Board Game Review - Flash Duel

A long time ago, in a galaxy - well, actually, in this galaxy. And really, not that long ago. Like maybe a year or two. OK, so not all that long ago in our galaxy, Dave Sirlin started a game company to publish a bunch of games simulating fighting video games. The first of these games was called Flash Duel, and it was pretty damned cool. It was not original, or anything, because it was basically Reiner Knizia's En Garde with special powers, but it was better than that game and quite a bit more fun. It also came in a semi-crappy wooden box and had ten different guys you could play. It really wasn't much game, but what it was, was pretty cool.

Then Sirlin made more games. Puzzle Strike took Dominion and made it competitive (and a lot more interesting) and then Yomi did the same thing for Rock-Scissors-Paper. Puzzle Strike was a big hit, because of how much better than Dominion it was, and then Yomi made a huge splash by being a very cool game.

But in the meantime, people kind of forgot about Flash Duel, because it was almost just an experimental game that didn't really have enough substance to enjoy a lot of staying power. And since Dave Sirlin wasn't really of a mind to have his games fade into obscurity, he reinvented Flash Duel and turned it up to 11.

The new Flash Duel is not just a reboot of the original. Where the first version had a simple format and a limited selection of characters, the new one doubles the guys you can play and has no less than seven different game modes. You can still play the original, head-to-head duel, but now you can also play in teams, solo, or in a huge four-on-one battle royale against a very angry purple dragon (he is angry because he is sick of people calling him cute).

The regular game of Flash Duel is still just as engaging, light and entertaining as it ever was. You maneuver, plan, manipulate your hand and gamble in an attempt to get a hit on your opponent before he can smack you. It's fast and fun, and you can finish a whole game in about ten minutes. There are even ten new characters to use, that add all kinds of interesting strategies and stuff to avoid.

The new game modes for Flash Duel really do add a lot to the game. The solo game has three levels of difficulty, from playing against an idiot drone to battling the dragon by yourself. You can also play the medium mode where you fight the stone golem who trains the fighters. All are interesting, though I think the game is better when you're playing against someone else. There are achievements you can gain as you play, as if you were playing on your Xbox, but while they may seem like a cool way to make a board game feel like a video game, they're actually pretty dumb.

The best new thing in Flash Duel is the dragon mode, where four players take on the dragon. Now the game gets really interesting, because while the dragon is basically just a skinny purple guy with a cute lizard head, he is also a total bad-ass who will beat the bejeezus out all comers. That's why it will take you four people to bring him down. He'll maul you retarded.

Sooner or later, though, you may get so good at killing the dragon that the dragon decides he needs to recruit help. Then you can play the dragon mode, but add in a traitor who actively works to hose the other players. Now the game has an element of Battlestar Galactica, which Dave Sirlin doesn't think is a good game because he is wrong.

If you liked the original Flash Duel, you're going to love the new version. If you thought it was a nice diversion, but weren't too crazy about the lack of meat on its bones, the new Flash Duel will offer a whole lot of reasons to like it and give you something to sink your teeth into. And if you thought the original was stupid and trite, then you were wrong, but you're still not going to like the new one. Me, I think it's awesome, but I really liked the original, and I like this one at least twice as much. Maybe a little more - my accounting is sometimes a bit suspect.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:
Everything you loved about the original, plus a LOT
Ten new characters
Several new game modes allow for some very interesting game possibilities
You can play this over and over and over

Cons:
Still essentially a light game, even with the heavier modes

As much as I would love to tell you where you can save a few bucks on the new Flash Duel, it's one of those Game Salute games that you can only get for full retail. But if you decide you want to pay full price for it, you can find it at the Game Salute page.

