Card Game Review - Yomi

I grew up in the 80s. Back in those good old stone ages, the only place you could find good video games was at the arcade. We would saddle up with a roll of quarters and roll out to a dark room, lit up from the glow of the glass tubes, with pings and beeps and explosions echoing off the walls. We would wander around, spending our money a quarter at a time, playing all kinds of games with guns and joysticks and buttons and roller balls. And while I was never very good at them, I still ended up spending all my money on my favorites - fighting games. I spent God only knows how much money trying to master Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Capcom VS Marvel and a whole lot of games I can't even remember any more.

Those days are long gone. There are still arcades, but most of them take swipe cards these days, and I haven't seen a good fighting game in years. All I ever see are games with guns. I can get Tekken and Soul Caliber and all the DOA games for my consoles, but I still can't face off against a complete stranger in a dank dungeon surrounded by garbled voice effects and warbling sirens, sweating all over a joystick and probably picking up seven different kinds of ebola from the last fifty snot-nosed kids who smeared their mucus all over their hands before they started slapping those buttons. And if I lose at home, I can just play again. Lose in the arcade, and you had to go to the back of the line - losers walk in the arcade.

Apparently, Dave Sirlin remembers those great fighting games, too, with their ridiculous characters, hidden combos and split-second timing. Dave has created a series of games that all take place in a fictional video game called Fantasy Strike. His first two games, Flash Duel and Puzzle Strike, were faintly reminiscent of those arcade monuments of bygone days. But when Dave finally decided to really turn it up a notch, he went and made a game that feels so much like an arcade fighting game that you'll wonder where to drop a quarter if you lose.

Yomi has everything you'll see in one of those old-school quarter-eaters. You've got an over-the-top cast of characters, all drawn like they just popped out of a Capcom spin-off. There's the stone golem, the gambling panda, the hot ninja, and even the bearded master who turns into a mean-ass green dragon. There are attacks and blocks and throws, crazy combo attacks and powerful counter-strikes. But most of all, there's the eternal attempt to guess what your opponent is going to do half a second before he does it.

According to the slightly self-indulgent explanation provided in the rules, yomi is Japanese for reading, as in reading an opponent and guessing his moves. In Yomi the game (as opposed to yomi the Japanese word), both players play a single card at the same time. Attacks beat throws, throws beat blocks and dodges, and block and dodges beat attacks. Hit your opponent with an attack or throw, and you may be able to string together a combination of punches and kicks that sends them reeling. Finish it off with a powerful combo ender, and you'll pound your opponent right into the mud.

One thing that is really amazing about Yomi is how the rules don't change, and yet every character plays very different. Grave likes to telegraph an attack, psyching out his opponents and then switching it up when they least expect it. Rook can block attacks like a stone giant (because he's a stone giant) and then retaliate with devastating throws. And Setsuki can afford to play ridiculous combos and still have cards in her hand, because she's got a killer power called Speed of the Fox. Considering her scant attire and tendency to flip upside down a lot, maybe her ability should be called Speed of the Beaver.

But even with the different strengths provided by any particular character, there are still lots of different strategies you could adopt with any of them. You could play a defensive early game and power up for a couple back-breaking blows, or you can hammer your opponent with flurries of swift attacks. Swing for the fences with powerful throws and press the advantage while your opponent reels backward, or build up great combinations and unleash them when your opponent finally leaves himself open.

Probably the most important part of Yomi, and the thing that makes it an absolutely spectacular game, is the importance of out-guessing your opponents. You'll have to look at your opponent's hand (the backs, anyway - if he has any sense, you won't see the front of his cards until you're wearing them for a hat), remember what he's played, and exercise just a little clairvoyance to time your blows so that you attack when he tries to throw, block when he punches, and throw him when he tries to dodge. It would seem almost arbitrary, except that specific moves are often the best moves. If your opponent is low on cards, he probably needs to block. If he's been powering up for several turns and has a hand full of deadly attacks, he's probably itching to use them. Plus you can often draw your opponent into specific maneuvers, setting him up for your ultimate secret weapon of destruction, leaving him cursing furiously as he gets thrown to the ground - again.

