0 Board Game Review - Magnifico

At first glance, you might look at Magnifico and think, 'oh, great, another Risk clone.' But that's like looking at RuPaul and thinking, 'wow, that chick has great legs.' Sure, there are some things in common, but the differences are a lot more important than the similarities. I'll let you decide for yourself if you think I'm talking about Risk or RuPaul.

Magnifico has players taking the helm of upstart nations attempting to subjugate Western Europe at the beginning of the 16th century. Only instead of just raising armies and shooting people with archaic weapons, you buy designs from Leonardo da Vinci and use his wacky, ahead-of-their-time inventions to grind everyone else under your fruity Renaissance comfortable footwear. Tanks, cannons, submarines, and airplanes are just a few of the nifty devices you'll use to run roughshod over everyone else.

I admit, that sounds like Risk: Old Europe. But it's not. That's just the jumping-off point, and there's so much more in Magnifico that if you sit down thinking you're playing a new twist on an old classic, you're bound to be disappointed. Magnifico is as much a game of managing limited resources, blind auctions and long-term strategy as it is a military simulation. If you want to simply enjoy a conquest game, I can recommend a bunch - but this one isn't it.

For one thing, you don't spend your money to just hire more troops. Every turn, you can recruit one soldier in any place where you already have at least one soldier - and that's it. I guess since the television isn't invented for a few hundred years, you can't blow all your cash on a Super Bowl ad to recruit for the National Guard, so instead you have to just grab whoever is passing by the office that day and give them a uniform and a really awkward firearm.

However, you will spend a lot of money. You need money to win the auction for first player, then you need money to buy the inventions and art from da Vinci, then you need money to build them. You also have to pay money every time you want to attack someone, and so if you blow your entire pile of cash on the Mona Lisa and plans for an armored sailboat, you'll sit there like a Quaker your whole turn. Maybe you can earn a little more money churning butter or something, because you're certainly not going to be doing any fighting.

The money part of da Vinci is a critical reason this is nothing like Risk - but there are other good reasons. Take combat - you can only start three fights in a turn, so you're not going to just plow through the opposition in a single turn. And that's good, because if you go in prepared, it's almost impossible to lose a fight as the offense. As in, the defenders will probably lose every single one of their guys, and you'll walk in unscathed. But then if you don't ramp up your defenses to an unreasonable degree, they'll just come sailing back in and kick you out again.

You can't play Magnifico defensively. There's no hiding in Australia while everyone else dukes it out. You can build castles to improve your defenses, but if you don't staff them properly, they'll just change hands when your opponent (who obviously has more balls than you do) kills all your guys and steals your castle.

While we're talking about stealing stuff, you have to be really careful with those magnificent inventions. When all your guys die, your tanks and planes don't. Instead they now belong to the bastard who just drove a 16th century Sherman right up your ass. They're his planes and tanks now, and he's going to use them to hit you again.

There are some wacky, seemingly unbalanced factors at work in Magnifico, and for the first half of your first game, you might think it feels like it was invented by a tenth-grader during study hall. You'll find yourself asking, 'Why do I lose a guy every time I set sail?' and 'Why can't I hire more soldiers?' and 'Do you like me? Check yes or no.' In order to really appreciate Magnifico, you have to come at it from a non-standard point of view.

And if you can manage to put aside everything you expect from Risk or Dust or Attack! or any of a huge array of other global conquest games, and just let Magnifico be what it is, instead of what you think it should be, you'll find that there is a really good game here. It's aggressive and fast, tricky and deep, and pretty darn easy on the eyes. You can win the game with a good attack strategy, but you can also win by making stuff. You can win by sponsoring art, and you can win by holding castles. This isn't a run-of-the-mill land grab.

In fact, Magnifico is a very fun game, and while I don't know that I would put it onto the 'never sell this game because I'll play it all the time' pile, it's certainly on top of the 'play this the next time I get a chance' pile. It's got an unexpected mix of European and American gaming. It kind of sneaks up on you, but it's an awful lot of fun once you get into it.

And that's not something I can say about RuPaul.

Summary

Pros:
Turns are fast - a big game that plays in less than 3 hours
Fun, funny art
Tons of depth
Plan ahead or lose badly

Cons:
Not at all what you expect
You may not get it right off... or at all

I really liked Magnifico, but it sure wasn't what I thought it was. If you can clear your mind of the Risk clone notion, you might be very pleasantly surprised. You can get it here:
http://www.gameoutfitter.com/product-p/asm%20mag01us.htm?gclid=CKedqsPAjJ4CFQEhDQodpxexpw

0 Board Game Review - Acquire

Reviewing old favorites is a little like driving a bulldozer through a field full of bunny rabbits and orphans - you're almost guaranteed to piss off someone. Acquire is an old standby favorite, reprinted by Avalon Hill several years ago, and stands to this day as one of the great Sid Sackson games ever made. Opinions on the game tend to vary from 'man, I love that game' to 'I think I'll pay $200 for one on eBay'. Reviewing a game this time-tested and sacred tends to summon the rabid fans who come out with pitchforks and tar if you make the slightest mistake, and because it has been played by so many gamers, you also get the people who want to prove how far off the beaten path they are by telling you that you're an idiot if you liked it.

For the sake of the metaphor, I'll call the Acquire fanatics 'bunnies', and the it's-cool-to-hate un-fans as 'orphans'. And I'll try to hit them both with my metaphorical bulldozer.

Acquire, for those readers who have only been playing games for the last twenty minutes, is a highly abstracted game of corporate takeovers and high finance (unless you get the version with hotels, in which case it's an abstract game of hotel takeovers and high finance). The growth of various corporations is represented by a numbered grid, and as you play, you place plastic tiles over those numbers. Place two of them next to each other, and you form a corporation. Place a tile so that it links two corporations, and the bigger one swallows up the smaller one.

The key to making money in Acquire is to buy, sell and trade stock in the existing corporations. When a corporation gets eaten up by another corporation, the players with the most stock in the now-defunct company get buyout bonuses, and anyone with that stock can dump it to get money or more stock in other companies. Placing tiles properly is important, but to really excel, you have to be able to manipulate stock prices and make smart investments.

There's quite a bit of strategy and long-term planning in Acquire, and you have to be able to recognize where you're likely to make money. It's fast-paced and cutthroat, with the constant temptation to get in over your head or get tied up in a no-winners bidding war. Many decisions you'll make as you play can get you so far behind that you'll be out of the game, yet very few of those decisions are so decisive that you'll shoot past the competition. It's tricky and really fun, and while it's easy to suck, it's hard to be brilliant at it.

And that's kind of the downside. A mediocre player can be shut out fairly easily by more skilled players, which is a mixed bag. On the one hand, I do prefer games where the better player wins, but on the other hand, new players could be completely disgusted when they go the whole game holding a huge pile of nearly worthless stock that tied up all their finances while the experienced players swim in money like Scrooge McDuck. I'm not opposed to games where people get knocked completely out, but it does kind of suck to be so far behind that you've got a snowball's chance in Hell of winning, but have to keep sitting there the whole time, anyway.

I'll be the first to admit that the reason I know about this particular 'flaw' is that it happened to me. I made a couple really short-sighted stock purchases and it cost me, big-time, because I was broke for the rest of the game. It's not hard to fall into that trap, though, especially if you haven't played Acquire a lot, and it really does diminish the enjoyment you can get out of a game when you know you can't win, but you have to stick around and see who gets to laugh at you when the game is over.

However, even if you are the guy who spends his first three turns ruining himself for the rest of the game, Acquire is still a lot of fun. It is a very fast, very fun game with lots of chances to bluff, plan, and make quick decisions. It's not hard to learn the rules, but it's got incredible depth, especially considering how simple it is to pick up. And talk about staying power - the first version of the game was released in 1962, and it still gets played today. That's the kind of longevity you see in Monopoly, except without having to roll dice all day long and grumble about having to be the shoe.

Acquire isn't a perfect game. The tendency for a weaker player to take himself completely out of the running could make a lot of gamers happy to avoid it. But it is an incredibly good game, it moves incredibly fast, and is a ton of fun, so if you've ever played and said, 'man, did I suck,' give it another shot. And then, if you still hate it, you can write me a note that says, 'I still suck.'

Summary

Pros:
Abstract theme that does a great job of representing big business
Brilliantly simple rules create amazing depth
Fun and fast

Cons:
Player elimination that means you can't win, but you still don't get to go see what's on TV

I have good news - Dogstar Games has Acquire. In case I don't drive this home often enough, they provide the review copies that let me tell you about stuff like Chaos in the Old World, Space Alert, and other games from publishers who won't return my emails any more. So if you want to pick up this really great classic game, go get it right here:
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/WOC221920000

0 Card Game Review - Dominion: Seaside

By the power vested in me by Blogger.com, I hereby declare the third week of every year to be Dominion week. During this holiday week, all federal employees shall be expected to show up to work, just like normal, and mail had better run or I'm going to be pissed. The holiday will be observed by me talking about Dominion all week, unless my pipes freeze over the weekend and instead I talk about how much it sucks to do your own plumbing.

