Card Game Review - Death Angel

Space Hulk is one crazy fun game. The new one, with all the different sculpts and the embossed floor tiles, is both fun and stunning to gaze upon. I like the quality versus quantity aspect of the game, and it's fun to blast creepy aliens with space marines in power armor. So I was really surprised when I played Death Angel, the card game based on Space Hulk, and didn't like it at all.

The story is the same. You have a team of marines, and they go tromping through the corridors of a derelict chunk of spaceship hurtling toward civilization. Along the way, ugly purple monsters pop out of the ventilation and slice the marines like a key lime pie. Then the leftover marines fire hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition into the aliens, and then you clean up because Mom needs the table to make dinner. Good times.

In Death Angel, the entire trip through the genestealer killing fields is abstracted. A location card tells you what part of the ship you're in, and a couple of blip decks tell you how many more psychotic aliens are left there. Once the blip decks are empty (usually because the aliens have decided to join the party and dance with the marines at the world's most horrifying luau), you flip another location card, and now you're there.

Another abstraction replaces the part of the game where you decide to shoot the bad guys, because you've got all these teams of soldiers, and they can't ever do the same thing twice in a row. So you shoot with two teams while the other two wander around with their thumbs in their assholes, because they shot last time. Not to worry - those two guys will probably die, and then the other guys won't be able to shoot because they just did. This is only an upside because if you die early, you can stop playing.

In fact, every part of Space Hulk, from the dark corridors and special rooms to the terrifying brood lords and flamethrowing marines, is abstracted. You don't count off movement and range. You don't advance slowly and set your guys to overwatch. You don't spawn around the corner and rush the bad guys forward. The bad guys are just cards that sit there until they're summoned, and the good guys are always facing the wrong way because they can't turn around and shoot at the same time.

Combat is basically a matter of the marines playing action cards to try to kill the genestealers, and then the genestealers chomping on the marines until their stomachs are distended like your fat Uncle Frank after Thanksgiving. There's a die in there that tells you how likely you are to kill something (not very) and how likely that something is to kill you (extremely). Fighting tends to go something like this:

1) Choose two guys out of your half dozen survivors to shoot.
2) Roll the die for each of them.
3) Curse because you missed twice.
4) Roll for every bundle of genestealers attacking your marines.
5) Curse because they all hit and dragged your soldiers to an untimely death.
6) Flip the table.

I get that cooperative games are supposed to be tough. It's not fun if you can win every time. But you know what is even less fun than winning every time? Losing every time. Call me a candy-ass if you want (and if you do it from far enough away that I can't throw something heavy at you), but when I play a cooperative game, sometimes it's fun to win. I don't want a game to slaughter me without effort before I get through the first door.

To be perfectly fair, you can win Death Angel. I did it. I played four games (both with other people and solo), and won the last one. I was surprised, but then, my luck was unbelievable. I mean, it was almost unholy. And I still finished with just one guy who rolled like Jesus was his co-pilot and managed to wipe out six genestealers all by himself. And when I can only win the game because I'm just that lucky, it's too damned hard.

To make matters worse, even though I won that last game, I still didn't like it. I only won because I was lucky, and furthermore, it was just a card game. It wasn't Space Hulk. There were no claustrophobic tunnels. There were no clever crossfires. There were no flame-filled corridors, or charging monsters, or desperate last stands. It was a card game, and it was missing nearly everything I love about Space Hulk.

In fact, it reminded me of something completely different - a Euro game. If a German designer had set about making a complicated puzzle game and then added a die roll that tilted all the odds in favor of the bad guys, he might have wound up with Death Angel. Only because he was a German designer, it would have been about floating bathtub toys, and it would have been called Der Ruber Quakkies.

If I want to play a cooperative card game ruled by luck... well, never mind, I don't want to do that. If I want to play Space Hulk, on the other hand, I own it, and I'll just play that. It's more fun, and I have this cool soundtrack thing that I can play on a laptop to make sounds like gunfire and screaming genestealers. Whatever mood grabs me in the future, I can be reasonably certain I won't be wanting to play Death Angel again.

Summary

1-6 players

Pros:
Cooperative game with the Space Hulk storyline
Very affordable

Cons:
Too damned hard
Overly abstracted
Loses everything awesome about Space Hulk
Not very much fun

I should point out that while I did not like Death Angel, I know lots of people who did. If you decide that you might like it, you can find a copy at Noble Knight Games:
GET DER RUBER QUAKKIES

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Board Game Review - Pastiche

The other day, a friend of mine mentioned in passing that I hated Euro-style games. The thing is, I don't. I like lots of games that are made in Germany and are all about harvesting beans or preparing dinner. And to prove that I like games that aren't all about gunfire or topless women, here's a very positive review of a game called Pastiche, in which players make copies of historic paintings. No bodies anywhere.

