These Are A Few of My Favorite Games

A while back, a reader asked me to tell him what games I really like. Then a couple weeks later, someone else had the same question. I guess people actually do like Game of the Year lists, even if I think they're overrated and just created to give people a good reason to argue on the Internet. But I'm not going to do a Game of the Year list, because the games I love might be the ones you hate. Instead, I'm just going to tell you about some of my favorite games. I've linked the headline for each game to my review of it, so you can find out more, if you feel like reading even more.

Warhammer Quest

To start off with a bang, my favorite game (right now) is Warhammer Quest. I know these things are supposed to have a bunch of build up and then a big reveal, like when you find out who was the runner up in the beauty pageant and which one gave a handy to the judge so she could get the crown, but the audience doesn't know which girl was using hand sex for bribes, so they're all excited (unless they've got more than three brain cells to rub together, in which case they're not watching in the first place). But I'm impatient and lazy, so I just started with the big hitter and I'll wind up at the end with nothing but dick jokes and boring games.

Warhammer Quest is the greatest dungeon crawl game ever made, if you ask me. There's no DM, and you can play it solo. The boards and figures are gorgeous, with cool plastic doors that clip together, and you can make your own dungeons by customizing your deck of bad guy cards. It's fast and brutal and fun as hell. I have spent so much money on Warhammer Quest that I could have replaced my washing machine by now (though it would have been a very crappy washing machine).

Formula D

This one springs to mind easily because I just played it the other night. It's a fast-paced racing game that rewards risky maneuvers but penalizes stupid moves. The new Asmodee edition is sparkly and pretty, with cool little gear boxes and neat plastic cars. Plus it's only one of two racing games that have ever made me feel like I could actually smell the burning rubber.

Many people will compare Formula D to Rush N Crush, and that's a very fair comparison. Rush N Crush uses a different method for controlling speed and adds in deliberate violence. While we are always seeing dead bodies in Formula D (thanks mostly to torn up tires or shredded fenders), Rush N Crush is virtually guaranteed to result in a very steep body count.

I guess the reason I prefer Formula D is that it feels like a tighter game. Rush N Crush is a blood-soaked blast of adrenaline, but it can get a little sloppy, and the rules are not as easy or as flexible as Formula D. I will play the crap out of both games, really, but Formula D edges out Rush N Crush by a dented bumper.

Dominion

It seems almost sacrilegious to praise Rush N Crush and then talk about Dominion, and that's probably why I'm doing it. But no matter what anyone says, Dominion is one hell of a good game. It's got hundreds of cards (if you have the expansions), and you only use ten in any given game, so it's really long on replay value. Which is nice, because I play the bejeezus out of it.

Now, anyone with any sense will admit that the theme is practically non-existent. The cards have very generic abilities and only need names so you can tell them apart. And unless you get some pretty good attack cards going, there's very little interaction. All the complaints people aim at Dominion are totally fair, but in the end, they don't really matter. The game is just amazing, and the longer you play, the better you get. It's a huge hit at my house, and at a hell of a lot of other houses, too.

Last Night on Earth

I hear complaints about Last Night on Earth, people who say the game play is weak or the various rules are tweaky. Those people are entirely missing the point. Last Night on Earth is fantastic because when you play, you really feel like you're in the middle of a zombie movie. A story develops around the game, and the best games are the ones with the most cool twists (though I did really love the game where the humans found everything they needed to escape in the first ten minutes, which would have made the stupidest zombie movie ever).

The expansions for Last Night on Earth are really not all that necessary unless you've played the original at least a dozen times. But once you get tired of protecting the manor home and escaping in the truck, there's an enormous line of add-ons that will provide you with new heroes, new scenarios, even new zombies. And still, every time you play, you'll feel like you just finished watching a zombie flick, except that you won't have had to sit through two hours of ridiculous George Romero dialog.

Alien Frontiers

OK, this is kind of a new one, and I swore I wouldn't name anything I hadn't owned for at least a year (I swore it to myself, way before you got here, which is why you didn't hear it). But Alien Frontiers jumped up to the top of our repeated play list after just a couple weeks, and has proven to have considerable staying power. It will probably lose its glossy luster after another dozen games, because unlike the other games in this article, it's doesn't provide a different experience every time you play. But it is a unique game, really solid, and it makes it to the table at least once a month. It's a little too European in flavor for lots of people, but I love it, anyway.