To commemorate the final day of Dominion week, I declare that Dominion: Seaside is 100% kick-ass. Unlike either the original Dominion or Dominion: Intrigue, Seaside is not a stand-alone game, and yet if you observe Dominion week, you are morally obligated to rush right out and buy Seaside immediately, unless you already have it. If you do already own Seaside, and you intend to observe Dominion week, you must play a game of Dominion using the brilliant cards from Seaside.

As a duly-self-elected representative for gamers who like Dominion, it is my duty to inform the citizens of this relatively mediocre gaming blog that Seaside is the best set yet, even eclipsing the original Dominion in the sheer amount of awesome in the box. The newest kind of card is the duration card, which has an effect both on the turn it is played and on the next turn as well.

These duration cards alter the game in ways never before seen, by allowing players to plan ahead for turns to come before they even have cards in hand. In fact, the tactician allows you to completely forfeit your current turn in order to have an absolutely amazing turn next time. It is difficult to overstate the brilliance in the new layers of planning and strategy now available to the players of the great game of Dominion, but it should be sufficient to say that if you can't decide between Intrigue and Seaside, eat ramen noodles for a week and buy them both.

Seaside also includes other cards that allow you to plan for the future, beyond the general theme of stacking your deck to maximize your spending power. The native village allows you to set cards aside, so that you can use them on a future turn, when you might really need them. Combined with a scout (one of my favorite cards from Intrigue) and a throne room (the most powerful card that does nothing in the original set), the native village is an incredible resource that really allows the skilled player to have the cards he needs, right when he needs them.

Another great development in Seaside is that finally, a consistent theme is presented, better than ever before (not that there was a particularly high bar set in the first place). Now, using the treasure map, you can strike it incredibly rich, and fill your deck with gold - if you can just find the other half of the map. You can use the pirate ship to steal treasures from the other players and make yourself richer. You can set up at the wharf to take on extra cards for next turn, or stash your victory cards on a deserted island, and then come back to get them when the game is over. More than either of the previous Dominion releases, Seaside actually feels a little bit like what it's supposed to represent.

And to make Seaside even more better than Intrigue (and yes, I know 'more better' is grammatically hosed. It's just that I don't care), the art is far better. It seems the folks at Rio Grande heard the complaints of the gamers who thought the harem in Intrigue looked like it was drawn by the guy who does Calvin & Hobbes. The cards are pretty again, and some of them are gorgeous. Like I said with Intrigue, I would play this game to death if it had no art at all, but it's still nicer to look at pretty art instead of something that looks like it was created by Napoleon Dynamite if he was sleepwalking while having a nightmare.

But the best thing about Seaside is how perfectly it meshes with the first two releases. There are so many great combinations possible now - you can pirate-ship your opponents to devalue their gardens, or use the wharf and the salvager to make yours more potent. Use the lookout to combat the witch, or add the sea hag to the witch to drop scores into the negatives. Use explorers to get treasure that the adventurer can find. Use the embargo to stop a run on the duke, or lighthouse to supplement the moat. There's so much more to Dominion when you have all three sets that I can't see owning one and not the others, unless you don't like it and have been trying to trade it away. And if that's the case, then you totally suck at celebrating Dominion week.

Summary

Pros:
Duration cards add a whole new layer of strategy and planning
Great art
So many new ways to play - you could play your whole life and never see the same game twice
The coolest metal money I've ever seen in a board game

Cons:
Not a whole game - you'll need either Intrigue or the original Dominion (but you should get them all anyway)

Dogstar Games carries Seaside, which is super convenient because they have the other two. And since you wouldn't be reading about any Dominion games, or for that matter, a whole lot of other games, I think you should get the games from them. And since Dominion is such an awesome game, I think you should get them all.
http://dogstargames.com/store/1329089/product/RIO404

0 Card Game Review - Dominion: Intrigue

I've already said that Dominion was an awesome game, and since I reviewed it, it has only gotten better. My wife and daughter both like it, so I find myself able to play six or seven games a week. I think it's safe to say that Dominion is a game that I won't be trading away any time soon.

So if a little is good (and it is, most definitely, good), a lot must be better. That was my thinking when I picked up Dominion: Intrigue, and I'm delighted to announce that I was right. Double the cards, you double the fun. In fact, I would say that Intrigue makes Dominion more than twice as fun. In case you're not picking up the vibe here, I'm definitely recommending it.

Intrigue is a complete game in a box. Everything you need to play Dominion is here - treasures, victory cards, curses, and a whole bunch of action cards. So you don't need the original Dominion to enjoy Intrigue - it's a heaping spoonful of awesome right out of the shrink wrap.

In fact, there are more than enough cards here to play Intrigue all by itself for a real long time. Some of the new action cards are just plain fun, like the bridge that makes everything cheaper AND gives you extra buys, or the secret chamber that lets you rearrange your cards when someone plays an attack card. There are a bunch more, and I don't have the slightest inclination to describe them all, but suffice to say that there's more than enough to have tons of repeat play value.

And as if that weren't enough, a new kind of card makes an appearance - the combination victory card. My favorite, given my love of loose women, is the harem, which gives you both victory points and treasure, so that you're not stuck with a damned green card taking up space in your deck the whole game. There are more, too - the great hall that lets you dump it out of your hand and get a replacement, or the nobles that let you choose between more actions and more cards.

But like I said, this is even better with the original game. The secret chamber is a great defense against the thief, but it doesn't stop the torturer, so you'll want a moat. And a throne room with a saboteur is just plain nasty. There aren't enough cheap multiple-action cards to please me, so I really like to roll in some villages to help out with the masquerade. Both Dominion and Intrigue are amazing games alone, but combined, they're the cat's pajamas.

The only thing that puzzles me is why they hired their artists at a school for special-needs kids. Some of the art is embarrassingly bad. The shanty town looks like it was drawn by an animator from the Simpsons, and the scout looks like Stephen Hawking drew it with a crayon in his mouth. I almost don't want to introduce new gamers to Dominion using Intrigue because they're likely to laugh me out of the room.

So, OK, the art on many cards is complete ass. I don't care. It's not like I'm playing Dominion for the pretty pictures. They could take the art off every card, and it would still be one of my favorite games ever. Intrigue is every bit as awesome as the original Dominion, and together they make for an absolutely outstanding game.

If you like Dominion and don't own Intrigue, you should make it your next game purchase. It's an absolutely fantastic game that makes an already fantastic game more than twice as fantastic. And that's an awful lot of fantastic.

Summary

Pros:
All by itself, a great damned game
So many new combinations and strategies to master
Exponentially more replay value
Takes a really awesome game and makes it more than twice as awesome

Cons:
Art drawn by retarded kids with cerebral palsy

Dogstar Games carries Dominion: Intrigue. If you like the original, you owe it to yourself to run over there and pick it up:
http://dogstargames.com/store/1329089/product/RIO390

0 Activity Review - Home Repairs

There's an old country song with a lyric somewhere in there that goes, 'if it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all.' This song was running through my head all weekend (or at least, this line - I don't actually listen to country music, and have no idea how the rest of the song goes).

North Texas was recently slapped with what the news calls 'arctic conditions', and what the rest of the country calls 'time to put on a sweater.' For three days, the temperature was well below freezing, and we even had a little ice one morning. To say that North Texas is ill-prepared for cold weather is an understatement. We're ill-prepared for any temperature that requires a jacket. When there's ice on the overpasses, schools close down for the day and people burn down their houses for heat.

While we did not burn down our house, there were times when we were considering it. The first night that the temperature dove, our furnace quit working. We woke up to a house that was holding at a not-very-comfortable 45 degrees, and the house only got colder until the furnace guy finally came out (the next day) and fixed our heater. And while the furnace was failing to heat our home, the cold seeped right up into the pipes and froze everything solid. We did manage to keep running water in the bathroom, but every other pipe was blocked up. It took until Saturday to get the water running again, and that's when we found out how bad the damage really was.

As soon as the cold water started running again, we could hear the rumbling sound of a burst pipe. Since people in North Texas are effectively retarded when it comes to protecting our homes from deep freezes, we're fairly familiar with the sound, and we know what to do. The first step is to turn off the water to the house, which involves running out to the curb with a metal doodad and digging in frozen mud to find the shut-off valve, then cursing because you just dug in frozen mud and don't have any running water to wash your hands.

