a cat. In the case that the guards successfully hear something, the alert level goes up a notch and the sentry or patrol who heard the noise may move two spaces in order to try to find the source.

After the alert phase has been resolved, the guard player may then play up to two cards on their turn, with the only restriction being that you cannot activate two cards on the same sentry or patrol per turn. Again, the cards you may use are quite limited to simply listening or moving figures during searches, and cards reserved for sentries cannot be used for patrols, and vice-versa. The main advantage that guards have is that they have a large starting hand, but this dwindles quite a bit against a clever intruder player who doesn't allow the guard player to draw up cards through alert increases.

The last thing the guard player does on his turn is to advance patrols two spaces on the printed patrol tracks. These tracks are circular tracks with junctions that connect them, and any group of two or more sentries that are facing the same way are considered patrols for this purpose. Having many patrols is nice because it allows you to get free movements at the end of your turn in order to hunt for the intruders, but the disadvantage is that you must move the patrol, and it always moves in the direction of facing.

You can't simply choose to change direction, you have to play a Patrol Search card in order to turn them around. So, patrols are predictable, which makes them easier to avoid. The real draw of patrols is that if they find an intruder, they can put multiple hits on an intruder, increasing the chances of hacking him to death in a single turn rather than wounding him as he moves back into the shadows.

Speaking of hacking people to death, the guards have but one life to give to their daimyo where the ninja can be hit three times and the traitor twice before dying. If one or both intruders are killed before the 11th round, they may respawn, drawing a new set of cards, albeit fewer of them than they originally started with, but if one is killed after the 11th round, they're dead and the best that the intruders can hope to achieve is a draw.

The last phase is the intruder's turn, where they may move up to three spaces each and search the castles in the center of the map for mission objectives. They don't need to declare which order they are searching, but they do need to tell the guard player which zone is searched and by which intruder. This is a free action, and the guard must tell the intruder player what was in the space, either a trap, a lettered mission objective, or a hidden guard.

If a hidden guard is found, the guard player may place a new guard on that space on the board as well as increase the alert level to its highest level. A trap simply raises the alert level to it's highest level as well. If an objective is found, it is permanently marked on the intruders' map, and if it matches an intruder's mission, they must move over that space and then make their escape. The intruders may also play any cards they wish on their turn, and while they have a very limited number of cards, they have a much more varied set of actions to use on their turn.

They can use rope cards to create paths through walls that are permanently marked on their maps. Additionally, the ninja can throw shurikens and kill a guard in an adjacent space, with no alert level increase. The traitor can play a Potent Sake card, which puts a guard in sleep mode, forcing the guard player to replace his figure with a drunken guard figure until he can play an Awaken card on the guard to bring him back to his regular, ninja-hunting self. Drunken guards might as well be stone statues, because when they're drunk, they can't do a bloody thing.

Both the traitor and ninja, as well as the guards, can use the secret passage, provided they are on one of the spaces that they marked as entrances, although the guards have to have discovered the entrance to use it. Finally, both the intruders may use a card to katana a guard, but in doing so, they not only give away their location to some degree, they also raise the alert level by either one or two. That being said, once the intruders play a card, that card is gone forever, where the guards simply put them back into their discard pile that doubles as a draw deck during the alert phase.

If the 20th round comes and goes without the intruders accomplishing both of their missions and escaping, the game ends with either a partial or total loss. If the guards can stave off the intruders completely, they win. If the intruders can get both missions complete and escape, they win. Any other combination of results ends in a draw, which in my experience seems to be the most common way to end the game, at least thus far.

The short version is that I liked the game quite a bit, and while the four player game is fine, the best way to play this is mano-a-mano. It's also a completely different game when you play as the intruders versus playing as the guards, so there's some replay value in the fact that playing one side is so foreign to playing the other. The downside is that the game has a hard time keeping me interested as the intruders because most of the time you're simply notating movement on your map sheet, with little being said.

It doesn't detract from the fun of the game, but it does take a bit of getting used to. You also have to consider that if you're playing with an inattentive player, or a straight-up cheat, you can totally have your game ruined. I also think that part of the fun of making clever moves in any game is in having the opponent realize it so that you can smirk at him knowingly, but in this case, the opponent doesn't really know what you did until the end of the game when you go back and have a "Scooby Doo reveal recap" if you so desire.

Why Ninja's Kung Fu Is Strong:
- Clever design and interesting choices beginning with the initial card draw make this a thinking man's game
- Superb art and production values make this a beautiful game to play
- This game runs about an hour and a half, making it perfect for a light game night
- The hidden movement of the intruders can lead to devilishly delicious plots
- The game's balance between the sides is as perfect as I could've ever envisioned

Why Jack Burton May Have Been On The Design Team:
- The card back situation and lack of player aid on the shields were serious oversights
- The intruder card decks have little in the way of variance, limiting replay strategies

Overall:
The great warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu wrote in his magnum opus, 'The Art Of War', "Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate." This single verse in personifies what Ninja: Legend of the Scorpion Clan is about; to be invisible, subtle, and unflinchingly patient. It's a very interesting game, but it just seems to lack some of the excitement I was expecting because it feels like such a one-sided event. That being said, it's definitely the best of this designer's "hidden movement" trilogy, the other two being the poorly received 'Van Helsing' and quite fun 'Nuns on the Run', and it is a pretty fun game.

Rating:
3.75/5

This game comes out in October 2011, and you can learn more about it at AEG's website here: http://www.l5r.com/ninja/

Five Fingered Severance - You Too Can Augment Unemployment Benefits Through Thievery

2011-08-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

I've always said that the mark of a great game is a novel, interesting theme that is completely integral with gameplay. This does not imply that the only great games are those where Space Marines or Valkyrie engage in mortal combat with deadly alien scum, it just means that a game that explores a compelling subject matter and allows you to engage in an activity you otherwise would not be able to in a fun and interesting way has a better shot than most of being a winner. Enter Five Fingered Severance, from Minion Games, a game that allows you to stick it to your corporate masters once and for all, and I'm here to tell you that the game has all the earmarks of greatness. In fact, it is one of the most enjoyable games I've played this year.

The game has players acting out their last day on the job at a convenience store, which would be totally boring if the object was to be the best, most faithful employee. Luckily, it's not. It's about stealing everything that's not nailed down, slacking off as much as possible without getting caught, and finally, about screwing over each and every last co-worker so that their similar efforts are stymied at every turn. This is a game of stealthily dodging the boss, stashing your stolen stuff in your locker, and above all else, making sure that your opponents are getting busted as often as you can manage to facilitate it. I can say, after four plays, that I absolutely love this game, and it will remain in my possession until the place burns down or I'm robbed. It's that fun.

Regarding the components, the only complaint that I have is that the box is utterly unappealing. It almost looks like it was designed by a high school student on an Apple 2E using a stock color scheme, and to add insult to injury, that color scheme is truly bland. If I saw it at a game store, I would likely not buy it just based on the box presentation itself, which would be a crying shame.

That being said, everything else is quite decent and very endearing in a cartoonish sort of way. Inside of the box is one pink and one blue D6 die, a medium sized game board, a pack of standard-sized cards which are used to plot against people, about a bazillion half-sized cards which act as activities to partake in as well as a game timer, a bunch of cardstock standies with bases, and three letter-sized cardstock sheets worth of tokens that represent various things, the most critical being things that you can steal.

Speaking of the tokens, there's a wide variety of items depicted, many are very funny, and the items make sense for the location they start in. For instance, the Brown Tooth Chewin' Tobacco is at the register, complete with a depiction of a nasty, brown, bloody tooth. The Hot Dog item at the fountain looks all shrivelled and nasty and has flies circling it. In the cooler is a "The Runs Brand Microwave Burrito". Can't forget the "Get Layed" brand Potato chips or the "Monkey Spank" brand ice cream. All in all, there's a ton of them, and while some are fairly pedestrian, the majority are funny in one way or another.

Finally, also the rulebook, which is quite easy to read not only because it's well written and well organized, but because it's quite funny. All the components are of really good quality, thick and durable cards, and the die cut cardstock bits punch easily and cleanly, leaving no hanging chads or ripped up edges. All in all, it's a very well made game that will last a good while.

Setup is very simple, but a hair on the time consuming side if you haven't bagged everything up. First, lay the board out and then shuffle and place all the half-sized cards, called "work markers" in the game, on their space on the board. Next, randomly select a character to play and take the player card as well as the standie, and then put the boss standie in the office location. Next, shuffle the large cards, called "plot cards", and give each player five of them. Next, stack each color-coded item token face-down and place the stacks in the color-coded circles on the board so that they can be pilfered later. Finally, draw six of the work marker cards and resolve them by either performing the action listed or placing them where they are supposed to be placed as indicated. Once all of that is done, you're ready to place your standies in the location of your choice.

Gameplay is very simple in theory, with each player, in turn, drawing and resolving a work marker and then taking two actions on their turn, in addition to playing any plots they desire to for free. The work markers are the narrative aspect of the game, and the work involved is only very rarely actual work, with a great many of cards representing various ways to slack off such as "nozzling" at the drinking fountain, playing video games, taking an unscheduled smoke break, engaging in a fire extinguisher fight, or the most disturbing, making out with an old lady who looks like a worn-out truck stop lot lizard. Many other cards represent customers entering the store, and these give you the option of insulting them which scores you points but cause you to take heat from the boss, or help them, which reduces the heat you're taking from the boss.

