Punishment Game Review - The Board Game Geek Game

[Usually, there would be a picture here. However, when I went to get one, the publisher's website was down for maintenance. Again.]

My group's punishment week consisted of two games that sucked. The first was Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, which wins the award for the stupidest name in the last five reviews (I'm sure there are names dumber than that, which I could probably find if I looked in my archives, but I can't be bothered). The second was the eyesore called The Board Game Geek Game.

First off, I know why it was done, but the name bothers me. Not as much as Escape from the Aliens Who Want To Eat You on a Spaceship in Outer Space, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I suppose there were not a lot of options for the title, and it could have been worse. The Board Game Geek Board Game would be worse, for example. Or The Board Game Geek Game for Geeks. Or The Geeky Game for Board Gamers Who Escape From Board Game Geek... dot com.

But the name is the least of the problems with this game (note that, unlike the last title, which I repeated repeatedly merely to emphasize its silliness, this time I intend to abbreviate or avoid the title whenever possible). Possibly the biggest detractor for The BGG Game is how much it hurts your eyes to look at the box. The graphic designer for this game obviously wanted to cram the maximum number of games onto every square inch of the box and the board, and wound up with a hodge podge of visual imagery that resembles nothing so much as a pile of vomit that came out of your eyes.

But a redundant name and the visual cacophony of the board and box don't have to instantly indicate a horrible game. And in all fairness, the game that you play with this mess is more or less sound. It's not terribly interesting, and the theme (which, again, probably could not be helped) is about as fascinating as categorizing the spice cabinet, but it works OK, if you like the kinds of games that tend to come with wooden cubes representing produce.

Each turn, players will represent publishers selling games, and then gamers buying those games. You'll take turns placing your games in stores, and then send your shoppers out to procure games that your competitors put in stores. You'll give points to your opponents if you buy their games, but you can also earn big points if you collect the right sets, so you'll be buying games even if they score for the other guys. This is actually a pretty clever mechanic, since you can earn almost as much money selling games as scoring sets.

There's also a good amount of tactical placement, planning and strategy. When you send your shoppers out into the market, you can pay a little to rearrange them in order to procure just the games you want. If you work hard at getting the cheaper games, you'll out-score your opponents when you finish sets, but you can also score big by making your high-dollar games more attractive to the consumers. If this sounds like the kind of business planning you might find in a conference room meeting with stale coffee and dry donuts, that's because it is. It's good practice for the mental adding machine, but it's not much more interesting than giving a presentation on retail returns over the Labor Day weekend.

I can't fault the actual game play in The BGG Game, because it works. What I can fault, however, is how boring it is to play. These mechanics could have been dusted off half a dozen other games and cobbled together with wood glue and rubber bands. There's nothing new here, nothing innovative, and nothing particularly interesting. You'll play six rounds of selling and buying, then check to see who has the best collections. This is followed by a few minutes of calculator-inducing math, and then promptly sweeping everything into the box to make it go away.

When the creators of the world's most popular board game site decided to make a game, they probably hoped it would be a huge hit. Hell, nobody creates a game and says, 'Man, I hope in a few years to have enough copies of this game in my garage that I'll give it away as door prizes!' But that's exactly what happened, because it turns out mixing a sub-average game with graphics that will make you bleed from the eye sockets is the recipe for a game that people don't want very badly. When you add in a theme that combines the worst parts of droning business meetings and online grocery shopping, you wind up with a U-Stor-It closet full to the roof with unwanted cardboard.

It's kind of a shame that with all the resources available, the result was such a mediocre game. Some of the world's most prolific and brilliant game designers regularly visit Board Game Geek, and it would seem like if anyone had access to the best and brightest, it would be the BGG guys. I have to wonder if the artist they hired was a volunteer, because he never would have made it in any studio where I ever worked. I pretty much have to excuse the name and the theme, regardless of how little I might like them, but the repetitive play and horrible art are fair game.

I'll tell you one thing, though. Having played a game based on a website, and having seen that it's possible (even if it's not a good idea), I'm considering making the Drake's Flames Board Game. In this game, you'll take the role of a foul-mouthed poser with a crappy day job who makes jokes about hookers with cerebral palsy and then pretends to be much cooler than he really is. You'll pretend to be a total industry insider who knows a lot about games, when you're really just a nerd who can tell a dick joke.