For a game that's channeling those old arcade hits of my golden youth, the art in Yomi is spot-on perfect. When I dodge an attack and follow up with a throw against my defenseless foe, I can almost hear cheap speakers reverberating with the sound of digital smack-downs and grunting battle cries. When I finally reduce my opponent below zero hit points, I keep expecting a booming voice to rise from the table and say, 'Finish Him!', expecting me to pull out his spine or light him on fire. Instead I just start shuffling and say, 'one more!'

Yomi is available in two-deck sets, so you can try it before you dive in the deep end, or you can splurge and get all ten decks at once. The deluxe version comes with two very cool battle mats and little counters you can use to track your life, and it has the added bonus of saving you 25 bucks and getting all ten decks at the same time. I'm having a great time experimenting with all the characters, but I'm also looking forward to finding a favorite and sticking with it until I master it, the way I used to pump quarter after quarter into Street Fighter as I attempted to figure out how to routinely beat all comers with Chun-Li (don't judge me. That flippy-kick thing was my speciality).

Yomi is a magnificent game. It has been tested so thoroughly that no character feels better than any other - all have weaknesses and strengths that can be exploited, and every character offers a different feel. It's smart and fast, which are two things I love in a game, with rules that you can learn in a matter of minutes before diving head-first into a crazy martial arts tournament that will have you missing those dimly lit digital palaces of your youth (unless you're too young to remember arcades and think the game room at the miniature golf place is as good as it gets).

Summary

2 players

Pros:
Easy rules that will take a long time to master
Different experience with each of the various fighters
Layers of game will have you reading your opponent while you plan your moves
Crazy fun, with lots of reasons to play over and over

Cons:
Only two players

It's time for my regularly unscheduled sponsor pimping. Here's how this site works:
You request a game review.
I ask the publisher for it, and they ignore me because I said one of their other games was a transvestite.
I ask Noble Knight Games for it, and they send it to me because they know I'm dead sexy.
I review that game, you get your review.
See, Noble Knight Games sends me all kinds of stuff I couldn't get from publishers because I have made too many crude jokes about those publishers' product lines. And so, in return, I ask you, the people reading this, to shop at Noble Knight Games. Don't click the ads if you're not interested. Don't try to send me money. I have just one request - if you're going to buy a game, get it from Noble Knight, and let them know I sent you.
If you're going to buy Yomi, here's a link to save yourself a bundle.
BUY THIS SWEET GAME

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Here's To Jack

When you're a young kid, all your nightmares are about being chased around by monsters and not being able to run. When you get a little older, your nightmares feature a lot of inappropriate nudity and doing poorly on tests. But once you have kids, the worst dreams you ever have are the ones where you lose a child.

I just got done watching the memorial service for Jack Vasel. Tom had it streamed live, and it was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. Tom was strong and brave, but I could feel his heartbreak when he said how he wished he could have seen Jack graduate, and how he would have liked to go to Jack's wedding. He was grateful for the time that he had with his son, and that for two months, he got to hold his boy. He was honest, too - he wasn't sad for Jack, he was sad for himself and his family.

The last thing Tom did before he followed the pallbearers out the door to head to the grave was to step in front of the camera and say 'thank you' to all of us watching from home. That was the point where I broke down. I have two kids, and if I have to have a funeral for one of them, you can bet your ass all you Internet nerds are not invited. Tom's a hell of a lot classier than I am, though, and I'm grateful to him for letting us share such an intimate, painful moment.

I have a lot of stuff to do this weekend. I only ever saw a couple pictures of Jack, and I've never even had the chance to shake Tom's hand. But before I get on with my day, I'm going to go into the kitchen, pour myself two fingers of scotch, and drink to Jack and his tough old man.