Some work markers are events, and these cause the boss to move, generally. The "bad nachos" card, for instance, has the boss sprint to the bathroom in order to transform into a soft-serve dispenser, where he'll stay for an entire round, groaning and evacuating his bowel. Others cause the boss to move to key locations, such as the office or the cash register, and these two locations generally end up having the choicest goods; the register has them because that's where the good stuff is, and the office has them because if someone's had a Jane's Addiction moment, the items get put in the office for safe keeping.

The entire game is made up of taking actions which include resolving work markers, as noted above, to reduce your heat with the boss, and these include mopping up the utterly vile looking bathroom, stocking an aisle, and other menial tasks. These are only useful when you're catching major heat and are getting close to being fired, because once your heat level reaches 30, your game immediately ends. Most of the actions are straightforward, such as moving your pawn to another location, calling the boss over to your location, or tattling on another player when the boss is in your location, which allows you to move the boss to any other position on the board.

The boss is truly the "x-factor" in the game, because you cannot steal things, slack off, or insult customers when he's in your space, and if you're copping some stolen merchandise when he's in your space, irrespective of how or when he gets to you, you must make a suspicion roll. The saving grace regarding the boss is that the boss can only move once per turn, so if he's moved on your turn due to an event card, your own action, or a plot, you know he can't be moved again, freeing you to rob the place dry or tell off the customers.

Suspicion rolls are the main deterrent to theft and slacking off, because if you get caught, you are completely screwed. You lose everything that you've stolen but haven't stashed, and for each item you've stolen you take some heat. Some items, such as a handgun, lottery tickets, and stolen money from the register cost you more heat if you're caught, but they're definitely worth stealing because they're the most valuable items in the game.

The mechanic is such that for each uncompleted task on the location you're currently in when you get waylaid by the boss, you add one to the total you need to roll above, and for each item you have secreted in your jacket you add another point. Again, the choice items from the register are more valuable, and thus add two to the suspicion roll rather than the normal one. If you pass the check by rolling above the total, you've eluded the boss's ire. If you're caught, though, all your stolen items go to the office and you catch the heat.

Now stealing items isn't all that easy, either, especially late in the game when lots of customers are strolling the aisles. With two exceptions, if a customer is in a location that you'd like to steal from, you can't. Add to that the fact that you can't steal when the boss is near, and it forces you to deal with the customers, either positively or negatively, to get them out of your face so you can grab the goods. Once you've got stolen items, you place them face up on your player card, and to bank them, you need to head to the storeroom and spend an action to stash them, which allows you to turn the items you've gotten face-down on your card and redeem them for points at the end of the game.

Another way to make some points, as I noted, is to mess with customers. While many customers have no special traits and are the typical fare you'd find at a convenience store, such as a soccer mom, a stoner, or a drunken, naked customer, some have special powers that affect the game. The ADHD kid moves around the store every time a new customer enters, the punk convenience rats will grant you free cards as they plot against "the man" with you, and my favorite, the Angry S.O.B., will "cockpunch" you if you insult him, thus forcing you to lose your next turn. Yes, the card says "cockpunch" right on it.

Anyhow, you are limited in what you can do when a customer's around, and when their work marker is drawn, the player who took the card may place them in the location of their choice based upon the icons on the card itself. Again, you can always help them to reduce the heat on you, but you don't get any points if you do so. As an unofficial variant, we've chosen that you must actually come up with an insult for the given customer to complete the action, and that adds some serious spice to the game. Telling the ADHD kid that the best part of him is still stuck to his mom's fleabag mattress just seems to add something somehow.

Besides stealing and insulting customers, the final way to score points is to slack off. When you're in a location that has a slacking off work marker, you can choose, as an action, to slack off for points. This is the only mechanic in the game that is persistent from turn to turn, and when you choose the action, you place a slacking off token on the work marker under your pawn. As an action you can end your slacking off and bank the points, or you can continue slacking up to five times. Once you've gotten the maximum of five tokens on the marker, you can't slack off anymore and have to close out the action to bank the points.

Some slacking markers are listed with a multiplier, so when you bank them, they double in value and you can bank twice the slack tokens. The downside of slacking is that if the boss comes by when you're slacking off, you have to make a suspicion roll, and the markers have a suspicion value listed that generally starts at two points, making them risky. Add to that the fact that you have to add the suspicion value of all the stolen items you have in hand, and it makes for a very risky proposition as all of your opponents will be just dying to get the boss over to you in order to screw you over.

The final, and arguably most devilish, strategic aspect of the game are the plot cards. These cards allow you to do all kinds of things that range from instantly nailing the opponent of your choice with three heat points or allowing you to move your figure to the Storeroom for free all the way through sending the boss to a location or being allowed to respond to a suspicion roll by sneaking off to another location. At any time on your turn you can, for an action, discard as many plots as you want and draw more, or simply draw up to your maximum if you're running low. Plot cards can be played, for free, at any point in your turn and two specific ones can be played in response to being hosed by an opponent.

As I noted, there's player elimination in the game due to getting too much heat, but there's another method as well, which are the red work markers. These events are the pinnacle of being a malicious employee, and range from leaving the back door open to telling the boss what he can do with that tube of Preparation H in aisle 3. These are worth six points, but instantly cause you to be fired and thus eliminated from the game. The game ends on its own when the last work marker card has been drawn from the pile, with the player who drew it not even getting to play out that last turn. Players tally their stashed items' values, their slack tokens, and finally, half the amount of their heat points remaining when the game ends. The winner's the one who has the highest score, and although the game makes no reference to resolving ties, we've run into this and decided that the player who stole the most individual items is the winner, in the spirit of the game's name.

The short version is that this game is loaded with player interaction, and it actually scales really well from two to six players. The two player game isn't as satisfying because you will invariably be trading blows with only each other, but when played with three or more it is an outstanding game. I was shocked with how much not only I enjoyed it, but how much every single person who I've played it with has. This game is absolutely in the pole position for my favorite game of the year thus far, and with Battleship Galaxies and Conquest of Nerath being contenders for that spot, this was the stealth candidate that I never saw coming. If you like Cosmic Encounter, then you will love this game. There's some randomness to it, but virtually every decision you make in the game will affect the outcome, for better or worse.

One of the best characteristics of the game is that not only are the turns quite short, the game breezes along at a wonderful pace, even with six players, and ends in right around an hour or an hour and a half. It truly hits that rarely seen perfect balance between being too long and drawn out and being too short, wishing you had ten more turns. I simply cannot recommend this game any more highly, and I'm glad I took the time at GenCon to eyeball it, otherwise I may never have heard about it, which would've been a total shame.

Why I Want To Rob A Convenience Store After Playing This Game:
- Only the NHL has more direct player interaction
- The fun, novel theme and whimsical cartoon style is absolutely wonderful
- Replay value is tremendous as the ever-changing situation makes no game play the same
- There's enough randomness that the risks you take are never completely certain to work out
- The game is just plain funny, and a riot may occur from the laughter around the board

What Caused Me To Become The Cockpunching, Angry S.O.B.
- The box art screams, "Don't Buy Me!"
- This is NOT for the easily offended as there's a lot of off-color humor
- It's a bit on the expensive side at an MSRP of $44.95, but you can always steal it, right?

Overall:
This game is simply one of the best games I've played in the last year, and with its cartoonish art, its irreverent theme, and its dorm room potty humor, it's absolutely a blast. Don't let the theme and art fool you, this is a very strategic came with cut-throat action throughout that would make Jack The Ripper blush. If you like games with player interaction and a mean streak, your collection simply will not be complete without it. I give almost all of my review copies away, but there's not a chance in hell that any of you will get your hands on this copy by my hand. It's just too good.

Rating:
4.625/5 Stars

You can learn more at the Minion Games site here:
http://www.miniongames.com/five-fingered-severence.html

Zooloretto - Enslave Animals And Slaughter Pandas For Fun And Profit

2011-08-15T06:05:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I was told by a couple of friends about this neat little zoo building game where players vie for odd-lot truckloads of critters for their zoos. Suffice to say, I was unimpressed by the sound of it. Then, I got a chance to play it. Holy God in Heaven; what a fun, nasty little game it turned out to be! While it has well-illustrated cute little pandas, leopards, and kangaroos, don't be fooled by the looks. This game is about stabbing your buddies in the back as best you can while trying to create your own personal menagerie of critters to take over the world. Well, the zoo world, anyhow.

The concept of the game is that two to five competing corporate henchmen have opened zoos, and the object of the game is sort of a "The Price Is Right" version of zoology in that you're trying to fill all of your pens with precisely the right amount of varmints without going over. The turns are incredibly brisk, and the downtime is at a minimum the entire game. It's just a ton of fun, and while the strategic options are fairly limited as it's a mildly simple game, there's enough zebra meat on the bones to provide a very satisfying time to both younger players and total game geeks like myself.

The box is quite nicely illustrated, as are the five player boards and zoo expansion boards that are included. The rules leave nothing to chance, are very well written, and come complete with illustrations to help with the finer points. Also included is a nice cloth bag, a bunch of wooden, silver coins, a big, red, wooden coin to mark the last round, and finally, there's five wooden slats and about a bazillion animal, animal baby, coin, and concession stand chits with which to populate your burgeoning zoo.

