TV Show Review - Day Break

There are times when I want to watch a show about the characters, where I'm thinking about what motivates these people and why they do what they do and how they interact with each other and, if it's on HBO, which ones will show me their boobs before the credits roll. But sometimes I just want to see a cool story with lots of guns and punches.

Day Break is firmly in that second category, an exciting thriller of a TV show that gives me just about everything I want out of quality programming. This is a show with good acting, believable characters, a great story, and Moon Bloodgood in her underwear. In fact, Day Break is the kind of show that makes me wonder why movies even bother. The entire show is 13 episodes, and is completely finished when it's over. It's like a carnival ride, but without the smell of puke and dirty urinals.

Now, back in the dark ages, we had to tune in every week to watch the latest episode, and I always forgot what happened last time, and needed the 'previously, on whatever show has you totally hooked right now' that starts off episodic TV shows these days. But thanks to the wonders of Netflix, now you can watch all 13 episodes in a row, with quick breaks for important stuff like peeing and sleeping and calling in sick to work.

Day Break follows Detective Brett Hopper, a cop who has to solve a crime. Right off the bat, half of you just went to sleep. Police dramas might be the most boring concept on TV, and have been for decades. But don't worry - this is not one of those boring police procedurals where the bad guy gets caught every week after the cops use good old-fashioned police work. There's no procedure to this one at all, especially because Hopper spends the entire show running from the cops (and getting caught on a regular basis).

See, Detective Hopper has been framed for killing an assistant DA. The show starts off with him getting arrested, protesting his innocence and getting locked up anyway, then getting dragged out of his cell and ordered to confess to the crime - right after he watches his girlfriend get shot and killed on DVD. This would normally be a very bad day, but Hopper finds out the next morning that it could be worse. It could be that he has to do the entire thing again.

Every day, Hopper wakes up at 6:17, and it's the same day. The traffic report is the same, the bird on the windowsill, the joggers running past the window. And worst of all, Hopper has no idea why he's stuck. He tries to run - and gets his partner killed. He tries to solve the crime - and gets other people killed. In fact, over the course of the show, he shoots the same pair of bad guys at least a half-dozen times, and sees the deaths of his friends and families so often that it starts to make him crazy.

And still he has to do it again. Every day he gets a little closer to figuring out who framed him and who committed the crime, and it's fantastic fun to watch. He'll hold a bad guy at gunpoint one day, and if that doesn't work, try smooth-talking the next day. He'll learn all kinds of stuff about which bad guys are doing what - but he can't really prove anything, especially when the informant squealed on a day that only Hopper remembers.

Where most TV these days tries to be innovative by being just like every other show on TV, Day Break tried something that just wasn't being done at the time. It was a 13-episode mid-season replacement that had a clear starting point and finish line, and didn't pretend that everything had to be resolved every week. Because of the crazy reset-button nature of the show, they could kill anyone - and they did, over and over and over.

Unfortunately, Day Break was a network TV show. ABC aired the damned thing for six weeks, and then pulled the plug before it was done. But luckily for those of us in the modern world of streaming television, you now have the chance to see the entire series, start to finish, and you don't have to stop unless you really need to peel your sorry ass off the couch to let the dog outside. And as long as you pay your Netflix bill, you also don't have to put up with some crappy network deciding to cancel halfway through.

Day Break is an incredibly fun show with a high-action, pulp feel to it. It reminds us that HBO doesn't have the corner on awesome TV - though ABC reminded us that there's a really good reason you shouldn't watch network television. Nothing like living up to their name - I'm pretty sure ABC really stands for Already Been Canceled.

Read More

Announcement - Next Week's Menu

Burning Down My House was a crappy enough game that I was really hoping there would not be an expansion. But when the fire took out all my games, it also took out my cushion - the pile of games that I had in reserve, giving me a few weeks of time where I wasn't desperate for a box of stuff just so I would have something to write about. And now I'm out. It's not like I have games I haven't played yet, either - I'm completely out (OK, I do have a pile of RPGs, but it's going to be a while before I can finish reading one).

So to buy myself a little time, and because I would rather waste pixelated breath than take a week off, I'm going to spend all three updates next week talking about something near and dear to my heart - television.

That's right, next week, all my reviews will discuss TV shows. But because my crappy rent house doesn't have cable, all the shows I review next week will be stuff that you could watch on Netflix.