Here's to you, Jack. And here's to you, Tom.

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Event Review - Vigilante Night Patrol

I don't feel like reviewing a game tonight. I have one all ready to go, but I'm just not in the mood. I just found out that one of the best friends I've ever had is moving to Oklahoma, and in honor of how much I'm going to miss him (never mind that he's only three hours away and will still be coming back to town every weekend), I'm going to review vigilante night patrol, instead.

Most of the time, when I write an event review, the purpose is to tell you about a cool thing you could do that you may not have considered before, or to warn you away from doing something that would suck. However, vigilante night patrol is not the kind of thing you can plan, unless you do this kind of a thing for a living, or are Spider-Man. So the purpose of tonight's event review is not to give you advice about whether you should wait outside the trailer of an armed fugitive. You probably should not. Instead, the purpose of tonight's review is merely to tell you a story about a stupid thing I once did that turned out awesome (as did most anything I ever did with the friend who is moving).

My friend lived in a trailer park. That's just unfortunate, and he doesn't any more, but while he did, we regularly convened at his double-wide for Halo LAN parties and cheesy horror movies. After a neighbor broke into his home, my friend decided it was time to do something about the crime in his community. Namely, we were going on vigilante night patrol.

The neighbor was a known, wanted felon with multiple warrants, and my friend even knew where he lived, but the police would not enter his trailer without knowing for certain that he was inside, because the trailer was not his residence of record. Or something - I'm not a cop, so I don't really know why they wouldn't just knock down the door and haul his ass out. So despite multiple attempts to apprehend this dirtbag, the rotten crook still walked around a free man, attempting to crawl through trailer windows to steal very small televisions.

The plan was that we would convene at my friend's trailer early in the evening. We would park up the road, so as to allow the house to appear empty, and then sit in the dark with baseball bats and hope the neighbor took the bait and broke in again. This was a dumb idea, and it failed almost immediately because we got bored and turned on the television. We watched belly dancing, which is awesome because it's one of those things that's not supposed to be hot but is anyway.

After we finished watching exceptionally fit middle-aged women pretending that their workout wasn't sexy as hell, we decided that we wanted ice cream. So we piled into the crappy station wagon I drove at the time and went for milk shakes. For no reason I could explain, we brought our bats. I guess maybe we were hoping the neighbor would be in the trailer when we returned with our frozen treats.

At any rate, on our way home, we took a spin past our target's trailer - and there he was, sitting on the front porch. My friend, in a state of excitement brought on by a combination of sexy aerobics, ice cream and the thrill of the hunt, urged me to stop immediately. As I brought the vehicle to a complete stop in front of the trailer, the villainous neighbor leapt to his feet and ran inside. But he was too late - my friend had his scent now.

It was obvious what we had to do. Immediate action was required, if we were to help the police bring this dangerous scumbag to justice. There were three of us in the car, all big guys armed with baseball bats, and we knew exactly what the situation demanded. We turned off the car, called the police, and then sat in the car and ate our ice cream.

Seriously, the ice cream place was like half an hour from the trailer park. No way were we going to let it go to waste. And the would-be burglar wasn't going anywhere. We had time.

Once we finished our ice cream, my friend hopped out of the car with his bat and began to patrol. We had the perp cooped up in the trailer, and as long as we knew he was in there, the police could go in and drag him out. So we watched the doors, and my excitable friend walked around the trailer, making certain his prey didn't escape through a window.

It was a good thirty minutes before John Q Law arrived, and in the interim, not a damned thing happened. It was shaping up to be an extraordinarily uneventful night of crime fighting, not counting the belly dancing or delicious frozen snacks. The black-and-white stopped just up the street, and we went to talk to them. We let them know that their target was inside the trailer, as we had waited the entire time and knew he had not left. After a brief discussion, the police went into the trailer, and five minutes later, emerged with the bad guy in cuffs.