I'll probably sell about seven copies, and wind up sticking the other 993 in my attic.

Summary

3-6 players

Pros:
The game play works, even if it is boring

Cons:
Rehashed game mechanics
Boring
Art like a fork in the retina

If you want a copy of The Board Game Geek Board Game for Geeks, just show up at a convention. They'll give you one.

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Pieces of Paper Game - Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space

This week was punishment week for my group of gamers. I always feel a little bad for my friends when I bring bad games. They're good sports - they'll play anything once, even if it's horrible - but nobody likes having to play really crappy games.

Which brings me to the subject of this review: Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space. Yes, that is the full name of the game. No, it is not ironic. Yes, it is very stupid. No, it is not based on an Ed Wood movie.

Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space (I'm going to write out the whole name every time, to emphasize how ridiculous a name it is) is a game where half the players are aliens, and the other half are humans, and they're in Outer Space, and the humans have to escape. So at least the title has some truth in advertising.

The entire game is played out on pieces of paper. Each player will have a hex grid with tiny hexes, and they'll write where they're going at the top of the page. If they step on a gray hex, they draw a card. The cards will either make you tell everyone where you are, or tell everyone somewhere you're not, or not tell anyone anything. Since the cards are discarded without letting anyone see them, you can bluff everybody. But since there's no way for anyone to ever check what you're doing, you can pretty much just lie. You would suck if you did, but honestly, the person who made you play this game has it coming, anyway. You'll never know if your friends are cheating, because it's not like you're going to play Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space more than once.

You'll also never know if your friends are cheating because it's nearly impossible to keep track of where everyone else is going. Aliens move faster than humans, so that just makes them even tougher to track. The whole object of the game is to figure out where your opponents are headed and, if you're the bad guys, jump on them and eat them like sugary baked goods. If you're not the bad guys, you just want the bad guys to not eat you, which you manage by escaping through an escape hatch. This is where the 'Escape' part of the title originates, in case that was not already abundantly obvious. The imagination of the designers was not exactly stretched to its limit with this bit of wordsmithing brilliance.

As you play Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, you may begin to wonder if it would be better with a different number of players. Like, if you play with just two and realize that it's a stupid game, you may wonder if it would be more fun with four. Or if you play with four, you may wonder if it would work with two. The fact is, it doesn't matter how many people are playing, because it doesn't work no matter how many people are subjecting themselves to the misery. You'll chart your progress, try to remember where your friends last said they were located, and attempt to puzzle out what made anyone ever think this was worth publishing. And you will figure out that the only thing that changes with more players is how many people are going to be pissed off that they played.

There are a few additional twists, but they essentially come down to items that the humans can use if they find them and escape hatches that may or may not be locked. These tweaks add almost nothing to the game, beyond being a couple more decks of cards with icons and no words. In fact, it's almost as if the designers didn't want anyone to know what the pictures were supposed to mean. If they had actually written descriptions on the cards, it would have been a lot easier to play, but I suppose then they would have needed a translator. The designers probably thought they would need access to the enormous international market, because of the colossal hit they knew they had created. They were so, so wrong - this game is ten pounds of ass in a five pound bag - but they didn't know that. They probably thought they were six months away from retiring in Bora Bora with their new private jets and hot trophy wives.

I do have to give credit to the art in Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space. It's a very minimalist style - mostly colorful half-images on a black backdrop - and it looks damned classy. Sure, a lot of the art is so bare bones that it's impossible to tell what it's supposed to be, but it looks great. If Andy Warhol created a board game, it would look like this. It would probably be about as much fun, too. The design makes the game more difficult to play, but it does a bang-up job of looking pretty, and at least you don't have to try to figure out why there are like fifty soup cans.

One last point remains to be made regarding Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space. If you like to get value for your gaming dollar, you should definitely not buy this game. You get a small deck of cards, a bunch of diagrams to plot your movement, and a handful of golf pencils. If you buy the limited edition, you also get a card with a picture and a signature, plus a few more of those diagrams. There's almost nothing in the box. If you paid twenty bucks for Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, you might be a little miffed. But the regular version is more than thirty dollars, and the limited edition goes for fifty. If I fill a box with rubber chickens and fake vomit, it would be worth more than this game, and a lot more fun (assuming you have any sense of humor whatsoever).

