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 cool. You summon your guys using cards, which you pay for with mana, which you get from controlling land. It's a tactical wargame with a fantasy theme, and it's fun. There are more 3D animations than are strictly needed, and that makes it slower than tectonic plate movement on my computer, but it's a fun game, anyway. You can download it and install it from Gamers Gate, where it will set you back a mere ten dollars.

The board game version is pretty much exactly the same game, but instead of having a computer handle all the math, now you have to do it yourself. It's still fun, as long as you have the patience to do all the adding that the computer was doing for you. Which, unfortunately, means that it's a pain in the ass.

It's still fun, though. You use cardboard tiles to build this big board, with the tiles offset to make a sort of fake hex grid. The tiles have plains and villages and cities and swamps and maybe a little piece of New Orleans that broke off after Katrina. Then you summon your cards onto these tiles and move them the way you would if you were playing a miniatures game, only the cards are the miniatures, and they all have these different abilities that tell you how they fight. Between orcs and dragons, knights and elves, and lots of other refugees from a D&D world, you've got a pretty standard fantasy world, and lots of choices.

But unfortunately, all these guys have to be different, and that means they all have wildly different attack, defense, magic, life, and other stuff you'll have to track as you play. There's an entire board separate from everything else that you use to track all the adding and subtracting, the way you would use an abacus, only not quite as pretty (unless it's an ugly abacus). Here's an example, to let you see how much adding you'll do:

Let's say you start your turn with 35 mana. Then you summon a band of wolf riders, which costs, say, 8 mana, so you move your mana marker down. Then you cast a spell that lets you move that guy, and it costs 7, so you slide your mana counter down again. Then some orc guys move, and they attack, and then you do a bunch of adding and subtracting and playing cards that add and subtract and cost mana and add battle value and reduce the other guy's mana value and maybe add some mana for you and then you play some other cards that add battle value or subtract battle value, only these don't cost mana, but they do make you slide your battle value counter all over, and then you look at the scores and go, 'screw this, let's play Parcheesi.'

As you can see from this example, there's a bit of math. It's not hard, but holy macaroni is there a lot of it. Add 3, then add 2, then subtract 1 and add 3 and a whole lore more, and when you're done, that will be your shoe size minus your age.

If the math doesn't scare you off Guardians of Graxia, it's a pretty damned fun game. It's definitely better than the Panzer General games, because it's not as complicated (which is saying something about the Panzer General games) and it's easier to maneuver on the hex grid. You can even play it solo, if you don't mind keeping track of all that math for both sides. It's got some very nice illustrations, though the graphic designers seem to have been the lowest bidders, and it even has six plastic miniatures that you absolutely never need to use for any reason whatsoever.

On the other hand, if the complicated parts of the game annoy you, and your computer was created in the last two or three years, you might be a lot better off with the PC version. It's fun, it's just as pretty, and the best part is that the computer does the annoying math for you.

So now that I've finished that, let me get a little preachy.

Look, video games are not board games. Board games have to be simpler, because we're not all walking calculators. There are board games that provide just as much tactical depth as the Petroglyph games, but do it with more abstraction and less calculation. I'm fine with a little bonus or penalty here and there, but a good board game designer could have taken Guardians of Graxia (and the Panzer General games at the same time) and created something fun and fast and smart and deep. It doesn't need to be Reiner Knizia simple, but it would be great if these games felt more clean. As it stands, the video games are a blast, because Petroglyph is a video game company, but the board games are sloppy, because Petroglyph is a video game company.

Guardians of Graxia is an entertaining, tactically smart game, no matter the format. The board game certainly makes more sense if you can wade through the math and want to talk about beer selections with your opponent while you play, but if you're really just here for the game, get the PC version and let your computer do the work for you.

Of course, if your computer is as old as mine, it might actually be faster to just play the board game. I'm still waiting to see if I killed the dragon, and I started last Tuesday.