My friend taunted him all the way back to the police car, and then the cops shook our hands and thanked us for the assist. We went back to my friend's trailer and played Halo for a few hours to celebrate our victory over the forces of evil.

Since we apprehended our nefarious arch-nemesis, we have had no more good reason to battle villainy in the dark of night. We also haven't watched any more belly dancing. I'm not sure which I miss more.

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RPG Review - Savage Worlds

If I have one serious pet peeve in RPGs, it's when people feel a need to separate the game from the setting. Maybe it's just me, but I want my rules to be integrated into a setting. I want different rules for a spaceship game than you find in a superhero game. And it takes all the fun out of reading a game book if there's no crazy world to explore, no trip to unreal worlds that I can visit in my mind's eye. Most of the fun of an RPG is discovering the wild corners of your imagination, and when the rules are all about how to shoot stuff and not the story those rules are meant to tell, I think it drains some of the soul out of a game. Reading a game without a setting is just work, and a setting without rules is not a game at all, it's a movie set.

So I was a little skeptical about Savage Worlds. It's supposed to be fast, furious and fun, but there's no indication of where you go to have all this fast, furious fun. It's a good-sized book of rules that you use to play a game, but with no playground, I was worried it would be as dry and lifeless as a college term paper.

I was about half right. The Savage Worlds rules are kind of a dull read. There are rules for spells, but none of the spells have cool names - you're supposed to add those yourself. There are a bunch of monsters in the back, but it seems odd to have stats for dragons and mechs in the same bestiary. I know it's meant to be a generic set of rules, but I'm not a big fan of generic. I like flavor.

Happily, the rules for Savage Worlds are just a stripped down version of the Deadlands rules. The Deadlands rules were complicated, certainly, but they were cool and worked really well, especially for an Old West game with monsters in it. You had cards for initiative, a bunch of dice, and poker chips you could discard for rerolls and what-not. They were perfectly married to Deadlands, because cards and poker chips are about as reminiscent of the Old West as you can get without bringing firearms and saloon girls to the table.

Savage Worlds dispenses with many of the finer subtleties of the Deadlands system. Instead of drawing a poker hand when you want to cast a spell, Savage Worlds has you spend a couple power points and roll some dice. Instead of dealing a dozen cards that you use for character creation, you just assign some points. And instead of fate chips, Savage Worlds has bennies, which everyone at our table agreed was a stupid name and we immediately decided to call them fate chips instead.

I liked the Deadlands rules. I didn't mind rolling piles of dice, because it felt like you had a better chance to shoot something when you could throw five dice at it. I liked dealing out cards based on Quickness rolls, because it meant the bad-ass gunslingers and fleet-footed kung-fu assassins got to act more than everyone else. I especially loved how so many things in the game required you to build a poker hand, and you could roll some dice to see if you could draw more cards. But I'll be the first to admit that where I enjoyed many of these elements, they sure did slow down a game. You could walk into a saloon, start a gun fight, and not finish for forty-five minutes. Halfway through, someone would have to pee, and then we would all discuss nerdy movies while we waited for our weak-bladdered friend to return.

Savage Worlds gets rid of a lot of that flavor, which is probably best in a game that could be about anything from stabbing orcs to shooting Nazis. After all, what are the odds that poker is a serious pastime in Cimmeria? Low, I would think. Without that flavor, the rules are not as interesting, but compared to Deadlands, they're like greased amphetamines. If you're looking for a game where the fights don't last all night, Savage Worlds can seriously deliver.

