TV Review - The Walking Dead

OK, I've held off long enough. I was all, 'everybody has already seen The Walking Dead. We don't need a review of a show that anyone with two brain cells is already watching.' And then the mid-season finale was last night, and I was all, 'holy crap, this show is the best frikkin show ever,' and lost all restraint in my need to talk about how awesome The Walking Dead is.

I'll get this out of the way first - I'm not reviewing the comic book. Seriously, ever. I love it, and can't wait for December 12 to find out what happens in the next issue, but it's the kind of book that when you ask a comic book nerd what he's reading, he'll go 'Walking Dead,' and you both shrug and go, 'well, yeah, duh.'

And I wasn't going to review the show, either, for a very similar reason. If you're a zombie fan, you have to be watching this show, so what more is there to say? But after the episode I watched last night, I just can't contain myself any more. The Walking Dead is fantastic, and I simply have to tell everyone who will listen that they ought to be fans, even if they already are.

If you are a fan of the comic book who (for no possible reason I can fathom) is not watching the TV show, you should know that it follows the comic only as a general guideline. There are characters on the show who are not in the book. There are people in the book who are not in the show. There are different scenes, different stories, and completely varied orders of events. Most importantly, you never know who will die. There's no guarantee that just because your favorite lasted 50 issues in the comic book, he can't get struck down halfway through season one (not that I'm saying that happened, or even referencing a particular character or incident. It's just an example. No spoilers have been revealed).

What I can tell you, without giving anything away, is that the show is impeccably timed and incredibly tense. The storytelling is precision perfect, often gut-wrenching, and thoroughly addictive. The second half of season three won't be out until February, and man, I can't wait. It's not even just because of the horrible cliffhangers they left us last night. I want the show to come back, and not just because I want to find out what happens. I want to spend more time with the people on the show.

And that's really what has me hooked - the characters in The Walking Dead are beyond believable. I watched eight seasons of Lost, and those overly attractive castaways were never more than puppets on strings. But in The Walking Dead, I feel like I'm spending an hour every Sunday night hanging out with a bunch of people I actually know. Even the ones I hate, the ones I hope will die - I still feel like I know them, like I'm not watching from a recliner in my living room. It's like I'm sitting on a filthy plastic chair at the side of the room while they argue about where to go next.

It takes a lot more than great writing to make me this connected to a show. To feel like these people are this real, they have to LOOK real. Even the attractive people are dirty most of the time, and not all of them are good-looking. They tend to be fit, but if they were lard-asses, zombies would have caught them by now, so I can see past the fact that all the women have killer asses. They look like normal, believable people. They have bad hair days. They grow filthy beards. They wear torn clothing and sleep on mattresses that I would swear I can smell - and they smell like dog farts.

The effects and makeup are also excellent. Just one flapping rubber mask, just one off-kilter contact lens, and the illusion would break down. Not shatter, necessarily, but weaken. And yet every episode just continues to build the feel that you're not just watching this horrific world. You're in it. You can feel the sticky Southern heat, smell the rotting corpses, taste the bland oatmeal. Everything about the show brings you into their world.

I would be lying if I said the show was flawless, though. Early on, there were problems. It took a while for some of the people to grow on me, and especially around the first half of season two, the show was flat-out slow as hell. The pacing was completely off, and it was almost work to sit through another hour just to turn to my son and go, 'man, is anything ever going to happen on this show?' That problem is GONE, by the way - this season has been absolutely phenomenal. Not too slow, not too fast, just the right amount of development mixed with just the right number of gruesome deaths. But if you're plowing through the reruns, keep in mind that you have to get through some slow patches to get to the genius.

And for a long time, they were also having a lot of trouble giving me a reason to give a crap about some of the characters. One guy in particular was so irritating that I just wanted a zombie to eat him so he could be interesting (if you're watching the show, you may know who I mean. Be cool and don't spoil it). Some people seemed to be deliberately stupid. Some were just intentionally unpleasant, beyond what normal people would be. The writing has been so amazing this season that it's not hard to forget the low points from before, but they were there nonetheless.

Finally, I do have one more problem with The Walking Dead, and it relates to both the show and the comic. I am seriously over the 'people are the real monsters' drama-queen bit. Other zombie-related entertainment has shown that you can definitely tell a good zombie story where human beings are not mostly douchebags, but it still plays as a recurring theme. At this point, it seems like it's written by a bunch of crappy poets sitting around a coffee shop on a Tuesday night listen to an open mike and saying, 'deep, man, deep.' The best zombie entertainment is allegorical, but this particular allegory has been done to death.