Now, you might protest. You might say, 'but I don't have Netflix!' And my answer will be, 'then don't read Drake's Flames next week, unless you want to see if I can figure out a way to get boob jokes into a TV review.' Because, see, I do have Netflix, and it's just about the only way I have to watch anything at all. And honestly, I would rather have some way to stream old shows than cable, so that's what I recommend, and that's what I'll review.

Now, you might really enjoy reading about television programming, but if you're not all that thrilled to see my game review site spend a week not talking about games, then throw me a bone here. If you know of a game company that needs a game reviewed, give them my name, or give me theirs and I'll write them myself. If you ARE a game company, drop me an email (the address is in my profile) and send me some free games so that I can talk about them.

In the meantime, I'm going to dedicate this weekend to seriously spooling through some streaming TV, and the entire time I'm watching, I'll be thinking this poignant thought:

"Maybe I shouldn't have pissed off Fantasy Flight."

Read More

Board Game Review - Cave Evil

As lord of the Abyss and Master of inappropriate Capitalization, I vow to bring death and madness to all who would deny the Pure awesomeness of Cave Evil, where death rules and evil also Rules. Those who would refuse to dive into the well of Pustulent disease and play Cave Evil have failed to appease the dark overlord of Darkest darkness and will be condemned to listen to Justin Bieber and bad hip hop while we revel in the pure unadulterated Evil of our twisted master.

Cave Evil will bring about the end of times, as long as those times that are ending are the times when we are doing boring stuff like doing homework and getting haircuts. Because we will don our Robes of Ultimate evil and become necromantic masters, commanding dark minions like shoddy abominations and Slimy Whore Bitches. I may have made up one of those. Guess which one, or be consumed by supreme BLACK evil.

We will search through the Cave Evil, accompanied by our bad-ASS minions of evil and dead Death and stuff. We will summon horrid cave worms and maggot swarms to crush all our foes under our skeletal Ankle bones, and some of our ultimate BadAss Minions will be good at digging, and they will uncover hidden caves, where we will find allies to add to our armies of seriously freaking Evil buddies who like to do evil stuff that is EVIL.

And maybe they will open up the caves and instead of finding other Evil guys, they will find Evil stuff that we can use to get more minions, like Evil metal and Evil fire and evil GORE. And then we will use all the evil stuff to bring on even more EVIL and stuff. Then we will bang our heads and listen to Gwar and not really understand that we're not actually supposed to be taking this ridiculous crap seriously.

When we meet other Evil Necromancers and their Evil Necromantic MINIONS, we will do battle using our Evil powers that are evil. We will call up on the power of the horned hellion and the DEMONIC gore princess, and we will pit our strength against their strength and our weapons against their weapons and our blood lust against their blood lust, and then we will roll some dice. Because all truly powerful bad guys use dice for fighting. Then some of us will die, but who cares, because we're already dead.

And then after a while, if any of us are still alive (or, I guess, not all the way dead) and have not been destroyed by big-time Bad Guy evilness, then the Ultimate Evil will emerge in the form of the Old Black Goat or the Darkest Evil BITCH. And then we will have to fight the Ultimate Evil, because otherwise the Ultimate Evil will totally take over the cave and also steal our lunch money and maybe beat us up after school, because the Ultimate Evil is really the varsity football team.

For a game this twisted and EVIL, there is only one acceptable color, and that color is black. Any other color is weak and not EVIL at all, and so everything in Cave Evil is black. There will be no blue or pink or purple or other colors like the mistress whores of DEATH wear (we call them cheerleaders). Even different player colors are black. But there will be a little red or gray or something, because otherwise we would never know which evil bunch of bad guys were ours and which belong to our friends who also like death metal and EVIL.

As anyone who likes games (and maybe Evil) should know, games where people get killed are the best kinds of games. The only thing better than games where people die is games where dead people die again because we kill them with our awesome EVIL powers. We will throw rotten eggs at the houses of people who play weak games with stuff like worker placement and resource management and other stuff that only Weak people do because they are not evil enough to play games like CAVE EVIL. And Cave Evil is wicked fun. Really - it's pretty Evil.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Crazy fun dungeon brawl with all kinds of bloodshed
You can play like a random idiot, but the smart players will do better
Monstrously dark fun
Completely unapologetic design makes absolutely no compromises
Freaking Fun As Hell

Cons:
A little bit complicated, but you'll figure it out
Not for people who are either not into Evil, or who do not have a healthy sense of humor

If you like Evil, or if you like games that take a style and make it their own, or if you just like awesome competitive games where the goal is to kill everyone else at the table, then you will totally love Cave Evil. But you can only get it from the guys who publish it, because they are far too EVIL to work with a distributor.
BORN TO SOW THE SEEDS OF ANARCHY

Read More

Board Game Review - Grave Business

If you have an office job, you're familiar with the concept of working with zombies. Lots of us just wander mindlessly through the day, drudging from one menial task to the next before we photocopy our butts (that can't be just me).