HeroScape

I think the main reason HeroScape didn't start this list is because I haven't spent as much time on it recently. But there was a time - a long time, really, like three or four years - where I played HeroScape at least once a week. Any of the other games on this list so far, I've played dozens of times, but I can say with no hesitation at all that I've played hundreds of games of HeroScape. And I still get my ass kicked by the people who are really good at it.

Sure, part of the appeal of HeroScape is that it's like playing with toys. You build a mountain pass, or a craggy desert, or a fortress on a lake. Then you take all your plastic people and send them rampaging at each other in an incredibly violent manner, crushing, maiming and spindling until only one of you has anyone left. But on top of looking like a million bucks, HeroScape is just plain brilliant, and one of the best tactical games I've ever played. Wargames are fine, and admittedly have a lot more depth, but HeroScape is brilliant without being complicated, and exciting without being capricious.

Unless you're using Deadeye Dan. Then it's a crap shoot.

Nostra City

While you probably recognized all the games so far, there are a lot of people who have missed the absolute genius of Nostra City. I don't know why, but Nostra City just never got as popular as other games that are a lot weaker. It's devious and tricky and clever and more fun than a barrel of monkeys stoned on apple cider and roofies. It's a mind-bending conglomerate of cooperation and cutthroat competition, with the possibility of a rat trying to send the game spiraling into chaos.

You may have tried all the other games I named so far, but most of you have probably not played Nostra City. I seriously recommend that you make a concerted effort to score a copy of this fantastic mob game. If you're like me, it will take you an hour to fall in love with it, and then it will stab you in the testicles and steal your wallet, and you'll still want to play again.

Bootleggers

I'm getting tired of typing, so I'm going to finish with one of my favorite games. Well, OK, these are all favorites, but I couldn't end the article before I mentioned Bootleggers. It's a great game about selling whiskey during prohibition, and while you'll spend most of the game trying to out-maneuver your opponents and send the cops around to bust up their stills, you can also kill their goons and steal their trucks. It's practically a staple of game night at my house, and while we haven't played in six months or more, there's no doubt in my mind that I could get everyone in my family to play with me tonight.

In fact, I think that's exactly what I intend to do. I'm going to quit typing and start pestering my family to play Bootleggers with me tonight. Buy these games, or don't. I'm weary of entertaining you.

Read More

Expansion Review - Formula D Maps Expansion #3

I love Formula D. I play it all the time, and at nearly every available opportunity. It's one of the only racing games I've ever played where I feel like I'm really racing, where I can almost see the smoke billowing from my overworked gear box and hear my tires squealing in protest as I blow through a corner.

But there's a problem - I get bored running the same race over and over. I have the original track that came with the game, plus the first two expansion tracks, but still, I am always in the mood for something new, something interesting, something with some teeth. Hopefully not actual teeth, though - that would be really creepy in a racing game.

And that's why, when I got the new expansion tracks from Asmodee, I got all excited and hollered just a little (I try to restrain my enthusiasm when my children are sleeping, even though they're high school students - when you have teenagers, you'll understand how much nicer things are when they're asleep). And when I laid the boards out and saw how cool the new tracks look, I couldn't wait to break out the tiny plastic cars and go flying through turns and destroying perfectly good automobiles.

The simpler side of the board is Singapore. It's a pretty straight-forward race, with the usual complement of twists and turns and tricky bends. But what isn't obvious at first is how difficult it can be. There are several places where you could upshift, if you're feeling lucky - but you may not want to. When a low roll could stick you at the wrong end of a turn, and a high roll could send you hurtling past it out of control, it can be tough to decide which gear you should use.

In fact, out of all the tracks I've played, I don't think I've ever played one that required such a careful balance of common sense and balls. The curves are spaced just wrong - drop a gear, and you could wind up puttering up to the finish line four hours after everyone has gone home, but if you shift up, you might wind find yourself flying ass over teakettle into a skyscraper filled with lawyers and Yakuza masterminds. And then you would feel really bad about killing all those nice gangsters.

But while it has plenty of places where you have to decide between glory and restraint, Singapore is otherwise an unremarkable map. It's basically just a standard two-lap race. It's a good track, but it's not all that thrilling, because it doesn't really give us anything we haven't seen before. It's like trying a new flavor of ice cream that's just a twist on an old favorite - it's fun to try something new, but it's still just vanilla with different candy in it.

For a real taste of a whole new race to play, you need to flip over the board and run a few races at the Industrial Docks. This is an absolutely fantastic track. It's got everything - difficult turns in technically challenging series, road hazards that could make you spin out your car, and even better, it's three laps in one.