I had a hell of a time getting this review posted at all. We haven't had actual internet for a week, and it's made posting a serious ordeal. We're working with a cell phone set up for tethering, which fails every third time I hit a link, and on top of that, this week has been an absolute Charlie Foxtrot, what with moving into a rent house and what-not. So there are only two reviews this week, and what's more, this one doesn't have an image or a link, because I don't have enough 'net access to go get 'em. Bear with me - I played some great games this weekend, and will have my regular dose of three reviews next week. Thanks for your patience.

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Card Game Review - Tschak

This is not a review of a Russian game. I just thought I would get that out of the way right now, because it very well could be, if you just look at the name. But in this case, 'Tschak' is not a translated word from a foreign language. In this case, 'Tschak' means roughly the same thing as 'Shnick' or 'Fkow' or maybe even 'Kpam'. From Webster's Totally Not Real Dictionary:

Tshcak (not really a word, vt)
1. The sound one hears when one cuts off a monster's soft parts with a very sharp weapon.
2. The feeling of having your tentacle chopped off by a very sharp weapon.
(v)
3. The process of removing tentacles with very sharp weapons.
Grimbolg's axe is sharp enough to throw down some serious tschak.

In theory, the goal of Tschak is to enter a dungeon with a team of adventurers and kill monsters and steal treasures. In practice, the goal of Tschak is to build three solid plays from a hand of ten cards in order to maximize point gains and minimize penalties. Obviously, the title of the game is slightly removed from the actual game play. So there is some abstraction.

In fact, there is very little need for the dungeon theme at all, aside from providing a springboard for some very entertaining art. You're going to get ten cards, and then you're going to see what rewards and penalties you'll compete for this round, and then you'll figure out how to play three hands before you bundle up your cards and pass them to the next guy. Basically, it's a trick-taking game. It's got virtually nothing to do with dragons, skeletons or angry dwarves, unless you play with Vern Troyer and Nicole Richie (in which case you still won't have a dragon).

But it is fairly challenging. The thing is, the playing field is pretty much level, with most of the luck of the draw inherent in a card game being mitigated by the fact that everyone is going to play with the same hand eventually. There are four rounds, and forty cards, and ten cards played in each round. When you finish a round, you pass the cards and play a round with the cards someone else was holding last turn, and see if you can do any better than they did. You don't rely on getting a lucky hand. The winner is the one who plays his cards better than everyone else.

Honestly, Tschak is not generally my kind of game. I like maneuvering tiny robots around a map to battle other tiny robots and then rolling dice, or moving miniature barbarians around miniature dungeons and fighting miniature goblins and then rolling dice. But my wife prefers traditional card games to hobby board games. She whips my ass at Spades every single time. And she very much enjoyed Tschak, which means it's a game that is going to see some serious play time in my house.

Tschak does have many of the elements I like to see in a game, whether it's a card game or not. It provides for strategy from the beginning of the game, and rewards the player who sticks with one consistent plan. It also requires flexibility and quick decision-making, because you're going to have to determine your plays at the top of every round (or one card at a time, depending on how good you are at playing card games, which means that my wife does it once at the beginning of a round, and I end up doing it every time I have to play a card). There are several different strategies you could employ to win, and part of winning the game is playing to your own strategy while countering your opponent's plans.

Tschak is not a game that I would replace if I lost it in a fire, except that my wife likes it. I'm kind of lukewarm on it, because I like games where people die. But I do enjoy playing it, and I really love that my wife likes it, because that means I'll get to play it with her. It doesn't really live up to the name, and I certainly don't get the impression that I'm dealing out bloody tschaks (or even minor fwiks, fleshy ktumps, or devastating prakaows). It's just a fun trick-taking game that the whole family can enjoy for thirty minutes, and then we can put it away so my teenagers can go back to texting their friends and I can go back to worrying about the bills.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Cool card game that rewards strategy and good card play
Fun for the whole family, as long as the kids are out of grade school
The art really is great

Cons:
Theme could be replaced by a story about drunken field mice in a steel mill (though you would need new sounds)

I really hate that I keep reviewing games that aren't out yet, but unfortunately, all the games I was going to review kind of got torched when my house caught fire. I can't tell you where to get Tschak, because it won't be out for a month or two.