I guess I should mention that there's also some multi-language reference cards, but after the first play you'll leave them in the box. All in all, the production values are perfect, and the only thing that really is missing is a Smallworld-style chit holder, which would've been a great addition. I bought a small Plano box to store everything separately, and it was well worth the four dollar investment, especially as it fits perfectly inside the box.

Setting up the game is a total breeze, and depending on the amount of players in the game, you may need to select a couple of animal types to keep out of the game. I recommend removing the chimps at every opportunity in smaller games, because it appears that even though the chimps have the same number of chits as the other animals, I always end up getting screwed by the monkeys; it's the board game equivalent of having a Costa Rican Capuchin toss feces at me.

Don't know why it's always them that hoses me, but I'm telling you, don't trust the chimps. They're evil. If you have them in your zoo, chances are, in my own personal experience, that no good will come of it. And yes, I know that chimps are actually apes, not monkeys. I call them monkeys to denigrate them because I hate them in this game. Did I mention that?

Anyhow, to describe this game, I'm going to assume five players because it plays best with five, although three and four player games are great, and the two-player variant is complete garbage. In a five-player game, all the species are used, so you simply toss them and all of the concession and coin chits into the cloth bag. Each player takes a game board and a wooden slat, which represent trucks. The boards are set in front of each player, and the trucks are set in the middle. Finally each player takes two wooden coins from the bank, and the game is almost ready to start. The last thing that needs to be done is that 15 random tiles are chosen from the bag and placed face down in a stack to the side, with the big red marker on top. These are the reserve for the last round, and I'll get into that in a minute.

To play, the players take turns passing the bag like a offering plate at church, yanking out chits one at a time and placing them on one of the trucks. There's three spaces on each truck, and on your turn, instead of pulling a chit, you can take a truck with chits on it to end your play for the round, thereby claiming whatever was on the truck for your own evil corporate purposes.

There's also coin actions allowed in lieu of pulling a chit, such as changing the layout of the animals on your board, buying a spare animal from an opponent, or sending an animal off to slaughter. Regarding that last bit, the rules simply note that you can "discard" a tile from your barn, but really, we all know it's not being released into the wild, so it's pretty clear that spending those coins buys you a leopard-skin rug or a set of nicely carved ivory tusks.

Anyhow, there's four pens on your player board, and each one has a capacity between four and six. For three coins you can add on an expansion pen as well, in case you really want to go for the gusto and rack up points. The downside here is that unless you completely or nearly completely fill up an animal pen, you don't normally score points for the animals within. For instance, if you have 4 kangaroos in a pen that holds six, when the game ends you don't get squat. The caveat to that is if you have a concession stand sitting in the pen, it gives you two points for each unique concession type in your zoo, not to mention that they allow you to score a point for each animal inside the incomplete pen a concession stand is in.

Some animals have little male or female symbols on them, and if you get a couple of them in the same pen, they make a baby animal, which you get for free and can place inside your pen. This can be good or bad, situationally, because if you place a fertile pair into a pen that becomes overfilled, the baby is separated from its family and sent to the barn. Luckily, though, every animal in the game is an exhibitionist and will only "do it like they do on the Discovery Channel" in pens, not in barns or on trucks, so you'll never end up with a barn full of babies you didn't want.

Regarding scoring, you don't count up the points until the end of the game. Each pen has a set of point values associated with it, with the largest pens having the highest point values, and when you completely fill a pen, you're due for the higher of the two values listed. Some pens also have coins indicated, and when you fill the pen you immediately gain that many coins. If you come close to filling the pen but have one empty spot, you gain the lower of the values listed. Then there's the concession stands I talked about. In short, it's critical to maximize the space available, and rearranging your zoo several times in a game is not remotely uncommon.

The barn is the Zooloretto version of the Island of Misfit Toys, where animals that can't be placed in a pen have to go to await their fate. Other players can buy them on their turn by paying a coin to you and one to the bank, and you can't deny them if they so choose to. If you expand your zoo or rearrange it so that you can fit an animal in one of your pens after all, you can pay a coin on your turn and move a single animal per turn to a pen. Because animals in the barn give you negative points at the end of the game, there's a huge impetus to turn pandas into lovely tapestries or have your zoo's shop loaded with stuffed animals, and I don't mean plush toys. Concession stands that are unplayable also go to the barn presumably to prepare the lovely kangaroo-on-a-stick and camel jerky for the next day's sales.

Animals and concession stands in the barn don't cost you points per chit in the barn, though, they charge you by the type. If you have an entire herd of elephants, for instance, it doesn't cost you any more points than if you simply had one elephant. You can use this to your advantage because there's a finite amount of critter chits in the game, so if someone has only a few of a varmint type that you have in the barn, the person may end up lining your pockets through the illicit purchase of said critters.

You can control quantities in this regard, and really hose people out of eight or ten points by hoarding a type of animal that's in several zoos, and it only costs you two points, so it's a big net gain. Plus, you can always send them off for the low price of two coins, which I'm assuming is the bribe used to have the officials look the other way while your staff is serving up elephant steaks at your concession stands.

When the last chit is pulled from the bag, the game's last turn begins. Those chits you set aside under that big red marker now get tossed into the bag and when all of the trucks have been taken for the round, the game immediately ends. Tally up the points, and the person with the highest score gets to do a victory lap around the room. In case of a tie, the person with the most cash left in hand wins.

In conclusion, this is a really, really fun game. It's much more fun when you're playing with people that aren't AP-prone, and even more so when you're playing with sadistic individuals such as myself that wonder aloud if the Flamingo meat you just carved up for two coins tastes anything like bald eagle or spotted owl. The game can be very, very backstabbity with experienced players, and while the cute, lovable little animals and animal babies can lull you into thinking it's primarily a game for kids, it's definitely a sinister game of corporate greed, illegal slaughter, and illicit ivory trade.

There are a MESS of expansions for this game as well, extending the life of an already infinitely replayable game and adding some truly epic, game changing stuff such as a petting zoo, larger concessions, and small aquarium attractions among others. A couple of the expansions are even downloadable, for free, from Rio Grande Games' site, and I'm telling you that if you don't like this game, you may be a fun-bludgeoning snapperhead.

I truly adore this game, and I cannot envision myself ever trading it because it always gets played, a good year and a half after I got it. If I had to pick on just one thing, there's not much in the way of direct player interaction beyond maliciously placing chits on trucks you know someone wants, thus sticking an opponent with a critter they can't use or dissuading them from taking the truck. As someone who likes to whine about stuff, it's a pretty short list.

Why I Love Being A Zookeeper:
- Great art, quality bits, and cute theme make this a truly fun experience
- Quick turns keeps downtime to a minimum, so you're always doing something
- While it's a simple game, mechanically, there's a ton of strategy to be had
- Playtime of an hour and fifteen makes it the perfect length

What Makes Me Want To Fling Poo Like A Dread Chimp:
- There's not much direct player interaction, instead it's more "messing with the resource pool"
- They should've sacked up and admitted "discarding a tile" equates to serving Leopardburgers

Overall:
If you have kids, buy this game. If you don't have kids, buy this game. Just buy this game. The only people I wouldn't recommend this game to would be someone who doesn't like Euro-style optimization games or that don't have a lot of direct player interaction. I bought this on Ebay for full boat, and I absolutely have gotten my money's worth.

Rating:
4.25/5 Stars

Check out the game at Rio Grande's site here, if you're interested, and you can get the expansions here too: http://www.riograndegames.com/games.html?id=220

The Superfly Circus GenCon 2011 Special Edition Magazine

2011-08-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

I'm back from GenCon, and because I love my readers so very much, I took the time to go the extra mile. Not only did I do my usual write-up, I did it in e-magazine format!

You seriously need to check out all the crazy shit I saw at GenCon this year, and there's all kinds of photos, news, and articles within to help you understand just how awesome the trip can be.

Highlights include:
Quarriors
Star Trek: Fleet Captain
Fantasy Flight
Wizards of the Coast
Alderac Entertainment Group
"The Afterparties" and barhopping in Indianapolis
The People Of GenCon
Dungeon Crawlers
The "You Stink And You're Foul" Campaign
....and much, much more.

Best part, it's completely free.

Download the 20 MB extravaganza here:

or here...if you can't see the thumbnail reader view above:
http://www.box.net/shared/hmjx4xxl8xi9ddxnbeyu

Psiduel - Dionne Warwick Would Get Her Ass Kicked

2011-08-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

The urban myth says that the average person uses less than 10% of their brain, and the latent part could be developed to provide supernatural psychic powers. I don't know about superpowers and all of that jazz, I'd just like to not lose my keys so often.

Thankfully, Travesty games believes the myth because they've come out with a game that has two superhuman brainiacs blasting each other with psychic powers that would make Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends Network go green with envy. Or maybe cause their heads to explode in a sea of broken teeth and grey matter. Either way, it's got really cool art, and in a 2-player card game, only the art and gameplay really matter.

I got this review copy after gently harassing one of the owners, Gil Nicoll, with my own brand of supernatural ability, the ability to annoy a person to death with seas of emails and phone calls. He sent it out, and it arrived within a couple of days, and I was on it like stink on tournament Magic players.