See, the track is only one lap, but it has three different loops. There are pits, so you can still stop for new tires if you're driving like a maniac, but only if you run the loops in a particular order. And this forces a decision - do you drive hell-bent for leather for one lap so you can pull a good lead and then swap tires for the last two, or do you drive conservative for two laps hoping to push yourself at the end? Or maybe you just feel particularly lucky, and save the loop with the pit stops for last, in which case there won't be any reason to stop - but you better be careful with those tires. You may want to try to choose different loops than your opponents, so that you don't spend the whole race swapping paint, or you may want to be aggressive and block them in until they crash into you and send you both to an early grave.

And that's not all. There are multiple ways to set up the race. You can start all in a line, with everyone choosing their route ahead of time, or you can play a normal race and run the laps in order. An enormous starting area gives you plenty of room to switch loops between laps, so while all the other drivers are bumping into each other on one loop, you're driving another all by yourself. This adds an element that has been largely missing from Formula D before now - strategy and planning. Sure, you could always decide to take a conservative first lap so you could skip the pit stop, but now you can make much more meaningful decisions right from the outset.

There is one feature of the Industrial Docks that makes me particularly giddy - a ridiculously long straightaway that gives you plenty of room to get to sixth gear. One complaint I've had with nearly every Formula D track I ever played was that even if you do manage to get to sixth gear, it's probably suicidal. But if you play the Docks well, you can come out of one particular turn in a high enough gear to actually make sixth gear a good idea. When I realized that I had just finished a turn in fifth gear and had more than forty spaces in front of me, I turned to my opponents with a grin that may have made them wonder if I was about to murder them and eat their kidneys. They were probably not too worried. They know that I don't know enough gamers that I can spare one just for kidney pie.

If you like Formula D at all, you really owe it to yourself to pick up this expansion track. Singapore is a very fun track that will reward you for driving like you had a pair and punish you for driving like you were high on prescription painkillers. And the Industrial Docks are easily the most fun I've ever had with this game, which is remarkable when you consider how much fun I had with the game before I ever got the new tracks (I had a lot of fun before, in case I was not clear). Asmodee really stepped up and gave us a couple great tracks. Once again, I can't wait to run out to my car, throw it into high gear and hurtle through turns at incredibly unsafe speed.

Of course, I would almost certainly crash into a van full of grade-schoolers on their way to soccer practice, so I better stick to board games for now.

Summary

Pros:
Same beautiful graphics we've come to expect from Asmodee
Two excellent tracks that are begging you to drive like a bat out of Hell
Finally, some real strategy and planning, right from the starting line

Cons:
Can't think of any, really. These tracks are really good

If you race over to Noble Knight Games, you can save a few bucks and get yourself a copy of the latest expansion track:
START YOUR ENGINES

Read More

Board Game Review - 7 Wonders

Every year, gaming websites have a ritual. I like to call it the Masturbatory We Wish We Had An Awards Ceremony ritual, though most places just call it the Game of the Year. It's like the Emmies or the Daytime Grammies or the Uncle Bob's Zippies or the Downers or Uppers or Ludes or some damned thing, except that instead of having a bunch of people show up in tuxedos and walk down red carpets, a handful of game nerds wearing Star Wars t-shirts with Cheeto stains tell the rest of us what games we should have been playing all year. Then everyone argues about it.

I read some of those lists this year. In many cases, I had not played most of the games on those lists. Being a maverick freelancer with no respect for authority (yes, that was tongue-in-cheek), I don't have access to many of the games I would really love to get, and no desire to get a bunch of the ones I end up missing. But in my opinion, not enough of those lists included 7 Wonders. I don't know if it's just because it has been so damned hard to get, or because not enough people loved it. And I don't care, really, because I don't put much stock in lists compiled by other people. I barely put any stock in lists I compile myself. Which, incidentally, makes it tricky to shop for groceries.

If I was to make a Top Games of 2010 list, however, I can tell you right now 7 Wonders would be on that list. Since I got the game about a week and a half ago, I've played half a dozen games, making it one of the most-played games I've ever received. When I really like a game, that usually means I'll play it three times before it starts gathering dust, so for me to play a game this much, I have to really love it. For the sake of reference, here are a few other games I've played a whole lot of times:

Dominion
Formula D
Warhammer Quest

Not coincidentally, those round out the top of the list of my absolute favoritest games of all time, which is why I look for nearly any excuse to drag them out. And now, I have another game to add to that list, because 7 Wonders is ludicrously fun.