Summary

1 or 2 players

Pros:
Lots of tactical depth
Very cool art (not counting the rather weak graphic design)
Tons of replay factor

Cons:
Math - not hard, but lots of it
Defensive strategies are doomed to failure
A few poor design choices make the game unnecessarily more difficult to play

If you're the kind of person who likes games that make you think, and where playing well means you win more often, Guardians of Graxia might be for you. Noble Knight Games has it:
LUDICROUSLY LONG LINK

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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, even though you were there when she was born.

In this unhappy case, you really need a cooperative game. In a cooperative game, nobody will try to swipe your demon child's sheep, or force her to discard, or destroy her capital city. Everyone teams up against a common foe, which is great because nobody really wants to be around when your unholy spawn has a teenage angst fit after she assumes that you hate her if you manage to build track through her coal-rich mountains. And if you want a quick, tense cooperative game with amazing visual and tactile appeal, you should try Forbidden Island.

In Forbidden Island, the players are a team of adventurers who have just discovered the location of a mystical island. This island holds four wondrous treasures, but it has been booby-trapped by the ancients. As soon as you set down, the island begins to sink beneath the sea, and you must race against time to gather the fabulous treasures and escape with your lives. That's a pretty exciting story, if you ask me. It would make a kick-ass movie. It could star some professional-wrestler-turned-action-movie-icon, and have lots of harrowing scenes of narrow escapes. It might also need naked women (but then, any movie could be better if it had naked women).

The game plays a lot like Pandemic, except that it's not anywhere near as much work. You have to collect cards that match the treasures, travel to the tile where you can swap those cards for the artifact, and then after you get all four, escape to the helicopter pad. And every turn, you're flipping cards that flip the tiles. Flip a tile once, it's flooded. Flip a flooded tile, and it sinks into the ocean forever. Eventually this entire island is going to be underwater. Hopefully John Cena and the naked girl can get off the island first.

Turns go incredibly fast. You'll do three things, draw two treasure cards, then flip some cards to figure out what sinks. At first, the island sinks fairly slow, but it speeds up pretty quick. Happily, you also collect what you need pretty fast, so it works out. In fact, in every game we've played, we were down to the wire. This gorgeous little game plays in fifteen minutes and still manages to get your heart racing, at least for the first half-dozen games.

Forbidden Island became an instant favorite at my house. We've played it five or six times now, and enjoyed the hell out of it every time. By comparison, we played Pandemic twice before I packed it up and shipped it to my father, who I hope has had more fun with it than we did. Many of the mechanics in Forbidden Island can be found in Pandemic - different character abilities that interact with each other, balancing forward progress with the need to slow down the advancing doom, and passing cards between players to get the right sets collected. But where Pandemic requires a great deal of long-term thinking and very careful planning, Forbidden Island plays fast and exciting and a little zany.

Of course, being this similar to Pandemic means that it's also prone to the worst thing about cooperative games - head jackass syndrome, where one person tells everyone else what to do on their turns. Fortunately, we've discovered that if we all just do whatever the daughter tells us, we can still win most of the time, play a family game, and nobody winds up wondering if they will be killed in their sleep. Everybody wins, even if we lose.

I can't emphasize enough how attractive Forbidden Island is. The art is so amazing that I want to visit the place, even if it is about to sink beneath the waves (I especially want to visit if that naked girl is going to be there, but I would probably not survive to the end of the movie. I would end up dying to create tension, and make people wonder how Dwayne Johnson is going to get the naked girl off the island). The treasures are wonderfully sculpted and just plain cool, especially the fire treasure that looks like a Ring Pop.

There's an awful lot to love about Forbidden Island, even if you're not trying to deal with a teenager who hates having to compete. It's light and fast and exciting, with absolutely stunning art and fun pieces. You can pull the game out of the closet, set up and play, all while you're waiting for the pizza guy. The end is down to the wire in most cases, and it scales well regardless of the number of players. It might stale over time, but if it does, give it a couple months and you'll be looking forward to another visit. You and Jesse Venture and a naked girl would have a blast.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
So damned pretty
Tense and fast
Fun cooperative game that you can finish in twenty minutes

Cons:
Might get dull after a few games

If you run over to Noble Knight Games, you can get Forbidden Island for just 14 bucks. That's money well spent, let me tell you.
LONG LINK

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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 you grow up, though, many people start to wander more towards the kinds of serious games that stretch their ability to communicate, pose difficult ethical questions, and kill a much narrower range of victims. There are games I've played that could actually happen. They're rare, but still, they're out there.