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Card Game Review - Mundus Novus

If I were way, way smarter, and maybe went to graduate school in London or something, I would write this review in Latin. It would be awesome and brilliant, maybe even use iambic pentameter. Mostly, it would totally go with the title of the game Mundus Novus, which is Latin for something that I would know if I could actually write stuff in Latin.

And I would write the review in Latin to help illustrate what a smart game Mundus Novus is. It's basically a fully developed trading game pulled from the game Mare Nostrum, which also has a Latin title, and would therefore be far more interesting to read in Latin, except for maybe the fact that nobody really knows how to read Latin, and so the review would actually be, for most people, the equivalent of reading complete gibberish for several paragraphs in a row (which makes it basically the same as this review, but with fewer juvenile jokes).

The idea behind Mundus Novus is that you're all wealthy merchants sailing across the Atlantic to make money in the newly discovered Americas. This theme is so exciting and revolutionary that any gamer worth his wrinkly dice bag will be absolutely overwhelmed with a desire to play the game. I mean, you just don't see games about snobby Europeans exploiting the New World in the late Renaissance period. In case you're wondering, no, I cannot figure out how to put more sarcasm in this paragraph.

But even with a back story about as fresh as a used Kleenex, Mundus Novus is a very clever game. It's also very focused and pretty damned fun, to boot. It's like if you took an entire game about global conquest, surgically extracted the most intellectually challenging part, then injected it with Super Soldier Serum and anabolic steroids until it was like the board game version of Mr. T. It keeps all the parts it needs to be awesome, and for the rest, it just does not have time for no jibba jabba.

The goal of the game is to either have ten different kinds of resources at the same time, or to accumulate a buttload of money by building sets of cards. You only get five cards every turn, and you discard them at the end of the turn, so making a set of ten is problematic, to say the least. So to improve your odds of success, you need to pick up the crazy ability cards, which you get by building sets of cards.

So, you have to build sets of cards to get the ability cards, and you need the ability cards if you want to build other sets. And you need those sets to be very specific cards, which you are decidedly unlikely to have handed to you by pure chance. And that means you need to trade with your friends.

Every turn, you'll all choose some cards to put up on the block, then take turns swiping the stuff in front of your friends. You don't get to choose a card unless someone chooses one of yours, so it's worth your time to put some good stuff out there. Plus there are other advantages to putting out really good cards, like the chance to go first in the trading or pick up the best ability cards. Of course, if you put out all your best cards, you might get a very nice ability to go with your hand full of absolute garbage that you have because you gave away all the good stuff.

One thing I love about Mundus Novus is the subtle layers of consequence and decision-making. For instance, you might decide to try for a hand containing three high cards, to grab that double-sized warehouse, but to do so, you only offer up some crappy low cards. Then someone else gets to go first, and you get shut out of the trading, leaving you with a bunch of nothing to reward your greed. Or you might decide on a lower set, but the sweet goods you put out there wind up letting someone else build a much better hand than yours, and then they get that sweet warehouse and you wind up with a dirty sock.

We also really enjoyed the various potential strategies. You could try for a huge hand of varied cards, to grab up the instant crazy-combo win, or you could go for a big earner with lots of recurring payoffs. You might exploit the events to hinder your opponents, or you could just get nasty and never let anyone else get ahead. It's actually kind of deceptive - every time we think we've figured out one particular preferred strategy, someone at the table breaks it and sweeps the win out from under us. Like I said, this is a smart game. I'm a little ashamed at not being able to write the review in a dead language.

It's also a beautiful game. It's an Asmodee game, which makes the amazing art no surprise, but even still, it's hard to imagine how it could have been any better looking. The visual design is impeccable. The cards are fantastic quality. The artists for Mundus Novus should be very, very proud of their work. If I knew how to say, 'holy crap, that looks good' in Latin, I totally would.