Here's a quick rundown of 7 Wonders. You start with a wonder, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Pyramids of Giza, and that basically tells you which civilization you're controlling. Then you get a hand of seven cards, choose one to play, and pass your hand to the guy next to you. You run out, then you see who has the best armies, then you do it all two more times, with progressively more impressive (and expensive) cards. There's more to the game than that, but if you came here to get a summary of the rules, let me just tell you how disappointed you are going to be. Very. That's how disappointed you'll be.

The brilliance of 7 Wonders comes from the intensely difficult decisions you will have to make in order to win. You need to decide on a strategy from the outset, and you need to tailor every decision to reinforcing that strategy. Are you going to be a nation of brilliant scientists? Will you rule the land with military power and an open disrespect for bathroom breaks? Or maybe you'll develop the arts, or become a nation of traders and merchants, or maybe you'll just get your ass kicked because you try to do too many things and wind up with the worst country in the world, and the Egyptians will stomp a mudhole in you so deep that it goes right through to China.

Every time you get a hand of cards, you're getting them from someone who can clearly see what you're trying to build. At the same time, you're passing cards to someone whose goals and capabilities are right there for you to see. So you have to decide - should you play the card you really want, or should you play one you want less to keep it away from the guy who will use it against you? Destroy it for money or bury it under your pyramid? Because the next hand of cards you get may give you exactly what you need - or it may give you a pile of used donkey crap that you don't even want, making you wish you had not just blown all your cash to kill a great card on your giant statue when you could have buried a crappy one instead.

Another awesome thing about 7 Wonders is how your first few turns have a profound effect on the rest of the game. Establish too many resource streams, and you'll waste the chance to create the building blocks of your master scheme. But build too many clay pits and stone quarries, and while you'll never have a problem building the good stuff, everyone else will have mighty armies and libraries full of brilliant works, and you'll be stuck with tin soldiers and coloring books.

But just because you build a great opening strategy does not mean that late game decisions get any easier. If anything, it gets even more difficult to decide what to develop, because the cards get more and more powerful. Too much focus on one aspect will help you pull out the stops on your fine arts district, but your neighbor is going to turn into a military juggernaut and repeatedly hand you painful beatings. Trying to control your neighbor by burning up his cards means you'll lose the chance to build the pantheon that will bring everlasting glory to your country. It's a tricky balance, and it gets trickier. And awesomer. Yes, that's awesome with an r. I don't care if it's a real word.

I've played several civilization-building games, and they always take far too long. I love a game with meat on it, but when the meat in my ass molds to fit the chair I'm in, the game is too damned long. By comparison, 7 Wonders has the elements of those historic empire games, but you can finish inside half an hour. Which means you have time to play again, which you will want to do, because 7 Wonders is a simply fantastic game.

It should not come as a surprise that 7 Wonders is as good as it is. It was designed by Antoine Bauza, who also created a little cooperative piece of genius called Ghost Stories, which is another game I've played more than five times. He also made Bakong, but I'm pretending I didn't see that. Hell, nobody gets it right every time.

With a nearly ideal combination of strategy, excruciating decisions, speed and constant tension, 7 Wonders is quite possibly about to join my top five games of all time. And I could tell you what those five games would be...

But I don't like lists.

Summary

3-7 players

Pros:
Incredible art
Tons of strategy
Accessible to nearly any level player
Easy to learn
Every turn is a difficult decision
Early decisions have long-term effects
Absolutely fantastic

Cons:
Sold out everywhere

I would tell you where to find yourself a copy of 7 Wonders, but it's really hard to find right now. Once Asmodee figures out that a reprint would be a license to mint money, Noble Knight Games will have it right here:
BOOKMARK THIS FOR LATER

Read More

Board Game Review - Hornet Leader

When you think of games about fighting in jets, you probably think of something like Wings of War, where you maneuver planes around the table and try to blow up your opponents, one airflap at a time. So when I opened Hornet Leader and saw that that board looked like a Venn diagram, I was a little non-plussed. Then I read that it was a solo game, that you can't even play with anyone else, and I was suddenly wondering if I might have just lost that loving feeling.

But after reading the rules, Hornet Leader starts to make more sense. It's not a dogfighting game. It's a game about planning air strikes, taking out targets, and managing a team of bad-ass, widow-making pilots dropping bombs and taking names. It's also a game about getting your ass kicked because you didn't plan very well.

Instead of just outfitting one or two planes, you'll outfit an entire squadron. Depending on the engagement you want to play, you'll have access to U.S. planes spanning fifty years of construction. You'll have lots of missiles and bombs and rockets, plus electronic counter-measures. All these options mean that when you finally get over the target and discover that you should have equipped your planes with more radar-seeking missiles, you'll have the opportunity to write the next of kin and tell them their sons are dead because you were stupid.