However, The Walking Dead obviously has no intention of altering its direction, and while I don't agree with it completely, I'll be damned if I'm not entirely hooked. I can't stop watching. I know there's heartache ahead. I know there are deaths and sorrow and pain, and yet this particular story has 100% of my attention. There's no guarantee of a happy ending, and I don't care, because in this case, it's not about the ending. It's about the people and how they change as the show progresses. That, and how they totally kill a ton of different things. That part is also awesome.

Oh, one more reason I'm reviewing this tonight - there's a big marathon coming up on AMC. If you're behind on the show, or missed an episode, or just want to dive in at the beginning, you can get completely caught up when they run every episode over New Years Eve and New Years Day. Yes, it's a month away, but that will give you time to get your order in with your cable company. Because if you're not watching The Walking Dead, you should be.

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Classic Movie Review - Aliens

My parents were very, very Christian. The first time I saw an R-rated movie, I was 17 years old. They didn't want to let me see Back to the Future because they heard that the mom has a crush on her son (which was true, but it was 1950s mom and 1980s son, so that was OK). I once had to leave a party because my friends decided to watch Commando, and I was not allowed.

But my old man had a weak spot - kick-ass sci-fi. The exception to the R-rated movie thing was when there was an awesome science fiction flick we could rent from Wherehouse (you might remember Wherehouse as the place where you got videos before Blockbuster put them out of business. You might remember Blockbuster as the place you got videos before the Internet put them out of business). So even though there was copious profanity (or, as one guy says at the beginning of the movie, harsh language), I got to watch Aliens on VHS. Though by the time we could rent it, I was already 17, so I still didn't really get to game the system.

Aliens is one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time. Ridley Scott kicked off the phenomenon with ideas he cribbed from HR Geiger, but it was James Cameron who made the movie fans wanted to see. Hard-assed space marines battling acid-blood bugs in a derelict planetary colony? Yeah, like you could pass that up.

It's almost a moot point to review Aliens. If you haven't seen Aliens, a movie that has been available for more than 25 years, then I'll send the nerd police around to repossess your nerd badge. The original was a sort of high-concept horror-in-space flick, and while it was OK, it was largely unremarkable. The sequel put it on the map, and marked it permanently in the collective sci-fi geek consciousness.

In case you're one of the very few actual nerds who has not seen this absolute classic of space movies, I'll run it down for you. Ripley, the tough broad who managed to eject the creepy alien from her ship in the first movie, gets recruited to return to the planet where the first bugs were found. Predictably enough, things go poorly, as the hard-hitting marines are under-equipped to deal with a threat of this magnitude. There are excellent explosions, thrilling gun battles, moments of tension and suspense and outright fear. And then lots of people die.

The brilliance of Aliens is not just in the great plot and excellent camera work. The action scenes are spectacular, but the stars of this movie shine brighter. Some of the lines in this movie are etched into my brain like alien acid - 'It's game over, man! Have you ever been mistaken for a man? In case you haven't been keeping up with current events, we just got our asses kicked!' OK, most of the best lines belong to Hudson, but there's still the eternally memorable, 'Get away from her, you BITCH!'

The story has betrayal and greed, heroism and redemption. Characters who seem like cowards turn out to be loyal and brave. While virtually nothing goes right for the marines and their civilian escorts, their strength in the face of adversity is inspirational. Corporate greed is overruled by human compassion and grunt common sense. And as I may have mentioned, there are more explosions than a Michael Bey movie.

Aliens was so good that it spawned lots of great material. The creators of Space Hulk, for instance, should be paying royalties to James Cameron, instead of trying to shut down every reference site that dares to post a rules summary for a game that's been out of print since the Clinton was president. There were comic books, video games, and a whole slew of sequels (and if you've seen the third movie, you know the only smart thing to do is pretend it never happened at all. You know, the way we do with the Star Wars prequels).

You might be wondering why I'm reviewing Aliens at all. It is a rather old movie, and most of us have seen it already. But it was at the top of my mind because I watched it this evening, and was amazed that after 20 years, it's actually better than I remember. After all that time, I still remember the names of the marines, even the ones who got killed early like Frost and Spunkmeyer and, of course, Drake. I anticipated all my favorite lines, laughed at Paul Reiser's ridiculous 80s haircut, and was on the edge of my seat even though I've seen the movie a half-dozen times.

Aliens is just as fantastic as it was the first time I saw it. I don't care if it's been out for two and a half decades, it's a magnificent movie, and if you don't like me reviewing old classic nerd flicks, ask the guy with the gun to your head if you can read something else. If you haven't seen Aliens, you need to correct that oversight as soon as you possibly can. Maybe right now.