The broken pipe was underneath the kitchen sink, below the floorboards. There's not enough clearance underneath there for me to slide my fat ass up to it through the crawl space, so the only solution was to cut through the flooring under the sink. This was accomplished with a Dremel rotary tool using cutting bits so dull that it took nearly an hour and a half to cut a hole large enough to fit one arm. Then, once I could see the pipe below, I had to ask my son to turn on the water while I watched the pipe, so I could spot the leak. Predictably enough, this resulted in me being shot in the face with a jet of icy water - but I was able to spot the leak.

Then I had to go to the hardware store. This part is my least favorite, because I have to wander around the plumbing section trying to look even a little bit like my job does not involve sitting at a desk and making catalogs on a computer. When asking for help, I try to use technical phrases like, 'half-inch copper pipe' and 'elbow joint' and 'you know, that metal thingy that patches the gap.' I always end up spending more than I need to spend because I don't want to come back, and I always end up coming back because I always buy the wrong thing. In this case, however, I did buy the right thing but still had to go back. If you're ever trying to fix copper pipes, I can't recommend the Sharkbite push-fit fittings highly enough. Rather than having to mess with pressure fittings and wrenches (neither of which was going to be manageable when I could only reach the broken pipe with one hand), I simply cut the pipe using my little red pipe cutter and slapped the Sharkbite over both ends.

And that's when we found the second leak, which was right underneath the kitchen floor. Since there was still not enough clearance to get there through the crawl space, I was left with two options. I could call a plumber, or I could use my circular saw to cut a two-foot square hole directly into the floor of the house. Obviously, the sensible thing to do would be to call a professional, and not carve up the hardwoods in the kitchen.

The circular saw did a fine job, though I did wind up with a lot of sawdust underneath the refrigerator. Once I removed the floorboards and the subfloor, I could see the broken pipe quite clearly. A second trip to the hardware store and a second Sharkbite fitting, and that leak was patched as well.

And that's when we found the third leak. The pipe had broken inside the wall, behind the load-bearing beam that kept the back of the house from sliding into the yard. Cutting out the beam was not an option, unless I decided it was time to file a claim on my homeowner's insurance and spend a few weeks in a hotel. My options were to either destroy my house to fix a pipe, or give up and call a plumber.

I went with option three. Yet another trip to the hardware store (by now the employees were calling me by name) got me ten feet of copper pipe and a Sharkbite fitting that made a sharp corner. I replaced every damned inch of pipe between the cold water feed and the faucet, and now water in my house runs just fine.

Now the only thing left is to put my house back together. Enough plumbing, now I have to do carpentry.

Summary

Pros:
Buying a house lets you find out how much stuff you never knew you could do
Great sense of accomplishment when you avoid having to pay a plumber

Cons:
Entire weekend shot to hell
Bruises, scrapes, cuts and muscle soreness
Spending three days covered in grime because you don't have running water

0 Board Game Review - Dracula

Good two-player games are hard to find. There are lots of games that say they're for 2-4 players, but what they mean is that you should find four players, because the two-player version blows goats. And then there are two-player games that are decent two-player games, but you have to each build an army that will cost you a couple mortgage payments from collectible pieces that you'll use six times and then store in a box for the next ten years until you find them in the attic one day and try to sell them, only to find out that since the game is dead, the entire collection is worth less than the eBay fees.

But my wife likes to play games with me, and she likes to try new stuff, so I'm constantly on the lookout for a decent game we can play while the kids tie up the television with Mythbusters and Miley Cyrus videos. I got Dracula, and was thinking that it might be just the thing that my wife and I could enjoy for a quick game before she went to bed and I ended up playing Dragon Age until I fell asleep in the living room.

Sadly, Dracula is not a good two-player game, so that didn't work out at all.

In Dracula, each player is trying to find the five things that the other player is trying to keep from them. There's a grid of twelve houses, and each player puts six of their supply cards out, and you shuffle them together and hide them face down. Then Van Helsing and Dracula take turns walking around and looking at the cards. If the card is a woman, Dracula can eat her. If it's a coffin, Van Helsing can break it. When one of them gets five of the things they want, that guy wins.

To make things a little more interesting, Van Helsing and Dracula have both called in some backup. Van Helsing has nerdy guys with stakes who will try to spike the bloodsucking bastard, and Dracula has hot vamp chicks who will try to get Van Helsing's pants off before he can chop off their heads (this is why Dracula will always be cooler than Van Helsing - one is an ugly old guy wtih a chip on his shoulder, and the other scores an undending supply of freaky tail).

There are also barriers that the two foes move around the tiny little village (which is apparently the village of the damned, because out of twelve spaces, something like half of them could contain either fanged hotties or empty coffins, and half of the rest probably have half-naked dames waiting to get ravished by Transylvania's answer to Rico Suave). These barriers are virtually worthless, unfortunately, but they can slow down your opponent a little, so there's a marginal amount of strategy in where you place them.

Both players use action cards to move around, and these action cards might have special abilities, which is the only reason why the two players have even vaguely dissimilar powers. In terms of game balance, this works out, but if you're trying to get to the theme, don't bother. In fact, if Van Helsing and Dracula show up at the same house, there's no fight. They just show each other their leftover supply cards like lawyers at a discovery hearing. Yeah, these guys hate each other enough to want to kill each other, but if they could just sit down in arbitration, maybe they could work out their differences without having to go to court.

What ends up happening is that the entire game sort of devolves into a two-player game of Memory. Every turn you want to see cards that aren't yours - after all, there's not much point in Dracula visiting his imported undead booty call, except for some possible undead lovin'. And why Van Helsing would want to spend some quality time with his dorky assistants is beyond me - even if he were gay, those guys don't want to get busy with any old dude with that much unruly face hair. So you both sort of trip around this tiny village, visiting houses and looking for the cards you need to make the game end, thus allowing you to put it away and just go to bed already.

I can't honestly say that there's no game here. There is a kind of cat-and-mouse thing working, only you're both cats and mice at the same time. If you like games where you have to remember lots of stuff, you might like Dracula. I don't like to play games that rely on my ability to remember twelve different cards at a time, so Dracula isn't my bag. Plus so much of the game just seems almost predestined - you'll move as far as you can afford, check inside a house, and repeat until someone makes it stop.

I'm glad I didn't pay for Dracula, and I'm really glad my wife likes Dominion as much as she does. Because this way I don't feel the least bit of seller's remorse when I get rid of Dracula, and we still have an awesome game to play in the evenings when we don't feel like watching whatever latest TV show has us roped in.

Summary

Pros:
Fairly nice pieces and a cool wooden Dracula
Slightly interesting twist on Memory

Cons:
Not enough decisions to be interesting
I don't like Memory
Dracula looks like a gay singer in an 80's hair band

Probably there's somebody who likes Dracula. I don't, but someone probably does, and it's not so bad that I feel a need to link you to a picture of vomit or something. But then, it's dumb enough that I can't recommend you buy a copy, so I'm not going to link you to a store where you can waste your money, either. Instead, here's a cool picture of Dracula:
http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Everyone%20Else/images-4/bela-lugosi-dracula.jpg

0 Card Game Review - Chrononauts

If you could go back in time, would you stop Lincoln's assassination? Would you save the Hindenberg? Or would you just go back and tell Dustin Hoffman not to make Ishtar?

In Chrononauts, each player is a time explorer separated from his timeline. You might be from a timeline where we signed a Vietnam Peace Accord and legalized weed, or where Wilson kept the United States out of World War II and Martin Luther King became president. So one of your goals is to get back home, by manipulating events to bring about the history you remember.

Of course, just fixing time would be too easy (that's not exactly an 'of course' situation - I would think it might be difficult to fix time, but I guess it's not that bad. It worked in Time Cop). So while you're traipsing around, throwing time all out of whack and bringing about the apocalypse, you're also supposed to collect artifacts, like the Ark of the Covenant or the Mona Lisa. Get the three artifacts you're supposed to get, and you don't have to worry about getting home any more. I guess you don't mind being stuck in an age where John Lennon makes a Beatles reunion album if you have the creation of the universe on Betamax.

The timeline cards are all laid out in order, with symbols that indicate what events become paradoxes if specific lynchpin events are altered. Like if Hitler is killed in 1936, then Germany never invades Poland, D-Day never happens, and Isreal is never founded. But then your parents never met, because you grandfather was an American G.I. and your grandmother worked in a Paris brothel, and just like that, you've got a paradox.

To fix these paradoxes, you have to patch them with other events that also never happened. For instance, if Al Gore wins the recount in 2000, then Obama never gets elected, creating a paradox that can be fixed by rigging it so Sarah Palin becomes the first woman president. And if you get hit by a car in your mom's driveway, you have to arrange for your dad to beat up Biff at the school dance. You also have to play Chuck Berry.