I tested Savage Worlds with a little mocked-up Deadlands adventure I made myself (with no setting in the rules, I had to improvise). We had one battle where five heroes faced off against twenty monsters. We finished in twenty minutes. It was quite a bit more rollicking than rolling initiative, dealing out half a deck of cards, rolling for the first guy to hit, rolling for hit location, rolling for damage, rolling for chips spent to reroll the damage, then figuring out that the attack didn't do enough damage to count and subtracting a bunch of wind before moving on to that same guy's second action. Instead, each player gets one card, and can shoot once. There's an attack roll and a damage roll, and wounds are marked right on the table with chunky colored beads I gathered just for this occasion (not really, I used to use them as sex toys, so I had a few laying around).

While I did miss all the flavor of the Deadlands rules, I didn't miss how long it used to take us to kill one bad guy and a couple minions. A small fracas against zombies was finished in five minutes, and even the final boss fight was over in less time than it takes to get a pizza delivered. The rules are easy to grasp, and yet flexible enough to handle lots of different eventualities. It didn't take long before everyone knew how to play, and where many RPGs reward players for thinking in terms of maximizing die rolls, Savage Worlds allowed us to reward smart thinking and acts of heroism without getting bogged down in five-foot moves and improved dice pools.

In fact, while I continue to be underwhelmed by systems without settings, I have to admit that Savage Worlds does a good job of letting you play a game without getting hung up on rules. And there are a hell of a lot of settings available for Savage Worlds, from pulp fiction to fantasy, space opera to superheroes. Plus the publisher wants you to give it a whirl, so a quick-start version of the rules is available on their site, along with pregenerated characters and sample adventures. If you just want to try Savage Worlds, you can get everything you need for your first game for the price of a couple sheets of printer paper.

Yet, with all those wild settings available, and all kinds of expansions, I know the next one we're getting. If you've been paying any attention at all, you probably do, too. Look for my review of Deadlands Reloaded in the next month or two.

Summary

Pros:
Fast rules
Accommodates anything from huge battles to quick scrapes
Easy to learn, but with plenty of flexibility
Lots of choices in character creation mean you can make whoever you want
A whole lot of cool setting material to support the game

Cons:
No setting
Generic rules are short on flavor

Basically a miniatures game with a few rules for calling people names

Noble Knight Games has Savage Worlds, plus a bunch of the settings and other support material. Plus it's really cheap:
SAVAGE LINK

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Expansion Review - Arkham Horror: Curse of the Dark Pharaoh

Game expansions are generally created for one of two reasons. First, they exist to extend the value of the original game and give players more enjoyment out of their initial game investment. Whether an expansion adds new stories, new mechanics, or new options, players can get more fun out of games that had grown stale and begun to be boring.

The other reason expansions are created is because publishers know how many suckers out there will buy all the expansions before they even try the game, then end up with all those boxes taking up copious space at the bottom of a closet somewhere, until the owner finally remembers that he owns them and donates them to a local thrift store. So the second reason expansions are created is because publishers like to get paid.

Which brings me to the main question you should ask yourself when you're reading a review about an expansion: Why hasn't this luddite asshole started doing video reviews yet? (In my case, it's because I am not what you would call a handsome man. That has not stopped most other video reviewers, but I have enough pride to hide my face.)

No, wait, that's not the right question. The right question is: Will this expansion add enough value to my original game for me to bother buying it? And if that's the right question, then it could be inferred that a good review of an expansion would answer that question for you, maybe even make up your mind for you through a complicated mix of coercion, persuasion and magical mind control.

Too bad I don't have any of those things. Think for yourself. I'm just here to make insipid jokes and get free stuff in the mail.

So is Curse of the Dark Pharaoh worth your money? That depends entirely on you. Do you play Arkham Horror a lot? Have you memorized all the location cards, until you know exactly how likely you are to get a membership to the Silver Lodge instead of being attacked by a mind-melting monster from an alternate dimension? Are you tired of that one guy at the table who always knows the exact right item to buy, and bullies you into buying the cigarette case when you really wanted the bullwhip, and now you wish you had the bullwhip because you want to hit him in the face with it the next time he says you're stupid for going to the Black Cave when there were more clue tokens at the police station?