In truth, you're not actually creating paintings. In Pastiche, you just have to collect the right colors to reproduce paintings from hot-shots like Renoir and Van Gogh. And unlike people who actually paint things, you're going to lay down hexagons in order to match splotches of primary colors and then take cards based on what you matched. That's completely different from the way actual artists come up with colors, because what actual artists do is pick the colors on a computer by clicking little boxes and stuff (I'm pretty sure nobody bothers to actually mix paint any more. Now they just pick color palettes on their iPads).

There are lots of layers to Pastiche. Kind of like an onion, except that it doesn’t make you cry, and it’s a very bad idea to cut it up and put it in chili. The first layer is where you choose what art you want to reproduce. There are four paintings available for anyone, and each player also has two more. You can trade yours for the ones in the gallery, thereby stealing them from everyone else and making them worry because you think you can finish that really hard painting before they can finish their really easy ones. Some paintings require a lot more colors, and so they’re worth a bunch more. Some require very difficult colors, like bisque and gray (which, by the way, are really easy to pick on your iPad, but very difficult to mix in Pastiche). And if you do a bunch from the same artist, you get a bonus at the end of the game, so sometimes it’s worth making a low-scoring painting to pick up a few extra points later.

Then you’ve got the part of the game where you have to actually pick up colors. To do this, you have hexagonal tiles with splats of red, blue or yellow, and you put them down next to other tiles that have red, blue or yellow, and get colors based on which splotches are next to other splotches. Yellow and blue make green, for instance, and if you can mix all three in one place, you can score brown (which is not a reference to heroin - you actually get the color brown).

This part of Pastiche is interesting because there’s a lot to consider. You have to complete your paintings to win the game, but you don’t want to set up your opponents for their turns. You might pass up the spot that gets you that teal swatch you’ve been eyeballing and block your opponent with a tile you didn’t really need, and then when you say, ‘I’ll just take the blue,’ your opponents will cuss you. At least, my daughter will cuss you. I don’t know about the people you play.

You also have to consider the third layer of Pastiche when you’re working that second layer, because you can trade your color cards in certain combinations to grab other colors. The only way to get a black or white card is to trade three matching colors – but you can’t use this method to get a primary color. It’s pretty tricky, and there’s a lot to consider. What this means is that while the entire game finishes in 45 minutes, it would only take 20 if everyone could just take their turns and stop staring at the board, then at their tile, then at the board, then at their tile, then put down the one tile and pick up the other one and start staring again, with interludes to stare at their paintings.

For a game that is pretty easy to learn (not like ‘play this with people who have never even played Monopoly’ easy, but definitely ‘play this with people who can handle Carcassonne’ easy), Pastiche sure does make your brain sweat. Will you go for a bunch of low-cost Degas pieces and work the combos, or will you put your head down and plow forward on that Monet that will score you a boatload of points? Will you grab the spot that gets you four colors, or will you block it with a primary to stop your opponents? Will you sit for the next five minutes trying to figure out how to arrange your yellow and red tile before you change your mind and place the blue one? Actually, that last question was rhetorical. You will totally do that.

I don't pretend that I'm not a fan of games with bloodshed. I like to sack villages and ride off on the women. I like to blow stuff up and get money. But I like just about any game that challenges me to think and plan, as long as it's interesting and not as dull as Puerto Rico. Pastiche does that, and as an added bonus, you get to spend the entire game looking at some of the finest art mankind has ever produced. Sure, it slows down a little when it's not your turn, but since you're going to spend the entire time that everyone else is playing to plan your own move, it's not as bad as you might think. And since you can finish in less time than it would take you to get an oil change, there's still time to watch reruns of Law and Order after the game is over (which, if you have cable, is always playing on one channel or another).

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Lots of depth
Timing and planning and smart moves are essential
Spend most of an hour looking at the best art ever made

Cons:
It will take so long to plan your move, it will surprise you when you're done in less than an hour

I am totally surprised - Noble Knight Games does not have Pastiche yet. But then, it just hit the US like, three days ago, so give 'em a week or so. It's a fun game. It's worth waiting.