But if you play Grave Business, your co-workers will be actual zombies. Not office drones in need of a caffeine fix, either - I mean walking, groaning, reanimated dead people. Which would be bad for morale, except that the only people who would be around to complain are also dead.

Each player is an enterprising necromancer looking for body parts and hidden treasure in an incredibly overpopulated graveyard. If you can find all the parts of your company's original CEO and put him back together, you won't even need the treasures and stuff, because that old dude will give you a beach house in Maui just for sewing his man parts back on.

So every turn, you'll send your zombies to work, digging up the graveyard. The contents of the graveyard change every turn, but will almost always include lots of pieces of dead people, which is convenient for a guy who can turn body parts into employees. Which is you.

But the other players are your competition, and they also want to dig up the original boss man, and build their own zombies, and collect their own priceless artifacts that they can pawn for quick cash. So you have to place your zombies, face-down so that nobody knows how efficient they are, and then after everyone has put out their brain-dead drones, you flip over the zombies and see who has put the best zombies to work on each particular grave.

A little explanation regarding the nature of the graveyard is in order here. So far, this just sounds like a great way to make a boring work day a little more lively, which is ironic since you're using dead people. But really, you're placing influence pieces on a grid, then calculating your combined influence for each space to see if you can claim the tile in question. If you were hoping for some brain-eating or a thematic narrative, go play Last Night on Earth. Grave Business is not that kind of game.

It is the kind of game that would appeal to people who like to place workers on spaces and calculate score totals. That doesn't really appeal to everyone, and to be honest, it doesn't always appeal to me. If Grave Business was a longer game, I would really hate it, but as an intellectual exercise with some hilarious art, it's actually pretty cool. It takes about half an hour to run through the whole thing, and then you're done. You probably wouldn't plan your whole evening around playing this game, but there's no reason not to break it out if you just need to enjoy half an hour with your family before your teenage son disappears to go watch TV in his room and your daughter returns to her own cave to spend the night texting her friends.

There are a few small problems with the game, but these should go away after you play it a couple times. For instance, you can send a zombie to go attack another zombie, but until you've got some plays under your belt, that particular action can seem counterproductive (and it is, if you're not careful about when you do it). But if you do it correctly, you can find out where your opponent is keeping his big hitter and even kick him off the board for this turn.

Another potential problem is that it is absolutely critical to build more zombies as fast as you can, even if they're not particularly effective. This is really only a problem for the first game, when people might not realize how important it is to have more drooling idiots working for them. At any rate, people who have played a couple times are going to have a huge advantage over the new people, which could make those new people really hate the game when it seems like they just took an undead clobbering.

If I gave numeric scores to games, I would give Grave Business a number of some sort. But I don't. So I will just say that it's not a particularly fascinating game, not overly deep, but it is enjoyable. It play pretty fast, and the art is done by one of my favorite cartoon illustrators, and really makes it more fun. You can play it with family (as long as they're OK with cartoon bloodshed), and exercise some brain muscles in the process.

And it's good to exercise brain muscles, because God knows your job as an office zombie isn't going to keep the ol' synapses firing at full speed.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Like push-ups for your brain
Great art that makes it more fun to play
Will appeal a lot to fans of European-style games


Cons:
Little to no story
A little dry, for a game about zombies

If Grave Business sounds like your kind of game, you can save some money and pick it up at Noble Knight Games:
WALKING DEAD SUCK AT CONFERENCE CALLS

Read More

Board Game Review - 1812

Once, a long time ago, there was a war. On one side were the Americans, who were pissed off at the British and more than a little land-grabby. On the other side were the Canadians, who were still pretty much British, but they were also Americans because North America is a big place, and we just call people from the United States 'Americans' because it sounds kind of stupid to call ourselves 'United Statesians'. Plus there were Indians who were not from India at all, and therefore had possibly the least accurate nickname ever assigned to an ethnic group. That might have explained why they were so pissed, but then, the fact that the United Statesians kept taking their land might also have had them a little riled up.