The real travesty here is not that I made my group play Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space. The real travesty is that it wasn't the only crappy game we played this weekend - but for that, you'll have to wait until next time.

Summary

2-8 players who have absolutely nothing better to do

Pros:
Very tasteful design

Cons:
Gaming value rip-off
You can't play without ruining the components
Cards just show symbols, and lots of them
Plodding and random
Planning, strategy and tactics are completely worthless
Irritating and pointless
Everything else not directly associated with the very tasteful design

I'm not giving you a link to a place you could buy Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, because I care too much about you. It's the Christmas season. This is my gift to you.

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Card Game Review - Sobek

Ancient Egyptians were some downright rotten people. They would steal and kill and rob and even park in handicapped spots. When something needed building, and there were big government contracts on the line, those Egyptian bastards would sell their souls - not to mention their grandmothers - to land the fat paycheck.

I know this is true because I play games, and they're highly educational. In Sobek, all the players are competing to get rich off the impending construction of the temple to the great crocodile god (his name is Sobek. He might be a jackal or bird or something, and not an alligator at all. I'm not an historian, so I don't know, and I'm not Egyptian, so I don't care).

Egyptian people got rich by having sets of things. Like if they had three baskets of wheat, that might make them rich. Or if they had four bundles of Playpharoah Magazines - you could totally get rich off that. And the reason this made them rich was because you could only sell things if they came in a bundle. So if you saw one cow, you knew that owner was screwed - he could never get rid of it. The only way to sell it was if he could get a couple more.

Sobek does a fantastic job of representing the economy of Ancient Egypt. In this game, you score points (which represent money) by playing sets of matching cards. This is a shockingly accurate depiction of exactly how Egyptian dudes got ahead - they sold stuff, but only in bundles. Every turn, you have the option to wander through the marketplace and add a card to your hand. Hopefully that card will help you make a set, because, you know, you can only score with sets. Nobody ever sells just one pile of rocks, after all. You can only sell them if you have three piles of rocks.

In Egyptian marketplaces, goods were placed all over, and all you had to do to get one was walk up and take it. The trick was, if you didn't want the thing right in front of you, you had to stab somebody, or steal an old lady's walker, or leave the bathroom without washing your hands. In the game, this is represented by being forced to take cards as corruption points. It's pretty realistic.

Instead of taking a card (maybe you don't want those ebony logs, because maybe you're not actually making a piano), you can play a set. This is like selling it, because you can score points later. Obviously, Egyptians were masters of the credit market, because they would sell stuff to you now and then make you pay out the ass later. That's sort of how Citibank does it now, only back then, the Egyptians had a little more integrity. If you didn't pay, they would stab you and throw you in the Nile, but at least they never used auto-dialers and obnoxious assholes with minimum wage jobs and unresolved power fantasies.

Some of the cards you can get have people on them, and those people can help you out, just like they did back in the Olden Days of Egypt. Instead of taking a card or playing a set, you can play a helper. This is like when the Egyptians would make a couple phone calls, and the priest would come out and absolve them of their sins by taking their stuff. It works pretty much the same way in the game - you play the card, and then the person comes and helps you out, maybe by giving you more stuff, or taking away your corruption stuff, or by letting you use your corrupt stuff to make sets (which, as we know by now, is the only way you can sell them).

That corruption does add up. Just like in Ancient Egypt, you didn't have to be the least corrupt. You just had to avoid being the MOST corrupt. If you're the merchant with the greatest number of dead people hidden in a basement in Queens (as represented by your corruption cards), you get to be the scape goat. You lose a whole bunch of points, and everyone else whistles awkwardly as they slide quietly past. You go to jail. They send fruit baskets.

When the dust settles and the temple is built, everyone checks to see how many points they got. That tells you how rich you are. Just like today, Egyptians won if they had the most money, so the person with the most points is the winner. Along the way, that person has probably stolen goods other people wanted, stuck other players with corruption points, and made them dump all their goods into a garbage can infested with head lice. There is a very high probability that someone at the table will have, at some point in the game, told someone else that they hate them and hope they lose a limb in an industrial accident. It's good, clean fun, Egyptian style.