As the game progresses, more and more paradoxes will be generated, which is sort of good because you can patch them to create your own alternate future, and sort of bad because they could unravel the fabric of the universe. So there's a bit of a downside. Also, if you screw up enough stuff, you set off nuclear war and blow up the world. Also a downside, unless you're actually trying to get back to a timeline where the world died in 1962, probably so you can hook back up with Cable and Bishop.

This is the best Looney Labs game I've played so far, which is kind of ironic, because it's also the least attractive. The art may be weak, but the game is brilliant. It ends in about 20-30 minutes, and it's so fun that you'll want to shuffle up and play again. There are so many different things going on all the time, with opponents grabbing dinosaurs and you helping to set up David Koresh's outreach ministry to the poor and time fracturing into a thousand pieces. You'll want to keep track of which opponents are grabbing up all the artifacts, and while you want to patch the timeline to get extra cards (and prevent the disentigration of the universe), you also don't want to get guns banned in the United States and send your hippie opponent back home.

If you're a sucker for pretty games (like most of us), Chrononauts isn't going to be your new favorite, because it's just not very attractive at all. But if you like a smart, fast, amusing game, you'll probably get a kick out of Chrononauts. It has several expansions, too - while the main game starts around 1900, you can get another set where you can make the South win the Civil War, and another set called The Gore Years where you can stop the World Trade Center attack or capture Osama Bin Ladin (though not in the same timeline).

Chrononauts surprised the heck out of me. I mean, I've figured out by now that Looney Labs makes some pretty fun games, but Chrononauts is a much more serious game than anything else I've seen from them. It might even be possible that in an alternate past, Andrew Looney turned down his first joint and decided to make some serious games, and then just made the one before the paradox was fixed at a college free-love party where he got a mad contact high. Whatever the case, we now have Chrononauts AND Stoner Fluxx, so I'm pretty sure the drugs came in somewhere.

Summary

Pros:
Deep and involved
Plays fast
For the first time in a Looney Labs game, you can plan several turns ahead
Different ways to win, but none of them are easy

Cons:
Really weak art

I think Chrononauts is a hoot. If you want to try it, you can preorder the reprint right here:
http://store.looneylabs.com/Chrononauts

0 Activity Review - Croquet Golf

It's a scientific fact that teenagers are stupid. There are actual studies that confirm this, not that any person who has ever raised a teenager ever had any doubt. The studies say something about the underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex and hormone release rates, but those are just big scientific words that mean 'teenagers are stupid.'

I mention this because if teenagers were not stupid, I would not have had the opportunity to play croquet golf. And my life might have been just a little bit emptier without the memories of endless bickering and teen angst mood swings to carry me into my old age. Which, if my kids don't leave the house after high school, may happen sooner rather than later.

We initially had plans Saturday for an actual event (I won't spoil it for you because we're going next Saturday). But when that plan fell through, we began to scramble for alternative activities. Play a board game? Not exactly an alternative activity in my house. My son wanted to watch a movie and make popcorn, demonstrating that there is virtually no originality in him. I couldn't come up with one single cool thing we could do, and my wife was out of town. We were stumped.

Then my daughter brought out croquet golf. This is a fake croquet set with one cheap-ass plastic putter and four colored wiffle balls, plus some hoops and a couple 'holes' that sit on the grass. At first, I was not sold, but then I remembered that it was very late and I had an article to write and no other decent alternatives (if I had been thinking, I would have suggested we visit the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, but that thought did not occur to me for several days).

If you've never had the chance to enjoy a late Saturday afternoon playing a ludicrously cheap lawn game with two teenagers who couldn't agree on the time if they were staring at the same clock, then you should celebrate your existence and keep using birth control. Batting very light plastic balls around an unkempt front yard with a cheap plastic golf club is bad enough, but when the rules change from turn to turn (which I allowed because nobody sane wants to argue with a teenager for very long), it turned downright unbearable.

Finally my son managed to bounce his oversized ping-pong ball off a stray leaf and into the hole, ending the game. And at this point, I demonstrated that I am not much smarter than my children - I suggested that we play again. But there was no way I was going to listen to 'you didn't say that' for another half hour, so this time we clearly defined the rules, which offended my son because he didn't think we were playing right. I guess they play croquet with their grandparents during the summer, who obviously have a great deal more patience than I do.

The second game went much better, and not just because I won. Then we took turns jumping over the shrubs, which resulted in more than a couple minor scrapes as we found out that the shrubs were not only taller than we thought, they were also more than a little prickly.

That night, after the sun went down, we found ourselves in the same revolving situation that seems to plague teenagers who think that their parents double as cruise organizers - nothing to do. Once again, we mentioned the old stand-bys, but we really didn't want to do movies or games. Instead, my daughter suggested we play indoor croquet golf.

See? Kids are stupid. We have hardwoods, for crying out loud, and recent unrelenting North Texas rainstorms have caused something of a foundation problem, which means that the entire house slopes gently from the living room to the kitchen. Indoor croquet golf had to be one of the most inane suggestions ever.

Needless to say, we had a very good time, though we did get stuck in the kitchen a lot.

Summary

Pros:
Physical activity, maybe even outside
Mildly entertaining - almost as much fun as jumping over bushes
Spend time with people who usually annoy you without wanting to club them like baby seals

Cons:
Almost impossibly stupid

0 Party Game Review - Dixit

Before I get to this review, allow me to apologize for being two days late. I had every intention of doing this one on time, but was unexpectedly afflicted with some sort of debilitating illness that required me to be a maximum of thirty feet from a toilet at any given moment. I spent most of my weekend either in bed or in the bathroom, and hoping desperately that my body did not confuse the two. More details, I believe, are not required. Or probably desired. So I'll just jump to the review.


I’m pretty sure recreational drug use is legal in France. I have no actual proof, and have done absolutely no research whatsoever to corroborate my assertion, but I have considerable evidence that it’s true. Exhibit A: Dixit.

In my several years as a game reviewer, I have played some very odd games. There’s one where a retarded, myopic giant gives small children multiple contusions because he thinks they’re fish sticks. Or the one where you have to collect cookies and milk before your opponents can get peace and love, and the rules change every two minutes. And those are odd, and I happen to know for sure that at least one of those is made by people who smoke some serious wacky tobaccy. But for sheer proof-of-stoned weird, I think Dixit takes the cake. It’s also proof that games don’t have to make sense to be fun.

Dixit is basically a family-style party game, but only if you have a small party, because it maxes out at six. This is definitely a case where more means merrier, but you can play with as few as three, if you’re having trouble rounding up gamers with a healthy appreciation of the bizarre. You’ll each get a hand of cards with pictures on them, and each round, you’ll take turns establishing the theme.

If you’re the leader, you’ll pick one of the picture cards in your hand and, without showing it to the rest of the group, say a word or phrase that you associate with that picture. You can even sing or hum or make a sound, if you’re feeling particularly extroverted. Like if you have a picture of the rabbit knight looking at three mismatched doors, you might say, ‘lady and tiger,’ then set your card face down. The other players will each try to pick a card that matches what you said, and that they think will fool everyone else.

This is where it gets weird. All the cards have art - no words or anything, just a seriously psychedelic painting that may or may not be the product of a heroin bender. If they had the kind of art they used to put on pulp magazines, with guns and masked vigilantes and chicks about to fall out of their clothes, that would be one thing. If they had naked girls like you might find on a deck of playing cards you could pick up at a Tijuana gentleman’s club, then it would be awesome, but you couldn’t really play it with your family without giving Child Protective Services a good reason to open an investigation. But instead, they have stuff like horned snails playing football and a night sky full of random letters, and one card where a man made of leaves wanders around black sand dunes. I couldn't make this stuff up - at least, not without illegal narcotics, or at least some a couple bottles of NyQuil.

The scoring is great, though. This is where Dixit quits being Apples to Apples on peyote and turns into a really fun family game. After everyone has picked a card, the leader shuffles them and flips them up so everyone can try to guess which one was his. If you guess right, you get points. If someone guesses your card when you’re not the leader, you get points. The leader gets points for every player who guesses his card, unless everyone gets it, so he can’t make it too easy or he’ll just wind up watching everyone else scoring off his stupidity.

I swear I'm not exaggerating about the oddness of the art on these cards, but at the same time, it is strangely charming. Bright colors on whimsical illustrations give the whole game a sense of wonder that defies logic and linear thinking. The art is crazier than Lyndon LaRouche, but it's a lot of fun to let your mind wander and just come up with stream-of-consciousness ideas that make it all work.

Dixit is not a strategy game, or a tactical game, or a game where the smartest player always wins. It's fun and charming, and it's a great way to spend an evening with your family. Because the art has a childlike break from reality, it is entirely likely that an eight-year-old will beat you, which is kind of important in family games, anyway.