Anyway, because nobody was present who was very creative, they could not come up with a name for their war. So they just called it the War of 1812, which was only accurate for the beginning of the war, which actually took place largely in 1813-14 and ended in 1815, thus making it a rather poorly named historical event. And then it went for a while, and a lot of people got killed, and then since both sides were getting their asses kicked, both declared that they had won and they quit and went back to pretty much the way things had been before the war started, except that the United States thought it might be a good idea to not invade Canada any more.

This was such an exciting event that someone made a game out of it. And to make sure that the game was not overly confused, they called it 1812, which clearly references the war that took place, for the most part, in years other than 1812. In this exciting game, both sides of the war will punch each other in the groin until the war ends, and then the side that took more stuff from the other side will declare that they won and then everybody will just give everything back and then we'll get William Shatner.

This sounds like it should be a war game, especially since it is a game about war. But when you think, 'war game,' you think of a game where you spend three days punching out tiny cardboard squares and organizing them in little trays before you devote the next six months to reading the complicated rules that are presented in type small enough to blind you. Instead, 1812 uses brightly colored wooden cubes, and the rules can be read on a smoke break, unless you don't smoke, in which case you can just take a normal break and not smoke at all.

1812 divides up the players into two groups - the Canadians and the Americans. The Americans (also known as USers) have two kinds of troops, and the Canadians have three because, like I said before, there were the increasingly mislabeled Indians. You can have one player be Americans and the other person be the Canadians, but the game will also let you play with up to five players, and it's still fun for everybody, and it's still a good game. Hell, it's a great game.

What it is not is a game where one side is going to completely overrun the other side and take the entire world for himself until the guy who turtled in Australia the whole time gets enough cards to turn them in for extra troops. Instead, it's a back-and-forth game where the Canadians will grab Detroit, then the Americans will grab Queenston, then the Canadians will take back Queenston and the Americans will take back Detroit. It will almost always come down to winning by one or two points, because 1812 does a remarkable job of recreating a war where both sides pretty much just kept swapping cities until everyone figured out that nobody was really enjoying themselves very much, because the main difference between New York and Quebec is that their bacon is a pizza topping.

There isn't a whole lot in 1812 that will make you say, 'Hey! I never saw that before!' You've got cards that you play to say how many armies you can move, and you've got crazy dice with wacky symbols that tell you if your guys got killed or just ran away before someone could catch them (apparently there was a great deal of running away in the War of 1812, probably because they were confused about the dates, seeing as they were fighting the War of 1812, but it was like 1814). These are elements that I've seen several times in games about killing people.

But what is original to 1812 is how very well the parts of the game work together to create a really fun game. It's got loads of careful planning, using the right cards, timing your big moves and otherwise doing awesome stuff. Turns go very quickly, so even in a five-player game, you're not going to get bored. Plus if the British Regulars are moving out of Montreal, they can take the Canadian Militia with them, and then both players will be rolling dice and attacking and stuff. In fact, exploiting the ability to move allied troops out of turn is critical if you want to be successful playing 1812.

There are not many games about war that my wife will actually want to play, but when she saw this one (and saw how pretty it was), she wanted to try it. It helps that she's an historian, but even an expert on wars could be bored by a crappy war game. Not 1812, though - she really loved the game, and told me she would like to play again. And this is a woman who would rather do the laundry than play most any other war game.

Perhaps my wife enjoyed 1812 as much as I did because of her background in history. Perhaps she liked it because of the light rules and fast play. Maybe she was just excited because she won by playing much better than I did. But whatever the case, the fact is, 1812 is a war game that a wargamer could play with a normal person and both people could have a lot of fun. The rules are fairly short, especially considering that half the book is devoted to the history of the slightly misnamed War of 1812.

Summary

2-5 players (but best with either 2 or 5)

Pros:
Great historical war game that's not hard to play
Fast turns
Lots of strategy and tactics and stuff
Looks pretty damned good
Exciting and tense right to the end

Cons:
Can feel a little awkward with 3 or 4 players

I think 1812 is a heck of a lot of fun. It's a fairly accurate depiction of an actual war, and yet it's not dry or hard to play or long or anything. You can pick it up at Noble Knight Games, where you can get it for a good chunk off retail:
BLAME CANADA

Read More

RPG Review - Don't Rest Your Head

When you think of role-playing games, probably the first thing that comes to mind is a world of dragons and people with pointy ears. You might also conjure up space adventures, or near-future science fiction with virtual universes, or post-nuke holocausts. You probably do not, on the other hand, think of a crazy world where bad guys have thumbtacks for heads and all the heroes are desperately sleep-deprived. But when the crazy bastards who made Don't Rest Your Head were putting together a game, that's right where their heads went.