Egyptians also cared a lot about how their stuff looked. They spent a lot of time carving sculptures and painting pictures (though that may have been because they didn't actually have an alphabet, and were forced to write everything on the wall because it was the only place with enough room to finish a sentence). Once again, Sobek brings home the past, by giving us great art, very nice cards, and an insert tray that ties for the coolest ever made. You'll have plenty of eye candy to enjoy while you steal from the poor, kick puppies and drive 35 in a school zone.

OK, I confess. This isn't historically accurate. It's just a set collection game with a penalty for impatience. But it's simple and fun, and has plenty of chances to make your friends hate you. Most games like this are short on interaction, but Sobek is almost one continuous opportunity to screw your opponents. If you watch the cards, time your plays and make your move when it counts, you'll probably clean up. If you're impatient, vindictive or sloppy, you'll get your ass kicked. And if you hate card games with weak themes, you'll just be looking for something else to play. Not me, though - I think Sobek is a hoot, even if I think some old Egyptian guy should have been able to sell just one cow at a time.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Great cartoony art on high-quality cards
Fast-paced and entertaining
Plan a little, scam a little, and hose your friends a bunch

Cons:
A little watery on the theme

In case you haven't been keeping up with the site (and with all the lewd humor, who can blame you), Noble Knight Games sponsors Drake's Flames by sending me games so I can tell you about them. I don't ask for handouts - I'm not a huge website with hundreds of thousands of members and expensive ads all over the place. If you want to support this site, you can shop at Noble Knight Games, who will see the value in continuing to provide me with games, so that I can keep giving you reviews. It's a giant win-win-win, which is something corporate people say so that they can steal your wallet.
LINK SO YOU CAN BUY SOBEK

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Card Game Review - Shashawa

Sometimes, to make me feel a little less guilty for doing something I love and getting free games for it, I try to tell myself that I am providing a service. I promote games for companies, hopefully pushing sales, and I tell buyers which games they might like. I'm like a GI Joe public service announcement.

But sometimes I just plain feel bad. When I review a game like Shashawa, I think readers will find themselves wondering why on Earth I felt the game needed a review at all. It's cheaper than used dirt, so it's not as though you're going to be thinking long and hard before pulling the trigger on a game that barely costs ten bucks. When you're adding games to your basket to push the order into free shipping, it's not likely that you're being particularly discriminating, anyway.

And the actual game in Shashawa is unimpressive, too. You pass cards to make matches, and when someone makes a match, they call out and everyone grabs a water token. Except that there are fewer water tokens than players, so someone gets a bad case of dry mouth. Three misses means you're out. And now you know how to play. You could seriously play this game with a regular deck of cards and just about any kind of tokens. I suggest you use spoons. I hear those are popular.

There's no strategy or planning in Shashawa. You pass cards, and try to grab a round piece of cardboard. You can handle this. Small children can handle this. Very old people with Alzheimer’s can handle this, though they may wonder what they're doing when they get halfway through the game. Come to think of it, completely competent adults may wonder what they're doing. In fact, the more competent you are, the more likely you may be to wonder why you're still playing.

Now, it's not entirely fair to just bash the hell out of Shashawa. It's not like it's boring. It can be fun. You get that palpable air of tension that comes when you play a game requiring you to have split-second reflexes, and there will probably be a lot of laughing. A game that inspires a whole lot of laughing can't be all bad, even if you could get the exact same result watching old Adam Sandler movies.

Come to think of it, you might as well go ahead and buy Shashawa. If you play it twice, you'll more than get your money out of it. You'll laugh, you'll have fun, and you can play with the in-laws when they visit for Christmas. It's not my first choice for games, but if I'm having company and they want to play a game, I can break it out without having to reveal how long I spend painting miniatures for Warhammer Quest, or trying to explain the rules for Conquest of the Empire.

I guess I don't have to feel too guilty for writing a review of Shashawa. For one thing, the publisher really wanted me to write about it, so at least I'm fulfilling that obligation. And if you're looking for a wide-access family game for the holidays, you could do a lot worse. You won't be adding it to your wishlist, and you'll probably end up throwing it into a trade deal down the line to add another five bucks in trade value, but at least you'll have it handy when you need it. Considering how close we are to the time of year when we have to choose between whiskey and firearms to make it through a visit from your mother-in-law, you might need it sooner than you think.