I read the rules, and was absolutely dumbfounded because I couldn't figure out how to separate the cards into the two equal decks that was required. As it turns out, my amazing psychic powers were not nearly up to the task of turning the deck over and noticing Alpha and Omega symbols on the backs of the cards that indicated whose cards they were. While it was clearly an oversight on my part, I was a little bummed that it wasn't in the rules, and I have to admit, I called Gil to get the skinny.

The rules had another omission that required me to call Travesty, which was how to count life as it was indicated that you needed to track life, but nothing in the box allowed for it. He told me that a pencil and paper or D10 die are perfect for the task, which was fine by me. In fairness, though, I have to dock them a point for not having a complete, playable game out of the box for that, just as I did for Munchkin.

Another point was docked, so to speak, for the rules, which were not nearly as clear when it came to life tracking, setup, and some of the finer points as I would've otherwise wanted to see. Gil reassured me that I got a pre-release copy and that the rules are already printed and amended with the appropriate information, so he gets his point back for that, at least.

The game ships in a single-deck box, and contains 72 cards and a single 8.5 by 11 rule sheet complete with explanations and illustrations on how to play. As noted before, the art is absolutely superb, and while the rules were reasonably well written when it comes to gameplay, there were a few questions on setup as I previously mentioned.

The real trick is to read the rules while looking at the cards, because the rules don't go into detail regarding each and every card, so it helps immensely to take a quick look at the cards to understand the interactions between them. As noted, you will absolutely need something to track ten life points, but beyond that, it's good to go right out of the box. That's all there is to the game, and for a fifteen dollar card game, that's all there really needs to be.

Starting the game is simple. First, you will need to separate the cards, using the Alpha and Omega symbols on the card backs. Each player has an identical set of 36 cards, and they'll stack them into defense and attack decks based on the indication on the card fronts, with 18 each. Each player will choose six starting defense cards and set them in front of them, face down, in a two deep by three wide formation, which represent your psychic defenses.

These also act as targets for your opponents attacks, and the value of the card, one, two, or three, is printed on the backs. The first player may then draw five cards from any of their two decks, and the second player draws seven. On each subsequent round, each player, on their turn, will draw two more cards to replenish their hands.

To play the cards against their psychic nemesis, players must burn cards equal to the value of the card played in order to activate it. This method also applies when replacing defeated defense cards. There's a variety of card types to play on offense, such as the beam or blast power cards that affect only a single card in the front row of your enemy's defense, or other cards such as the arc that damages a V shaped pattern of cards. Some cards penetrate the front row and will also affect the back row, and all of the cards have special abilities that trigger if a defense card is destroyed.

Speaking of defense, there's a variety of those card types as well. In all cases, if a defense card is not destroyed by an attack, a defensive power is triggered which can do such things as cause the vile opponent to burn cards from his draw pile, allow you to look through the top few cards of either of your decks and rearrange them, and the best part, reflect damage back to your opponent.If a defense card is revealed, but not destroyed, you may replace it with another card that you have in hand, for free, on your turn.

The final aspect of resolving attacks is direct damage, the only thing that will win the game. Attack cards will have a damage value and type of damage displayed, and this value determines how much of a junk-punch you actually do to the mind of your opponent, which is represented in life points. The final aspect of attacking is that if you do direct damage to the opponent, and it's caused in the middle row of defense cards, the player receives double damage. Do ten damage to your adversary, and you win the game.

There is a lot of strategic variety in the game, and while the cards can be somewhat complex to resolve when a bomb or arc card is played, as you must resolve multiple cards, this game is incredibly fast-playing. If you took more than thirty minutes to play, even initially, you're probably doing something wrong.

This is a smart, fun little card game, and this comes from a guy who is perpetually 'meh' about card games in general. If I had one real reservation about this, it's that there's only 18 cards per side on offense and defense, and thus the replay value may suffer in the long term, although I've played it quite a bit and haven't found myself tiring of it yet. The long and short is that it is certainly a hell of a quick, two player filler game for a husband and wife to play or for a couple of friends to play while waiting for the rest of the squad to arrive on game night.

Why I Foresee This Being Well Liked:

- The art and theme are perfectly intertwined, and the dark feeling of the game is awesome
- The speed and pace of the game is perfect for its type, a light, fun filler game
- The price of is perfect for the product

What Made My Head Explode:
- There were a few omissions in the rules that I had to contact Travesty Games about
- You really need to look at the cards before playing to understand how the cards actually interact
- I have to be consistent; there's no way to track life in the box, and that's a big no-no in my book

Overall:
I like this game quite a bit, and the dark theme is gritty and reminds me quite a bit of the Silent Hill series of video games, although the cards that depict a male remind me of Agent 47 from the Hitman series of games. In both cases, I was thoroughly impressed. The game is very tight, and quite well designed, and the only complaints I have with it are that the rules could've used a hair more polish, which I am told was addressed, and that there is no life tracker in the box. As far as short, filler-type card games go, this is a great choice for people that like huge, nasty player interaction and a strong theme.

Rating:
3.5/5 Stars

Check out Psiduel here, at the Travesty Games website:
http://www.travestygames.com/?page_id=21

Here's the pre-release rule sheet:
http://www.travestygames.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Psiduel-Rulesheet_Hv1.pdf

You can demo this game at GenCon Indy 2011 at the Travesty Games booth, number 757! Go mess with Gil and Adam, and tell them that Pete sent you!

Monsters Menace America - All Your Base Are Belong To Us

2011-07-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

I don't care who you are, unless you've been under a rock or living in sub-saharan Africa for the last 50 years, chances are that you know who Godzilla is. And if you know what he is, you know what he does: break shit and kill people on an epic scale. While the 1954 release of Gojira in Japan spawned countless other "big monster terrorizing a city" flicks, the most recent notable one being Cloverfield, it did not spawn all that many board games of the genre.

The best, arguably is Monsterpocalypse, from Privateer Press, but while great, it is limited in scale to only one city. If you are itching to destroy not only one city, but to plague the entire United States with odd, mutating monsters that devastate everything in their path, Monsters Menace America (MMA) from Wizards of the Coast and Avalon Hill may be just what the cryptozoologist ordered.

MMA is a two to four player game that has each player controlling a unique, campy, oversized creature that has its own advantages and disadvantages, vying to be the King of Monsters. The game is essentially broken down into two parts, with the first being to devastate cities, bases, and national treasures such as Elvis' shrine, Graceland, in order to gain health, send your preferred branch of the military in to mess with opponents' monsters, and most effectively, head to toxic waste sites or research agencies in order to mutate your creature and provide it more powerful attributes.

The last part of the game, after all possible stompings have occurred, the last person to crush something becomes the ringleader of a battle royale where he chooses which creature to battle to the death. The winner of that battle will gain whatever health the opponent began that battle with, and then continue onto other monsters until only one creature remains, who is declared the winner. It's a fun, campy romp through 50's era monster movies, but the game isn't without minor problems, at least in my mind.

First, there is no direct monster versus monster action until the end game, as its forbidden during the first part of the game until the final battles. While this makes some sense to me because most big monster movies has the military softening up the big baddies before the final showdown, this isn't a movie, and I'd have liked to use my death rays or spiked tail to flay the white meat from my one-eyed, tentacled opponent more than just for 5 minutes at the end of the game.

Second, the final battle seems to be a tacked-on mechanic, because the infrastructure is built into the game to have a player be declared winner based solely on the carnage factor, but since they've tacked it on, the real impetus to break things in the game is solely to get more hit points to be more durable during the final battle. It's a shitty thing to be well in the lead when it comes to crushing and maiming, yet lose because one of your opponents got a lucky mutation card that makes them harder to hit or more damaging, or worse, both.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of gameplay, let's talk a bit about what comes inside the box. I'm going to start off by saying that I love all of the campy, cartoonish art that is on the box, in the manual, and all over the cards. It's brilliant, fun, funny, and completely embodies what the theme is trying to do.

The box comes with a variety of neat plastic tanks, missile launchers, fighters, and cruise missiles in five colors, and it comes with six unique monster characters, all painted and looking really cool. There's also two additional figures that represent a superhero and a big war-bot, both of which become controllable by players if the proper card is pulled to allow it. In addition to this stuff, there's two medium-sized cardboard sheets that are used to track statistics on the two aforementioned card-pulled units, and there's five large cardboard sheets that tell you how to implement your military forces, each broken down by branch; Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and National Guard. There's also a bunch of Infamy tokens and Stomp tokens, both of which are made of durable cardstock and punch very cleanly from the sheets.

Now I need to mention that there's six large, cardboard character sheets, each representing a monster, and each has two plastic sliders you affix to the edge of the monster cards in order to track health. These, in addition to the two large unit cards, use these sliders to track health, and these sliders will invariably muck up the cards, as nice as they are, from the friction of continually sliding them up and down the card edge, so I view this as a negative. You could put a couple of D10s in the box to perform the same function, albeit slightly less easily, but it will certainly save the cards from wear.

The final bits in the box are the standard D6 dice, a great, well written manual, and the game board, which is well illustrated and rather funny, but has a single deficiency. The spaces are too small to place a monster on and have any military units on as well, so you end up having to prop the military units on top of the base halfway inside the hex.