Summary

Pros:
Fun and charming and whimsical
Creativity for everyone
Really cool art
Great family game

Cons:
Clearly, hallucinogenics were involved (that may not be a con, depending on who you ask)

If you can live without all the strategy and maneuvering and tricky plays that make you play all those other games, Dixit is a great game to play with your family. Adults might dig it, too - though they may want to drink first. You can find it here:
http://www.trollandtoad.com/pd2634682.html

0 Event Review - Speech Meet

I once competed in a speech meet, way back when I was in seventh grade. My only category was poetry - I recited 'Casey at the Bat' and won first place, which was, up to that point, my biggest accomplishment yet. I wish I had done something cooler, like Hamlet or maybe Letters to Penthouse, but whatever. Hindsight's 20-20, I guess.

So when my daughter told me she was in a speech meet, I was thrilled. She is an incredible student - far better than I ever was - and she's sharp as a tack, too. She was in two events, storytelling and debate. Neither of us could be bothered to care a lot about storytelling - her speech coach made her sign up, and she couldn't have cared less. But we were both kind of stoked about debate. She wants to be a wealthy lawyer, and I think she's got the chops. She sure as hell knows how to argue with me.

Sadly, speech meets for junior high kids don't seem to be a very big deal in my city. The meet was at a local high school, and was primarily run by the high school debate team. If these debaters are the upcoming politicians and attorneys for our great nation, then God help us all, because these were some stupid, stupid kids. For one thing, they were all wearing the debate team shirts, which were seriously retarded garments. They had a top five list on the back, for crying out loud. I have an idea that's way more original - you could make a shirt that says, 'Got Debate?' on the front, and on the back it could say, 'Debating: Priceless'. Freaking ignorant nerds. Someone ought to beat them with a rubber mallet just for wearing those stupid shirts.

For the first debate challenge, my daughter faced off against a girl who was not only half an hour late, but was also thoroughly unprepared. The entire thing took five minutes, because the other girl (who told the judge she memorized her case) forgot her case. Total deer-in-the-headlights blank. So my daughter, who spent three weeks writing cases, walks away with almost no points. Apparently, debate is unlike sports, where a win is a win - if you clobber the other team 95-0, you still get to put it in the win column. In debate, however, if the other person gives up and walks away, you get only a little bit of win. This came back to make me more angry later in the day.

The second challenge was between my daughter and one of her classmates. In this particular debate, the judge ended the entire session one round early, and then proceeded to tell both contestants that they left off their closing remarks. Well, no kidding, Whiz Kid, you cut them off before they were done. My daughter, however, kicked ass (metaphorically - it's debate, not kickboxing), closing remarks notwithstanding.

The third challenge was even more of a debacle. In this case, the other kid's main argument against my daughter's intensely persuasive contentions was to say, 'yeah, like what?' Sadly, it was at the end of this particular debate that my intestinal difficulty reared its ugly head, and I was forced to make haste to a public restroom at a public high school and was not able to watch my daughter complete the humiliation of the uninspired mama's boy. I was there long enough to note that the judge for this round cut it even shorter than the last one, just not long enough to see the dorky loser boy start crying.

As if to make a bad situation even worse, my daughter (who completely destroyed her opposition in three out of three matches) did not make the semifinals. Why? Because she did not get enough points against the first opponent. Both of her other opponents, on the other hand, did make the semifinals, because my daughter ran them so hard that they were given points for continuing to attempt to counter her brilliant, unrelenting logic (despite failing completely). So to sum up, my daughter prepared for three weeks, executed her debate skills with the brilliance of a military tactician, and two of the three people with whom she mopped classroom floors went on, and she did not.

I can only hope that the debate team process improves as my daughter gets older. As it stands now, I could not be any less impressed. I know that my daughter could rock your face off in a debate - as I said, she does it to me all the time. I'm not just saying this because she's my kid (though that is a completely sufficient reason). If she was a bonehead, I would tell you, because it would be funny. No, she's a damned brilliant kid, and it makes me sick that she wasted her efforts on such a complete circus sideshow.

In fact, that gives me an idea for the next speech meet. Instead of wearing those dumb-ass t-shirts, the high school debate team could wear round red noses and huge shoes, and when they arrive at the school, they could all pile out of a VW Bug. Instead of crappy nachos and dry pizza, the cafeteria could sell peanuts and cotton candy. Because while watching my daughter destroy her competition in a contest of genius was one of the proudest moments I've had in a long time, the debate team at that high school was a circus.

If you get the chance to attend a debate contest when your kid is in high school or college, I'm betting it would be very cool. But if your kid is in junior high, just drop her off and then go spend the day at the batting cages. They serve hot dogs there, too.

Summary

Pros:
Massive pride in watching your kid kick ass
Bonding with your spawn

Cons:
High school debate teams should be competing, not judging

Oh, yeah, one more note - my daughter took third in storytelling.

0 Happy Thanksgiving

I know, you're coming here to read about games (that, or you're entertained by the hijinks of my teenagers). But today, I have something else to share, something that isn't games. It's about...

Yeah, Thanksgiving.

I'm not usually the kind of guy who bothers to follow the crowd with some big holiday cheer announcement. And given how much I despise the Christmas season (I love the actual day, but the season pisses me off - some people would go back in time and kill Hitler, but I would kill Bing Crosby), it may seem a little odd that I would make a special note about this particular holiday, especially since it is almost entirely an artificial holiday.

But I was thinking today, and we're some lucky sons of bitches (and daughters, too - I hate to alienate any female readers who either have no finer sensibilities or who clicked the wrong link and are even now wondering why they haven't closed their browsers and rushed to an eye-cleaning station). If you play games at all, if you hook up with friends or family to enjoy the odd hobby game, or even if you just buy them and put them in your closet, then you are one lucky bastard (unless, like I said, you're a girl. Then you're a lucky something else).

There are literally billions of people in the world (not that you needed me to tell you that), and an immense number of them are hungry today. A staggering number of people will die today, away from their families, left for dead or shot to death or maimed or just dying from dysentery brought on by dirty water and spoiled food. There are mothers missing their kids. There husbands mourning their wives. Today, all over the globe, people are miserable.

But not us. We're sitting here at our computers, surfing the net and checking our email, trying to decide on one more game to add to a stack of games so ponderous that we could sell them all and fund an entire Mexican town for a month. We are thinking about our turkeys, our lasagnas, our steaks. We have so much that we can't even decide how to spend it all. If there has ever been a point where you had to decide between the most recent expansion for Arkham Horror or a used copy of Railroad Tycoon, then you have it damned good.

If you're an American citizen enjoying this site from the comfort of home, then we have even more reasons to be thankful. Because right now, some 20,000 or so of your fellow Americans are on the other side of the globe, in some Godforsaken third-world country, holed up in a tent in the middle of the desert or a cave in a mountainside or some other miserable, rat-infested turdhole, looking forward to wearing body armor while they eat dry-ass turkey and canned cranberries provided by the USO (I was military - even when we got good food, we didn't get good food). And for a lot of those gutsy men and women out there putting their ass on the line so we don't have to, they're grateful for what they have. You should be, too.

And even within the borders of our nation, thousands are going hungry, or enjoying their Thanksgiving feast at a homeless shelter where they're trying to explain to their kids why they had to sell their Hannah Montana bed set along with the house when Daddy lost his job and they had to move into their station wagon. Today, somewhere, there are people hurting, real bad. They're getting kicked out of hospitals because they don't have insurance. They're getting foreclosed because they don't have a job. They're losing their cars, their life savings, and everything they've worked for years to protect. And yet lots of those people, sitting around a cafeteria table and eating Thanksgiving dinner off a plastic tray while surrounded by crazy people who wet themselves and talk to their food, lots of those people are intensely grateful, too. You should be, too.

My point here is not to make you feel bad. I sure as hell don't feel bad. I feel lucky, and humble, and awed by my good fortune - but I don't feel guilty. I've worked for what I have, and while I grant you that I had opportunities others did not, I didn't get here by accident. If you have the money to spend on games, chances are good that you didn't get there because of some random fluke. You may have had chances other people didn't get, and you may have been passed over by the Recession Fairy sprinkling layoff dust all over the country, but just because you got lucky doesn't mean you didn't bust your ass. You shouldn't feel bad for your success, unless you're a giant bag of crap, in which case, go ahead, feel bad.

No, what I want, for myself and for anyone reading this, is to think about what you've got and be grateful for it. If you're usually grumbling about your crappy job and your dirty apartment and your complaining family, give it a rest, just for a day. Today, thank whatever deity you worship for the job that lets you buy a meal, and the apartment that keeps the cold out, and the family who loves you even if they can't stand you. The next time you want to bitch about how lousy you have it, when you see your neighbor driving a better car and you're still driving your '97 Honda POS, be grateful. Change the way you see the world, acknowledge how good you've got it, and quit your bitching. You've got it good.