But then, if this review had been written in Latin, it would be very snooty, and might give you the impression that Mundus Novus is a game only fit for Mensa members and ivy league academics. And if the game were that hard to play, it would not be anywhere as smart. Being a smart game means that dumb people can play it, but smart people will win more. And that's definitely the case with Mundus Novus - this game is deep and clever, but it's surprisingly easy to learn.

So it's probably just as well that I don't know any Latin. On top of being able to write this review in a language most of you can read, it also means that I won't have to replace all my t-shirts with cardigans. But in the absence of thoroughly brilliant writing, I'll have to settle for blunt. And here it is - Mundus Novus is fun and smart and pretty. If you visit a redneck bar in Arkansas, those same adjectives can be used as a pickup line. You're welcome.

(Please note that those words will not work in a redneck bar in California, because then you have to include some reference to either organic artichokes or pretentious-but-affordable white zinfandel).

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Focused, intelligent trading game
Wastes nothing - every part of the game is useful and important
Incredibly attractive
Very fun and exceptionally interactive

Cons:
Theme worn out worse than a bald tire

Mundus Novus is very affordable, especially considering what a great game it is. Unfortunately, it's not out yet, so you'll have to wait until Asmodee actually releases it to buy a copy.

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Lego Game Review - Heroica

I love Legos. And I love dungeon crawl games. So it seems to me that Heroica, a dungeon crawl game using Legos, would be the absolute best of both worlds.

On the other hand, just because a person is particularly good at coming up with interesting ways to put plastic bricks together does not mean that the same person is a master of theoretical game design. Plus Legos are Norwegian or Danish or something. Cultural differences are virtually guaranteed, like naming all the sets weird stuff I can't pronounce.

However, the idea bears exploration. Of course, there are some obvious hindrances. For one thing, can you really expect to find a good orc warlord in a Lego minifig? And how much room would you need on the table to recreate the dragon's lair? And what rules do you use?

Happily, Lego saw all those potential pitfalls and dealt with each one. First hurdle - minifigs. They solved this one by not using minifigs, and instead substituting miniature versions of minifigs. These are very tiny, with just a small amount of art painted on them, and no moving parts. They are not as cool as a minifig, I can tell you that, but they are smaller, so that's something.

The room on the table - this was also solved, because with the tiny playing pieces you don't need much room to make dungeons. Each corridor can be assembled from just a few pieces, and with just a small box of parts, you can build quite an impressive dungeon. Plus you can mix it up and make your dungeon do pretty much whatever you want, and because of these little miniature rooms, you can fit the whole thing onto the table in your breakfast nook (or in my case, the counter in our hotel).

That just leaves the last issue, which would be the rules, and Lego conveniently solved this problem by pretty much not using any rules. Sure, it leaves something to be desired in terms of game play, but you have to admire the simple elegance of a game that you play with virtually no rules of any kind.

OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration. On your turn, you roll a die that tells you how far you move. The die also has hit icons on it, so you roll it when you attack, too. If you hit (which you will, 2 out of 3 times), the monster dies. If you miss, you lose some life. You all run through the dungeon and try to be the first to get to the big bad guy and kill him.

The monsters are spiders and werewolves and golems and stuff, but unfortunately, the only real difference between them is whether their strength is one, two or three. Other than that, they have absolutely no differences of any kind. Fighting a flying giant bat is exactly as dangerous as battling a weak goblin, and that just is not as cool as it could be. I kind of like for my monsters to feel different - sure, they all die just the same, but some should throw sticky webs and some should shoot arrows and some should fly out of reach. Sadly, that's kind of hard to accomplish in a game with virtually no rules.

But that's also kind of the beauty of Heroica. If you were a ten-year-old with no exposure to Warhammer Quest or Descent or even HeroQuest, Heroica would be just the right amount of meat. It's light and pointless, but you still get to wander around and kill things, and I do really like to wander around and kill things (you know, in games. In real life, I prefer to sit on my ass and kill beers).