Summary

4-8 players

Pros:
Super easy rules
Light and fun
The kind of tension you get when you have to react fast
Perfect for family get-togethers

Cons:
More shallow than the puddle you get when you spill a beer on a concrete floor
You could easily replace it with a deck of playing cards and a raid on the silverware drawer

Noble Knight Games is carrying Shashawa, which means you'll know just what to add to your order to get it to nice round number:
LONG LINK

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RPG Review - Fiasco

Roleplaying games have several things in common.

1. A referee. This is the guy who comes up with the story, creates the monsters, plays the shopkeepers, and pretends to be the king. His job sort of sucks, but he gets to know all the secrets.

2. Some rules for determining what happens when somebody gets punched in the face, or stabbed in the kidney, or stomped in the nuts. Generally, these rules involve rolling lots of dice.

3. Getting better. Your characters will get stronger, and faster, and smarter, and learn handy skills like blacksmithing and trap-making and parallel parking.

Fiasco does not have any of those things, and yet it is most certainly a roleplaying game. You'll take on a role, and you'll play it. So that's a roleplaying game. It just doesn't have a wild setting, a dungeon master, stat blocks or character advancement. You start and finish in a single session, with no setup time and no need to learn a bunch of rules. If you're not intrigued yet, then you probably found this site accidentally, when doing a search for reptilian venereal diseases.

In Fiasco, a handful of players take on the kinds of characters you might find in a Coen Brothers movie like Fargo or A Simple Plan. If you've never seen Fargo, then 1) shame on you, it's awesome, and you should see it right now, and 2) it's one of the greatest examples of how bad decisions can lead to disastrous outcomes, with characters ending up either in prison or in a wood chipper.

All you need to play Fiasco is a whole bunch of regular dice, half of them black, half of them white. In a pinch, you can use blue and red, or yellow and green, or chartreuse and beige (but those last ones would probably be kind of ugly dice). When you want to have something good happen to your character, you want white dice, and when you're hoping your character gets completely screwed, you want black dice.

Which brings me to my next point - you may very well wind up rooting for your character to be arrested, imprisoned, maimed or killed. You might be laughing hysterically as your drug-dealing extortionist is buried under eight feet of snow and shoved into a massive drift by a snowplow. Because more than any other game I have ever played in the history of playing games, Fiasco is all about the story.

Here's a short synopsis of one game we played, to give you an idea of how completely screwed up this can be. Mike was selling drugs to his boss, Derek, who also owed him a bunch of money for gambling debts. Billy Joe was also trying to supply Derek, and Derek was embezzling money from federal grants to cover his bad habits. Lisa wasn't involved in any nefarious misdeeds, but just wanted Mike to actually show up to work and do his job. By the end, Derek was in prison, Billy Joe was homeless in South America, Lisa was still an underpaid company drone, and Mike was dead. As it turns out, he was buried in a snowdrift. By a snowplow. That Lisa was driving.

The game is broken down into acts, with each player having two scenes in the first act and two in the second. You use this huge pile of dice in the middle of the table to determine whether your scenes go well for you, or if they go bad. Maybe if Lisa had been able to get Derek to reprimand Mike in the beginning, a lot of misery could have been avoided, but we gave her a black die for that scene. Derek blew her off, and it went downhill fast. Mike ended up killing a completely unrelated company contractor when Derek fed him a red herring, and Billy Joe put decidedly questionable porn on Mike's computer so that Derek could blackmail him. Billy Joe put a dead seal in Mike's bed to scare him off, but all it did was get Mike angry. Then things got worse.

With no character generation outside establishing some relationships at the outset, and no rules for resolving violence outside handing over a single die, the rules in Fiasco practically fade completely into the background. They provide a framework and guide to make sure you create the most god-awful Charlie Foxtrot that results in the maximum potential mayhem. Hilarious hijinks will ensue. People are very likely to die - or worse.