It's a bit wonky, that's all, and sometimes you can confuse which units are engaged in battle and which are on an adjacent hex. All in all, the game is very well-produced and the bits are very, very good. Were it not for the minor bitch about the hex sizes and the major bitch about the life tracking cards, this would be a total A+ game from the standpoint of the quality and design of the game.

Now moving onto how to set the game up, it's really a breeze to accomplish. Each player can pick a monster, and starting with the last player to choose a monster, each player will then choose a branch of the military to control. Once that's done, you shuffle the two decks of cards, place your monsters on one of their three pre-set starting points which are printed on the board, and then deploy the military units to their respective locations. While all branches are initially placed, the only branches that are directly controlled are the branches chosen by the players, and to a small degree, the National Guard. Each branch has its own selection of bases to choose from except the National Guard, whose units can be placed in any city, base, or "infamy site", which represent national places of interest as I noted before.

The final bits to set up are the Stomp tokens. During the game, these are placed onto locations that were destroyed by monsters, but the reality is that they act as a game timer. Depending on the amount of players, you'll stack a certain amount ranging from 14 to 20 for use when a monster attacks. Nearly all location actions require the stomp action, and it's one of the few ways to gain hit points or stifle other players so it's an important part of the game.

Once you've got everything set up, everyone rolls off to determine who goes first. Each turn is broken into four distinct sections: Move, Fight, Encounter, and Deploy. Starting with the movement action, you may move your creature as many spaces as it is allowed, and there are some restrictions as to where some may move, such as not being able to move over water if that creature lacks that ability, or to move onto a tile with another monster which is always illegal. If you move into a space with a military unit, even one of your own, you must immediately stop.

An alternative to making a normal movement with your monster is to disappear. I'm guessing that this represents your creature burrowing underground, sinking into the depths of the ocean, or whatever, and so you pull your monster off of the board completely. On your next movement phase, you can not only put them back on one of your starting spots, but if you're hurt, you can heal yourself back to your starting health. It amounts to both a catch-up mechanic as well as a way to get around the board more quickly or to evade a large swath of incoming enemy military units.

Once you've moved your beastie, you can then move all of your own military units. Each unit has a movement value, with cruise missiles zipping along at a huge rate of speed and the lowly tanks plodding along at about the same speed as most monsters. These units also have a limited amount of restrictions that mirror the monsters' restrictions. If you move them onto a space that contains a monster, or as I mentioned before, on top of the monster's base, they can attack during your fight phase.

The fight phase is really simple to resolve. The player chooses the order of attacks if more than one battle ensues, and the mechanics for battle are quite simple. With few exceptions, monsters always get to attack first, even if one of your military units initiated the fight. Monsters have three attacks per round, and they declare who they're attacking and roll a die. Each monster and military unit has a defense value, and if the roll equals or exceeds the defense value, they are damaged.

All small military units have one life, so if you hit them, they burst into flame, with little wee soldiers screaming and attempting to escape the boiling wreckage. If any survive, they get to counterattack, and they follow the same roll-and-check system. Monsters who are damaged simply move their life markers to indicate their new life level. Monsters, however, may use any earned Infamy tokens to make another attack, if they desire to, and there's no limit on how many they can use, provided you have them.

Each battle lasts exactly two rounds, and in the unlikely event that any military units survive the onslaught of the gargantuan creatures for the two rounds, the monster must retreat to an unoccupied, adjacent space, thereby stopping them from encountering the space they were hoping to crush under their un-sandalled feet.

Now, not all military units are as easy to kill. The big robot and superhero figures that can be called into play by Military cards have more than one life point, and therefore are quite valuable in forcing monsters to retreat. Retreating monsters do not get to encounter a space when they retreat, effectively denying them a stomp opportunity, and if they can't retreat, they are forced to move using the disappear mechanic, which causes them to come off of the board.

If a monster is killed, they don't simply go off into the sunset, they become a star. I shit you not, they get put on the Hollywood space, where they're exploited more viciously than the Olsen twins. A monster sent to Hollywood loses all of their Infamy tokens, and on each turn they may roll a 1D6 and recover that much health. If they reach five health points, they may re-enter the game immediately by placing their unit on Los Angeles or one of its starting lairs, thereby ending it's movement. Another drawback of going to Hollywood is that if the game ends and a monster is in Hollywood, that moster effectively loses the game and cannot participate in the Monster Challenge, which is the final battle royale that I mentioned above.

Once all battles are resolved, the encounter phase begins, provided your monster didn't retreat. Depending on which space you encounter, different things happen. If you stomp a city, you are awarded the amount of hit points printed on the board. While most indicate one measly hit point, many allow 1D6, 2D6 and in two cases, 3D6 of health to be earned. If you stomp an Infamy site, you get two infamy tokens.

If you destroy a military base, which is arguably the most satisfying, you not only destroy the base and earn an Infamy token, but you may snatch, from the board or from a reserve, a single military unit from the branch whose base you crushed, and it is permanently removed from the game. The final space you can encounter, but not destroy, is a mutation site, which allows you to draw a mutation card and permanetly use the mutation you've gained in future activities.

Mutations are one of the coolest things in the game, and they vary wildly in what they allow you to do. Some, like the Armored Scales card provide you a higher defense value, and others give you regeneration ability like the Son of a Monster card. The cards all have wonderful artwork, and the variations between the cards is surprisingly large. As an aside, some military units, such as certain missiles, can cause a spontaneous mutation if the person rolling against the monster rolls a value of one. While there are some Military Research cards that can sap a monster of these powers, generally they are persistent and your monster will remain a mutated colossus for the duration of the game.

The last phase of the game is the deployment phase, where you'll choose to either place some military units onto the board, move them from one spot on the board to a distant base, or instead of placing units, you may draw a Military Research card. It is during this phase that the National Guard comes into play, as all branches of the military allow players to place one National Guard unit onto the board in addition to some of their own. While National Guard units may be placed on any city, base, or infamy site, players may only place their units on bases of their own type.

Military Research cards, when drawn, can provide a persistent power, such as the Fuel Cells that allow you to move all of your units one extra space during the movement phase, while others provide a one-time effect such as the Defense Satellites that damage all creatures on the board, including your own, up to six hit points.

In addition to these powers, there are the three cards that allow you to place special units onto the board, two of which are the giant superhero and war-bot figures, with the last being a pair of X-Fighters which are slightly beefier versions of normal fighters. These cards are absolute game-changers in many cases, and can sometimes be far more effective at staunching the appetite for destruction of one of your opponents than simply pounding them with military units on the map.

Once the last stomp token has been placed, one final round passes before the final battle begins. There are several Challenge spaces marked on the board, and if a player can move their monster to one on their last turn, they become the Challenger instead of the last person to stomp something. Being the Challenger is important because you choose which monsters to fight, so you can knock off a weaker one to absorb their starting hit points before going after the really nasty opponents. Once the final battle begins, the player who is the Challenger chooses a monster to fight and a special battle phase begins, this time to the death.

Monsters may use their Infamy tokens, mutations, or any other benefit they've accrued during the game to battle their opponent, and starting with the Challenger, each of the two battling monsters take turns using their three attacks to whittle away the opponent's monster. Once a monster has been butchered, the winner then adjusts their life meter upwards by adding to their current life level the amount of life the opponent had when the battle started. After doing so, they pick another remaining creature to rinse and repeat the process with, and the last monster standing is the winner of the game and is crowned King of Monsters.

As I noted before, the end-game is a bit disappointing because irrespective of how much carnage you wreaked upon the planet, if your life level starts low, you have a very small chance of winning. The Infamy tokens are a bit of a counterpoint to that, because if you weren't racking up hit points by decimating major cities, you were likely mutating like a flu virus and scoring some serious infamy tokens to get extra attacks during the final battle.

Still, it feels a bit underwhelming to have destroyed the Eastern seaboard and lose because Mothra or whomever got a lucky mutation card to raise it's defense value even though it did little damage to cities and bases during the game. It's a minor beef, at best, because I really like the game, but it still feels a hair tacked-on.

I've owned this game for a good long time, and I've played it many, many times. I've always enjoyed it, win or lose, because it's a fun and challenging game of death and destruction in the good ol' U.S. of A, and the art and theme really shine to make it a fun and engaging experience. Down time between turns is quite minimal, and you can play out a four-monster war on America in about 90 to 120 minutes.

The monsters aren't all that different, to be honest, but they're different enough that you'll want to try out several and see how you fare using their unique abilities over the course of several games. Pair that with the fact that each branch of the military has its own advantages and disadvantages, and there's a lot of replay value there. On top of that, there's ample Military Research and Mutation cards to play through the game a multitude of times without ending up playing the same cards over and over again. I play this often, and every time it comes to the table, it's always a group favorite.