If you're a grown-ass man, or maybe just a kid who actually knows that dungeon crawls are supposed to be interesting, Heroica still has a lot of potential. Only now, you're going to have to make some rules of your own. The beauty of this game is that when there are practically no rules to begin with, there's plenty of room to expand it.

Personally, I love the whole thing. I got the biggest set for Christmas, and once I built it and loved it, I had to go get more. Now I have all four sets, and I'm putting together some rules that I plan to test with my daughter tonight. I can send my adventurers (there are six in all, if you buy all the sets) from the beach, into the forest, through the goblin fortress and into the mountain lair of the golem overlord. I can rearrange everything on a whim, and add or subtract potions, treasures, magic gates and locked doors. The giant, bouncy die is fun to roll, and once I develop some differences for the monsters, this game is going to be a hoot.

Of course, that exposes the biggest problem with a game like Heroica - once you start tweaking it, you'll never be done. You'll tire of defeating the goblin king, and decide you need a lich. You'll develop special abilities, but then you'll need tougher monsters. And with all this dungeon crawling, there's still no dragon. All of which means I will be modifying the hell out of Heroica for a good long time, until my daughter and I tire of creating thrilling dungeon crawls and battling for very small plastic trophies.

Summary

2-5 players (depending on the set you buy)

Pros:
Legos are bad-ass
Really fantastic modular dungeons
The pieces are pretty damned neat
Dungeon crawls are fun

Cons:
Practically no rules - certainly not enough to make a good game
Not enough variety

I can't believe it! Noble Knight Games carries Heroica! I'm actually really surprised, because Legos are not exactly hobby games. But here you go anyway:
CRAZY CASTLE BATTLES

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Card and Dice Game Review - Carnival

I just got this game called Carnival. Now, when I first opened the box, I was hoping it would have an 'e' on the end, so that it would be Carnivale, and it would be like that crazy HBO show and you would travel the US during the Great Depression and Satan would take on the guise of a Baptist preacher who also used to be the Kurgan from Highlander. But it's not.

It is pretty cute, though. It's got kind of a Reiner Knizia feel, but without boring math exercises. It's fairly simple, but it has some neat twists that you haven't seen before, and they force you to think on your feet while you make plans in your head. They don't have a blind guy drinking absinthe over a spoonful of sugar, but that's not really kid-friendly, anyway.

The idea of Carnival is that you're trying to build four out of your five rides before anyone else can get them done. Each ride needs banners, lights, seats and materials, and if you're paying attention at this point, you can probably spot pretty quick that the theme in this game is almost completely unnecessary. It's a set collection game with randomized actions, which is another way of saying it's a heck of a lot like a Reiner game, which I already said.

To build your sets in front of you, you'll roll some dice and put them on a card that will tell you what your actions are for that turn. This is basically how you get more cards in your hand, or how you steal cards from your friends, or how you screw up their sets so they can't win. It's not a mean-spirited game, but it is fairly competitive, and that's OK with me. It also went over alright with my family.

Of course, the dice can be pretty capricious, as anybody who has ever rolled dice knows full well, so to give you a little more control, each player also has three tickets. You can burn a ticket to manipulate the dice a little, or just reroll all of them. You can also throw one away to block some mean bastard's attempt to screw up your pretty sets. But you only get three for the whole game, and you're going to be sorely tempted to use them all in the first three turns. But don't. You're going to want them.

Now, I said the theme in Carnival was pretty disposable, and yeah, it is. But it's implemented so well that I would actually be a little disappointed if this were just played with a deck of regular ol' Bicycles. The art is charming and attractive, and while I certainly don't get the feeling that I'm a traveling carnie setting up hilariously unsafe sideshows for unsuspecting townies, I did find myself drawn to the simplicity and basic beauty of the game. It doesn't try to do more than it should, and the design manages to make the game easier to play and more pleasant to see.