Then you have people who go the other way, people who say, 'killing giant purple man-bugs is fine, I suppose, but I wish I could play something a little silly.' Playing blue-skinned elves or bearded midgets is just too damned serious. They want to play plants who look like cockroaches. Those people want to play Gamma World.

The newest version of Gamma World is one of the goofiest things I've ever seen. Cat people who manipulate gravity, giant yetis, and people made out of stone - and those are just the PCs. You can jump right past the militant raccoons and psychotic rabbits, and dwell on the absurdity of the yexil. When I showed a picture of this winged lion with insect manidbles to my son, he asked, in a tone he might have used to ask if the house had turned into a glacial ice cap, 'are those lasers coming out of his eyes?'

Yes, son. They are. Laser eyes.

Gamma World has always stood as one of my most absurd memories of early roleplaying games. The explanation for the setting requires more than a suspension of disbelief. It requires a willingness to leave all logic at the door.

In the year 2012, the Hadron Supercollider managed to seriously screw the pooch. Somehow, it broke the plane of reality and thousands of multiverses were torn asunder, and then slapped back on top of each other so that they all existed in the same place. In many worlds, nuclear war had devastated the planet, and in many others, the Rangers had actually won a World Series. Somehow, all these wacky alternate universes ended up creating Gamma Terra, a world in which a swarm of rats could fuse into a single entity and wear armor made from long underwear and discarded refrigerator magnets.

It should go without saying that the roleplaying experience in Gamma World is not intended to be particularly deep. You walk into a room and kill every mutant badger and four-foot mosquito you can see, then root through their belongings for anything that aliens might have created. It's actually more shallow than Dungeons and Dragons. However, if you can go into the game with a sense of humor, it is entirely possible to have a good time.

The rules are very easy. Since this is technically D&D Gamma World, it uses the basic rules from 4th Edition, but stripped down for quick access. Instead of a 300 page tome with at least 30 pages of tables and charts, the actual rules for playing the game are about 80 pages. There are no core rules, players guides, or monster manuals. There is one book, and it's easy to read, with lots and lots of pictures. In case you're not familiar with D&D, the system is very easy - add up your bonuses, roll a d20, and see if you hit. But instead of just beating armor class, you might have to overcome fortitude or reflex or will, mostly because most everyone has some bizarre mutation that can melt minds, or create gravity wells, or shoot ice cubes like a drink dispenser in a fast food restaurant.

Another separation from rational thought occurs when you examine the way these mutations come and go. The players have access to mutations that might be there one minute and gone the next. One day you have poisonous claws, and the next you can see in the dark. This is made possible thanks to the alpha mutation cards, a deck that comes in the box, and at regular intervals, players discard the ones they have and pull more. There's also a deck of omega tech, stuff made by aliens and futuristic civilizations and maybe that nerdy guy from the James Bond movies, and players can draw these every now and then, too.

If I had one real beef with Gamma World, it would be these cards. See, players can create their own decks, so they have more control over what they're drawing, but only if they go out and buy booster packs of overpriced cards. That's right, it's a roleplaying game that wants you to do some blind purchase, CCG style. That stinks, if you ask me. What really stinks is that some of the booster cards are really cool - the base set might give you the ability to find a lost sock in an empty dryer, where the booster cards allow you to manipulate time and space to turn some mutant swine into a throw pillow. If you really want to build a great deck of alpha mutations for yourself, you have to go drop a bunch of money on these cards.

On the other hand, in a game with all the seriousness of clowns getting out of a VW Bug, the two decks of cards do make for some wacky fun. When you finally defeat the rabid rose bush and get to search the planter, it's a great reward to get to pull a couple pieces of bizarre super-tech that will let you turn brains into tapioca or start levitating around the room. But to my surprise, the part my kids liked the most was the ancient trash.