Why I Want To Be Godzilla When I Grow Up:
- Great bits, fun gameplay and a great theme make this a hell of a time
- Ample strategic and tactical decisions abound
- Minmal downtime reduces the snore-factor to almost nil
- The artwork is absolutely outstanding, and perfectly fits this game's theme
- Huge replay value makes this a game that will be played often

Why This Big Monkey Belongs In Hollywood:
- The hex size is too small to place critters and tanks on the same spot
- The end game makes the destruction portion of the game seem less important
- An expansion with new monsters and cards would've been an auto-buy, but it doesn't exist

Overall:
The short version is that it's a really neat little game, but just as the internet meme from Zero Wing was a not-so-great translation from Japanese, Monsters Menace America is a mediocre translation from the Japanese "Godzilla" genre that spawned in the 1950's, primarily due to the end-game. The gameplay is brisk, and fun, but as I noted, the end game takes a little shine away from an otherwise brilliant game. Regardless of this one shortcoming, I recommend this game to anyone who likes a medium-length "dudes on a map" style game with an emphasis on screw-your-neighbor backstabbery.

Rating:
3.75/5 Stars

You can get this game on Ebay or Amazon for the original retail price, generally, and you can check it out at Wizards' site here, complete with an online demo:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=ah/prod/monsmenamer

As usual, Universal Head, the coolest cat in gaming, has produced a wonderful rules summary sheet, which is downloadable here:
http://www.headlesshollow.com/downloads/games/MonstersMenaceAmerica_v1.1.pdf

And, as always, if you want to try this before you drop 40 bones on it, especially since it's an older game, give Board Game Exchange a shot:
www.boardgameexchange.com

Omen: A Reign of War - Shattered Aegis Expansion

2011-07-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

Well, as usual, I screwed up. In normal Circus fashion, I gave one of my subscribers Omen: A Reign of War after reviewing it. This was clearly a mistake because the expansion, Shattered Aegis, is coming out. Here's a preview of one of the cards and what Small Box had to say:

Shattered Aegis is the first expansion for Omen: A Reign of War. The expansion adds 20 new units, once again illustrated by Michael " Riiven" Ng, to the base game that can be used in the standard game or the draft variant, but also in 3 new game play variants: Test of Skill, Grand Melee, and Pure Deck Building.

Test of Skill gives each player an identical deck of 40 units (1 copy of each unit from the base game and expansion).

Grand Melee is a 4 player swiss-style draft variant, where each player drafts and builds his own deck of 10 units to play against the other players. Each game one grants a Victory Card, and the first player with 2 Victory Cards wins the Grand Melee.

Pure Deck Building allows each player to build his own deck (or decks) to play against opponents who have done the same. This variant requires both players to own a copy of Omen: A Reign of War and the Shattered Aegis expansion.

Aside from new units and play variants, Shattered Aegis also introduces the first status effect: Enrage, which turns non-beast units into beasts for short time, allowing players to turn the tide of war in their favor, help achieve a feat, or turn the opponent's most threatening unit into a mindless beast.

Preorders for Shattered Aegis will open the week of August 1st at smallboxgames.com

The Game Of Redneck Life - Living The Life Of Riley....Bubba Joe Riley, That Is

2011-07-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

At Origins, I walked by a booth that had on display, for our amusement, a mullet-topped hilljack with a tobacco stain on his already pit-sweat stained wifebeater tank top. I had to stop and ask what the hell the dude was about. Turns out that no, he isn't a Kentucky resident, he was the spokesmodel for Gut Bustin' Games offerings, The Redneck Life, Trailer Park Wars, and O Gnome You Don't. After ten minutes of conversation involving the merits of Kentucky Pillow Talk ("Git off me Paw, yer crushin' mah smokes") and other aspects of country life, I was offered a copy The Redneck Life to review. Now, I had never heard of these folks, but now that I have, I'm going to keep an eye on them. This game had all of us involuntarily snort-laughing nearly the entire time.

I just played this game for the third time last night, and I have to tell you, that while it is a really, really dumb game when it comes to any meaningful, thoughtful mechanics, it's so damned funny to play that I have to admit that it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I cannot envision another game that has such anecdotal moments as that which I just played, such as when my wife was getting divorced, and when she was asked whether or not she wanted to fuck the lawyer for a $50 discount, she responded, "I ain't no ho, and I ain't sleepin' with no damned lawyer. I gots Elvis to think about!" Elvis was her youngin', just so you know, and it was a noble thing to do seeing as she had merely an 11th grade education and was trying to make ends meet by operating a Mullet salon. In the immortal words of the cousin in 'O brother, where art thou,' "There's a depression on, and I gots to do for mine."

The game had incredibly funny moments involving the fact that my second wife, who coincidentally was named the same as my actual wife's character in the game, had five kids named Darryl, who became stepbrothers for my other two kids, Thelma Louise and Jack Daniel, all of whom were taken by Child Protective Services near the end of the game. My wife was blessed with the adoption of two of her brother's kids, who were names Denise and Denephew, not to mention little Elvis.

At various points in the game, all four of us had houses in various states of disrepair, all vividly illustrated on the title deed cards, and were driving around in stretch limousines and upon the backs of donkeys named Quincy. I should also mention that by the end of the game, we'd lost a combined 24 teeth between us, accumulated over $3,000 in debt to the local paycheck advance guy, and to top it off, half of us had slept with the lawyer, who we decided was my wife as she was continually correcting our 4th grade math. Damned college folks. To add insult to injury, I chose to bone the socks off of the lawyer not only because of the discount, but because she got the judge to let me keep my trailer. You really can't buy that kind of representation, so I rented her.

Getting back to the details, though, the concept of Redneck Life is quite simple. Players roll and move along a very linear downward spiral toward the end, noted by the Day of Reckon'n, taking cards and enduring such inequities as taking days off of fishing to sire several illegitimate children, having the payday advance guy come and pop our teeth out when we couldn't pay up, and enduring names given our kids such as Cooter and Skeeter, all of whom drained our paychecks. Let's not forget about my buddy's one-night stand with his cousin which produced his new son, Gene.

Anyhow, each space on the board produced more and more absurd text and card draws which ended sadly in the above mentioned circumstances. At certain pause points during the game players will make rolls to determine things such as getting edjumucated up to a maximum of 12th grade, getting such illustrious careers as becoming a Swap Meet Merchant and Mullet Salon Operator, buying a trailer painted as an American flag or a trailer with a porta-john attached to the exterior, getting married to such lovely folks as Jebediah James and Bessie Sue, divorcing said folks and putting their home in peril, getting remarried and adopting up to six stepchildren named Darryl, and at the culmination of the game, spending money to pay off debts, and if any money remains, to buy back teeth, which in this game is the coin of the realm. The winner of the game is the player with the most teeth in their head, and in the case of a tie, the player with the most cash wins.

When you open the sturdy, imaginitively illustrated box, you'll find a pad of scoresheets with which to record the trials and tribulations of your redneck avatar, a bunch of pawns, a red and blue die, a crapload of funny money with such titles as "Mullet Moola", "White Trash Cash" and others, a stack of photo-realistic homes and vehicles, a huge supply of red debt bills, and a huge stack of "Gone Redneck'n" cards which provide most of the narrative of the game. There's also a primative but surprisingly well-made game board, and several reference charts to use at each stop along the Redneck Trail of Tears, which is what we came to call the track on the board. The final bit is one standard letter sized rule sheet, which is truly all you'll need to play this very, very simple game. All in all, the components are exactly what I'd expect from a novelty game, and were fully adequate.

To set the game up, you simply get the money laid out with the banker, put the appropriate cards on their spaces on the board, and put all of the vehicles into the "Uncle Clem's Rig Rodeo", which is a plastic sleeve used to display the sad excuses for vehicles that inhabit the game. Pick a pawn, get a scoresheet, and then you're ready to go. Each player, in turn, will roll the blue and red dice to name their hillbilly, using a chart to come up with names such as Billy Bob, Earl Ray, and Wynona Fae.

Gameplay consists of rolling the dice, adding the values, and moving your pawn that many spaces on the track. Some spaces have text that causes events to occur, which vary from group events such as the Redneck Olympics to individual ones that can cause you to take on new kids, referred to as youngin's, or lose teeth. Other spaces, which are the most common, cause you to take and resolve a Gone Redneck'n card, and these vary from winning a chaw spitting contest and winning money to getting into a bar fight and losing several teeth. Some cards are Redneck Revenge cards which contribute a screwage factor in the game, allowing you to hose over an opponent, take their stuff, or foist your leeching kids off onto them.

I really want to emphasize how funny some of the cards and events are. One of them tells you that you've earned some cash by selling the story of your daughter, who was born with sideburns and a mullet, to the Globe Magazine. Another card has the drawing player judge a real live hog calling contest, where three of us called, "Sooooooooey!" loudly and my wife ended up winning on originality by calling, "Here, piggy, piggy, piggy!" There's a huge variety of hilarious cards, and I don't imagine we've gotten through them all in three plays.

Several times during the trip through the Redneck Life you'll come across stopping points that cause you to resolve events, as I mentioned before, starting with determining your level of education, your job in life, what kind of hovel you get to inhabit, and finally, who your first and second wives are. There's also payday spots which allow you to get paid whatever your career choice allows, less ten dollars per kid you have on staff. Note that in the last game, I had nine, two of which were actually produced via incestuous activity.

