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 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 Card Game Review - Dominion

I've played lots of card games in my day. Poker, canasta, bridge, plus stuff like Mille Bornes and Race for the Galaxy and other non-standard card games. Without getting up from my desk, I could list fifty card games I've played, and some of them were really awesome games. I say this so that when I tell you that Dominion is one of the best card games I've ever played, you know I'm not working with a limited frame of reference.

The theory behind Dominion is brilliant. Basically, you're building a deck of cards that you'll use to grab the victory points - and this isn't the preparation, that's the game. You're going to buy a militia to get more money to spend and a moat to protect you from enemy militia. You're going to buy a workshop to get small properties easily, and a market so you can afford the big stuff. Some cards let you draw more cards into your hand, some let you take more actions, and some just screw the hell out of everyone else at the table (those are some of my favorites).

On your turn, you'll have a hand of cards. You fill that hand with cards from your deck, which starts out really small at first and grows as the game progresses. When you run out, you shuffle and draw again from the same pile. You can use action cards to do stuff like get more cards in your hand and have a little more mad money, and you can chain these cards together to have this whole display of extra money and more actions and a hand of cards so big you could buy Paris. And you could just focus on buying those victory points, but that's not a great idea. For one thing, those victory points are completely worthless cards until the end of the game, and for another, the best victory cards are wicked expensive.

What ends up happening is that you'll spend the first two-thirds of the game competing to grab the cool cash-in cards, and then once your deck is a well-oiled machine built to churn money like butter, you'll spend the rest of the game rushing to grab up the victory points before they're all gone. This basic element of the game doesn't change much from game to game - you build up your hand, and then you use it to cash in.

There is, however, a significant part of the game that changes every time you play, and this is because there are like 30 little mini-decks in the box, and you only ever use 10 at a time. So you won't have the adventurer in every game, or the thief, or the throne room, and that means the strategy changes dramatically every game. You'll want to play a whole lot to understand the winning strategy for different combinations of abilities. For instance, if there's a garden and a fair, you can use the fair to get additional buys, which will let you fill your deck with cards, and then buy up the gardens which score more points based on your deck size. Since there are hundreds of possible card sets for any given game, the winner tends to be the guy who can see winning combinations popping up like lesbians at a California liberal arts college.

I absolutely love Dominion, to the point that I would not only never consider trading or selling it, but I'm actually considering blowing off a few reviews so that I have more time to play it. But it's not all wine and roses (or crack and hookers - I don't know what you're into). For one thing, there's supposed to be a theme here, but I was never really feeling it. It's got that European stodgy fantasy thing where throne room politics are more interesting than stabbing people, and there's a minimal amount of interaction (unless you're playing with the screw-yer-buddy cards). Compared to Arctic Scavengers, Dominion's theme feels almost like an afterthought. Why dropping a moat lets you draw more cards is beyond me, and doesn't really fit into any kind of story.

Plus, depending on what cards you're using when you play, Dominion could almost be a solo game where you have to wait for your turn. It's more fun than shooting ill-behaved children with a BB gun, but it can wind up leaving you curious why you need the other people at the table at all. Of course, if you're playing with the guy who always breaks out the attack cards, this is a different story - you'll spend the whole game trying to defend what you're building while you take shots at everyone else.

In a game this good, I don't much care about theme. It's so fun, the theme could be Mister Rogers, and I would recruit homeless people to help me put together the King Friday/red cardigan/McFeely combination. And if you don't like the solo-style game, just make sure you play with the cutthroat cards. Any criticism I might have of Dominion is completely overshadowed by the fact that this is a staggeringly awesome game.

I figure that by now, if you're reading this, you've probably played Dominion, and don't need my opinion to help you decide whether you like it. But if I don't review this one, I can't review Intrigue or Seaside, and since those are coming next week, I figured I better knock this one out. Plus I love this game more than Cinemax soft porn, and really wanted to make some noise about this awesome game.