If you said, 'yes' to all those questions, then you should stop reading out loud. Just answer the questions in your head. Also, the guy on the other side of your cubicle wall asked me to tell you that he's had it with you singing show tunes. Save it for the car, Dorothy.

Curse of the Dark Pharaoh doesn't really throw a new twist on Arkham Horror, at least not the way I was hoping it would. It does replace every location card with cards more specific to the traveling museum display that has brought all the bad guys back to Arkham, and it replaces the gate cards, so you'll have all new encounters. That part is pretty cool, actually. It also introduces a deck of creepy artifacts that relate to the doomed exhibit, and they're pretty interesting, too. New spells seemed about as useful as a barn door on a submarine (no, that isn't the right saying, but I maintain it is still apropos), and the new allies are even less compelling. But the new stuff on the mythos cards (which you'll draw every other turn) have all kinds of cool options, in addition to spreading the cult of Yig (well, in our case it was Yig. You might be dancing with Shib-Nuggo-Hooja-Gig, the Third. Seriously, what was Lovecraft smoking when he named these bad guys? You know it's bad when 'Goat with the Thousand Young' rolls off the tongue easier than the actual name.)

Basically, there's not much in the way of new rules in Curse of the Dark Pharaoh. There's no new ancient evil. There are no new investigators, and no new monsters. If you're playing Arkham Horror for the mechanics of the game itself, the all-against-the-game cooperative gaming experience, Curse of the Dark Pharoah is going to disappoint you. If you were already bored with Arkham Horror, this expansion isn't going to change your mind.

On the other hand, the new story is pretty interesting. The traveling museum exhibit featuring the lost artifacts from a long-dead religious cult has brought with it a retinue of cultists, nutjobs, and dark energies, and once again, Arkham has gates to alternate dimensions opening faster than new Starbucks franchises. And once again, the investigators have to close all those gates before some sleeping ancient evil wakes up and eats the East Coast like a Hostess cupcake. So if you enjoy the comfortable familiarity of the original rules, but really only play to see how the story evolves, Dark Pharaoh may give you a good reason to take another trip to the world's unluckiest small town.

And if you've only ever played Arkham Horror once before you stuck it on a shelf to play the other fifty new games you got this month, then you should ask yourself why you would even consider buying an expansion in the first place (I already know why - it's because you're a sucker for expansions. Fantasy Flight asked me to thank you for your support).

Summary

Still 2-8 players

Pros:
A new story gives you a new reason to fight evil and go insane

Cons:
Mechanically, a lot more of the same

If you love Arkham Horror and just want a new story to tell, you can get a copy of Curse of the Dark Pharaoh from Noble Knight Games:
GET CURSED

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Chip Game Review - Puzzle Strike

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Dice Game Review - Cookie Fu

It's not often that I read the rules for a game and then wonder what the hell I'm supposed to do. It's even more rare for me to play the game and then end up making that sound Tim the Toolman used to make when he was confused. If I typed that sound, it would be something like 'Erruhnh?' Which I think was actually the same sound Scooby Doo used to make.

Cookie Fu elicited one of those odd grunting sounds that you can say but not type. The rules were downright confusing, and I had to read them three times to figure out what I was supposed to do with this box full of dice. Then I played the game, and was a little less confused, but still not sure what it was supposed to be. Then I went online to find more, and came very close to throwing up my hands and making another sound, this one quite a bit more intelligible but a lot less appropriate for family-hour television.

From what I've gathered after extensive Internet research (by which I mean I went to the publisher's website for five minutes), Cookie Fu is currently limited to just the starter packs. And apparently, it's a collectible dice game. But you can't get dice beyond the starter, so maybe that's why I'm confused - it's a collectible game that doesn't have anything to collect.