A rather long table gives 100 pieces of discarded crap that players might find, and my kids willingly jumped right past the omega tech cards for a chance to score a box of cake mix or an electric razor. They would forfeit all the really great treasure for a few rolls on this random chart of stupid crap, and some of it, they even used. My son found a stocking cap, for example, which he pulled over the camera sensors of a death-dealing robot, causing it to veer out of control and crash into a huge piece of machinery, creating a massive fireball of destruction. And he was then disappointed to have lost the hat.

It helps considerably that the box comes with eight different scenario maps, with are all used in the sample adventure at the back of the rules. The game also comes with a bunch of flat counters to represent all the monsters in the rules, which makes running battles that much more entertaining. The character sheets practically walk you through rolling up a hero, and all in all, this is just a really easy game to play.

Unfortunately, it also appears to be almost completely unsupported. As is almost always the case with Wizards of the Coast, they pour copious resources into D&D and Magic, leaving just about everything else to thrash around a while before dying an early death. The only support material for Gamma World that you can even buy right now are the booster packs of cards. There are a couple expansions planned, recreating a couple of the classic modules from way back in the day, but I can't get them now. And a game this completely goofy is not inspiring me to create my own adventures, so I fear we won't be playing it again until Famine in Far-Go hits the street.

I can't really bash Gamma World for being stupid. It's like complaining about Vegas having too much gambling or NASCAR having too many car wrecks. If you're hoping to get something out of Gamma World besides pure dopey fun, you have chosen the wrong game. But if you can just unplug the part of your brain that keeps you from having a conversation with your toaster, Gamma World is easy to play and a goofy good time.

Summary

Pros:
Silly good times
Easy to learn and play
Wicked cool art
Lots of extras in a great boxed set

Cons:
Completely absurd, which is only a con if you're not a fan of absurdity
Collectible cards make Baby Jesus cry

OK, here's the deal. Noble Knight Games sends me products to review. Without them, I never could have reviewed this game, for instance. But this whole thing only works if they see a little payback for it, so if you want to support Drake's Flames, you don't need to send money or go chasing click-throughs. All you have to do is, if you're going to buy Gamma World, go buy it from them:
SUPER LONG LINK

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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 stupidity, not one ever included police watching over us and driving us home. Any time our stories did include police, it was generally because the party had reached critical mass and the neighbors were complaining. That, or someone was outside naked.

All that changed last weekend, when I was invited to participate in alcohol training. See, the local police academy has to teach cadets how to perform field sobriety tests and spot drunk people, and to do that, they need real live drunks. Obviously, it was important for me to do my civic duty and help out my local police force.

What followed was one of the greatest parties I have ever attended.

A police cadet met us at my house and drove us to the training center. It seems that after the police get you drunk, they would rather you did not drive home. So our cadet friend was our designated driver. The rest of us were designated drinkers. Really, that's what the instructors called us for the rest of the evening - drinkers. Nice of them not to call us drunks, if you ask me.

We were given a choice of poison at the door. Sadly, the only beer available was Coors Light, and I would almost rather drink my own urine than a Coors Light, so I decided I would be drinking whiskey. Which, also sadly, was Crown Royal. Still better than Coors Light, though.

The head cop told us that we would be asked to drink four drinks in the next two hours, with pizza halfway through. I scoffed initially - four shots of whiskey is how I get through Christmas morning. But when they poured the first glass into a little plastic cup, and it was at least three fingers deep, my scoffing turned into mild panic. Four glasses like this were a sure indicator of a powerful hangover, and a potentially felonious evening.

I very seldom get drunk at all any more. One thing I learned from years of consumption is that when you put 26 drunks in one place, you're virtually guaranteed to see someone lose a tooth. But when the police are monitoring your alcohol intake and strictly cutting off everyone as soon as they are thoroughly smashed, you avoid that part of the night when everyone slides into 'mean drunk' mode. And when you know that taking a swing - even a sloshed 'didn't mean it' half-punch - is likely to get you slide-tackled and handcuffed, you're all likely to be a jolly band of drunks.