Summary

Pros:
Incredibly brilliant concept
Simple in design, but layered genius in execution
Requires quick decisions and a good long-term strategy
Really makes you think, and has no pity on the crappy player

Cons:
Theme doesn't work very well
Decent potential to wind up being a four-player solo game

In case you're one of the last eight gamers to decide whether or not you like Dominion, and now you really want to buy a copy, you can run right out to Dogstar Games and pick up a copy. And you should, because they're wicked awesome. Not only do they support this site, but I've had occasion to talk with some customers recently, and Dogstar makes a point of taking care of the people who give 'em money. Here's the link:
http://dogstargames.com/product/RIO370

0 Card Game Review - Tooth & Nail: Factions

It seems odd to me to title a game with a colon in it. Expansions do it all the time, but when Small Box Games calls their game Tooth & Nail: Factions, it sounds like there's another Tooth & Nail out there, maybe Tooth & Nail: Clippings or Tooth & Nail: and Hair. But nope, this is the base game. Of course, it's no stranger than Vampire: The Masquerade (which begs a similar question - is there a Vampire: The Night Out At The Movies or Vampire: The Going To Bed Early?), and that's been around for decades.

Off-beat naming conventions aside, Tooth & Nail is a fascinatingly interesting little game. It comes in a really small box, which makes sense because it's from a company called Small Box Games, thus displaying a remarkable amount of truth in advertising. And not only is the box really small, but the cards inside only fill it about halfway, which means you've got a pretty darn small game. It doesn't seem like there should be much game play with the 200 cards you get, but small packages and all that.

Tooth & Nail features a bunch of cards with animal warriors, like an elephant with a chain gun and a wallaby with a diaper rash. And in an exceptionally complicated twist, they fight. Damage is done as discarded cards, and whoever runs out of cards first loses.



If that doesn't sound like a lot of theme, don't worry about it. This game doesn't have a lot of theme, but it doesn't need a lot of theme. Because what it has is the kind of combo-slinging genius you don't often see outside of collectible games, and it has it in spades.

The game itself is remarkably easy to learn, especially for a Small Box game. You get cards, you get actions, and you can use the actions to play the cards. In your command zone, the cards can be used to get you more cards and more actions, and in the war zone, they can attack. And if they're in your command zone, they can also grant you awesome abilities, which is awesome.

For instance, one vulture card with wires in its head can steal cards from the other guy's deck and add them to yours. One hyena with an uzi can kill wizards (which is interesting, because you would think an uzi would be equally efficient against people who were not wizards). There are Egyptian jackals who yank cards right off the top of the other guy's deck and directly out of the game. There are all manner of awesome abilities, and they work great together.

Another interesting thing about Tooth & Nail is the timing. As in, this came out at almost the same time as Smash-Up, and if you really want to see the game work at it's best, the only good way to play it is by combining decks. Only instead of shuffling together your ninjas with your pirates, you get to throw your African animals in with your Arctic animals to see what happens when they meet up in Munich for a beer and some schnitzel.

This combined-deck mode is called Alliance, and seriously, it's the only way to play. You can learn on the base game, but as soon as you possibly can, you need to mix up the decks. There's a lot of strategy in how you combine your decks, because it will change how you play. You can only use the special ability of one faction, so you have to decide how you're going to use your combined deck to beat the yak hair out of the other guy's water buffalo. One ability might give you insane attack strength but leave your command vulnerable, while the other might give you all kinds of control over your deck or the ability to heal the damage you suffer.

And then when you play, you're going to see combinations so involved that they will literally make your head spin. I'm not being metaphorical or allegorical or prehistorical. Your head will actually spin. Of course, it can only spin like 90 degrees, or you would snap your neck and die, and it's probably only spinning that far if your dog is puking on the love seat and you have to jump up really quick to get her outside before you spend the next two hours shampooing orange barf stains out of the upholstery.

But the combinations really are amazing. In one game we played (and we have played seven so far), the last turn was incredibly crucial. If my wife could do 15 damage - an incredible amount - she would win. Otherwise, her two remaining cards were toast. So she attacked, used a jackal to put the attackers into her deck, used a different jackal to get more cards, used a rat to draw some other cards, used another rat to get two more actions, used her new actions to put more warriors into the fight, and then used her last action to attack one more time. To describe how convoluted and tricky this was would be impossible if you had not played Tooth & Nail, and if you had, you would already be nodding and saying, 'yep, you can totally do that.' And after all the convoluted combo play, she actually managed to destroy a third of my deck in one turn and win the game in a wild upset.

Moments like that, where you see an incredible series of brilliant plays come together to pull off amazing feats, are what gaming is all about (unless it's all about driving cars with guns on the roof, or barbarians smashing goblins with giant swords, or growing a crop and then taking a nap, which only happens in German games). After that last game, with that stunning combination, I was hooked. I don't care if there really is no reason at all for there to be an anthropomorphic walrus. This game could be played with no theme at all, and be absolutely brilliant.