If you're playing roleplaying games for the chance to explore bizarre, fictional worlds and work out your deep-seated power fantasies, Fiasco is not for you. But if you want to see a story grow right before your eyes, and you want to take part in that story and watch it twist and gyrate like a belly-dancer's hips, then you should waste no time in getting a copy of this incredible game. I've been playing these silly games for thirty years, and Fiasco is the most fun I've ever had with a roleplaying game. It is simply amazing and pure genius. The rules are short, intuitive and easy to read, and after you try it one time, you'll be talking about the game for weeks to come.

One quick word of warning - Fiasco is most certainly NOT a game for children. Our game started with extortion, gambling, embezzling and drug addiction, and before we were done, we added murder, illegal porn and some downright unfriendly acts towards animals. The book has a very readable, conversational tone, sprinkled liberally with the kind of profanity that George Carlin says you can't use on TV. It's raw and exciting and hilarious. I could not possibly recommend this game more highly. If you only play one game this year, then you should definitely get out more.

Summary

3-5 players (preferably grown-ups)

Pros:
No referee
No stat blocks
No accounting
Pure, unadulterated awesome that you can finish inside three hours and be discussing for years

Cons:
Could spoil you - you may never want to play any other RPG

If you're not too weak in the knees, you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to pick up a copy of Fiasco. Bully Pulpit Games has the game, plus they support the crap out of it with new scenarios all over the place:
http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/

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Card Game Expansion Review - Rise of the Creator

Expansions are kind of a way of life in the world of games in general. They make the fans all excited, because they add more value to the games you already enjoy. And the publishers make more money, because in addition to having a new product to sell, they also tend to inject new life into old games and drive sales of the originals. To sell more Arkham Horror, Fantasy Flight offers Dunwich Horror. To sell more Summoner Wars, Plaid Hat releases The Vanguard. And to sell more Gamma World, Wizards gives us... well, never mind, it's not a perfect model.

Small publishers know the power of expansions, too, so to get more attention for Chaos Isle (a very fun game by a very small company), RealmsMasters recently released Rise of the Creator. To read a review of the original game, you can check here. I also reviewed the expansions, which add a bunch of value to an already cool game. And to read about Rise of the Creator, well, just keep reading.

Chaos Isle is a chaotic dice-fest where you take turns revealing zombi cards and then killing them with your awesome dice-rolling skills. It's fast and bloody and fun, but there really isn't enough interaction, in my decidedly non-humble opinion. Players don't get to hose each other unless they're already dead, and in a game this nasty, I totally want to do that. That was my biggest complaint with the original game, along with the amateur-hour art.

It seems the guys at RealmsMasters follow Drake's Flames, because everything I wanted out of Chaos Isle has been added to Rise of the Creator. This 30-card expansion includes three new kinds of cards, including feats, viruses, and mutations. Plus you get a couple new monstrously evil zombis to murderize and collect their unholy corpses. So it's basically a game you can play with the third-graders in Sunday School.

My favorite cards in Rise of the Creator are the feats, which let players totally screw the other players. I would not consider playing the game without these new cards. Feats let your heroes power up zombis on your opponent's turns, make him fight more monsters, steal his cards, or just save your bacon when you're about to die. They're fantastic, but they can be hard to get, and they're not free to use, either. You have to discard the trophies you've collected, take wounds or dump your gear when you want to play them, so while they are very powerful, feats are balanced wonderfully by the expense involved in using them.

To get more feats, you have to fight mutated zombis, which only occur when they're drawn along with one of the new mutation cards. If you're fast enough, you might be able to just run away, and considering how much more deadly zombis can be with a mutation card, that might be wise. But since killing them all is the only way to get more feats, you'll find yourself diving headlong into really bad decisions against very poor odds. And that's great, because this really is a game about doing incredibly stupid things against unimaginably horrible monsters.

And just because too many people were actually able to win this game before being massacred, eaten by mutated ringworms and turning into the walking dead, we have the new virus cards. If you're playing with the feats, which could definitely make the game easier if you use them right, you also get to see how the zombi virus has mutated. Maybe there are just more bad guys to fight every turn, or maybe they run faster, or maybe they just bite really, hard. On the other hand, maybe the infection has spread to the heroes, and they get more gear, or get to attack each other. And maybe the infection has become a full-scale epidemic, in which case you have to deal with two of these nasty cards at the same time.