The world of Don't Rest Your Head is our world, but twisted. Well, not so much twisted, as shadowed. There's an entire city hidden beneath the city where you live, a city you can only reach by losing so much sleep that your mind kind of breaks off on its own. For some, we call this 'wild hallucination,' but for those people who need a nap so badly that they start seeing cops with wind-up keys in their backs, they call it the Mad City.

This is the bizarre and intriguing setting in Don't Rest Your Head. For whatever reason, you've missed so much sleep that you're now invited into this festival of the very odd, and now you have to solve the mystery, or defeat the villain, or find your missing book report. There are lots of ways to fail - twisted monsters will steal your fondest memories or lay waste to your sanity until you think you're John Paul Jones (either the Revolutionary War hero, or the musician from the 60's). But you're more than usually equipped, because on top of being able to actually see the monsters under the bed, you've also got super powers. They're weird powers, but they'll probably be useful.

Lots of games dabble in making the character the important piece, but in Don't Rest Your Head, your entire game will center on you. It starts when you create your character and tell the game master exactly why you're so damned tired. You'll even tell him right where your adventure starts. You'll invent a quest for your wacky alter-ego, whip up a back story, and all of this will relate directly to how you play the game.

In fact, when we played Don't Rest Your Head, I couldn't even start coming up with an adventure until characters were created. Once they were, it took me two weeks to find some way to play out the seven apocalyptic dreams that had created the main hero (though the one character who was only an insomniac because she took too much Aderol was a much easier sell). And the adventures we played had nothing to do with generic settings or dungeon battles or rescuing the macguffin. These stories were one-hundred percent about the characters. Replace the characters, and you'll need a new story.

This is the most striking thing about Don't Rest Your Head, though the system is also fascinating (and I'll get to it in a minute). In nearly any other role-playing game I have ever played, you could swap out a hero and tell the same tale. You might have to swap a couple details - the aunt replaces the father, creating one hell of a confusing wardrobe situation, or the city is moved to Vegas. But in this game, if your player doesn't create an alcoholic private investigator with an obsessive-compulsive disorder and nightmares about the end of the world, you're going to have to go directly back to the drawing board.

Now, that sounds daunting, but it means this is one game that can be incredibly engrossing. Sure, it takes a lot more work, and a lot more investment in the game, but at the same time, you'll have everyone dying to know what happens, and not just because they're curious about what's behind Demon Door Number Two.

The way you get through these stories is also amazing. The system uses piles of regular ol' dice, but the number of dice you get to roll is based on how much you want to push yourself. The game master will announce his personal threat level, and then the heroes will need to respond. The only way to get more dice is to either push yourself to exhaustion, or tap into the madness that seems to be spreading. A very clever dice mechanic means that even if you win, you could get a little more tired, or a little more insane, or possibly just get a little more bloody. Happy endings are rare. Insanity is the order of the day.

Unfortunately, some of the setting details seemed almost comedic, especially for a game where fathers enter the Mad City to rescue their daughters from horrific monsters. The head cop has a watch for a face, and the avatar of Death runs a girl's reform school. The paper boys are relentless enemies - but they're also actually made out of paper. It seems like great lengths were taken to make villains out of dorky puns.

So I did what seemed natural - I threw out all of them. Lock, stock and barrel, I disposed of every monster and villain the game offered. I replaced the pin-headed puppies with black-skinned imps transformed from kidnapped children. I threw out the cartoonish policemen and replaced them with abominations formed of severed limbs. And I got rid of the silly tax assessor with a thumbtack head (the tacks man, get it), and added a serial killer in the service of the darkest threat the world has known since Satan got chucked out of the Holy Land.

And the game was AWESOME. Sure, I tweaked a little, but the stuff that really counts in this book - the character creation, the dice-rolling, and the backdrop of the hidden city - will let you tell a completely twisted story that will have everyone sleeping with the light on. Don't Rest Your Head has some pretty damned silly parts, but it has to be commended for providing a fantastically engrossing way to play out an insane adventure in a world of madness. More importantly, it was incredibly fun.