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RPG Review - Deadlands Reloaded

It's funny, for a guy that grew up playing roleplaying games and amassing a considerable collection of oddly shaped dice, I actually enjoy a very small number of roleplaying games. Some are too much work, and others don’t have enough meat on their bones. Some are just board games with options, and others have so much drama and baggage that they should be played on a headshrinker’s couch. Some have convoluted and twisted rules that try too hard to fit onto the setting, and most make almost no effort to make rules that fit the world you’re supposed to be visiting. And of course, whole bunches of them are just stupid (no offense to anyone who actually really loved RIFTS).

That leaves me with a good-sized pile of games that I tolerate, a few I enjoy, one or two that I really love, and just one that I will play nearly any time I have the chance. That one game is Deadlands. Between 1996 and 2001, I procured every book ever published for classic Deadlands, and didn’t stop buying them until they started making d20 and GURPS crossovers. Then I cried a little (but only on the inside), because making a d20 version of Deadlands is an affront to all that is holy.

Deadlands is a brilliant mix of dark and campy, horror and sci-fi, monsters and cowboys and steam-powered robots. It’s a game where your heroes can get stronger and faster, but they can also lose limbs and develop debilitating speech impediments. It gives me everything I want, sacrificing nothing to deliver great stories, exciting scenes of derring-do, and more flavor than a Kansas City barbecue joint.

If I had one beef with classic Deadlands, however, it was that the game tended to drag if you fought more than one bad guy at a time. I recall one battle against mud creatures that slowed so badly, I would have sworn the slop critters had left the game and were actually in our living room, making every turn take three times longer than it should. I loved the game, but I regularly found myself cheating to make stuff happen faster (I ran the game, so I could fudge a die roll now and then and just say, ‘wow, you got him in one shot!’)

I was hopeful when I decided to check out Deadlands Reloaded. It’s the same setting I know and love, but now it uses Savage Worlds, which runs like a road runner on amphetamines compared to classic Deadlands. On the other hand, I was worried that trimming down the rules meant I was going to lose a lot of the flavor that made Deadlands a wonderful marriage of setting and rules.

It turns out, I had nothing to worry about. For starters, Deadlands Reloaded dumps a few of the problems I have with Savage Worlds and goes back to its roots. There are no ‘bennies’, which I feel compelled to put in quotes because I’m embarrassed to be typing the word at all. They’ve been replaced with fate chips, which is as it should be, because fate chips are Old West, and ‘bennies’ are ugly guys who mop up after wild nights at the gay bar.

I did kind of like how classic Deadlands gave each player a roll at the beginning of each round, and then you got cards based on how well you rolled. So if you had a very high Quickness, you were likely to get to act many times in a round, and if you were slower than Christmas, you got to go once. However, this was also the main reason classic Deadlands is so slow, and so when Savage Worlds replaces it with just dealing out a single card to each player, I can see why that happened. I don’t like that my lightning-fast gunslinger has to count on getting lucky if he wants to shoot before the bad guy can pull a weapon, but on the other hand, there are edges he can take to make sure he gets a good draw. It’s not quite as slick as the original, but it gets the job done.

Deadlands Reloaded also does away with many of the cool spells, and kind of lumps them all in together. I actually really liked many of the hexes, miracles and other arcane madness, and don’t really like that mad scientists just build devices that cast spells. That seems like too great an effort to make everything work the same, and I don’t want everything to work the same. I want the hucksters to throw a soul blast while the mad scientist calibrates his fluctuating defrabinator and the preacher sings Glory Hallelujah while swinging a hickory stick and firing a righteous shotgun. That still happens in Reloaded, but now it all basically works the same way. And that’s not as much fun.

Anyone who knows classic Deadlands knows how every different character type had his own book, from the hucksters and voodoo priests to the Texas Rangers and the walking dead known as harrowed. Each book was chock-full of specialized powers, arcane knowledge and secret handshakes. Half the fun of taking one of those specialized characters was finally being allowed to read through the book and find out what you had been missing. Unfortunately, Reloaded distills all those crazy archetypes into a few pages in the player’s book, which again, is not as much fun.

Ironically, all those things I loved about classic Deadlands were also its biggest failings. Information overload became almost impossible to manage. When I had four players, and they were a huckster, a preacher, a mad scientist and a harrowed, I had to know where to find rules in almost 400 pages of books. After a while, it became a running gag – ‘a shaman, a nun and a harrowed walk into a bar. Hold on while I look that up.’