The actual game play isn't that difficult. Your guys shoot, bad guys shoot, and then you see if anyone is still alive. I managed to play a whole game without losing any pilots, though one of them still flinches every time someone says, 'night run.' But every time I played, I found myself spending more time selecting planes and munitions than I did actually playing. There's an incredible amount of micro-management, and you can't take it lightly or you're practically guaranteed to fail.

You'll select your targets from a deck of cards, showing stuff like radar stations and government buildings and tank convoys. Then you'll pick and tell yourself that you can beat it. You'll slap missiles and bombs all over a bunch of planes and send them bravely into the air, and when the anti-aircraft on the ground blows all the guided missiles off your best Tomcat, you'll figure out that your mouth was writing checks your body couldn't cash.

In case I'm not being clear, this game is hard. A decent player with good planning can pull out a marginal victory, but you're going to have to play several times before you'll be able to achieve a victory you can crow about. I could tell you that a little planning and luck will carry the day, but I don't want to blow sunshine up your ass. Hornet Leader is fun, but it's not for wimps.

And when I say it's not for wimps, I don't just mean you have to be brave. I mean you have to be willing to sift through piles of information (literally - the pilots are all on cards, and there are hundreds of them) just to decide who you want flying for you. Then you have to wade through dozens of different armaments, keeping in mind weight limits, distance to the target, and whether your pilots can get by with smoke breaks or if they really need full-body massages with happy endings. The sheer volume of data can be overwhelming. The creator of this game did his homework, for sure, but he didn't dumb it down.

This is where the game really breaks down for me. I really enjoyed playing Hornet Leader, but I just don't have the mental stamina to stick it out. I tried a long campaign, and after three hours of managing stress, weight penalties, infrastructure damage, intel and a bunch of other minutia, I was tired. I love the idea of picking a bunch of pilots and taking the highway to the danger zone, but after all juggling all these details, I just felt a desperate need... a need for speed.

Hornet Leader is a meticulously designed game with an incredible attention to detail. If you ever wanted to know how it feels to command a battle group of planes from an aircraft carrier, you should join the Navy. Of course, you're too old for that, and you probably couldn't pass the physical anyway. So you'll have to settle for Hornet Leader, which is a lot of fun, if you can handle all the details.

But don't screw up, or you'll be flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog crap out of Hong Kong.

Summary

1 player

Pros:
Amazing detail
Great planning will pay off, and poor planning will kill you
Lots of tactical decisions and difficult choices

Cons:
Dense as granite - lots and lots and lots of stuff to consider could slow the game to a crawl

If you've got the guts to tackle a game this brutal, you should run over to Noble Knight Games and pick up a copy. It's fun, especially if you spend a lot of time playing with yourself.
BUZZ THE TOWER

Read More

Announcement - BoardGameinfo

If you're enough of a gaming nerd to read Drake's Flames on anything like a regular basis, you are almost certainly also aware of the Great Big Gaming Site called Board Game Geek (recently retitled Geekdo, so they could cover every kind of game ever, albeit rather poorly in the case of RPGs and video games). And you probably also know that there's virtually no competition for the job of Primary Geeky Gaming Site.

You may also know that while Board Game Geek is an incredibly useful tool, and a veritable treasure trove of information, it's also about as user-friendly as a punch in the nuts. It will allow you to do a wide range of things, from uploading images and useful files to trading games and managing your profile - if you can find the right link. I never can, so I don't use it a lot. It's also home to some of the most stilted Internet justice and downright censorship that you'll find at a site that owes its entire existence to unpaid volunteers who contribute enormous amounts of time and effort just to be thanked by having some power-mad asswipe give them a five day suspension for defending themselves after douchetit Euro-nerds pull their 'I'm smarter than you are' arrogant horse manure.

But all that is about to change. There's a new game in town, and BGG is about to get a run for its Monopoly money. BoardGameinfo.com is finally live, and it's ready for game nerds to descend on it like a pack of nit-picking locusts. Sure, there's some work to do - but what do you think BoardGameGeek looked like when it started?

If you visit the new site, you may notice that I'm one of three feature reviewers over there. I'll be copying my reviews to BoardGameinfo, and maybe writing exclusive content for them from time to time. I'm very excited to see someone really stepping up and being prepared to compete with the current reigning superpower in gaming sites, and I intend to support the hell out of it.