You only get two new zombis in Rise of the Creator, but what the new guys lack in quantity, they make up in quality. These suckers are going to be crazy hard to kill, with an exceptionally high chance of making you dead. The head bad guy's pet is called Noxx, and he looks like a cross between a dragonfly and a very sick angler fish (look 'em up, they're creepy as sin). And Rex Jarvis, the undead auto mechanic, is one mean motor scooter, especially because he can whip out a shotgun or a fireman's axe and go to town on your pathetic human.

The guys at RealmsMasters also stepped it up in the art department when they put together Rise of the Creator. The design issues I had with the original game have been completely addressed, by varying the backs of the cards and printing the card types bigger (not to mention making the cards easier to read). And where some of the art in Chaos Isle looks like it was done by a small child with a box of colored cheese doodles, everything in Rise of the Creator is pure bad-ass. The art looks seriously demented but completely professional (assuming that your professional artists are acid-tripping psychopaths with very bad dreams).

Every single thing in Rise of the Creator makes Chaos Isle a better game. The feats are fantastic fun, the mutations make you work for the feats, and the viruses add a twist that means you have even more fun ways to play this crazy game. If you haven't checked out Chaos Isle yet, now's the time. RealmsMasters is running a great special where you can save a bunch and get everything in one package, and if you already have everything else, Rise of the Creator is only twelve bucks, anyway. Break out the dice and prepare to re-kill the undead - it's time to go back to Chaos Isle.

Summary

2 to 6 players (You can play the original solo, but the whole point of this expansion is to screw your opponents. Not a good idea in a solo game.)

Pros:
Great art
Massive improvements in the graphic design
Finally hose your buddies!
Makes a damned fun game even more damned fun

Cons:
Nothing comes to mind

Imagine my delight when I discovered that Noble Knight Games is carrying the entire Chaos Isle line! Or don't imagine it. If there are children present, it could be disturbing.
LINK TO NOBLE KNIGHT

And if you want to get everything at one time, you can check out the Whole Damn Thing here (just real quick - the word is 'damned'. 'Damn' is a verb. After you damn something, it becomes damned, unless you're not very good at damning. I know, nobody likes a grammar nerd.)
http://www.realmsmastersgameforge.com/thewholedamnthing.htm

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RPG Review - The Burning Wheel

If you grew up on Dungeons & Dragons, a few factors became standard operating procedure. One, you were going to fight, get hurt a lot, and then win (unless your DM was a dick). Two, you would carry barrels of treasure back to your local inn, where you would then spend at least 45 minutes on lengthy accounting procedures and profit sharing. Three, if the princess was locked in the tower and you had to kill the lich, you could send just about anyone to get her out again. Essentially, D&D is a board game where you can do whatever you want, as long as you can figure out how to roll for it.

And if you grew up on Dungeons & Dragons, The Burning Wheel will blow your mind, because the only similarities between the two games are elves and swordplay. Everything you ever knew about dungeon crawls is out. There have been several attempts in role playing games to make players actually play some roles, but The Burning Wheel doesn't try to add character interaction to a board game. It's not about the dungeons, the monsters, or the treasure. This is a game about the people you're pretending to be.

The Burning Wheel has been around long enough that serious RPG nerds will probably have heard something about it. You may have read phrases like 'character-driven story lines' or 'story-driven game' or 'something you could clear up with some medicated cream.' But those don't really tell you anything useful, beyond being a jumble of irritating words that sound like either corporate boardroom catchprases or medical diagnoses.

To understand just how important the characters are to their own story, all you have to do is look at how you go about creating your fictional alter ego. Rather than rolling some dice and assigning some attribute points, you actually have to start with birth and chart the life of your character through a series of lifepaths. These paths can twist and turn to create a fascinating life, and as you choose your paths, your character develops almost spontaneously. You can have an end goal in mind - in fact, you really should - but you'll be adding tons of meat to your warrior knight as you take him from his spoiled noble roots, through his service in the war against the orcs, and up to his current life as a knight errant in the service of the king. You'll invent family members, associations, and maybe a hooker or two (those are optional, but I recommend them). You'll feel like you've been playing before you ever roll any dice.