Deadlands Reloaded may have cut a lot of the stuff I loved about classic Deadlands, but at the same time, it trimmed the fat until Deadlands is a lean, mean, Old West horror machine. I can run a zombie invasion with a terrified town and a posse of deputies in half the time it used to take me to fight two drunks in a saloon. When a player asks me how long it will take to climb under the burning wreckage, I can tell him so fast, I still have time to send a trio of angry prairie ticks to rip off his face when he’s stuck under a fallen rafter. I don’t have to work anywhere near as hard I used to, and that makes running Deadlands a lot more fun.

I wouldn’t say that Deadlands Reloaded is the perfect replacement for classic Deadlands. I like the flexibility of the old system, and the way everything about the game oozed Weird West. You could meet Doc Holliday, get in a shootout with the Clantons, then have some nightwalking demon scare you so bad you soiled yourself. You can still do that in Deadlands Reloaded, though, and now those two shootouts won't take the better part of three hours. Now you can kill Ike, run from the manitou, find its weakness, change into clean drawers, and go back to bury the bastard before everyone gets tired of asking if it's their turn yet.

I was on the fence about whether I liked the new Deadlands better than the old, to be honest, until I considered a few things. First, those long fights can really suck the fun out of a game night. Second, there's nothing stopping me from adding some of my favorite parts back into the game. Third, none of my current group of players made characters with any kind of supernatural ability, so until somebody croaks (and possibly comes back), I don't have to worry about asking anyone to build poker hands to throw unholy death at their foes. Finally, the Pinnacle website has a PDF specifically made for converting old Deadlands stats into Savage Worlds - and that means I can still use the bookshelf full of classic books.

And I guess that brings me to my final conclusion. Deadlands is my favorite RPG ever - and I like Deadlands Reloaded better.

Summary

Pros:
Fast and lean
Rules are easy to learn and easy to remember
All the flavor, half the calories

Cons:
Not really all the flavor. I lied about that part to make a diet food joke.

Hey! Guess who has Deadlands Books! Yep, Noble Knight Games!
FILL YER HAND, AMIGO

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Card Game Review - Nightfall

Groff Deathbloodfang, squire of East L.A. and fire marshal of the apocalypse, spread his leathery vampire wings and swooped down out of the night. His prey was below him, hot blood filling his nostrils like the cream in a chocolate eclair. He dove down, down, down, down, down, down and one more time down, claws extended to pluck his dinner out of the inky blackness and devour the human's terror. He was a wolf on wings, a wolverine in a hang glider, a badger on roller skates.

At the very last possible second, Groff's prey turned and looked up at him, and a high-powered rifle exploded in an orgasm of gunsmoke and muzzle suppression. Groff's last thought before the bullet tore into his face and sent his brains flying out the back of his head like a water ballon filled with orange marmalade was, 'son of a bi-' He wasn't able to finish the thought, because he died halfway through 'bitch.'

Derek Coolaselvis smiled grimly. 'You won't hunt in my town again,' he said as he lowered his rifle and wiped vampire brains off his cardigan. Then a werewolf ate him.

The unending night had consumed another victim. Well, two victims, if you count the vampire, but he was a bad guy, so he's not so much a victim as a statistic. The werewolf had a little indigestion, too. So maybe three.

If you play Nightfall, you too can join in the brooding darkness where the sun never comes up and humans are walking snack cakes. Vampires fight werewolves, and they both fight humans, and all this drama and violence and sadness and angst is played out in the only feasible way it could ever work - as a deckbuilding game.

Nightfall brings to your table the epic struggle between vampires and werewolves, with humans caught in the middle, by letting you buy cards that represent vampires and werewolves and sometimes humans who are caught in the middle. You can also buy actions that simply do what the bestial animal inside every immortal demon longs to do - hurt your friends. Only you do it with cards, which is not quite as dark, unless you're giving them paper cuts or throwing the cards at them really hard. Then it's as twisted and evil as the soul of the abominations hunting through the neverending night, where streetlights cast watery shadows and nobody anywhere has a tan.

When your turn arrives in this abyss of hopelessness and long black leather coats, you will have the chance to unleash your minions so that they can ravage your opponents in a festival of blood-soaked anarchy and freeform dance. But beware, because each of your minions and actions shows colored moons, and if your opponents have matching colored moons, they can play on your turn. They can also steal your Lucky Charms. Then not only will their actions resolve before yours, possibly ripping out your spleen and eating it with fava beans and a glass of Not-Very-Sunny Delite, but you will not have any breakfast cereal.