Having a half dozen police officers watching over you as you slide rapidly into inebriation has a very calming effect on a party. We still laughed too loud, yelled happily at people only three feet away, danced to very loud music and otherwise carried on like a bunch of hammered frat boys. By the time they served me that last huge glass of Crown, I was completely sideways. But where the potential for idiotic bloodshed would normally be about DEFCON 4, all those police just made sure we had a good time. All we really needed was babysitters!

After two hours of revelry and a whole hell of a lot of booze, it was time for the testing. I figured the party was winding down, which was a shame because I was just getting started. I could have been rowdy and stupid for at least another two hours, but now I had to pretend I was sober and try to convince the cadets that I was safe to drive. But the testing was nearly as much fun as the drinking, as we joked and laughed and rode our buzzes for another hour and a half.

The cadets were very good sports. I know I was irritating. I had to be. I don't really remember anything I said, exactly, though I do know I was able to do my ABCs backwards. I also remember that, when they told me to tilt my head back and close my eyes, I told one of the cadets to stand behind me, because I was virtually certain to fall down. When one group asked if I would do some tests for them, I remember saying something like, 'maybe we could just skip to the part where you put handcuffs on me and let me sleep in the back of your squad car?'

The ride home was jolly, rowdy and fun, though I doubt that our cadet friend had as much fun as I did. I was in a terrific mood, but then, I was completely trashed. I went home and ate another half a pizza, drank two gallons of water, and went to bed.

As much fun as I had, I don't know that I would do it again. It was a fantastic party, and I had a blast, but that morning I woke up in some serious pain. I hate to think how much it would have hurt if I hadn't instinctively slammed a couple milk jugs of water (a lesson learned most painfully from a misspent youth). I still slept until almost noon (though for most of it, I was not sleeping, I was passed out. There is most certainly a difference, as any seasoned drunk can attest), and then woke up with a hankering for greasy food and Ibuprofen.

Alcohol training is the kind of thing I recommend you do at least once. If you're a real fan of drinking heavily, it's a cheap way to get a killer buzz, and the cops keep all the stupid to a minimum. It's safe and fun and free - but you'll pay for it in the morning.

Summary

Pros:
Get trashed for free
Cops keep you safe while you get hammered
Good clean fun
About the only time the police will thank you for getting drunk

Cons:
Really crappy booze selection
The hangover might be a bitch

If you want to know more about alcohol training... good luck. I only found out about it because my friend knows a cadet. But it's worth investigating, if you're a fan of the devil's drink.

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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, a shockingly low number of ten-year-olds want to do logic puzzles when they could be digging in a sandbox to find raccoon turds.

Then last week I got a game called What's My Word?, and it looked an awful lot like Mastermind, only instead of colored pegs, you used words, and instead of five minutes, it will take you half an hour, and instead of being a pretty simple game if you can use your head, it makes your mind sweat until you pop a blood clot. You don't have to be particularly good with words. You just have to be really, really smart.

The game consists completely of two binders full of scoring sheets. You each come up with a six-letter word and hide it under your screen, then take turns using words to try to guess the letters in your opponent's word. You use logic and a little creativity to work through letters and words, and after a little while, you stop because you need a Midol for the skull pain.

The rules are incredibly simple - say your word, write it down, and score points based on whether you have the right letters, and whether they're in the right place. Since you can win even if you don't guess your opponent's word, smart play isn't always the move that gets you closer to the answer. But simple rules don't mean a simple game, and if you're not ready for some serious mental calisthenics, you may not be smart enough for this game.

The reason this is so much harder than Mastermind is because where Mastermind had just a handful of colors, there are 26 letters in the alphabet, and you're going to need to find just six of them that work. Then there's the fact that in order to guess, you actually have to come up with a word. No fair guessing 'imprgh' just because you know the I, M and P are in the right place. You'll sit studying your sheet for two or three minutes, brow furrowed in concentration as you try to find a word that uses V, B and N, with A as the second letter, just because you're trying to eliminate V and you know your word has B and N in there somewhere.