In fact, I don't think I would have minded an absence of theme, if the art was pretty. In an act of arguable irony, the art was done by John Ariosa, who has done several games where his work was fantastic, like Summoner Wars and Mice & Mystics. And yet in Tooth & Nail, he must have been on a really tight deadline, because there were several cards where I said to my wife, 'I think this bird has cerebral palsy.' Lots of the art is thoroughly bitchin', but I ran across a whole bunch of them that were sloppy and awkward. Since Small Box Games is starting to make a real effort to publish gorgeous games, the occasionally unappealing card stood out more than it would have if the game had come from, say, Z-Man, who often specializes in butt-ugly games.

But art aside (and I'm nitpicking like crazy, because most of the art is pretty awesome), Tooth & Nail is one hell of a fun game. It combines all the things I love in a game - strategy, clever plays, planning, sacrifices, decision-making and violence. You can play the base game in fifteen minutes, and the Alliance version in half an hour, and both are pretty damned awesome. I know I recommend a lot of Small Box games, but if you're only going to get one, make it this one. If you like the kind of card play you expect out of Magic, but don't want to spend a paycheck on cards and then throw a third of them away because nobody needs that many land cards, you really ought to check this out. And then you should start an email campaign to John Clowdus and tell him he needs an expansion right now. Tell him to ignore his day job, his family and his personal hygiene and get us more factions, because Tooth & Nail is one you're going to want to play until the cards fall apart in your hands.

Summary

2 players (or more with optional rules)

Pros:
Surprisingly robust
Lots of strategy, starting before you play your first card and ending when one of you is dead
Incredible combinations
A neat but unnecessary theme

Cons:
A few poorly illustrated cards
I want more of this, right away

Being as Small Box Games is a very small company (thus the name), you can only get Tooth & Nail directly from them. And you should, because it's awesome.
http://www.smallboxgames.com/shop.html

0 Card Game Review - Revolver

I think timewaster games are a sad commentary on society. When you can put a game on your phone whose sole purpose is to distract you from the fact that you are doing absolutely nothing whatsoever, and then play it while you wait at the DMV instead of reading a book or something - well, that obviously means something bad. What that might be, I don't know, but it can't be good.

But not everyone agrees with me. In fact, I don't even agree with me, because I have plenty of time-wasting games on my phone. However, some people disagree so much that they decided to go ahead and make a timewaster that you play at the kitchen table. They called it Revolver.

Revolver has a story, and it has a body count, so I should love it. I don't love it, but I liked it OK. It's a fun fifteen minutes that you can sweep into the box when you're done. It plays just long enough to distract you while you wait for your Hot Pockets to finish nuking and then cooling down enough that you can eat them (have you ever bitten into a Hot Pocket right out of the microwave? The name should be a hint, but let's just say that when they say 'hot pocket' they mean 'pocket full of searing magma that will burn right through your tongue').

It's not hard to play Revolver. One guy is the bad guy, and the other guy is the good guy. On your turn, you draw some cards then you play some cards. If the good guy plays better cards, one of the bad guys dies. If the bad guy plays better cards, one of the bad guys still probably dies because the good guy has all these cards that say 'kill a bad guy even if you don't play better cards.' If the good guys can kill sixteen bad guys, they win. If the bad guy can get the gang's leader onto the train and out of the country before he dies, he wins.

There's actually some pretty interesting card play in Revolver, which is nice in a game that takes less time than you need to watch an episode of Robot Chicken. The bad guy will want to save his cards for when they're important, and not squander them when he's almost guaranteed to lose anyway. He'll want to gamble a little, wondering if the good guys can draw cards to beat him, because he might need that gatling gun at the next location. The good guy has basically the same conundrum - send a herd of buffalo through right now, or hold off for later in case the bad guys are hiding the Jackson clan?

But that's about it, really. This is not anything remotely like a complicated game. It doesn't have the depth to be interesting more than two or three times, unless you're playing it because you have absolutely nothing better to do. It's light and fun and people die. For lots of people, that's high praise.