Carefully selecting your minions and special actions is paramount to survival in the dark world of Nightfall, where policemen carry loaded pastrami sandwiches and every action could be their last, especially if they carry their sandwiches past werewolves who really like pastrami. It's important that you choose actions that you can chain together, because you may be able to play five cards when everyone else is playing one or two. Of course, it's also nice if the cards you choose actually work well together. It's not as helpful as you might imagine to destroy a summoned minion if you're the only stupid vampire lord with any minions summoned. Then you kill your own guys and your friends laugh at you, and in a fit of hideous anger you rip off your shirt and feel very bad about yourself.

As with any game where the goal is the complete decimation of your foes and the eventual consumption of their internal organs in a nice cobb salad, the hunters in the darkness win by giving more wounds than they receive. To represent this tragic and violent goal, Nightfall uses the one thing at which it excels - cards. When Bad Fart and Cheese Toe, your werewolf aggressors, rip through your opponent's meager defenses and savage his leader with their very scary claws and razor-sharp teeth, that leader will have to add wound cards to his deck, which will then take up space and irritate him to no end as he receives hand after hand with a bunch of cards that aren't good for anything.

Ultimately, nothing can adequately express the horror and misery of unending night, unless that something is black eyeshadow and false fangs that make you talk with a lisp. No card game could ever really convey the darkness in your soul. Only by wearing fingerless gloves and dying your hair, and then reading fan fiction you found on a Masquerade website, can you truly understand the powerful urges of the monstrous rulers of the night. And when I say all that, I mean the theme in Nightfall is almost as weak as the theme in Dominion, but with better art.

However, no matter how easily you rest in your comfortable chair, gathered around the dinner table as you hold your cards close and pretend to be from Transylvania, nothing can prepare you for how damned much fun it is to play Nightfall. It will hurt your head, though it will hurt considerably less than if a vampire were to really eat your face. Carefully buying the right cards and playing them in swift, damning moves destined to wreak havoc on your foes will aid you in your quest for bloody victory. But buying the wrong cards and playing like a chump human will have you reeling from the constant stream of painful blows to the face that your opponents will heap upon you.

So many things about Nightfall make it one of the best deckbuilding games you can encounter. A redraw for wound cards provides an edge you might need if you are losing badly. Personal archives of cards that only you can buy force you to form an overall strategy from the very outset of the game. A beginning deck erodes as you play, forcing you to buy wisely before your resources are depleted and the other werewolves all pull your underpants up over your head and give you a nightmare of a wedgie. The greatest feature of the game is the chain, where you plot and scheme to take advantage of the weaknesses of your enemies while building towering attacks and unbeatable defenses. In other words, Nightfall is a very, very good game.

And if you don't buy Nightfall, Goat Raper the werewolf will come to your house in the middle of the night and run off with your Magic cards. Then all you will have left is the black of your soul and your red-tinted contact lenses.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:

A deckbuilder that really lets you lay into your opponents with your bloody talons of doom

The chaining card play makes this a thinking-vampire's game

Never any morose pauses, because you could play on your opponent's turn (could be a con if you need to touch up your white foundation)

Neat re-draw rule helps players who are losing to get back in the game

Excellent depth and plenty of room to grow

I totally dig the art

Cons:

Theme is a little weak, but it gets the job done

Nightfall kicks ass. If you like deckbuilding games at all, you should check it out. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's out yet. That sucks for you.

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Worm Game Review - Worm Up!

One day, aliens are going to come to the planet long after we've all died out. They'll be exploring the ruined husk of our planet, and using the odds and ends they can find to determine what kind of society we had. If they find Worm Up, they will assume that we were pretty darn stupid.

Worm Up is another in a long line of reprints coming out of Gryphon Games. In this latest rehash, players will partake in a particularly asinine activity - they will race worms. When the aliens see this game, they will probably deduce that humanity died out because neither our brains nor our bodies moved very fast, and so we were actually capable of being entertained by worm races.

Each player's worm is made up of a bunch of wooden balls, only they're chopped in half. These half-globes all sit in a line that you tell people is a worm, even though you know they're actually just a pile of wood buttons laid out in a line.

To move your worm, you bid a movement number, which you indicate by turning a humongous die with numbers on it. If someone else bids your number, then you don't do a damned thing. If you're the only one bidding your number, you get to take the those wooden beads from the ass end of your worm and put them in front of his head. That's how worms move, too - they just suck their butts up through their faces. It's quite fascinating, or it would be, if it actually happened that way.

If this were one of those reviews where I just tell you the rules, I would be done now, because that really is most of the rules. Fortunately for you, that's not all I do here. For one thing, I haven't made any boob jokes yet, so I need to work those in somewhere. I also haven't reached the part of this review where I tell you that I actually really liked Worm Up.