Your chittlins, as you can imagine, play a huge role in the game as you not only have to pay for them each paycheck, you also have to transport them. Each vehicle in the game has a youngin' capacity, and at all times you must maintain a total capacity that exceeds the amount of kids you have in your corral. At several points during several games I noted, "Damn, I need to gets me another rig, cuz I need to drive a damned mob around town." It is likely that you will have a veritable used car lot in front of you, as I have had more then four rigs at any given point during several games to support my large and empoverished stable. If, at any point, your legion of ill-conceived children exceed your transport ability, any player can call you on a violation at which point you must immediately buy a new car capable of transporting them, and then pay them $100. I have to say that you will NOT have that hundred bucks, and will invariably go deeper into debt with Uncle Clem and his shady loansharking operation.

Some of the other spaces cause you to roll on charts to determine what a bad batch of moonshine has done to you, while another allows you to get a hundred bucks and gamble it in a winner-takes-all, luck pushing dicefest. There's even spaces that allow you to determine what your cigarette habit has done to you, from being able to sue for millions yet only keep two hundred due to the damned lawyers, all the way to getting very sick and having to pay a bunch of money you don't have. I should also mention that at one point in the game, and only one point, you may purchase health, car, and home insurance for a hundred bucks each. These are invaluable resources as rednecks appear to be the unluckiest folks in the world.

At the end of the game you'll reach the "Day of Reckon'n" space and you sell off your house and cars for half price, assuming they weren't "blowed up real good", lost in a lake, or otherwise destroyed, and then with all the cash in hand, you have to pay back any debt to Uncle Clem. In the unlikely event that you have any cash left over, you can spend a hundred dollars a tooth for dentistry work, which are the victory points in this backwoods adventure. You record the amount of remaining teeth, your extra cash, and then sit back and heckle the other players. As noted, the winner is the player at the end of the game that has the most teeth, and in three games, only one time did any player actually have all 28 of their "moufers" in their gums.

I would be remiss in my duties were I not to mention that with four players, the game time can run two hours or more. Part of this is due to the conversation, which is a good thing, but the main issue with the time is that the roll and move mechanic can cause you to lose interest. The rules have a game variant that allows you to roll a third die, if you provide one, to speed up the travel along the grim path, and I highly encourage this practice. It drops the game time to just over an hour and thirty minutes, which is the sweet spot, in my opinion. Too much longer, and you just get sick of the tedium that the roll and move mechanic is prone to producing.

To summarize, this is clearly a novelty game. This is not a game that you're going to talk about because of the epic comeback victory over Sauron, and it's not a game where you'll lament rolling all skulls when you needed all shields. That being said, I am very glad to have played it repeatedly. The conversations that have spawned are something we've been talking about for the last 2 weeks, and we're still laughing about how Jebediah Joe was shipped off to military school, which was the edge needed to buy back a couple of teeth and win the game.

We're still calling each other Billy Bob, making jokes about how we "can use us some biscuits and mustard, ummm hmmm" and still thinking about what total shithole houses we ended up drawing. All in all, it's a very funny game, and without the humor would be incredibly dull, but the humor made it fun. In a lot of ways, this game is the same as Munchkin; you can play it a few times, but when the jokes wear thin, that's when the game gets shelved, only to be played when your relatives from out of town come over and you need to kill some time after, well, some biscuits and mustard.

Why Living The Redneck Life Will Give You The Vapors:
- This is a ridiculously silly, fun time, provided you have funny friends
- The photographs of the houses and cars are priceless, and other art is pretty decent too
- There is some serious screwage in the game via the Redneck Revenge cards
- Turn length is very short, so there's minimal downtime
- If prominently displayed, this will certainly be a conversation piece

What Makes This A Southern Fried Nightmare:
- This game has precious few meaningful decisions outside of playing Redneck Revenge cards
- When the funny wears off, this will become a once-a-year event
- The math in the game can cause confusion if you're actually playing out your real life's story
- The game is just too long to keep your interest if you play with two dice

Overall:
The game is as simple a roll and move game as you're ever going to find, but the merits of the game have far less to do with the gameplay's interesting decisions, razor-sharp mechanics, or exquisitely sculpted miniatures. None of those things will make an appearance in this game. The fact is that while the game tends to lag on for about 45 minutes too long, the theme and conversations that erupt from the game make it a worthwhile party game that, while a hair on the expensive side for what you get, is as entertaining as many other, far more cleverly designed games. The downfall is that once you've played three or four times, the jokes will have all been heard, and it will be a lot less fun.

Rating:
3/5 Stars

You can learn more about The Game Of Redneck Life and its expansion at their website, which also has information on their other games:
http://gutbustingames.com/

If, in the interest of wanting to play this game a couple of times without dropping thirty bucks at Wal-Mart, you can rent it at The Board Game Exchange!
www.boardgameexchange.com

Kickstarter Spotlight: Travesty Games

2011-07-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

This week, since the wife is out of town tending to her very sick grandmother, I haven't had too much time to play games. I've got 3 games on the review schedule, but I simply can't get people together to play them for a second or third time, respectively. Suffice to say that one of them will knock your socks off and the other will have you soiling yourself with laughter, at least until the jokes wear thin.

So, this lunch hour I've decided to start yet another little Circus venture, where I show you some games that you likely have never, and arguably would never, have heard of. These games are from relatively unknown, or at least underrealized, companies that are making their livings by trying to get funding through Kickstarter, the newest way for companies to attract investments in small increments based upon a sort of preorder system.

This week's game company is Travesty Games, a small and relatively unknown publisher that got its start on Kickstarter and has successfully produced a handful of imaginative and rather diabolical games. Just my kind of folks.

Travesty Games is an odd bird, and that's why I've been subtly stalking them for a while. The boys over there, Gil and Adam, have a good sense of humor and I, as a proponent of all things humorous, appreciated their "Vision" page on their website:

"Our goal is to make stuff so awesome that your skin flies off your body.

Or to put it another way, our goal is to make stuff so awesome that it’ll make you run into the forest, where a turkey will fly into your mouth and you will jump up into a tree. And I’m not talking about some little tree either. I’m talking about a Redwood or something.

And that’s how angry that makes me."

So far, my skin is still intact, but I've had skin cancer and so I stay out of the sun to avoid burns and subsequent peeling. Maybe I'm the outlier. To be fair, though, I've only read rules and checked their press releases, so perhaps I've just not been exposed to their games long enough to have my skin etched from my body as they so hope. Anyhow, they have three really interesting products, one of which has just successfully been funded by Kickstarter supporters.

The first game is PsiDuel, a card game that allows you to take the role of a psionic superdude (or superbabe, as it were) to psychically kick the piss out of your opponent. The card art is really nice, and the layout of the cards is actually really appealing to me. So appealing, in fact, that I asked Gil to send me a copy for review, which he has kindly done. So you'll be hearing more about it very soon.
http://www.travestygames.com/?page_id=21

The second game is KillBall, which is a cross between soccer and the French revolution, and it's played by clones. There's goals on either side of the board, and the goal mechanisms aren't all that smart, so you can score by putting a ball in the goal, or alternatively, by severing an enemy player's head and putting it in the goal instead. Not only that, but you can regrow clones, which squirt out of little chutes and can re-enter play. In short, heads will roll. It's a neat looking and quite clever dicefest, and although the art is black and white, it's still a pretty cool chit and counter type game.
http://www.travestygames.com/?page_id=18

The last game these guys are currently publishing is a cool dungeon crawler called Deathfear. It's not your standard fare, though, as it comes with a twist: the object isn't to kill some nameless, faceless monster and emerge a champion, it's to BECOME the nameless, faceless monster before your opponents, and then bust their shit loose. You hunt the dungeon for demon parts, and once you've gotten them all, you become that demon and then seek to devour your former running mates.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travestygames/deathfearThere's a promotional video that comes with the game, apparently, and you have to check it out. It reminds me of the video that comes with Dragonstrike on VHS...it's a riot.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travestygames/deathfear/widget/video.html

I just started looking at this game very recently, and they just hit their mark on Kickstarter, which guarantees that the game will be published. It's currently on a fast-track to get printed before GenCon, and these boys will be there in the dealer hall at booth 757, giving demos of PsiDuel, from what I understand. Get over and show them some love, check out their stuff, and see if there's something there for you.

Check out the Travesty games site at www.travestygames.com for more information on their stuff!

Omen: A Reign of War back in stock!

2011-07-08T06:26:00.000-07:00

John Clowdus asked me to get the word out about Omen: A Reign of War. He sold through his first printing and ordered a second one, which is now sitting in his warehouse (read: home office) awaiting homes.

Normally, you'd preorder his games and at the end of the month his orders would be filled, but this time, since Omen has become so popular, he put his you-know-what on the chopping block and invested in you, his customers, so you wouldn't have to wait.

So, get over there and order it already!

What, you've never heard of Omen?
http://superflycircus.blogspot.com/2011/06/omen-reign-of-war-flaming-capes-hot.html

Go to http://www.smallboxgames.com/ to order! While you're there, check out his other games, too. I recommend several, and the reviews can be found here at the Circus.

Cheers,
The Management

A Journey Of Self Realization In Gaming, Or, "Sick Of The Same Old Shit"

2011-07-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I've had ample time to reflect on games this month, and it was primarily because I'm in the process of cleaning up my Man Cave (...or Dude Dungeon if you prefer) for the purposes of having a huge 6 player Heroscape game. In the process, I was reorganizing my games, and it hit me that there are certain games that I simply don't have. That being said, I'd almost rather have my scrotum crushed by an air conditioner that fell from a skyscraper than have them.