BoardGameinfo is owned and managed by James Mathe, a guy I’ve been working with off and on for nearly ten years now. He’s a savvy businessman and a pioneer of game-related Internet entrepreneurial efforts. He started RPGNow, and while there were other people selling PDFs on the web before he showed up, he was the first to create a viable online mall combining hundreds of different publishers, and allowing micro-press creators a place to sell their works. That’s not all he’s done, either – he knows gaming, and he doesn’t go into a new project half-cocked. He has done his homework, and he and his team are prepared to pour an incredible amount of time and resources into BoardGameinfo. He has tapped into some serious heavy hitters and knowledgeable people to make BGi a contender (which makes me wonder what he was thinking when he asked my ignorant donkey’s ass to help out).

BoardGameinfo is going to be the same kind of game-information resource that you see at BoardGameGeek, and frankly, they’re not entirely original in how they’re going to get the work done. Just like the bloated beast that is BGG, BGi will allow its users to upload content. And like BGG, which rewards users with a false currency (effectively creating their own internal economy), BGi will pay you for your time. You’ll earn Victory Points, which can be redeemed at their store for actual games. Right now you can’t get a whole hell of a lot, but sooner or later, you’ll be able to get real products, in addition to stuff like avatars and titles and other silly crap that I’ll totally be buying myself.

BoardGameinfo will also have one thing that you won’t find at BoardGameGeek – me. Like I said before, I’ll be copying my reviews there, and I intend to contribute to the forums and otherwise be active at the new site. I quit posting at BoardGameGeek around the beginning of 2009, but I’m enthusiastically looking forward to being a big part of BoardGameinfo, and I hope you will join me.

One point I want to make here is that the Internet is a wide open place, and there’s no reason anyone has to stake their loyalties at one site and ignore another. Unless you just don’t have any time in your day, there’s no reason you can’t visit BoardGameGeek and BoardGameinfo. I still accept the occasional trade request at BGG, and even if I don’t post, I still like that I can find information when I need it. There’s room for two gaming sites, and no reason you have to snub one to be loyal to the other.

Oh, one other thing - I'm not getting jack squat from BoardGameinfo, outside the same rewards any other knucklehead can get for posting reviews. I'm excited about the site because it has a real shot at being the kind of place I wish BoardGameGeek could be, and because it's a seriously professional effort. Sure, I'm shilling for them - but I'm not doing it because I'm getting a kickback. I'm doing it because I'm 100% thrilled they exist.

So come on down and join me. Together, we've got a chance to make BGi into something awesome. Let's take it.

http://www.boardgameinfo.com/

Read More

Board Game Review - Tikal II

Once upon a time, in a land not unlike our own, there lived a prince. He was kind of a wiener, and he had silly ears and cheated on his hot-ass wife with a woman who had buck teeth and a horsy laugh. So we're not going to tell a story about him, because this prince was a douche and his story would be lame.

Instead, our story will take us to a nearby land, which is not as much like our own land, but still not totally different. In this magical far-away land (not unlike our own), there lived two designers, and they made a game. They poured their hearts and souls into this game, and then rubbed it with a little bit of dust they pulled out of a pixie's bunghole (pixies poop magic dust). They brought their magical game to the people of the land, and a whole bunch of people that I don't know said it was a brilliant game, and gave it awards and stuff. That game was called Tikal, and it had many adventures before fading quietly into the realm of games that everybody likes to talk about because it makes them sound like they know more about games than they really do, as if knowing lots of information about European games would ever make you more likely to get laid. It won't, by the way.

Well, one day, these two adventuring game designers decided to set off again in search of magical treasures and paychecks. They put their heads together and decided that the best way to recreate the success and magic of their first game would be to make a sequel to the game. To make sure that all the people of the realm knew it was a sequel to their wildly popular game that won awards but that I've never even seen, much less played, they called it the same thing, but then put a 2 on it. Their new game, which was destined to take the world by storm, was therefore called Tikal II.

But there was only one problem - the game designers forgot to rub pixie poop on their new game. Without the magical pixie crap, Tikal II just didn't have the same charm. Basically, it was fun, but it was kind of a pain in the ass to play. It was magically beautiful, but it just didn't make much sense, and without the pixie dust, the game had too much happening at once.