OK, yes, the game is stupid. It takes almost a whole minute to set up, then you can finish in ten more minutes, then you sweep everything into the box and you're done putting it away. There aren't very many decisions to make, outside trying to second-guess your opponents. But even without a lot of flash, or excruciating decisions, Worm Up is cute and a lot of fun. And that's not something you can say about a lot of games (which makes me wonder why those other games get made in the first place).

When you think you're the smart one and you bid the X, and then someone else does, too, you're both going to slap your foreheads and groan (make sure you slap your own forehead, and not the forehead of the other guy. This is a pretty important consideration). When you get one turn where you're leading the pack, you might twist your worm so he's cutting off all your opponents and forcing them to swing wide. You can move the finish line to get it closer to your worm. You can laugh at the light silliness of the game, and then laugh at yourself for playing it.

I was dreading Worm Up when I broke it out. Like the alien archeologists, I was sure the game was dumber than a bag of hammers. I could only surmise that babbling idiots were responsible for its creation, and that someone was playing a joke on me. But the rules and pieces don't show the goofy charm of Worm Up. To understand how much fun you can have with a ten-minute game about racing worms, you really have to try it.

If the aliens try it, they're going to decide we knew how to have fun. But they will still think we were stupid for playing a game with wooden nipples.

Summary

3-5 players

Pros:

Incredibly quick to set up and play

Fun for all ages

Light and silly and charming

Cons:

Kind of dumb

You can get yourself a copy of Worm Up at Noble Knight Games, and then you can also feel stupid while you have a good time:

GET WORMS

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Board Game Review - Earth Reborn

A couple weeks ago, I heard some Metallica on the radio. Then I got to work and someone mentioned Zombieland, and since I was already humming Whiskey in the Jar in my head, I leapt to For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I had a kind of shot of inspiration. And here it is:

We need some heavy metal board games.

It's not like there have been no solid attempts at making a metal game. Space Hulk should have been pretty hardcore, but while it is awesome, it's not quite loud and raw enough to go with a little rowdy Quiet Riot. It's fun, but it has a little too much polish to be metal. Space Hulk is more like the kind of music young people play at raves while they ingest ecstasy and have sex with strangers. The same can be said of a lot of other games with lots of violence but streamlined rules - they start out metal, but then they get all cleaned up and corporate.

The very next day, still pondering a kick-ass headbanger board game, Earth Reborn showed up at my house. It was like fate was in my head, guiding me to the answer I had silently asked. No, not that question. I still haven't heard back on that one, but I have a tarp and a shovel in the back of my truck, just in case.

I'm not sure it was intentional, but it sure looks to me like when Cristophe Boelinger was making Earth Reborn, he was staring at an Iron Maiden poster and listening to Sabbath. I'll run down a few elements, to illustrate my point.

1) Raw and unpolished
2) Loud and fast and violent
3) Zombies and machine guns
4) A guy with a giant saw blade permanently attached to his arm

Add it up, you get headbanging metal. You also get Earth Reborn, the most thrashing, hardcore, flat-out heavy metal game I've ever played.

The first indication that Earth Reborn is a heavy metal game is the post-apocalyptic setting. This isn't just post-nuclear armageddon. In Earth Reborn, China and the US are threatened by Greenpiece (yeah, I spelled it right), and so everyone builds underground vaults and hides for five hundred years. The NORAD guys get all paranoid and military, and while they build mechs and learn how to shoot heavy weapons, the people living underneath Salem learn how to make zombies. So now you've got heavy machine guns and robots fighting creepy guys who make zombies in an irradiated wasteland. And just in case you've been listening to Michael Bolton and Air Supply for the last ten years, that is heavy metal.

Of course, when guys in powered armor shoot vicious aliens in a derelict pile of space junk, that's also pretty metal, so there has to be more to Earth Reborn to make it truly metal - and there is. For starters, look at the art. Zombies with glass tubes attached to their heads to give them superhuman intelligence. Top-heavy women with guns nearly as big as their boobs. Guns and claws and kevlar and night-vision goggles. The illustrations in Earth Reborn look like they could have been taken directly from a Judas Priest album cover.

And then we get to the game, and if we weren't sure if this was heavy metal before now, we are now. In an age of gaming where we've become used to universal resolution, elegant rules and streamlined mechanics, the insane variety of things you can do in Earth Reborn is like a Thin Lizzy guitar solo to the brain.