The reason I say this is that no matter how compelling the gameplay, how clever the mechanics, and how highly rated the game may be by those who enjoy, above all else, such amazing feats as moving a quarter-inch brown cube from a pile (arguably the slave pens) onto a map representing Puerto Rico, if the theme is garbage I'm going to have a hell of a time wanting to play it repeatedly. Where's the fun in that? It seems to me that these games generally end up as dick-measuring contests by potentially unimaginative people who yearn to prove to their slide-rule using peers that they are, indeed, the smartest Mensa member in the room.

To those who think these games have compelling themes, I loudly proclaim: "Fuck That Shit." I'm sorry, but if you think that managing the power grid of Germany or scheduling shipping containers is fun, chances are that you and I will never see eye to eye. In my world, being a merchant of the middle ages, hustling corn husks between the farm and the market is about as compelling to me as having every single ass hair ripped from the root by an Epilady. Sure, I loved "The Darjeeling Limited" and "Lady In The Water", but if I had my druthers, I'm watching "Aliens" or "Conan The Barbarian" instead nine times out of ten.

So, seeing as I'm here, let's talk about theme a bit.

First, what the fuck is going on with games these days? Most of the drivel that is being produced for the Board Game Geek crowd of late seems to come in two flavors: games that involve farming or production of some kind, or games that are total knock-offs of someone else's work. Seriously, you think Hollywood has plumb run out of new ideas, take a look at our hobby. It's the same old shit, redone over and over, ad infinitum. If I see another damned Zombie game where a small group of survivors have to escape peril through swarms of the undead, I may slice my fucking balls off and sing showtunes in front of city hall until I bleed out.

Same with production games where the pinnacle achievement is growing and selling shit (oh, wait, let's not forget the shipping the shit you grew variant! BRILLIANT!). Or, wow, set collection games. There's a new one. If I wanted to play an Old Maid or Go Fish variant, I'd just play Old Maid or Go Fish. Worker placement is another pet peeve, because I can't think of many things less interesting than putting a little cube somewhere that represents a person in some manner of indentured servitude, be it serf, slave, or subject. Where's all the new stuff?

Back to theme, though, in my little tirade here, what the hell is going on with the damned Renaissance? Why is that so compelling to so many people? Do we really want to relive plague, death by dysentary and cholera, and wars that lasted 30 years? Or how about tripe like Fresco, where the object is to mix paints? Fuck that, if I want to mix paints, I'll do it, and I'll go even further by actually painting something. Like maybe a ultra bad-ass pewter miniature resembling some nightmare creature eating the white meat off of a damsel in distress!

I just don't get it. Maybe people are just boring these days, or maybe the advent of the internet visual media has completely dumbed down peoples' ability to use their imagination. How many shipping games do we need? How many Pillars of the Earth building games does the world really need? Why on God's green Earth do we need another game about farming or medieval life? I mean, seriously....WHAT THE FUCK?

Theme matters to a lot of people. Games like Ascending Empires, where varied interstellar races beat the piss (or whatever liquid non-humans excrete) out of each other, are compelling. They make you WANT to play the game. Games like Road Kill Rally, where the racing aspect is less important than running over grandmothers pushing strollers, are irreverant and fun, and although the theme is a bit dispicable, at least they're compelling. It's not enough anymore to simply pick a theme out of the old playbook, tack on some mechanics that may or may not work well together, and then hire an artist to make it all look fancypants. If you do, you'll do it at your own peril because I'm not fucking buying it. God forbid I do get a hold of it, because your ears will be on fire from the review I'm going to write and whose wrath I'll personally deliver to 10,000 readers in the first month of publication.

I'm not saying that some of the new "thematic games" ( which incidentally, I refer to as "games that may actually be fun" ) have to be completely original themes to be good. I really like Battleship Galaxies, and I think it may well become a fan favorite, but it really is just another "space dudes in space shooting space weapons at other dudes in space" when you boil it down to the base. The difference, my dear friends, is that Hasbro took the time to flesh out the story, build some characters in, and then explain the whole thing to players so that they had a reference point. As I noted in another article, the imagining of a universe or setting, and then building the game, from bottom to top, around that setting, is the hallmark of a great game.

Games like the new Chaostle, while I don't know that much about it, are compelling because there's something new there. I want to know more about it, and that's saying something because there's so few games these days that actually make me want to click on a couple of links to learn more about them. I'm not saying Chaostle is a great game, because I don't know yet, but I will tell you that it has an integral theme, great visuals, and a backstory, and all of this adds up to something that has the potential to be fun.

To be great, as I've said before, requires a rare crossroads of integral, interesting theme, great mechanics, good pacing, and most of all, an assload of fun gameplay. There are very, very few games that I consider to be truly great, but I can point to all of them and they have precisely that rare mix of elements, hence my reasoning that these games have risen above the chaff to become legendary, in my mind, at least.

While it's true that some games have such novel concepts that they can ride on that alone, they are the rarity. Dominion, for example, has almost no noticable theme and could've been about buying various quantities of dope from Columbian and Afghani dealers, or alternatively could've been about amassing different tiers of out of print board games in a basement. The result would've been the same, because at the time, this style of game didn't exist. Dominion was so novel that many were OK to look past the obviously pasted-on theme and saw it for what they saw it for: a neat new game design. Personally, I owned it for a month, played the shit out of it, and then realized that it was ultimately a very boring multiplayer solitaire game, and I subsequently gave it away. But that's because it wasn't about Space Marines collecting the ears (or whatever) off of Genestealers, right?

So, in conclusion, I sure wish game designers would focus more on getting cool games out there that have nothing to do with shipping corn to some island I don't give a fuck about, or games that involve having fistfuls of cards that are supposed to make me feel like some sort of land baron. Stop trying to be "Dominion with a theme" because you can't. Ascencion of the Godslayer, Nightfall, Thunderstone.....whatever. They're all trying to trump the original, and you really can't. All you can do is hope to ride the sea of mediocrity and sell as many games as you can until it subsides and sanity kicks back in.

Be original in design, and stop trying to knock off other people's shit. I know that virtually all games are derivative of another game design, but you can certainly mix it up. Talisman does the same thing Prophecy does, essentially, but they are very different game designs. Earth Reborn does what Tannhauser does, but again, very different paths between A and B. Come up with a cool theme that hasn't been done not only to death, but to death, reborn, and to death again. Take that theme, and wrap around its magnificence a great story, some great art, compelling, fun mechanics and gameplay that are absolutely soaked in the pickle juice that is your awesome theme, and then playtest the shit out of it so that it doesn't disappoint. Then, alone, you have a shot at greatness, unless you're very lucky.

There's just not enough "new" games out there that are worth buying, and quite frankly, I was wholeheartedly unimpressed with the big-box offerings at Origins. The highlight with all the buzz was yet another snoozefest Knizia math game that happens to have Captain Kirk in it is a completely epic failure in judgement and execution. So much could've been done with that license, especially with the skill at minis games Wizkids has, yet they found a way to totally fuck it up. Seriously, is this all we, as a colletive group, have to offer the world?

I hope "Wild" Bill Shatner kicks ol Wizkids hard in the balls for that one....whomever decided Star Trek and Knizia in the same sentence would be a good idea really should go back to barber college or whatever the hell they did before signing up at Wizards. What a shame. And things like this are so much more often the story than the story of triumphing over all odds and creating a totally awesome game like Omen: A Reign of War. And guess what: John Clowdus doesn't have Wizkids money, Knizia name recognition, or Star Trek fanbois to work with, either. So stop blaming the market for your failures, bitches, and start sacking up. Make great products that are loaded with fun and stop relying on the same people with the same old ideas. There's a lot of fresh ideas out there, I know it, but they're buried under the weight of the old guard and the marketing giants that get all the press.

Alright, I'm done, go back to your regularly scheduled programming. I'm going back to playing Heroscape and waiting for my Hirst Arts molds to come in so I can pimp out my Epic Duels set....you know...a FUN game?

Because the Blogger interface is pissing me off and won't let me post comments, I'm having to put responses here.

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@Kenchan13: Thanks!

@Trent: (shaking head...) Buddy, there's a difference. The brown cubes are nameless, faceless little markers. They're not Paco, Pablo, and Geronimo. There's no personality, and if you're trying to tell me that people actually can not only keep track of who's who on a loaded PR board, I'll be the first to tell you that you're full of shit.

Miniatures have unique looks, and they elicit emotions in people, which is why they're so popular. It's not enough to note that your random legion cube dies in T&E when viewed from the light that you could rather be playing a game that Kaemon Awa, Master Samurai, has fallen to the likes of the sinister robot menace, Major Q9. It's just apples and oranges.

It's hard to give a shit about cube #9, but your imagination runs wild when playing a game like Dungeon Twister when your Paladin falls to the fearsome Dragon. Totally different experience.

I am sure glad you grabbed onto the idea that "Pete is saying people that like cubes are dumb", although it's totally inaccurate. I like Puerto Rico. I like El Grande. I like Tikal. I'm just sick of every God damned game being a copy of something else, with a different but equally boring theme tacked on.

Clay: Totally agree.

July 3, 2011 6:49 AM

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