Me, I like a game with some meat on its bones. I want a longer game that makes me think more. I want to get into what I'm doing. I also like to play a game that isn't over before I can finish a beer. But if I am ever looking for a game that I can set up in half a minute and play through before my wife calls us for dinner, I've got Revolver. It's perfect for when I need some way to not notice that I'm doing nothing of value, and I don't have time to actually do something useful.

Summary

2 players

Pros:
Neat art
Incredible body count
Surprising amount of story for a game that ends this fast
A little bit of strategy

Cons:
Finishing quickly is nice if you're having your oil changed, but not as great in a game
Not really very deep, but that's OK because it's over before you notice

If you need a card game designed perfectly to waste fifteen minutes, you should run over to Noble Knight Games and pick up a copy of Revolver.
WASTE YOUR TIME

0 Card Game Review - You Are The Maniac

Today's review is more of a precautionary tale, a sort of How Not To Kickstarter. Unfortunately, given the number of people who are willing to throw money at anything that passes by like a rich kid in a titty bar, this precautionary tale is likely to send the wrong message, because this one is probably going to reach its goal and thereby bring into existence yet another crappy game.

The people creating You Are The MANIAC! (the emphasis, in this case, being absolutely not mine) are doing everything right. If I were going to run a Kickstarter promo to sell a game, I would hire these guys to be in charge. They're showing spiffy art, sending regular press releases, and advertising in all the right places. They did, unfortunately, neglect one thing - they didn't make a good game.

The idea of the game is that you're all horror-movie serial killers, and you're competing to kill the best victims. Harlots and bimbos are worth the most, while cops and well-meaning parents are worth the least. You have weapons and masks and dirty tricks that you can use to make sure you wind up with a better selection of dead bodies than your friends.

Theoretically, this doesn't sound entirely bad. It sounds like bad-taste fun, and I can get behind that. But it falls apart when you play it, because when you play it you realize that someone made a game about killing teenagers in horror movies and they made into a freaking EURO (this time, the emphasis is mine). It's a set-collection game with some minor card play. Worse yet, it's a game with limited interaction, very few real decisions, and too much dorky art.

Yeah, dorky art. The stuff they're showing on the website is A-Game material, but that's not what's on all the cards. Mostly, the pictures of victims are Poser models with a cheesy Photoshop filter. Sometimes that works. Mostly it doesn't. In the case of the fat guy in the jacuzzi with his pants off, it seriously, emphatically doesn't work. Also, most of the athletes look like they would be more comfortable in a pride parade than a spooky cabin. If these football players are chasing tail, it's just an attempt to cover up the fact that they're really in love with the towel boy.

On your turn, you play a card and capture a victim. The cards don't do a whole lot, and it's usually pretty obvious which card would be your best bet. In most cases, you want to play the card that will actually have some effect, as opposed to the ones that won't really do you any good at all. There's no hand management, no sacrificing cards for future effect, no planning ahead or tense decisions.

Then you have weapons and masks, the defining characteristics of the horror movie killer. These identifying traits do... nothing. They add points, and that's it. You don't combine them to make yourself more dangerous. You don't have specific victims who can be more easily defeated with a fireman's axe. Even better, you can swap them out as you play, so you might start off with a hockey mask and a machete and finish the game with a bread knife and a pair of grandma's bifocals. Not real butch there, Freddy.


I would keep writing about all the ways YOU are the MaNiAc!!11! doesn't work (OK, yes, those emphases were mine), but the fact is, it doesn't have enough things working to be a game with multiple things that don't work. It's barely a game at all. It's not fun, it's not interesting, and it's not pretty. If I were stoned all the time and spent my weekends digesting old 70's slasher flicks, I might get a kick out of the game, but I'm not, and I thought it sucked.

I did get an interesting piece of news today, in the form of one of those press releases I discussed earlier. It seems the designers of the game, having read a few pieces of feedback, are changing how the game works. So now I'm reviewing a game that doesn't exist yet in a form that will be changing. If you gave money to this game already, you're not getting what you thought you were getting. And if you're about to give them money now, you don't actually have any idea what you're getting, because they're changing it from the way it is now.

I almost didn't write this review at all. When I read that the game was being changed from the game I played, I almost said, 'well, then, what's the freaking point?' But I wanted to see if there's anything I could do to prevent other people from throwing money at this Kickstarter. For that matter, stop throwing your money at games where you have no idea what you're getting. Quit funding these half-assed productions that could never get published if they had to sell them to actual publishers.