Forget about having some carefully worded special ability on a character card that lets you use one particular guy in one particular way. Screw that - send your wounded gunfighter to the infirmary to heal up, and drop a mine on the way to discourage pursuit, then send the crazy scientist to fill up his syringe in the chem lab before he runs to the bathroom to drop a deuce (I didn't make that up - it's in the game). You'll roll a bunch of dice - the more the merrier - and you'll do anything from firing guns or stabbing people in the gizzards to activating the radio scrambler or torturing a captured opponent. Search for enemy plans in their stronghold. Blow up the command room. There are so many things you can do in Earth Reborn that you'll play dozens of times and still never try everything. And most importantly, not one of those things is neat and tidy and streamlined. They do all make sense, though. They're just not so abstracted that you're placing a clue token and acting like that means you bribed a gate guard.

Most of all, Earth Reborn is like heavy metal because it is fast, violent and fun as hell. There are rules for playing with three or four, but mostly you'll be across the table from one guy, who will be doing everything in his power to kill the living and raise the dead, and it will be awesome. I can't remember a time when I had this much fun playing a two-player face-off shoot-em-up game. It's just plain incredible.

But like any good heavy metal band, Earth Reborn is not perfect. In fact, the list of flaws may threaten to drive off people who would otherwise become huge fans. For example, the graphic designer for this game never even heard the word 'restraint.' There are icons everywhere. garish colors, sloppy lines, confusing backgrounds, and endless arrays of needless Photoshop layer effects. If Pantera is supposed to make your ears bleed, Earth Reborn targets your eyes. The rules and character cards are painfully cluttered and sloppy.

I could easily forgive the slop on the cards and rules if not for the fact that it flows over to the room tiles. You've got this infinitely versatile building set to make all different kinds of interesting locations, but they're hideous. I know it's the apocalypse and all, but would it kill you to use a bright color? It's been 500 years since the bomb. Could we maybe put in a request to get the grass green instead of gray?

It's bad enough the colors are a mess, but when they make it harder to play, that's a serious problem. I don't know how many times I plotted an entire move, shot at a guy, and ran off to make my escape - only to run smack into a wall that I didn't see because it was the same color as the floor. The artist clearly knew how to use Photoshop. Would it be too much to ask that he learn how to adjust the contrast?

The last thing that is going to intimidate anyone who is not really committed to Earth Reborn is the length of the learning curve. A book of tutorial scenarios teaches you the game, one scenario at a time. The first scenario teaches you about moving and close combat - and when that's all you can do, Earth Reborn is stupid. Then you get to do running and stabbing, but with interrupts - and it's still stupid. Add in guns, and you've got some great opportunities for covering fire and suppression and other cool violence, but you still can't use the mission cards or the surveillance room. In fact, you have to play five or six times before the game really gets good, which means some seriously lame games early on.

But here's the good news - those downsides are lame excuses for nancy boys who can't take the heat. The visual assault of the cards actually makes them easier to play. After you set up a couple times, you'll remember where the doors are. And once you work through three or four of the scenarios, you'll start to realize that you're playing a piece of two-player genius that will rock your face off like Queensryche opening for Motorhead.

If you're a fan of two-player gridded miniatures games, Earth Reborn should be at the tippy top of your wish list. It's crazy amounts of wild fun, with so much flexibility and brilliance that even if you lose every game, you'll have fun. If there's another reason to play games besides having a good time, I don't ever want to know about it.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Fast and fun and violent
Wacky and exciting and over-the-top
If Megadeth and Black Sabbath collaborated on a board game, this would be it

Cons:
Rookie design mistakes
Wicked learning curve

Noble Knight Games has Earth Reborn for a pretty good discount. If you like games where you shoot zombies and play with cool toys, you really ought to pick this up.

SHOOT SOME ZOMBIES

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Expansion Review - Railways of England (and Wales)

It's been a while since I was able to get Railways of the World to the table. Until a few weeks ago, it had been more than a year since I broke it out and played my favorite train game. Four days of ice-covered roads and a mandated vacation, however, gave me boatloads of time to spend with my family, whether or not I wanted it. So to kill time while we shivered in our poorly insulated house and waited for the pipes to thaw so I could crawl around under my house and fix the leaks while lying in frozen mud, we broke out the trains.

And when we did, I realized that I have owned Railways of England and Wales for a year and a half and never actually wrote the review. It wasn't because I didn't want to review the damned thing, because I did. But there are two sets of rules in the box, and one of them was so completely foreign to anything I understood at the time I first got it that I gave up and put it away, then forgot it was there.