Unlike the HBO show that I was really hoping this game would be about, Carnival is not terribly deep (it is also not frighteningly twisted and full of deception, and that definitely makes it more palatable to the average American family of four). It is a little on the light side, but still has enough meat to attract a serious gamer who wants to play with a couple junior-high kids and a visiting grandmother. It's engaging and smart, and fun to look at. The only part of the HBO show that was like that was Adrienne Barbeau. The rest was just weird (and really, so was Adrienne Barbeau).

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Fun and clever
Competitive without being mean
Delightful graphics
Great pacing - plays fast without feeling rushed

Cons:
Theme is just there to be pretty
Not overly deep, and very Euro

Carnival is one of those games coming out of the Game Salute deal, which means Noble Knight Games doesn't have it. The only place that does have it (and they just have it set for preorder) is Game Salute. It's a decent game, but I can't tell you where to save any money on it, because the only place you can buy it is charging full retail:
http://shop.gamesalute.com/collections/front-page-1/products/carnival

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Board Game Review - Ninja

You are ninja. Clad all in black and armed with poison, blade and shuriken, you creep silently over the wall of the daimyo's compound and into his palace. You glide silently through the corridors, hunting the lord of the land, intent on shedding his blood to fulfill your ancient contract. You creep like a shadow to the very door of his room, slip inside, and promptly stumble over a pile of folded clothes and fumble around the room like a drunk wildebeest. Then guards stab you.

OK, you're not really that bad at doing ninja stuff. Well, you probably are, because your asthma makes you wheeze and you are about as graceful as Ethel Merman stomping grapes. But if you play Ninja, you get to be a really bad-ass ninja, unless you're playing the guards, and then you get to be about as clever as a bag of ripe fruit.

I tend to be somewhat skeptical of hidden-movement games. There's no way to ever really know if your opponent is cheating, for one thing, and for another, one innocent mistake or misplaced pencil mark could completely screw up the whole game. Plus after I played Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space, I kind of wanted to swear off these mark-your-movement-on-a-hidden-pad games altogether.

But Ninja is pretty cool. For one thing, only the ninja player has to hide his movement. The other guy has nifty plastic minis to show where all his guards are. For another thing, most of the stuff in this game actually works, as opposed to Escape The Aliens, which was mostly just stupid.

As the ninja player, you'll have two bad guys roaming around the castle compound, intent on mayhem and discord - and they're trying really hard not to get caught. You can move faster than the wind, and strike with deadly skill, but the guards you have to outwit are not exactly mall cops, and they'll perforate you like a spaghetti strainer if you're not careful. You can run when time is of the essence, and when silence is more important than speed, creep slowly past the watching guard.

You'll have a handful of cards for each of your villainous intruders, cards that can be used to quietly dispatch the searching guards, distract them, or escape capture. These cards can be very powerful, but you don't have very many, and you can only use each card once per game. You never have to reveal your location until a guard stumbles across you, and if you use your cards right, you can take them down with a shuriken in the knee before they raise the alarm.

It may sound like the guards have a hard time of it, but remember, these are trained samurai walking the grounds. They're not just flashing a torch into the corners and yelling at kids to quit necking in the back seat. They'll stop every now and then and listen for intruders, and if the ninja player has been sloppy, you'll have a chance to go running off after the bad guys and throw down some steel justice.

Plus there are a ton of guards. You'll start the game with a decent handful, and as you go, you'll wind up with as many as 20 pipe-hitting warriors patrolling the grounds. Some of the guards are sleeping at the beginning of the game, but as the game progresses, they're going to wake up and start running aroung like the Keystone Kops playing lacrosse with the F-Troop.