I loved What's My Word?. I like logic puzzles, and I like word games, so this was a blast. But if you don't particularly care for the kinds of intellectual fat-burning exercises that make your cerebral cortex melt into a bowl of noodle soup, it's not going to appeal to you at all. On the other hand, it's very likely to appeal to non-gamers who just like word games. You know, like your grandma who blows through the New York Times crossword every morning but still can't figure out DVR Matlock.

So now that I'm grown up, the only problem I have with What's My Word? is finding someone to play with me. Cruel fate has deemed that, like most children, adults are rarely interested in flame-broiling their brains when they could just let them reduce to a jello-like mush by watching reality television.

Summary

Pros:
Seriously fun mental gymnastics
Creative and smart at the same time
Rules are easy to understand

Cons:
Holy sweet Mother of Pearl, this is hard

I can't find pictures of the box for this game, and I can't find anyone selling it. Check out the Eagle Games site, and see if you can find it there:
http://www.eaglegames.net

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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 are chewed up in glue sticks and printing expenses. Plus, if your time is worth more than four bucks an hour, PDF games usually set you back a couple hundred dollars in lost wages.

But then I saw Venture, and I knew that I was going to have to ask for a review copy, even though it was just going to be a download link. Hell, it's a dungeon crawl, and you can almost always sell me a dungeon crawl, even if I have to put the bastard together myself. Plus the art really sells it. Call me a snob if you want, but when a game has good art, it tells me that the publisher has put some effort into his product. Sure, there are ugly games that are fun, and pretty games that suck, but I like to think of those as statistical outliers. And when a game is a dungeon crawl, the art is especially important, because good art sells a theme better than the rules ever can.

So I bit the bullet, got a copy of Venture, and printed it out. Then I built it. This was not a simple process, as there are what seems to be a completely unnecessary number of paper figures to assemble. I mean there are lots and lots of them. Which is cool, I guess, but after a while, you start to wonder if you're ever really going to need a dozen orcs. Most of the rooms aren't even big enough to hold that many. But I soldiered through and finished. I mounted the boards on foam core, and glued all the doors and figures together, and cut out all the cards and stuck them in sleeves. There's even a nice, big piece of cover art that you can put on a box to hold all this stuff (I bought a jigsaw puzzle at a thrift store, threw out the puzzle, and redecorated the box. It works great, but my garbage man probably thinks I totally suck at jigsaw puzzles).

When the game was assembled, I was quite impressed with what I had built. The figures are pretty darn nice, for being paper miniatures. The boards are attractive and easy to play. The doors are cool, the cardstock furniture is swanky, and the cards all have pretty slick art. The rules are attractive, too, and they make sense right out of the gate. Combat and movement are simple, and most monsters are basically just collections of stats, which makes them pretty simple to set up and knock down.

Which is, at first, exactly what you'll do. Most of the monsters are meant to be slightly more challenging than wet toilet paper. If they get super lucky, they might give you a black eye before they fall, but usually, they're really just there to wear you down a little before things get all gnarly - which they do when you finally find the big bad guy. Because then the mean ol' beastie can actually kill you, and if you're not careful, he does. Even the ogre in the introductory adventure can stomp a mudhole in at least one of the heroes before he goes down.

Venture is not a cooperative game. I would say that the optimal player choice is two people, where one person runs the heroes and the other runs the bad guys. This is basically a HeroQuest clone, so one guy is doing everything he can to murderize a group of heroes, and the other player is tromping around performing unpleasant home invasions and stealing everything that isn't nailed down.