I'm through reviewing Kickstarter games. If your game has not been published, don't send me an unfinished prototype and ask me to take it for a spin. I don't want to play any more vaporware games, no more ill-conceived notions, no more brain farts on cardboard. You Are The Maniac has shown me one thing I needed to know - life is too short to play games this bad.

Summary

Pros:
An interesting and entertaining theme
A couple decent pieces of art

Cons:
A whole lot of crappy pieces of art
An uninteresting and bland game

I'm not linking you to the Kickstarter. Hunt for it, if you're just dying to see the game, but I won't be responsible for driving any more traffic.

0 Card Game Re-Release Review - Sentinels of the Multiverse

The battle had raged for hours. Unity, The Fanatic, Tempest and Absolute Zero had finally found Citizen Dawn and her super-powered followers in the primal jungles of the forgotten land, and the casualties were steep on both sides. Unity had fallen to a pack of blood-hungry velociraptors and Tempest was badly burned by a volcanic river of lava. But now Dawn was badly weakened, and her minions lay defeated all around her. The Fanatic bravely sacrificed herself to deal Dawn a devastating blow, leaving only Absolute Zero to go toe-to-toe with the charismatic leader and channeler of the sun's might.

Both remaining combatants tapped on their last reservoirs of strength, Dawn blasting away at Zero, and Zero in turn smashing at Dawn with icy blasts.

"Surrender!" yelled Absolute Zero, as Dawn stumbled away, careening out of their jungle battleground and onto an open field.

Citizen Dawn pulled herself to her full height, wiped the blood from her eyes, and screamed, "NEVER!!"

Then a T-Rex ate her.

This is what happened the last time I played Sentinels of the Multiverse. Seriously. A dinosaur ate the villain. It was AWESOME. The time before that, a bunch of slightly bored, overpowered heroes threw a beating on Omnitron, the self-aware robot terrorizing Megalopolis. None of those heroes got much more than scrapes and bruises, though. Omnitron was a wimp compared to Citizen Dawn.

These kinds of stories are why I love playing Sentinels of the Multiverse. Unexpected twists, massive superpowered assaults, energy blasts and alien invasions and defiant last stands. This is what you get when you play this game.

If you've been paying attention for a long time, you probably noticed that I already reviewed Sentinels once. I liked it then, but I also had complaints. Too much paper accounting was my biggest beef, but I also had problems keeping track of stuff like damage immunity and power-up punches. And then there was the problem where 20 decks of cards would slide around in the box and get all shuffled up unless you bagged each one separately, and that was a pain in the ass, too.

Well, apparently the guys at Greater Than Games heard me, because they issued a reprint of Sentinels of the Multiverse that fixed every single problem I had with the game. Now it comes with a pile of cardboard counters that will help you remember when you've got a damage bonus, when you're immune to fire damage, and how many hits are on the pterodactyl. These counters make a good game into a great game, by allowing you to just play without forcing you to keep an accounting ledger handy.

Not only that, but now the box has two rows of card slots and dividers, so you can organize the cards and even put bigger cards between the individual decks, making it easy to pull out just the heroes and villains you want, and leave the rest in the box.

(One tiny, tiny problem I have now, and it's the only complaint about the entire game - the card rows are too narrow. I mean, making the box big enough to hold card sleeves might be optional. Making the box big enough to hold the cards themselves - that's pretty much mandatory. But it hasn't been enough of a problem yet to cause me any serious concern, so I only mention the entire complaint within a set of parentheses.)

My original set of Sentinels of the Multiverse was lost in my house fire, so I can't tell you if the actual cards are different. I don't remember for sure that there was a scaling mechanic in the original, but I also don't seem to see as much of a problem playing with three or five heroes. Lots of cards do damage based on the number of heroes, and there are other factors that take into account how many good guys you can put on the table. The more difficult villains will be even more heinous with five heroes, and a little less dangerous with three. Still, having more heroes is going to be easier than fewer, but since the idea behind this game is the story you tell, I'm mostly going to discount any potential scaling issues.

Basically, Sentinels of the Multiverse has gone from a really damned good game to an exceptionally great one. For my money, it's the best superhero game you can buy. I can almost hear the cheesy lines, see the speech balloons full of villainous pontification, and feel the huge capital-letter hay-makers. I love this damned game, and I haven't even busted open the expansions yet.