Now go eat some turkey, and have a good Thanksgiving.

0 Board Game Review - Pandemic

Every now and then I like to share my dream for world peace, so that people know I'm really just an idealist. See, in my perfect world, my idyllic future, terrible disease wipes out humankind until there are only like eight of us left. Terrible disease could be replaced by a zombie apocalypse, but only if the zombies get tired after a couple weeks and go back to their graves, so that those last eight people can get out and use the bathroom.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks about stuff like this. Somebody went and made a game about this peace-on-Earth scenario, only in this one, you're actually trying to stop everybody from going tits up. Go figure.

Pandemic is a cooperative game, which means I at least wanted to try it. I like cooperative games. It's awesome when you can play a game with people you like and get that social interaction and brain-churn as you try to choose the best move, and yet you don't have to make anyone cry. If you're playing with weaker gamers, you don't have to feel guilty about giving it your best shot, and if you're playing with people who takes games too seriously, you can kick them in the wiener and tell them to lighten up, because it's just a game (granted, you can do that with any game you're playing, and probably should).

So in Pandemic, four different diseases are breaking out all over the globe. They probably have terrifying scientific names, but in typical Big Media fashion, they just get colors - red flu, yellow stars, green moons... hold on, that might be a breakfast cereal. Whatever, there are four colored diseases and you have to cure them before the world is consumed by disease and you all die from purple smallpox.

Every player gets a different character, and each character has a different special ability. The key to winning Pandemic comes in using your ability to facilitate better moves for everyone else. One guy can run around the globe setting up research stations so that the other players can move faster, which will help the dispatcher who moves people on his turn instead of theirs, which in turn helps the guy who has to already be in Hong Kong at the start of his turn if he wants to be able to give his research to the scientist, who can then stop the black toe fungus from destroying the Pacific Rim.

You'll wander around the board, trying to get the cards you need to travel faster and cure white acne, working to beat the clock, because if you run out of cards or the diseases get too out of control, you lose. And in the meantime, every turn, you have to do something bad, which generally means a lot more people get sick. Hopefully, as the game progresses, you'll be curing some of those diseases so that they don't end up overtaking North Africa while you're all bouncing around between North American cities trying to figure out how to stop the pink shingles, but at the start, it can be awful hard to keep up with all the outbreaks.

I did mention that I like cooperative games, but they do often come with a considerable downside - the know-it-all, fun-killing jackass. This is where one guy, presumably the guy who believes he is the smartest person at the table, tells everyone else what they need to do on their turns. Pandemic is the absolute worst offender for this syndrome that I have ever played, unfortunately, because to win, you'll need to plan a seriously complicated series of moves five turns out, and then execute them flawlessly. Plus you have all the time you need to make your plans, so you could wind up with one guy saying, 'So if you move to Brazil and trade a yellow to her, and then she moves to Paris and waits, then I can send this other guy to Milan on my turn, which will allow him to treat the brown bunions in London before he picks up the cure to yellow dermititis.' After a full game of being bullied for an hour, everyone else at the table is likely to have their own response, which will sound like this:

'If you get up and go to the refrigerator, then I can kick you in the ass, and she can stab you with a tuning fork, and the other guy can send you screaming to the Hell you so rightly deserve.'

That's not the only downside, either. While I did find Pandemic to be tense and exciting and interesting, it also has an element where you're doing the same thing every time, and just trying to shave one or two cards off your previous attempt. I know a lot of people love this game, but I can't see playing a whole lot of times. After a point, you pretty much understand how the dynamics of the various characters work together, and it's just a matter of time before you're performing by rote memory. My son completely lost interest after two games; I could play a few more times, but I wouldn't be interested in making Pandemic the cornerstone of my game group.

However, if you're able to play with a group of like-minded gamers who understand the game, and you aren't terribly averse to fairly repetitive game play, Pandemic is a remarkably good game. The challenge of planning out multiple actions and complex turns combines with an escalating sense of urgency as the countdown to Armageddon ticks closer, until you're immensely proud of yourselves when you finally cure orange crush and win the game.

I suppose there is one more downside, if you're me - if you all do a great job, you actually prevent my ideal world peace scenario. Humanity makes a comeback, and the next thing you know, the world is afflicted with cell-phone ear and garbage yard, which can only be cured with high explosives and a flamethrower.

Summary

Pros:
Intense, action-packed cooperative game
Every decision matters, and every turn counts
Very flavorful - the theme comes out in spades

Cons:
Huge potential for the Mensa asshole to tell everyone else what to do
Good possibility that it gets repetitive

Pandemic is definitely a fun game, especially if you can get past the potential problems. If you like cooperative games - and can really cooperate, instead of all doing what one mouthy jerk tells you to do - you should go to Dogstar Games and order it. As an added bonus, if you buy it from Dogstar Games, then they'll be all grateful and keep sending me the games you want to see reviewed. You can get it right here:
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/ZMG7021

0 Event Review - Model Train Show

If you want something done right, hire a nerd.

I know that's not the way the saying really goes, but let's face it, for most things, you couldn't do them yourself anyway. If you want your computer fixed properly, you should almost certainly not do it yourself. If you want someone to tell you exactly how much equity you have in your home based on current appraisal value and time value of money, you should probably not try to figure that out on the calculator that came with your cell phone.

And if you want to set up a toy train display that will bring in crowds and impress everyone, you should not leave that to the local craft club that meets at the rotary club on Tuesday nights after the crochet class leaves. Unfortunately, if you go see the trains at the mall, that's what you're likely to see.

Christmas, that most despised and odious time of year, brings out many horrible things, like rude shoppers, crappy parking, and repeated airings of 'Feliz Navidad.' But it does have a great benefit - people break out model train dioramas left and right. These run the gamut from 'holy crap, that crane is actually unloading the cars!' to 'why is that guy's head bigger than the front window of the store next to him?' And of course, Christmas brings out the uninspired, unoriginal, profiteering bastards who put less time into actually creating the spectacle than they put into marketing it for ten-year-olds and hiring moody teenagers to sell tickets.

The mall shows that get all the publicity are frequently publicized by local news stations, who are giddy to tell people about the pathetic train shows because the marketing people are giving a sliver of the money to some nationally known charity that buys hats for bald kids while they're on chemo. If you're trying to decide if the train show is worthwhile, avoid any affiliation with Marines at Ronald MacDonald's Toy Box Christmas Tree. If you see those big-name charities, it's a sure bet the trains will suck.

If you are interested in seeing some great train displays (and I am - I once saw a scale model of the French Quarter that filled a large display hall, and I spent two hours looking in the windows and checking out the inch-tall street walkers), then you need to find nerds. Look for local model train clubs. Especially around this time of the year, these enthusiasts shake off their mantle of secrecy and open their doors to allow the unwashed masses to walk slowly past their thousands of hours of hard work, allowing their preschool children to lean on the plastic retaining walls and pull parts off the scenery. This, of course, causes incredible consternation among the train modelers, but if you're naive enough to think that you can invite seven hundred people to look at your painstaking effort and carefully constructed dioramas and none of them would be rude enough to just break your crap, then you're high. Any place you put more than ten people, someone is a douche bag.

Still and all, if you want to see some examples of careful, cautious, devoted model-train nerdery, you simply cannot beat an enthusiast's club for dedication and attention to detail. Avoid the mall trains entirely - they seem to think that they've built a whole scene if they have a ceramic old man with his dog next to a model car that would bruise his kneecaps if it hit him in a high-speed chase, and put them both next to a caboose built completely from cheap Chinese plastic, decorated with the names of whichever loser family decided to give ten bucks to Angels of Christmas so that every loser stupid enough to get duped into a six-dollar ticket could see that they were an upright and holy family. The mall train sets have no sense of scale. They lack the obsession over detail that marks the true nerd, and thus are less than merely adequate.

On the other hand, if you can handle having very uptight hobbyists staring down their noses at you and slapping the hands of every street urchin who wants to drop his gum into the tiny model creek, you should treat yourself to a real train show. And now is the perfect time of year to do it - especially if you can go while everyone else is at the mall.

0 Board Game Review - Arkham Horror

The more I play cooperative games, the more I see how different they can be. Some cooperative games are like tricky puzzles that everyone tries to solve (like Pandemic), some are trudging exercises in frustration (like Shadows Over Camelot), and some are just exciting, mad-cap romps (like sex). Arkham Horror is another kind of cooperative game, one I'm going to call awesome chaos.

For starters, you can tell this is a Fantasy Flight Game. It's got cards in three sizes - and there are several decks in each size. It's got a big ol' board, and a whole lot of counters, for everything from terror and sanity to health and cash. There's so much stuff in this box that even after I played it once, I wasn't sure what it was all for.