A few elements of Venture were cooler than HeroQuest. For instance, the campaign mode allows players to get the sense that they're improving over time, as opposed to HeroQuest, where you're essentially stuck as first-level goobers and your only improvements are better weapons. Also, Venture's rooms and corridors open up a lot wider, which does away with the problem I always had in HeroQuest, where the barbarian can't get to the gargoyle because the dwarf is in the way, and the wizard is stuck next to the chaos knight because the elf has him boxed in. There's a lot more room to maneuver in Venture, which I personally find exceptionally refreshing.

I also really liked the way the heroes get treasure, and how the bad guys get more powerful if the heroes dick around too much. Every now and then, the monster player will get to draw a card from the 'sweet powers for evil' deck, and this happens even more if the heroes drag their feet. Rush right for the bad guy, and you miss out on all the good treasure, but explore every corner, and the end boss is likely to get too tough to beat.

Unfortunately, as pretty as my Venture game is now, it's still got nothing on the visual appeal of HeroQuest. I love those little plastic miniatures, and the dungeon decorations really add flavor, even if they do clutter up the board even more. Plus it's a lot easier to run a battle using plastic figures, because the paper minis have a tendency to scatter every time someone at the table exhales loudly. So if you buy Venture, consider not assembling the miniatures at all, and just use some D&D prepaints.

Venture comes with enough adventures to keep you busy for a while, but if you like the game, you're going to run out eventually. But there's good news - the publisher has several free adventures available at the site, and even better, they've got an actual expansion cooking. Personally, I'm looking forward to it, and plan to buy it when it's available, and I plan to play all the free scenarios while I wait.

Venture still has one huge hurdle to jump - you have to build it if you want it. I would be thrilled to pay a lot more for the same game full of plastic miniatures and premounted playing boards, but that's not likely to happen. There's a small company who will build you the game for another $65, but it's still not the same as having figures instead of paper standups. Still, if a download is the only way to get this easy-but-entertaining dungeon crawler, I'll suck it up and drain my printer.

I just have to wait until payday. Ink cartridges aren't free.

Summary

2-5 players... but 2 is best

Pros
Super easy rules
Still enough depth and dungeon crawl to be entertaining
Very cool art
Well supported with a good amount of expansion material

Cons:
You have to print it yourself - and then you have to build it
Paper minis are a pain in my ass

If you like dungeon crawl games, you're probably going to dig the hell out of Venture. If you're cool with building it yourself, you really should run over and get yourself a copy:
http://0onegames.com/catalog/index.php?manufacturers_id=20

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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 thought occurred to me when I was playing Crossroads at Dark Lion Pass, though I keep having to go back and remind myself what the damned thing is called. Couldn't give it a catchy title, could you? No, you have to go and name your kid something as ridiculous as A'paul-o or Vulva. Seriously, I've seen both of those. The kids are practically destined to come out warped.

And the reason I thought of bad game designers screwing up perfectly good youngsters is because Crossroads at... whatever the hell it is... shows a whole lot of promise. It scored pretty well on the standardized tests, and was able to memorize the entire monologue for the Christmas play. But then the game designer screwed it up, and now the kid is bouncing between military schools and playing with matches.

The idea of Crossroads is that you have a team of adventurers moving through the countryside and overcoming obstacles to finish the big quest. Players will take on the roles of those characters as they battle brutally ugly monsters and win oddly pointless treasure. The player with the most experience at the end of the game is the winner. Since I very much enjoy adventure games, this shows a lot of promise.

But there are so many things the designer did wrong. Starting with the art and proceeding to the ludicrously messy arithmetic (but not ending there), this promising and potentially entertaining game ended up smoking weed and hanging out behind the gas station on school nights. Even worse, the fun parts of the game are buried underneath laughably horrible art and staggering piles of completely unnecessary math.

The ideas are so good. You'll compete for the experience you need to advance, with players gaining more points for doing more damage. The first few monsters will probably kick your asses, but eventually you'll learn enough to face down the meanest boogers with little more than a scratch. By the end of the game, you'll be juggernauts of violent power, with magic weapons and incredible abilities and powerful card combinations. So far, Little Johnny is practically an honor student.