Another thing that confused me is why there were fortune cookies in the box. I mean, it's a cool gimmick, but I'm not eating any food that comes in a game. I smashed the cookies to get the fortunes (which are special moves, not actual fortunes), and then threw out the cookies. I get that it's called Cookie Fu, and comes with actual cookies, but honestly, there's a limit to the amount of prepackaged food I want to ingest, and when it's prepackaged with dice and packing peanuts, I'm not eating that.

The game also confused me because the rules didn't make sense. There's some jabber at the start about how whole cookies are better than crushed cookies, but it wasn't until I actually pulled out the dice and read the rules a few more times that I figured out I was supposed to roll a die with pictures of cookies on it to figure out who swings first.

So here's how the game works, as far as I can tell. You have a handful of dice, and so does your opponent. One of your dice has pictures of cookies on it, in various states of disrepair, and this one is used for a sort of rock-scissors-paper dice-off for initiative. The others have fists and feet and grabby hands that let you attack your enemy or defend yourself. You hide your dice, and take turns showing them to each other and saying, 'I kicked you in the pubes.' Some dice let you attack, like if you have punches or kicks, and others let you defend, like blocks and grabs. You might also roll Chi, which lets you do more powerful attacks that are harder to block.

OK, so this part actually makes sense. You select the dice that you think will do you the most good, and save the ones you need for defense. Or, if you're me, you look at your dice and realize that there's absolutely nothing you can do with them, and say, 'I stand here like a rube while you punch my face out the back of my head.' Some dice can be used for multiple things, and you might want to save them for defense, or use them to set up a killer grabbing and throwing combo move. And then you have Chi.

Chi is where this game actually begins to be worth something. You won't see a whole lot of these, but when you do, they're useful for all manner of powerful super-attacks. You can unleash your clan moves with Chi, or you can do a Flaky Crust Boot to the Head, or Sugary Face Punch, or Dry and Stale Tooth Decay (that last one is not a special move, exactly, it's just what you get if you eat cheap fortune cookies that come in games). You can also use these Chi dice to stop some of the more violent attacks, and even save them for later, if you think you can hold out that long. The Chi adds an element to the game that takes it from a rather insipid festival of luck and makes it interesting.

Another thing that helps is if you don't play the novice-level game for very long. Once you understand what you're doing, you'll want to add some of the more specialized dice and add more options to your repertoire. When you do, the game gets a less about lucky dice and more about risk assessment and planning. In order to work all the way up to grandmaster and roll the cool green dice, you'll need a bunch of dice for each player... which means you'll need to collect more... but there aren't any more to collect. So just buy the game again. I figured out that for two players to be able to play at the highest possible level, you'll need to spend two hundred dollars. And if you do, then you are stupid.

I can't gush about Cookie Fu because it's got too many problems. A collectible game with nothing you can collect seems pretty well doomed to me, especially when I would actually be interested in getting more dice, if I didn't have to fork over a car payment for them. And to say the learning curve is steep is an understatement - you have to memorize a lot of stuff before you're not just randomly showing each other dice like a six-year-old showing off a booger. And I'm not ready to sign off on food in my games, no matter how full of preservatives they might be.

But I can see a lot of potential in Cookie Fu, if the publisher pulls his head out and starts doing a few things right. Releasing some boosters might help, for starters, and a massive rules overhaul should be a huge priority. Because at its core, Cookie Fu is a fun, quick dice game with lots of direct face-bashing and clever maneuvering. Granted, collectible games are as dated as Nirvana and plaid shirts, but the game itself is actually interesting and fun. If you play it a few times, you may even get close to a point where you don't feel like a caveman operating a helicopter every time pick up the rules.

Summary

2 players

Pros:
Neat dice
Cool combat game that plays really fast
Nice balance of luck and strategic planning

Cons:
Confusing rules
Collectible game with nothing to collect
Food belongs in the pantry, not in my games

If you can't hold out a few months to see if Blue Kabuto actually releases more dice, you can rush over to their site and pick up the starter:
http://www.bluekabuto.com/

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