Board Game Review - Entdecker

Sometimes, it's really hard for me to tell whether or not I'm going to like a game until after I play it. I mean, I try to approach every game with an open mind, but usually, I can finish reading the rules and know whether I'm going to love a game or hate it. But every now and then, a game leaves me with no idea whatsoever.Entdecker was like that. It's a game of exploration in a fictional part of the Caribbean, which should make it pretty cool. That's...

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Board Game Review - Bridgetown Races

When I was a young man just out of college, I spent a winter in Portland, Oregon. It was effing cold, was the main thing I remember, and there were a ton of bridges. So I have no problem believing that when the creators of Bridgetown Races needed a city with lots of bridges where they could hold races, Portland was the logical choice. With the Willamette River running right through the middle of the city, they had to put in a buttload of bridges...

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Toy-Slash-Game Review - Broadsides & Boarding Parties

There are gamers for whom a game is only a good game if it's a mental exercise. If they're not stretching their Mensa muscles and proving their intellectual superiority, these gamers cannot have fun (if you ask me, they're probably not that good at having fun, period). For those gamers, I recommend more fiber.For those gamers who, like me, regularly use games as an excuse to play with toys, Hasbro made Broadsides & Boarding Parties. This is a...

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Card Game Review - Botswana

I think I've finally figured out a little something about Doctor Reiner Knizia. I used to wonder what kind of doctor he is. Is he a foot doctor? Is he a neurosurgeon? Or maybe he's just an over-qualified dentist? But I think I have come up with a plausible answer - he's a doctor of environmental studies. Clearly, he understands just how life in the African savanna really works.And to educate those of us who did not know about the circle of life in...

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A Note About Advertising

If you see the little 'Because I'm a Whore' box to the left of the main column, you'll notice three small, square ads. Those are there because I'm a whore. Well, not all of them are explicitly there for whoring, but I'll explain.First, there's Dogstar Games. I talk about these guys all the time, because for the last couple years, they've been hooking me up with the review copies I could never get otherwise. Dozens of the games I've reviewed at Drake's Flames have come from Dogstar, and because I'm a whore for free games, I promote the hell out...

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Humongous Game Review - Battle Masters

A few weeks ago, I was doing a little cleaning in my closet. Way at the back of the closet is a tiny cubbyhole under the stairs. If my house was empty, it would be hard to reach, but I've lived in my house almost ten years, so finding the back of that particular closet consists of wading hip-deep through a decade's worth of discarded exercise equipment and old dog beds. It was herculean, is what I'm trying to say.Anyway, while I was under the stairs,...

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Board Game Review - Guardians of Graxia

If you want evidence that board games are not like video games, you just have to look at Guardians of Graxia. Or, you know, pretty much any other video game, except that in this case, there's a video game and a board game version of the same game. So comparing Grand Theft Auto and Agricola is probably not as good an indicator, though it does make it pretty easy to tell which is not a board game.The video game of Guardians of Graxia is pretty damned...

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Board Game Review - Forbidden Island

Let's say, like me, that you have a child with whom you enjoy playing games. Let's further say that this child is a very bad sport. Let's further say that when you invade this child's home port and steal her resources, she breaks down and cries before assuming a countenance darker than the inside of a cow's asshole, and may or may not slam the door to her bedroom in a fit of rage that makes you wonder if it's possible that she might have been adopted,...

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RPG Review - D&D Gamma World

Roleplaying games have a long, solid tradition of being ridiculous. Hell, just look at D&D - the ludicrous variety of monsters should be enough to tip off any reader that any attempt at reality was thrown out a long time ago, leaving us populating underground lairs with landsharks and floating eyeballs. Not to mention the fact that goblins don't poop, as evidenced by the fact that 90% of dungeons are home to hundreds of goblins, but no toilets.As...

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Event Review - Alcohol Training

You probably know someone who has a lot of stories that start with, 'We were so wasted!' (if you know me, then you definitely do). I have some crazy drunk-man stories from my youth that include drunken brawls, wild strippers and waking up in a bathtub. We even had the paramedics come out one time. Ah, to be a kid again. Given the chance to do it all over, I would definitely not do all that stuff.But with all my incredible tales of alcohol-fueled...

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Some Kind of Game Review - What's My Word?

When I was a kid, I used to love playing a game called Mastermind. It was essentially a logic puzzle, where one person arranges colored pegs behind a screen and the other player makes guesses with colored pegs, and the first player put black and white pegs into holes to tell the second guy which color pegs are right and wrong. There were lots of pegs, I can tell you that. It took five to ten minutes to play a game, and then we would switch sides and try again. My biggest problem was finding someone to play with me, because to my complete surprise,...

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Board Game Review - Venture

I'm not in the habit of reviewing PDF products. For one thing, my printer blows through ink like a crack-head with an eight-ball, and nearly anything you download as a PDF is going to require like fifty pages, which means by the end, my printer will be spitting out blank pages. So I suppose I could take it to Kinkos, but then you still have to put it all together afterward, and now any savings you were hoping to score for buying an electronic game...

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Board Game Review - Crossroads at Dark Lion Pass

I've talked with game designers who are so attached to their projects, it's like the games are their babies. This can be good, because it means designers really take the time to turn their ugly, fat, bawling pile of diaper filler into a useful member of society. And it can be bad, when 'parents' turn a child who might have become an exemplary model of behavior into a disrespectful teenager, who then goes on to spend most of his life in prison.This...

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