The only thing is, where the ninja player can go wherever he wants, you're stuck using cards every time you want to make a move. At the beginning of the game, you'll have plenty of options, but by the end, you're going to be groaning when you discover that even though you know right where the traitorous fiends are hiding, your cards will only allow you to pick the lock on the outhouse and throw cherry bombs in the toilet.

Ninja is a hard game to win. For the killers to win, both the bad guys have to accomplish their hidden goals and get out. For the guards to win, they have to kill both of the bad guys. If only one murderer gets out alive, the game is a draw - and since that's about the most likely result, not very many games of Ninja are going to end in a decisive victory for anyone.

In fact, while I do like the mechanics of Ninja, and think that the pieces are simply brilliant, the end of the game is likely to be very unsatisfying. You'll maneuver around, playing cards and positioning your forces, and then after you spend an hour or so working hard to outwit the other guy, the game ends and nobody wins. That's incredibly frustrating.

But even though the end of the game can be a let-down, the part where you're playing is ridiculously tense. Over and over, the ninja player will be just one lucky move away from getting caught. And time after time, the samurai player will be hot on the trail, just to have his prey escape at the last second. Every time you play, you're going to want to go back over the events of the game and relate all the places where the good guys almost got the bad guys, the time when the ninja escaped by hiding silently in the corner, and how the patrolling guards were just seconds away from stumbling across the nefarious murderers.

There were a few other problems with Ninja, like the fairly confusing rules for the secret tunnel, but those will vanish after you play a couple times. My only serious beefs with Ninja are that it's too easy for the samurai player to wind up with nothing he can do, and the fact that far too many games end in a tie. If you like a game that will literally get your heart beating faster (and I am using the word properly - while playing Ninja, I could seriously feel my heartbeat speeding up), Ninja does a spectacular job of both telling a story and just plain being exciting. There's a lot of bluffing, sneaking, and outwitting, and those make for a pretty fun game where I'm from.

Summary

2-4 players (but it's really just meant to be 2)

Pros:
Really feels like a cat-and-mouse ninja home invasion
Spectacular components make the game more fun just by being pretty
Tense and exciting

Cons:
Poor card draws can cripple and frustrate the guard player
Too many games end in a tie

If you feel like creeping around in the dark, run over to Noble Knight Games and pick up a copy of Ninja. You can even save ten bucks in the process!
IF DO RIGHT NO CAN DEFENSE

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Card Game Review - 51st State

Neuroshima is the coolest setting that was ever ruined by a board game. And the crazy thing is, the games that ruin the setting are great games - but they suck at playing up the setting. Neuroshima Hex is a brilliant game of careful placement and long-term planning, but it has virtually nothing to do with killer robots or mutated plants, aside from some pretty pictures.

51st State does a better job of playing up the theme, but only marginally, and now it feels way too friendly to be a game about killing bands of roving marauders. It has a lot of similarities to Race for the Galaxy, and like that Puerto-Rico-in-space game, really does help to deliver the feeling of building a nation from the ground up. In fact, I would say it's even better than Race for the Galaxy, but it still doesn't address my main problem with either game. Namely, you can raise powerful armies and hard-hitting raiders, but you can't send them to hit other players. If I'm playing a game with bloodthirsty armies, I want to use them, and not just to beat up the cards.

The idea behind 51st State is that, in the wake of the nuclear destruction of the United States, you head up a nation attempting to build a new nation from the ashes of the old. Your opponents are doing the same thing, but only one of you can come out on top. So instead of having a race for the whole galaxy, you're really just racing for the East Coast.

There are so many great concepts in 51st State that I'm really only going to hit on a few of them. My favorite is how all the different locations can serve three different purposes. For instance, say you find a bar full of gun-toting wastelanders. You can ride up with a couple tanks and kill everybody, then steal all the liquor and guns. You can negotiate with them and get a regular supply of small arms. Or you can bring them into the fold, thereby allowing all your soldiers a place to fire guns in the air and disco until the bullets come back down and kill their dance partners.