And then there's the theme. A good American-style game should have the theme layered on thick - since this is a Lovecraft horror game, I want to see slimy tentacles and inbred cannibals. And boy howdy, does Arkham Horror deliver on theme. If you pay attention while you play, you can actually see the story developing around you. Even if you lose, you'll have fun, just because you'll feel like you just finished a scary movie. Gates to horrific realms will open in the woods, or the witch house, or in some crazy old man's barn where he keeps the tools he uses to skin people so he can use their buttcheek skin for curtains. And you'll send your Roaring 20's characters running all over Arkham as the town descends into bedlam, shooting monsters and stabbing undead horrors and trying not to go completely insane every time they run up against a monster that looks like a rubber chicken with a face sculpted from soap bubbles.

One complaint I sometimes have with cooperative games is the Lead Dick factor, where one guy tells everyone else what to do because he's got the whole thing planned out and can't see any way that anyone else would want to do anything he doesn't want them to do. Possibly because he's a dick. Arkham Horror does not let the Lead Dick take over, because for one thing, there's too much going on for one guy to track it all, and for another, winning the game doesn't require the kind of obsessive planning that so many other games require. As long as you're not playing like a chump, you've got a reasonably decent chance of closing the gates before Cthulhu steps through and eats you all like crackers with spray cheese.

A good American game needs to have some violence, too, and it needs to feel like an ass-whoopin'. None of this 'discard this item and then flip the card' violence - I want to roll some dice, chuck some lead, and when the bad guy drops, I want to stand over his cooling corpse screaming, 'Yeah! Eat it, Bitch!' And again, Arkham Horror delivers, with an open-ended dice pool mechanic supplemented by spells and weapons that lets players gather power until they're ready to deliver some hot lead justice. And if they lose? They might just go crazy. That is AWESOME.

A good cooperative game needs mounting tension if it's going to be fun, and once again, Arkham Horror hits the sweet spot. At the beginning of the game, the investigators will have a little freedom to run around and pick up guns and spells and magic books made out of human hair, but as the game progresses and the monsters are running amok all over the town, things will get desperate. All manner of rubbery beasties will be rolling through town like a homecoming parade, with the heroes fighting their way through Hellish underworlds, staving off the impending doom with just their guts and firepower.

I've just barely scratched the surface of the awesome factor of Arkham Horror. It's not terribly well organized, and there's no way that a Euro nerd would call it 'elegant', but it's an unreasonable amount of fun. In a market continually saturated with clones and reprints and unoriginal crap, Arkham Horror delivers an amazing story-telling experience and tense game, and delivers it well. There's a reason this game is as popular as it is, and that reason is because it's damned fun.

Summary

Pros:
Great background
Tells a story while you play the game (without having to pretend to be other people)
Excellent action and a building sense of doom
A nearly perfect cooperative game

Cons:
Messy - so many parts, you'll need a box of sandwich bags to put them away

If you like cooperative games (or even just games you can play solo), you should get Arkham Horror, because it's very, very fun. If you're going to buy it, you should get it from Dogstar Games. You can get it cheap, even with shipping, and plus they support Drake's Flames so that I can keep reviewing the stuff you want to read about. Go here and tell 'em I sent you.
http://dogstargames.com/product/FFGVA09

0 Expansion Review - Chaos Isle Expansions

A while back, I reviewed a little card game Chaos Isle. It's a cheesy, campy brawl-fest where you kill zombis (no, I didn't spell it wrong) and try to complete missions. The nice folks who make the game were selling it in a big package at the time, to try to get you to buy everything at once. But they just picked up for distribution, and after the end of the year, you won't be able to get the bundle deal.

So this review is actually a dual-purpose device. First, I'm going to tell you about the expansions in a little more detail, so you know why you want to get the bundle and not just the base game to try it out. And hopefully, I'll also remind you to run right over and buy the bundle, because you won't be able to get it in a few more weeks, and then won't you feel stupid.

The first expansion I'll discuss is Fresh Meat. This expansion is mostly new characters for you to use as you run around the horribly named Chaos Isle and kill things. These characters are interesting, and you get a couple new missions and new equipment, to boot. But really, the reason you want Fresh Meat (beyond the fact that you're a completist) is for the new rules. Now you can play in teams, or for a really wacky variant game, you can just pit a team of zombis against everyone else's zombis and see who can kill the most in a hurry. The best new game style (and in my opinion, the best way to play the game) is Double Mission, where you have to complete two missions before you can win. This balances out some luck factor, and makes the game last a little longer - which is nice, because it's typically over in five minutes otherwise.

The second expansion, Reinforcements, is not what it sounds like it should be. Instead of being more characters, it's actually eight copies of one new zombi, and a couple missions where you have to get the food he's guarding before he destroys all the gasoline and gunpowder you've been stockpiling. I wouldn't say this is a critical expansion, but the new Exterminator zombi is a great new monster to fight. The new game modes are interesting, too - in one, you help Exterminator zombis kill all the other zombis, and in the other one, everyone fights to complete the same mission, instead of everyone having their own.

The final expansion is called The Lunatics, and this one I could have lived without. The characters are all escaped from the looney bin (thus the name), and so now you can play deranged little girls and body-snatching hospital interns. It's not like Chaos Isle is all about good taste, but this is even a little too messed up for me. The additional game modes, on the other hand, are great - cooperative mode is a fantastic way to enjoy the game, especially if you're playing with some fragile ego who cries if you beat her at chess (though why you're playing this horror show with your second-grader, I don't know).

All things considered, if you're going to get Chaos Isle, you should just pull the trigger and get the expansions at the same time. Right now you can save ten bucks and get some cool dice, to boot - but only if you hurry up. You've got until the end of the month, and then this offer expires, and you'll have to pay retail and hope your local game store decides to carry a copy.

Summary

Pros:
More new options for a game that is already fun
New game modes add a ton of replay and flexibility

Cons:
Still the same bad art on the characters (though like I said before, it grows on you)

Here's the link to get the bundle. Get it now, before it's too late:
http://www.realmsmastersgameforge.com/tearmylimbsoffbundle.htm

0 Event Review - Paintball

I am in so much pain.

My son is a teenager, and like any other healthy, red-blooded American adolescent boy, he has an unhealthy fascination with firearms (and matches, but that's a different article completely). He grew up shooting tin cans with his grandfather, and graduated to AirSoft when he hit early puberty. Now that he's taller than most adults, he has decided to upgrade once again. So he wore me down, weekend after weekend, until I agreed to take him to play paintball.

For those of you who don't know about paintball, this is a game where you pretend you are the least bit athletic, and so you run halfway down a field covered with obstacles until a boy who has not yet developed hair on his testicles shoots you with a gun that leaves a huge purple welt on the fleshy part of your belly (and in my case, that leaves a fair amount of targetable area). Then you go to the sideline and watch for five minutes, then you do it again. After a few hours, you will be covered in bruises and welts, your legs will be so wobbly that you will be unable to stand, and you will smell like a wild coyote covered in rancid vegetable oil.

It might seem like I didn't enjoy myself, but I did have a very good time, and now I have to figure out how to do it again (it was expensive, and I don't own any equipment, and I really hate those damned pubescent acne-magnets who show up with their own guns and armored jackets that make it look like they've been sponsored like NASCAR drivers). My kid was crazy about it, which is no surprise, because as I may have mentioned, he likes guns. He got to shoot a lot of people. He is much faster than I am.

I think I would have had much more fun if the park had been organized a little better. For instance, the fields we played were kind of small. In one or two cases, you could actually shoot from one side to the other. For another thing, the only game we played was straight-up deathmatch, where you all go out there and shoot each other until one team is all gone. I wanted to play Capture the Flag, or King of the Hill, or some other game mode invented by kids in the 1950s and stolen by Halo.

Also, beware of parks that don't speed check their guns. The guns we had were so underpowered that you couldn't hit the same place twice, but some hot-shot kids showed up with ammo belts and guns that cost more than a used motorcycle, and their weapons were so over-pressurized that the little plastic bullets could almost send the paint right through a wood plank. Forget about the amount of pain you receive if one of those bullets actually hits you - you may be in a coma for a while. The park should have clocked their weapons to make sure they weren't causing lasting harm to fifth-graders, but since the park was staffed mostly with high-school dropouts and college stoners, they weren't exactly operating on a 'safety first' platform.

Ultimately, I think it would be best to go with a group. It would be fun to plan your attacks, set up screens and flanks and hand signals, and get to gloat furiously when you shoot your buddy in the neck. It's so much more fun to talk trash after a game if you're friends with the guy who scored that hit on your crotch that made you glad you wore a cup. Plus, this should really be approached in a manner similar to playing a board game. You should plan your moves, position your key players, and practice careful and flexible strategy. Paintball should be played as if it were live-action HeroScape, and you just can't do that when you don't even know the names of the burnouts who showed up with guns that are only slightly less painful than actual bullets.