If you're a fan of manipulating a system to make super-powered barbarians who can crush goblins between their oiled thighs, Don't Rest Your Head is going to confuse and frustrate you. But if you want to try something completely different, something that makes Call of Cthulhu look like a game of Uno, a game that will challenge you and make you really think about why you're doing what you're doing, Don't Rest Your Head is a must-have.

Summary

Pros:
Excellent mechanic that is completely inseparable from the setting
Ties the characters to the story to make very personal, customized games
Wild and imaginative setting

Cons:
Some rather silly monsters
Will require some pretty serious imagination work

Don't Rest Your Head is not an easy game to play, but it sure is fun. And you can get it at a shocking discount, right here at Noble Knight Games:
DO BUY THIS GAME

Read More

Board Game Review - Venture Forth

My favorite kind of game is the dungeon crawl, where you traipse around an underground lair, kill things you find there, steal their stuff and maybe rescue prostitutes who may or may not be so grateful that they give you freebies (granted, very few games include the grateful hookers, but that sure would make a cool game, even if it meant you couldn't let your kids play it). Venture Forth is not that kind of game.

But it's OK, because my second favorite kind of game is the adventuring game, where you put together a band of heroes who traipse around the world, kill things they find there, steal stuff and maybe rescue grateful whores. And that is what Venture Forth is about (but without prostitutes). It's a little like Talisman, a little like Runebound, and little like a European game that comes with tiny wooden blocks. But for a cool twist, it's in Greece, and not failing-economy-and-ugly-fishermen Greece, but this-is-Sparta-battle-for-Olympus Greece.

Most of the adventure games you could play boil down largely to the dice - you roll dice to move, then you roll dice to fight, then you draw treasure cards or turn into frogs. But there are no dice in Venture Forth, because like I said, it's a little like one of those European games that are all about solving the game. Happily, the theme works even without all that dice-rolling. In fact, it might even work better.

One cool factor of the game is that you don't get points just for killing stuff. You get points when your heroes do the stuff that they set out to do. For instance, you might have a guy who really wants to kill monsters in the mountains, and so if you can slay the dragon in the mountains, you can use him to score some points. You might have a guy who dreams all day of setting up trade routes to the sea, and he'll score points when you go down to the shore. You might have a guy who desperately needs to rescue a grateful hooker, but this guy is screwed because, you know, no hookers.

Another brilliant element of Venture Forth is the way the monsters and potential buddies appear on the map. If you want to get some gold, or get a little heroic might for your adventuring heroes, you're going to have to put out monsters and adventurers that other players could encounter. You might try not to give away the best stuff, but sometimes you won't have a choice and you'll just have to give an opponent the amazon so that you can power up your hunter. This means there's a great reason to seed the board with snarling monsters and intrepid allies, because it's about the only way the game provides to get you the resources you need to be successful.

If you prefer your games to be light-brained and lucky, you're going to be very disappointed in Venture Forth. There's an element of luck, in that if you're not holding the right cards, you're probably going to lose some momentum. But the real luck factor comes from the other players. Can you count on the guy to your left noticing that you just set him up a road full of legendary exploits, so that he'll leave you alone and you can go hire the swordsman you desperately need to defeat the hydra? Or will your daughter just wander up and down the same freaking path, over and over, and spend the entire game stealing the only way you have to get out of the mountains and actually get a couple points before the game ends (if your daughter is my daughter, then yes, she will do that)?

At the same time, there's a definite puzzle-solving element to Venture Forth, one that should definitely appeal to fans of games with wood cubes, but may leave behind those gamers that prefer bloodshed and dice. You'll need to plan your escapades and place your foes to maximize your odds of heroic adventures, all while attempting to account for the other players who might be really thrilled to steal your awesome adventures before you can get there. It lacks some of the visceral bloodshed and random thrills of other adventure games, but at the same time, you'll definitely see the unfolding tales of Greek heroes stamping their mark on a world of legend.

But sadly, they will not find grateful prostitutes.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
A fun adventure game that brings the theme to life
Lots of planning, careful plays, and outsmarting your friends
Great art on the cards
No dice (could be a con)

Cons:
A little bit like solving an efficiency puzzle
Weak art on the board
No grateful prostitutes
No dice (could be a pro)

If you like saving money on games, you can get Venture Forth from Noble Knight Games. If you don't like saving money on games, then what is wrong with you?
SAVE MONEY ON THIS GAME

Read More