In this non-magical game, every player got to pretend to be an explorer and his posse competing to unlock the mystical treasure of an ancient temple. Kind of like Indiana Jones, but not exciting, and with no women (pixie dust may have added hot Nazi chicks, but alas, no pixies). The players would send their canoes around the peninsula looking for clues and keys and other stuff that would appear on action tiles, and then they would pretend to be the explorer tromping madly through the temple. Players could score points in the first part of the turn for all kinds of things, like grabbing treasures and scoring rooms, and then they could get points in the second part, mostly for exploring rooms inside the temple and maybe for getting their dumb asses locked in a secret chamber.

Sadly, without the magical pixie excrement, the game bogged down and wound up getting boring by the end. Sure, there were lots of things to do on your turn, and you always had lots of options, but it became difficult to keep all the options straight. You could grab a key, and then it could go down or up. Or you could grab treasure and hide it, but you still had to ship it back home if you wanted more points (apparently in the crazy land of Tikal, the treasures would spoil if you didn't get them in the fridge fast enough, and then they weren't worth as much because they had mold on them and smelled like grandpa's feet). Maybe you could discover a new room, which your explorer could then explore, but you could also find a secret passage or an altar or some other damned thing that you would have to keep track of, and it would all start slipping around in your mind until you ended up completely forgetting that the turns were supposed to be passing to the right for the second round.

It's not that Tikal II was hard to play, really. The rules eventually made sense, especially if you played a little bit. After a few turns, you could remember what all the stuff was supposed to do. It was more like the game just had too many things happening at once, and while you could certainly play it, it started to drag after a while. If the temple was half the size and stuff happened way faster, it might be more fun, but then again, it might not. Unfortunately, in the absence of magical pixie poop, Tikal II was a graceless, lumbering beast that stayed so long that its hair got everywhere and it started to make the furniture stink.

However, even if they forgot to make a pixie drop a deuce in the box, the designers did hire a wonderfully talented artist to make it beautiful. While the game itself was not amazing, it looked like it should have been. The paintings on the board and the tiles and everything else came pretty close to transporting the players to the depths of some forgotten South American jungle as they traipsed around a completely harmless temple. The plastic bits were equally remarkable - each explorer had a different sculpt, and the little canoes were undeniably cool.

This story has not ended yet, but if I had to guess, I would bet it ends a lot happier for the two game designers than it probably should. See, the people of the realm knew that the first game was a big hit, even if they had never played it or even seen a copy. And so based on the success of the original, lots of people would run out and buy Tikal II just because the original was so impressive, and then persuade themselves that they loved the game. They might even say that they could see the pixie dust, because this magical land was full of people who liked to say they could see things that they could not so that other people would think they were perceptive and maybe, just maybe, want to sleep with them. In case you’re wondering, that still won’t work.

And those people might actually like Tikal II. The game designers were very good, and the game was ridiculously pretty. It was put out by a respected publisher, and while it was busy and overburdened with unnecessary tasks and little tweaks that could have been removed to make the game faster and easier to play, there are always gamers who will enjoy something. Tikal II wasn't a terrible game, just not the magical, record-breaking success the designers were hoping to create.

Hopefully, the next time these two game designers get together to have an adventure in game design, they'll remember to catch a pixie and force him to take a dump in the box. Then they will live happily ever after (but not the pixie. He's going to have permanent emotional scars).

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Great theme, even if it is missing the exciting parts
Lots of options and tricky choices to make
Holy crap, is this game pretty

Cons:
An overabundance of tweaky little things make the game a bit of a chore
A decided lack of magical pixie manure

If you just absolutely feel like you must play Tikal II, you can get it from Noble Knight Games, and save ten bucks.
PIXIE DUST LINK

Read More

Card Game Review - Irondale Expands

This review covers the expansion for Irondale, and not the game itself. If you want to understand what in the burning blue blazes I'm talking about here, you may want to go back and read the original review.

Technically, Irondale Expands is not a card game. Technically, it is an expansion for Irondale (which explains the name). But when you add Irondale Expands to the base game, what you wind up playing is a completely new game. It works with the same rules, but the additional parts will have you wondering why you ever bothered to play Irondale without them (that's assuming you've played Irondale before, and considering how head-spinning it is to play, you may have missed it in favor of something less complex, like air traffic control).

Irondale Expands is a modular expansion. You can decide exactly how much extra game you want, and then just add the parts you dig. I'll go through them one at a time, as if I was a dead-boring hack reviewer at some hugely popular gaming website, and then save my opinion for the very end of the review, at which point you will have wondered why in Hell I didn't just tell you if I liked it at the beginning and save you all that reading. But let's face it, half the time, you're only reading this retarded website to see if I make a really witty joke about one-legged crossdressing prostitutes, so you'll probably read it all, anyway. I would hate to disappoint, so I'll do my best to be funny. Wish me luck (which won't really be necessary, because by the time you're reading this, I will have finished writing, and you'll be the one who needs luck, not me).