Summary

2-5 players (may require some players to double up on heroes)

Pros:
Great stories and fun art
New additions to the reprint make it easier and faster to play
The best superhero game you can buy

Cons:
(Box is a little tight)

If you want a fantastic superhero cooperative game, you owe it to yourself to visit the Greater Than Games site and buy yourself a copy. You can thank me later.

(Except you may have to wait a little bit, they keep selling out.)

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/store

0 Card Game Review - Down In Flames: Guns Blazing

We need to start a campaign to stop ugly games. We'll have an online petition and send letters to our state representatives. The petition will be something like, 'We hereby do swear to talk like lawyers as we ask for a law that will make people stop producing ugly games.' This is necessary because there are just too many ugly games out there, and some of them might be fun, except for they are so darn ugly.

Case in point - Down In Flames. It's a card game about WWII airplane fights. It should be basically pretty awesome, because it has a few cool ideas and some neat stuff that could work, except that unfortunately it's just butt ugly. I mean, I've had the game for months and haven't written anything because the game was so unattractive that I didn't have any desire to play it.

The cards could have been cool. They have art on them depicting airplanes shooting at each other, but they look like someone made cheap 3D models and shoved them on top of a Photoshop cloud background. If they had actual awesome art, from awesome artists, you would want to play just because they would look cool. But when even the design elements scream, 'this is a boring game,' it's hard to get motivated to crack the cigarette wrappers and shuffle up a game.

Conceptually, there are cool ideas in this box. There are two things you can rely on Dan Verssen Games to deliver - one, they will be ugly, and two, they will be meticulously researched and developed. The dogfights are short and brutal, with maneuvering and card management and lots of luck when you're drawing cards. Dive or climb? Shake your tail and get clear or jink sideways to get a better position? Fire full out, or spread the attack over a few different trigger pulls? Lots of neat ideas create excellent decision-making conundrums (should that be conundra? Probably).

Unfortunately, if you play this game in its most basic mode - two opposing airplanes in a sky duel - it's not particularly interesting. Sure, there's card play and stuff, but it mostly comes down to being luckier than the other guy. There's a little maneuvering, and a few smart card plays can tilt the balance, but mostly you just hope you get the right cards to keep your ass in your plane and your finger on the trigger. If you only bought this game for the mano-a-mano dogfights, you would be disappointed. Because not only did you get a game that looks like the south end of a north-bound pack mule, but the game itself is kind of on the dull side.

Which is why there are like a hundred planes in the box. Not literally, of course - the printers would be furious, trying to fit all those airplanes into one box. No, they're all on cards. There are fighters and bombers and - well, there are fighters and bombers. That's about what we had in WWII. But there are enough different planes, plus lots of different scenarios, that you can run a complicated bombing run over Germany or a kamikaze attack on an aircraft carrier. You can fly through flak attacks or send whole fighter squadrons after other fighter squadrons. You can even team up, and have British and American planes battling two squadrons of German Luftwaffe.

It's actually a really good thing this advanced play is in the box, because in my book, they were on two strikes with no balls up to this point. The more complicated scenarios are no grand slam, but they're a solid base hit, maybe a double to left field. With this more interesting format, what starts as a dry, ugly dogfight game becomes an involved, strategic, ugly dogfight game.

This is where the game really comes to life. You can build big airborne battles, count victory points, jockey for position, and otherwise play out a really interesting fight in the sky. There are several scenarios to pick from, with their own special rules, and there's no reason you can't play the ones you like more than once. This is really the redeeming feature of Down In Flames, because these big battles introduce a much greater degree of intelligent card play.

If you're looking for a clean, smart, attractive game about airplane battles, this is not the game you've been hunting. It's busy and ugly (though it is smart). DVG makes involved games for people who want to spend some time using their heads, and if that's the kind of dogfight game you want to play, Down In Flames should be just your cup of tea. If they hired a couple really good artists, it would be my cup of tea, too, but as long as the cards make my inner artist want to choke on its own inner vomit, I am not looking forward to the expansion.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros
Some cool dogfighting card play ideas
Exciting theme
A great expanded mode makes for much more interesting aerial battles

Cons
Super ugly
Played as a straight-up two-plane dogfight, it's a little weak

If you want to learn more about Down In Flames, maybe because you prefer ugly things, you can check the DVG site right here:
UGLY PLANES KICKING UGLY PLANE ASS