One moderately neat feature is that you won't automatically play the same guy every time. Each time you start a quest, you'll bid for the chance to pick the character you want. If you've spent all your experience buffing out the fighter and someone grabs him first, you might find yourself with a really weak bard as your only option (let's face it, bards are like leftover D&D characters). You may have to balance your character growth to have a good chance with all the characters.

There's an awesome card management system where you try to get good combos, and you have to discard some cards to move the party forward. This works pretty well, and has you trying to decide between one more step towards the goal versus the healing spell you need to stay alive for a few more fights. You'll need to maximize one color card, but you have to be careful because that can backfire if you wind up playing the wizard when you have all the cards for the thief. Little Johnny looks like he might just graduate sixth grade, after all.

But when you introduce the ridiculous experience system, Johnny starts shooting heroin and selling stolen car stereos out of a van. First, monsters have hit points based on the number of players, like 14 per player. So if there are four players, just multiply 14 by 4. If there are 6, it's 14 times 6. I could tell you what that is, but I don't have a calculator handy (that's a lie. I'm on a computer. I just don't feel like looking it up). Then every point of damage you do earns you 10 experience points, which means if you do 22 points of damage, you get 220 points (I can multiply by 10 just fine) and then subtract those 22 from the monster's total, which is whatever you got when did that multiplying from before. You'll need to be writing this down.

To really get Johnny hooked on cheap whores, you need 100 points to get a level, and if you have less than 100 leftover, you just record it in the little box on your disposable character sheet. So now you have pen-and-paper accounting in a game about killing stuff. Happily, you can use the back side of this sheet to keep track of the monster's life, which is great because you'll need some place to do all the irritating amounts of math that you probably can't manage in your head.

And then it gets really bad when the alternating character system falls apart. It's a cool concept, but eventually, people are going to dump their points and focus their cards into particular characters. If you do this, everyone else would be wise to do the same, and then you're all basically playing the same guys for the whole game anyway. The whole character-swapping system is almost entirely ruined because the smartest way to play is to do away with it in the first place.

The movement mechanic seems like it should be pretty cool, with players trying to steer the movement to get experience for their own characters, but it ends up feeling a little silly. You just play out this pointless dot-to-dot exercise, and nothing happens until you get to a quest. If this were a cooperative game, players would be steering towards the places that benefit the group, and actually having to make some tough calls after a little discussion. Instead, some people just get hosed. Better break out the bail money - Johnny is hot-wiring cars again.

As if the rest of this sloppy, underdeveloped game weren't bad enough already, the graphic designer for this game must have been completely blind. The art, for lack of a better word, is completely horrible. Some of it is crudely drawn on a computer, and the rest is cribbed right out of clip art collections and manipulated to be more ugly. Seriously. I'm not making that up. In more than one case, they would have been better off just using the picture they got in the first place, and not messing with it. Pictures are stretched, filtered, poorly clipped and otherwise mutilated. The image for the Back Stab card shows a naked man coming uncomfortably close to a horse's behind. Now Johnny appears to be sexually assaulting the neighbor's pets.

The end result of all the bad decisions that went into Crossroads at Dark Lion Pass is a game that is barely enjoyable, and almost unplayable. You can see the promise this game had at the start, but it crumbles to cigarette ashes at the club-fisted hands of the designer who thought he was finishing it. I would hate to have my name attached to anything related to this game, outside of a review telling you not to buy it, and I can promise you I won't be playing it again. I'm not a big fan of recalcitrant youths in real life, and games that make me think of teenage burnouts are definitely on my 'to be avoided' list.

With a little luck, this game will go to prison and find Jesus. Then it can come out and be a productive member of society. It will need a mentor to guide it, groom it, and for God's sake, get rid of all that clumsy math.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
So much promise
Neat premise

Cons:
Hilariously awful visuals
Buckets of needless math
Disposable accounting ledgers double as character sheets
Steals from convenience stores and swears at nuns

Here's a warning. Keep your kids off drugs, and don't let them play Crossroads at Dark Lion Pass, or they might turn out like this:
http://listverse.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lindsey-lohan-drunk.jpg.jpeg

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