I sure am glad I dug it out again. Going over the rules again, I realized that the reason I didn't understand the advanced game was because I couldn't wrap my head around a railroad game where you didn't actually own the railroads. But after I forced myself through Baltimore & Ohio, I was embarrassed that I was ever confused by the advanced version of England and Wales. Compared to Baltimore & Ohio, England and Wales is a breeze.

The theory is essentially the same. There are a bunch of train companies, and you buy stock in them. The guy with the most stock in one company decides what that railroad does, and the railroads pay dividends to the shareholders if they make enough money. So you need the railroads to make a lot of money, so that their stock rises and they give you a bunch of money. You win by being the richest investor, so having lots of expensive stock at the end of the game (especially if you bought it on the cheap) is, you know, good.

It's almost funny to me now that I actually gave Baltimore & Ohio a positive review. If I had just grown a pair and powered through the rules for England and Wales, I would have realized what a tweaky mess Baltimore & Ohio really is. The two games have a ton in common, enough that if you're going to own one, there's not much reason to own the other. And in this case, I'll be dumping my copy of Baltimore & Ohio as quick as I can. Railways of England and Wales is so far superior that there will never be a reason to play Baltimore & Ohio again. Like if you've only ever had one girl in your whole life, and then she dumps you and you wind up with some bedroom freak who reinvents your entire sex life, and you wonder why you thought that other chick was so hot when all she ever did was lay there. I'm not saying that either game is like sex, of course. And there is absolutely no good reason to lube your plastic trains, you sick bastard.

The concept of owning stock and controlling railroads with the end goal of getting rich is not exactly innovative. A bunch of those 18XX games do exactly that, as do England and Wales and Baltimore & Ohio. However, where Baltimore & Ohio is so overrun by mathematical minutiae that every player has to have a calculator (this is literal - every player will need their own calculator. It helps if you can program if for sine curves), England & Wales distills the math down to sheer simplicity while maintaining every bit of the strategy and planning required to excel at either game.

Another feature that ruins Baltimore & Ohio is needless historical accuracy. I can make plenty of tactical decisions and long-term plans simply by having varying starting values for stock prices. I don't need to be forced to run the cast of Jersey Shore to Buffalo just to be reminded that this is how it happened in real life (but with different stupid people, obviously). I'm all for granting a little historical feel to a game in the name of playing out a theme, but when it interferes with the game play, I just don't see the point.

Need another reason that England and Wales beats the balls off Baltimore & Ohio? How about the fact that it plays in half the time. You can have very nearly the exact same experience, but finish before your wife goes to bed, so you can still have time to kick your friends out of the house and maybe get a little before she calls it a night. Would you rather have a great game, or a great game and then sex? Don't answer that. I do not want to know.

One final improvement in England and Wales is that the map is a lot smaller. Even with just three players, you're going to run into each other by the end of the first turn. And then you're going to be scheming and plotting and blocking and competing right up until the end of the game. Make a good move early on, and it could pay off for the entire game. Screw the pooch right out of the gate, on the other hand, and there's still a little time to catch up.

So now that I've spent this much time singing about why England and Wales is so awesome, it may surprise you when I say that I'll probably stick with the normal game. The advanced game really is fun, but I like owning my railroad. I am pretty good at the standard rules, and I really like the England and Wales map. It's perfect for three players, with enough chances to get bare-knuckles with your opponents, and still enough room to spread out a little. For playing with my wife and daughter, England and Wales is just about ideal. It has that sweet spot of interaction without excessive brutality, and all the stuff I enjoy about Railways in general, like jockeying for cards and racing to complete rail lines and rebuilding cities so the game can go just a couple more turns.

If you enjoy Railways of the World, you're really going to like England and Wales. If you enjoy Baltimore & Ohio or some of those 18XX games, but don't like having to break out a laptop just to track dividend splits, England and Wales will totally be your cup of tea. But if you like a really small map, you can get Mexico in the base game, and if you like a really huge map, you can use Eastern or Western US. England and Wales is perfect for me, and my favorite Railways expansion so far. It works for me without making me do too much work.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:

Map is just the right size for three

Advanced game kicks Baltimore & Ohio in the balls and steals its lunch money

Everything I like about the Railways games, in a size and location that is perfect for my family

Pick the game you want to play - both are a blast, so play the one you like

Cons:

Still that stupid thing where you can't tell the blue from the purple

Simplified, which you may not like if you're a math nerd and a history dweeb

Noble Knight Games has a great deal on Railways of England and Wales. If you like Railways of the World and want to try something new and different, get it here, and save some money on it:

JUMP THE POND

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