Speaking of rolling dice, this is not the 'I hit him, does he hit me?' back-and-forth of most RPGs. You could face down an opponent, roll your dice one time, and within two real-time minutes, one of you is dead and one of you is cleaning the blood off his blade. You're not maneuvering around, checking initiative and making five-foot steps. You're diving in, yelling a hoarse battle cry, and swinging for the fences until the bad guy's severed jugular sprays blood all over your clean shirt. There's a more in-depth battle system for when the battle really gets messy, but The Burning Wheel is not a game about fighting. It may be a game about people who fight, but it's the people who are important, not the fight.

The most obvious indicator of how personalized these stories really are can be found in the beliefs, instincts and traits. Every character has something important to him, whether it's looking out for number one or always stopping to help old ladies cross the street. These beliefs are integral, and when the player invents these beliefs, he's telling the GM that he wants them to come into play. If your grizzled veterans believes firmly in the bond of brothers in arms, sooner or later, one of his soldier buddies is going to wind up in some hot water. If your sticky-fingered beggar has an instinct for swiping loose change, you're as much as telling the GM that you want plenty of chances to steal (and probably get caught).

The best showcase for all these character components is when they make problems. When one character believes that might makes right, and another believes in the rule of law, they're going to clash, and then something interesting will happen. The GM has to be light on his feet, because the story rotates around the characters, and all it takes is one horny sailor with a taste for older women to completely derail everything you had planned (especially if you hadn't planned on centering the story around the waterfront bordello).

What this all means is that, unlike most mainstream, commercial RPGs, The Burning Wheel does an exceptional job of putting the role playing back into role playing. You're telling a story, not killing monsters. You're growing and changing and mutating, not leveling up and rolling for more hit points. You can still have plenty of action - but players will want to be a little more careful, because the toughest brawler can be dropped by a single sucking chest wound. You know, like in real life.

I can hear the erudite uber-gamers in the back, which is crazy because you're not actually there, which means that you're just voices in my head. And those voices are saying, 'other games have done this!' And you know what? I've played those games. They tend to be self-indulgent, arrogant crap designed by douche-nozzle fruitcakes who think their bowel movements smell like Old Spice body wash. And to really embarrass those elitist assholes, The Burning Wheel does it better. Admittedly, some of the writing in The Burning Wheel smacks of 'look how cool I am', which is ironic and slightly hilarious in a role playing game, but it's not bragging if you can do it, and The Burning Wheel delivers some of the best cooperative storytelling and role playing you're likely to find.

I have a few complaints, but they're fairly minor. For one thing, the rules are really long, and you have to digest several hundred pages before you can even stab anybody. It's worth the prep time, but you'll have to read some confusing rules, and for lots of them, you'll have to read twice, because some of the ideas are very unlike all the other games you've played. And in all that reading, you'll have to occasionally listen to the author get a little preachy about the right way and the wrong way to play his game, which gets only slightly older than a well-aged sharp cheddar. Hell, I could probably write a couple paragraphs about the various problems I have with Burning Wheel, but they would be completely overshadowed by the fantastically fun time I had playing it.

The Burning Wheel is a grownup RPG. If you just want to play out some nerd-rage power fantasy with a sword as long as a Buick and underground caverns full of stock monsters, you're going to hate Burning Wheel. But if you showed up to play a smart game that twists and develops and grows on its own, with stories that only your characters could tell, The Burning Wheel should be the next game you buy.

Summary

Pros:
Create interactive stories that revolve around the characters, not the dungeons
Emphasizes the story, instead of being a tactical reenactment with a flexible ruleset
A system that creates interesting conflict
Stories about the characters, not their battles or magic armor or bestiary of slain foes
Some of the most fun I've ever had role playing

Cons:
Some confusing rules that, from time to time, get a little counter-intuitive
More than 600 pages of rules spread over two books is a bit intimidating
The author's 'voice' is a little on the irritating side
Inconsistent art looks like it was culled from a clip art collection

Noble Knight Games provided me with this review copy after some of you requested it. So you wouldn't be reading about this awesome RPG if it weren't for them, which means that if you want to buy this game, you should get it from Noble Knight:
REALLY LONG LINK

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