The first new addition to Irondale is the City Sprawl. These are 54 new building cards, probably the most predictable addition to a game about creating a city, one building at a time. Fortunately, every new card adds something cool that you haven't seen before. My favorites are the monuments, which act like wild cards when you're trying to decide if you can pull off a master plan and grab a few extra cards. My least favorite new card is the Seat of Judges, because not only does it sound like a very uncomfortable toilet, but it can make someone lose a turn, and in this game, missing a turn means you're going to be bored for a long time, and probably lose the game. It's just too damned mean. In the future, I will be removing Judge's Seat from the deck before I play. I also won't have one in my bathroom.

The City Sprawl also includes the Rector's Spire. This card earns an honorable mention, but not because of what the card does. I don't really care what it does. It just makes me giggle inside every time I see it. It reminds me of when I was a dumb kid (as opposed to a dumb adult, which I am now), and we used to say, 'Rectum, darn near killed 'em!' And it's not just the rector part that's funny - this building is a rector's spire. It's like an all-purpose crotch joke.

An interesting new twist is the New Start cards, which are four cards with no special powers, representing each of the four building types you can make in Irondale. These are not very cool. They don't really add anything to the game, to be honest, and I'm not sure why I would bother with them. But as an upside, they do finally clear up for me what the four building types actually are. Based on the pictures in the original, I previously thought the types were windmill, church, tower and Little Mexico. So it's nice to get that cleared up.

Two new building types make Irondale much more interesting, and by themselves are a great reason to buy the expansion. The first is the Banking Institution. Each player gets one of these, and puts it off to the side. When you complete a master plan, you can store the card, and then redeem it later for awesome bonuses that will make you plan even farther ahead than you were before. While I may not really care about the New Start cards, the Banking Institution is a great way to make Irondale a much better game. It gives you a great reason to work harder at getting those master plans working, and gives you a way to pull off some incredibly impressive turns that will make the other people at the table throw their cards down and stalk angrily away. Which means you win.

The Architect's Guild, by comparison, is not as cool. I didn't like it as much, but you might, so feel free to give it a shot. It just lets you put a card up for sale, and might earn you some points. Me, I generally want to keep my cards in my hand, because the trickiest task in Irondale is keeping up a healthy hand of cards, and most cards require you to have other stuff in your hand. Dumping a card to earn one point means you just have to spend a point later to get another card. Seems pointless to me, and aggravatingly worthless when we played.

So far, my opinions on Irondale Expands are sort of mixed. Some of the new stuff really makes Irondale a much better game, and some just bother me. But to push my opinion from 'somewhere in the middle of the cool zone' to 'you need this, right now, stop reading and go order', the expansion includes the City Square. This totally changes the way you play Irondale, and basically turns it into a whole new game. In fact, it's so cool that the explanation of the card merits an entire new paragraph.

If you're using the City Square, each player gets one. It counts as a sort of wild card, so you can build anything you want next to it and score the maximum points. You don't build just one city any more. Now each player has a city, and you can build on any city you want. You don't score for how your city develops, so you're not screwing anyone by building in their town, but now you have a nearly limitless number of places you could build. You're no longer stuck trying to wedge your buildings into the corners. Now there are corners everywhere, and open spots, and just a whole ton of new things you can do on your turn.

Of course, if Irondale confused you before, the cards in Irondale Expands are going to make you feel like a short-bus-riding potato-head. If you didn't have the mental agility to keep up with the original game, you're totally screwed now. But if you do like Irondale, and you can play it even reasonably well, Irondale Expands makes it a whole new game - and a much better one.

Irondale Expands does exactly what an expansion should do. It doesn't just add a few new cards or a couple additional rules. It takes the entire game, reinvents it, and provides you with lots of options that you can apply to fine-tune it into exactly what you want to play. I could play the original, but I rarely found myself wanting to. Now that I have Irondale Expands, I look forward to getting this one on the table a lot more often.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Many new options
Add what you want, and ignore what you don't
City Square makes this a whole new game that's better than it was before
A great reason to own the original

Cons:
Some of the options suck (but you might like them)

If you haven't bought into Small Box Games yet, you're missing out. Get over there and put in a preorder now. You won't be sorry, unless you don't like them, and then you might be sorry, but that's really not my problem, is it?
http://www.smallboxgames.com/games.html

Read More