However you decide to exploit a location, you're going to have to pay for it. If you decide to settle it, you'll need a different resource than if you decide to burn it down. Every faction has three cards they can use every turn to generate the specific resources needed for conquering, negotiating or incorporating - but you can only use them once. And to make things more complicated, you have to buy the resources on those cards with other resources.

The goal of the game is to earn victory points (so no, that's not all that original), but you don't just count up every turn. You can build up points with special actions that will be counted every turn, so early investments can pay off big down the road, as long as you don't screw it up and wait too long for your big play. You can hire leaders and use them to earn these recurring points, then kill off the leader and get another one - just to build up more points. There's a very delicate element of timing and planning that can pay off huge, if you exploit it, or ruin the unprepared.

Unfortunately, it's not all wine and roses. Nothing is easy in 51st State, and I don't just mean for the guys who live there. There's an unnecessarily complicated series of resource generation steps that means you have to invest in raw materials, then in ways to use those materials, then in ways to spend them. This is actually where 51st State starts to bog down. A typical transaction might go like this:

1) Discard spoils to gain workers.
2) Send workers to round up some gears.
3) Swap gears for negotiation points.
4) Spend negotiation points to play a card.
5) Wonder out loud why it takes four steps to do something that probably could have been accomplished in one.

This complication adds a few cascading downsides, too. For one thing, instead of having just two or three icons for resources, there are eight or nine. And since the icons relate quite a bit of information (and the game was originally Polish), there are no words on the cards describing what the icons mean. If you thought it was tough to remember what all the icons meant in Race for the Galaxy, you're going to need night classes to learn the pictures in 51st State.

Another problem is that a game that requires all those resources also requires tiny cardboard circles to represent them. You'll have a pile of chits depicting everything from indentured servants to clay bricks. And in a production decision that I can only assume still causes the publishers to shake their head at their own oversight, these chits are made out of fairly thin cardboard, making them virtually impossible to pick up. I finally broke down and stuck a piece of gum on the end of a ruler, and used the gum to pick up the pieces (I did not actually do that. Instead, I just dropped them all over the place).

But all these are secondar compared to the biggest complaint I have about 51st State - I want to shoot my friends. I've raised a howling, rabid pack of mutant ass-kickers, and I want to use them to burn down enemy encampments and get mud all over my friends' carpet. Instead, I have the option to send my guys to work for my opponents in exchange for a box of bricks. It's too damned cooperative. If I want peaceful coexistence, I'll play a game by Oprah Winfrey.

So I do have some pretty valid complaints about 51st State, and I haven't even mentioned how complicated the rules are. But I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like the game. In fact, I loved it. We played it a bunch, just because of how much fun we were having. We played it wrong, because we didn't understand a few of the rules, but we still had such a good time that we kept coming back for more.

Even with all the downsides, it really is quite fun to start with almost nothing and build up this powerful nation of ruined airplanes and mutant hamburger stands. It's an excellent blend of tactics and strategy, where you decide on a direction early in the game and then see it through with smart plays as the game progresses. The art is great, and the game has plenty of tension as you push to get just one or two points ahead of your opponents before you hit the finish line and the game ends.

If you hate Race for the Galaxy, you're probably not going to enjoy the amount of mental effort it takes to play 51st State. In fact, you might be completely confused for the first couple games, because all those icons really do take some learning, and can become an avalanche of indecipherable information. But once you get it down, you might find that all the complication and tricky rules make for a game that is wonderfully engaging and just a bunch of fun.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Build a nation out of nothing
A great mix of long-term planning and quick thinking
Fantastic art
Every decision matters

Cons:
Unnecessarily complex
Tiny pieces that you can't pick up without very sticky fingers
Not anywhere near as much interaction as it should have

I enjoyed the crap out of 51st State. If it sounds like your kind of game, you can pick it up from Noble Knight Games, and save yourself a few bucks:
BEFRIEND THE MUTIES

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