But even if you go to a place like the one we visited, where you check out your gear from a shack that looks like it might have been stolen from the set of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and where there are huge piles of discarded gun barrels in drifts behind the buildings, you can still have a really good time. It's obviously fun to shoot people - that goes without saying. I shot a little kid at a distance great enough that I'm surprised the paint pellet broke, and I shot a really cute girl right in the eye of her facemask, so that she was half blind as she stumbled off the course. That was fun. But even more fun was circling around, dodging behind stuff, calling for help and organizing flanking maneuvers that allowed a couple of scrappy kids and one slightly tubby old man to take out a couple of those wannabe-pro punks. Those gun nerds might have talked crap up until then, but once two of them got sniped by a little dude shorter than an Ewok hiding behind a spare tire, they shut up for a while. It's no fun having to tell your elite paintball buddies wearing armored jumpsuits that you got completely outmatched by a winded, middle-aged man and his cohort in the SpongeBob sweatshirt.

I am seriously in pain. Not just sore - I have some welts and bruises that aren't going to heal in the next few days. Every muscle in my entire body is aching, and reminding me that the most strenuous activity for which I am actually fit is an afternoon nap, and spending three hours crouching, diving, climbing and sprinting is way outside my comfort zone. Yet I would love to put together a small local league, made up of friends who have as little experience and physical conditioning as I do, and play a good, fun game about one Saturday a month.

And next time, it will be someone else who is in so much pain. And, probably, me too.

0 Board Game Review - Robotory

In the future, everything will be smaller. Cell phones will be so small, you'll have to keep them on your key chains - which will be so small, you'll have to have them surgically implanted in your hand. And board games will be so small, you'll be able to fit an entire game in your pocket.

The future is now (please forgive this painfully cheesy and horribly overused cliche. It sounded a lot better than 'You can actually do that now').

Before someone points out the obvious, I do know that there have been games that fit in your pocket for just about as long as there have been pockets, so by the logic I presented in the first paragraph, the future took place a couple centuries ago, and we've been living in Star Wars since the birth of Christ. Having thoroughly mangled my opening, I think we'll just skip right to the review.

Robotory is a very small game (now that you read that boring sentence, do you see why I tried to gussy it up with that stupid 'future is now' gag? I hope so. But inevitably, some humorless tool at BoardGameGeek will tell me that he would rather my reviews were boring and dry, and take offense to me even attempting to be interesting. For that guy, may I suggest you start reading assembly manuals for power tools?).

So yeah, it's small. It comes in a box you could fit in your pocket, unless you wear very tight jeans, in which case I hope you are a girl, because otherwise you're either morbidly obese or a little bit gay. Let's just say it would fit in my pocket, huh? There's a board in this little box, and three robot counters, and a handful of little plastic discs in either black or white. Add in the miniaturized rulebook, and there's still room in the box, despite this being a very small box.

But size isn't everything (at least, that's what we men tell ourselves after we finish watching a porno featuring a man whose main talent is having a dingus he could wrap around his leg). There's a pretty cool little game in this cool little box. It's an abstract, but unlike a whole lot of abstracts (especially European ones - I'm looking at you, Reiner), it doesn't pretend to tell a story. It goes, 'there are these robots, see, and you move them by putting down energy markers', and then it quits trying to crap in a bowl and tell you it's ice cream. It just lets the game be the game.

The robots are three plastic markers that sit on a hex grid. One is white, one is black, and one is red. The black one moves by consuming black markers, the white one eats the white markers, and the red one swings both ways and eats anything it can get. One your turn, you can drop an energy pip, move a robot by following a path of the right energy markers (and then taking them off the board), or replenish your supply of markers. Since you can only do one thing, you have to time each thing, or you'll wind up with no good actions when you really need them. The game ends when you run out of energy markers, after which you check to see who has more robots on their side of the board, and that person wins.

Since Robotory is over in about five to ten minutes, I had the opportunity to test with a variety of players. One player thought it was kind of boring, which I can understand, because it's not like you're going to fit Squad Leader into a box you can put in your pocket (though if you did, I would buy it). Two other players enjoyed it so much that once I taught it to them, they immediately spent an hour playing against each other. It's got a fair amount of hidden strategy, a little bluffing, and a lot of planning. It's kind of like a high-energy version of checkers, so if you like a lot of theme, you're not going to dig the heck out of Robotory.

On the other hand, if you can appreciate a really fast game that allows for plenty of mental exercise and some careful timing, Robotory might be your thing. It's portable and quick, and will only set you back about ten bucks. Plus you can put it in your pocket next to your portable lawnmower and portable dirigible, once those are invented.

Summary

Pros:
Takes about 30 seconds to explain the rules
Surprising depth for a game that finished in five minutes
Small enough to take with you to dinner and play while you're waiting for the appetizer
Doesn't pretend to have a theme

Cons:
No theme
Short game
(Weird how pros can be cons, depending on who you're asking)

Here's a place where you can get Robotory for nine bucks:
http://www.coolstuffinc.com/main_boardGame.php?viewType=view%20board%20games&fp=Acc-ASMRobotory#Robotory%20Board%20Game

0 Tile Game Review - Chromino

I've never been a huge fan of dominoes. That may be linked to the fact that I've hardly played dominoes, but I've played more games of dominoes than I've played Race for the Galaxy, and I like Race for the Galaxy, and I don't like dominoes, so there goes that theory. Mostly, it's that I tend to think they're kind of boring. Maybe I'm missing the strategy in a games of dominoes, but every time I play, I just end up thinking, 'this is stupid. Can we play cards?'

So I confess to not being overly excited about Chromino, because frankly, it looks an awful lot like dominoes. Only instead of having pips, you have colors. And instead of having two sides, you have three blocks on each tile. To place a tile, you have to match at last two colors with tiles that are already on the table.

Now, that sounds like dominoes for retarded kids. 'It's OK if you can't count, junior - you can play this game instead! (unless you're color-blind AND retarded, and then you're just screwed)' How hard can it be to match colored tiles? That's even easier than dominoes, and dominoes is already too easy.

Aha! But it's not that easy! In fact, it's damned clever. It has a lot of the strategy of dominoes (holding onto some pieces because they'll be easier to play later, or blocking moves that force opponents to pick up extra tiles, for instance), but it also has a lot more flexibility. Dominoes tends to make a long twisty snake of tiles, but in Chromino, you end up filling the whole table with this expanding tableau of colored pieces. And because of the way the table fills, there are times when it's more like a game of Tetris than dominoes, because you're having to twist the pieces in your head to see if they'll fit in the narrow gap that will block your opponent from using the wild card tile and dumping his last piece to win the game.

There are also some neat variants in the box, and more stuff online - only to read the stuff online, you have to know a little French, because it's not in the English version. I don't read French, so I'm not sure what's online, and frankly, that pisses me right off. There's this awesome solo puzzle version of Chromino, but you only get one puzzle in the box, and the rest are online, and I can't find them because I'm an American, dammit, and we don't ever bother learning other peoples' languages!

I particularly like the expert rules (those are in the box, and they're in English). We tried a couple games with the basic 'Uno' rules, but when we played with the scoring rules, the game took on a whole new dimension. Rather than simply trying to dump everything in a hurry, now we were looking for big scores, setting up future moves, and maneuvering to force opponents to take losing spots. This is a WAY more interesting game.

The funny thing is that even though Chromino is just dominoes with colors, I really like it, and I really don't like dominoes. A good friend played with us, and he does play dominoes, and he also liked it, so it might be hard to say exactly who would dig this game. Obviously, it's an abstract, so you're not going to be happy if you're a theme whore, and it's very simple, so it's not going to appeal to your average chit-shoving grognard. But it's a great family game, and an excellent choice for holiday get-togethers, since it can be easily enjoyed by your 'normal' aunts and uncles who flew in from their Kentucky farm where they make soap from lye and goat turds, and still think you're weird because you own Arkham Horror.

Summary

Pros:
Easy to learn, fast to play
Great mental challenge that will really get your brain working
Very attractive plastic tiles
Forethought and strategy can make up for a bad hand
Still enough luck of the draw to let Gramma Agnes win a hand even if she forgot her Alzheimer's medication

Cons:
Simplistic and abstracted - may not appeal to 'hardcore' game nerds

Dogstar Games has Chromino, and if you get it, you should get it from them, because they keep me supplied with the games you want to read about. Their support allows me to answer your requests, and I would consider it a personal favor if you would buy your games from them.
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/ASMCHR002