Card Game Review - Heroes of Graxia

Petroglyph Games is definitely making a name for themselves in board and card games. I think it's time for them to come up with a good slogan. Believe it or not, I have one they can use:"Games for your head."And when I say, 'games for your head,' what that means is, 'games that make you do more math than a certified public accountant.' The ol' cerebral adding machine is going to get one hell of a workout on any Petroglyph game I've seen so far. Even...

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Card Game Review - Cartouche

One thing I've noticed a lot of big-shot reviewers doing is deliberately inserting stuff into their articles that can be easily quoted. Stuff like, 'fantastic four-player fun' and 'great family entertainment' are easy to stick into a banner ad or something, and then not only do you help sell the game, but your name should be right under the quote. I figured I might try it, if only to try to get a little free press. So the game I've chosen to try...

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Event Review - Cowboy Action Shooting

Cowboy Action Shooting has to be one of the most bizarre events I've attended so far. It's entirely possible that it was more surreal than when we used to go watch the Society for Creative Anachronism people at the park, when they would get dressed up in historically inaccurate armor, swing foam swords, and address each other by fake names such as Lionheart Vineripen and Gronad Bronzeweiner. The difference, when it comes down to brass tacks, is the...

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Card Game Review - Gosu

The craziest thing happened the other day. I played a card game and - this may be hard to believe - it was not a deck building game. Weird, right? It seems you can't swing a dead cat any more without hitting a deck building game. I'm still a little amazed myself.The game is called Gosu. That seems like an odd name, but it's a severely shortened version of 'Goblin Supremacy', which, now that I write it, is still a pretty odd name. You take turns playing...

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Board Game Review - Baltimore & Ohio

There are several things about a board game that tend to earn bad reviews from me. Design an ugly game, and I’m going to tell people. Make me do a bunch of math, and you’re likely to piss me off. Give me a dull-ass theme with arbitrary historical accuracy and no body count, and I might just end up putting your game through a wood chipper just to keep it out of the hands of children who might play it and not realize how important violence is to board...

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Announcement - Noble Knight Games

If you've been reading Drake's Flames for a while, you probably know that Dogstar Games keeps this site stocked up with good stuff. If it weren't for them, we would have run out of games five or six times, just this year. Thanks to Dogstar Games, I've been able to respond to several requests that otherwise would have just gone unanswered because lots of publishers would rather send me a bag of flaming dog crap than a review copy. Many of you have been awesome enough to buy games from them, which has really kept them sending me games, and I totally...

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Card Game Review - Fzzzt!

I once complained at some length about the exclamation point in the game Attack! Since then, I have noticed this increasing trend of putting inappropriate punctuation into game titles. It's not quite epidemic level just yet, but it is getting pretty out of hand. It's bad enough that publishers are not only comfortable using improperly placed punctuation, now they're preceding those errant marks with words that are not actually words.I'm referring,...

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Board Game Review - Panzer General: Russian Assault

About six months ago, I reviewed a game called Panzer General: Allied Assault. I have to spell out the whole name, because even though it's a really long name and anyone referring to the game who isn't selling it in a magazine is going to call it Panzer General or Allied Assault or something, there's a sequel out now called Panzer General: Russian Assault. Yes, that was a really long run-on sentence. And yes, I did that on purpose. My twelfth-grade...

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Event Review - Disc Golf

My kids are teenagers. For those of you not familiar with this malady, one of the main side effects of being a teenager is a secure knowledge that your parents are idiots. So are most adults, with the exception of A) extremely popular musicians, B) any extraordinarily attractive member of the opposite sex (as long as they don't know your parents), and C) the homeless guy who tells stories about Vietnam and carries a knife he made out of a discarded...

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Card Game Review - Yin Yang

There's a great joy in being a game reviewer. It's found at the point that I walk in the door from work and discover a package sitting on the counter, one that my kids brought in when they got home from school, one that contains games I probably never even knew existed. Opening the box is like a mystery present from a distant relative on Christmas morning. Sometimes that relative is my rich uncle who always picks the perfect gift, and I break open...

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Event Review - Another Train Ride

A year ago, I decided to mix things up here and include event reviews in my rotation. It was an attempt on my part to get away from the three-a-week grind of trying to play a near inhuman number of games, and an experiment to see if I could actually go and do something different every week. It worked great for a while - I reviewed whiskey tastings, fashion shows in the mall, geocaching and model train shows. I was out doing all kinds of things.A lot can change in a year.My wife has been getting progressively more ill. Doctors can't tell if she...

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Opening the Floodgates

When I was growing up, I played a hell of a lot of role playing games. I started on D&D, but also played a ludicrous amount of Star Frontiers and Traveller. As I got older, I played lots of Shadowrun and Vampire. Even after I got married, I played Deadlands and Talislanta and a whole heck of a lot of other games.But in the last ten years or so, I've kind of given that up. For one thing, I changed. I think RPGs appeal to people who wish they could be someone else. It's natural for a kid to want to be more powerful, but I think after a point,...

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