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Board Game Review - Capital Offensive

I used to start every day by reading through my daily dose of web comics. Most of them were just for the sake of the joke, but my favorite was a story-based daily called Schlock Mercenary. The art was weak, but the stories were great, the characters were interesting, and the dialog was outstanding. It was about a roving band of space mercs, focusing in particular on a green goo alien named Schlock who shot things with a plasma cannon and ate a lot of fried cheese.

Being a big fan of the comic, I was delighted to get a review copy of Capital Offensive, a skirmish game based on Schlock Mercenary. You get to play Tagon and Legs and Kevyn and, of course, Schlock as they fight serpentine lawyers and violent foes, and you get to kill a whole lot of people. So that's pretty awesome.

The game starts out with a training mission, which sets three enormously overpowered mercs against a horde of snaky attorneys. The rules are basic, and you'll pick them up pretty quickly, which is nice because the training mission is so lopsided it's actually kind of boring. The snakes are freaking doomed.

Playing the full rules, on the other hand, will let you pick up equipment, dodge and aim, go on overwatch, and otherwise play a considerably more tactical game. More options means more decisions, and more decisions means more fun. You'll run around the inside of spaceships, blasting your enemies and jumping through teraports and grabbing up goober guns. It's a lot of action - but unfortunately, still not really a great game.

I hate to say it, but my first strike against Capital Offensive is that it is not very pretty. I know, I already said Schlock Mercenary is a visually unimpressive comic, but the game is somehow even more bland than the comic. Sure, the art is taken straight out of the comic, but it's just not very exciting. Frankly, it needs plastic. I don't need thirty different characters. I can get by with a dozen, if they're miniatures and not cardboard circles.

And the floor art is so flat and colorless that it makes the game less fun. This is a serious shame. Look at the art for Space Hulk - the tiles are simply amazing and the game is more fun because of it. It's simply not fair to compare Space Hulk to Schlock Mercenary, but the tiles did not have to be this drab. There were things that could have been done. There were opportunities missed.

I could get past the sleep-inducing art if the game were amazing. Sadly, it's not. I'm not saying it's bad - it's really not. But it's also not great. We did have fun blasting each other with sniper rifles and laser cannons, but it just didn't feel like a lot of maneuvering and razor-wire decision-making. Dungeon Command is an exceptional skirmish game with only twelve miniatures per side and an incredible amount of depth and tension. Capital Offensive is the same kind of game, but without the tension or depth. It's not bad. It's just average.

Unfortunately, in a market where more than 800 new games appear every year, there's no room for average. Your games need to be better than average. They need to be exceptional if they want to compete with the hundreds of other games I could play. The only people I can see getting very excited by Capital Offensive are those who are already Schlock Mercenary fans. Everyone else will just go play HeroScape.

If you are a fan of Schlock Mercenary, you'll see that the creators of the game went to some serious lengths to make Capital Offensive a good Schlock game. The characters are in there, including a bunch I don't recognize any more because I have a day job now and can't read web comics at work. The weapons are in there. The art is in there, and I even have a custom-drawn character card done by Howard Tayler. I probably won't play it again, because I have several other good skirmish games, but if you're a fan, it's worth at least a glance.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros
Built on a really fun comic
Lots of bloodshed and violent outburst

Cons
Gameplay is basically average
Seriously needs a facelift

Get more glances at Capital Offensive at the Living World site:
http://livingworldsgames.com/project/schlockcapitaloffensive/

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Card Game Review - Down In Flames: Guns Blazing

We need to start a campaign to stop ugly games. We'll have an online petition and send letters to our state representatives. The petition will be something like, 'We hereby do swear to talk like lawyers as we ask for a law that will make people stop producing ugly games.' This is necessary because there are just too many ugly games out there, and some of them might be fun, except for they are so darn ugly.

Case in point - Down In Flames. It's a card game about WWII airplane fights. It should be basically pretty awesome, because it has a few cool ideas and some neat stuff that could work, except that unfortunately it's just butt ugly. I mean, I've had the game for months and haven't written anything because the game was so unattractive that I didn't have any desire to play it.

The cards could have been cool. They have art on them depicting airplanes shooting at each other, but they look like someone made cheap 3D models and shoved them on top of a Photoshop cloud background. If they had actual awesome art, from awesome artists, you would want to play just because they would look cool. But when even the design elements scream, 'this is a boring game,' it's hard to get motivated to crack the cigarette wrappers and shuffle up a game.

Conceptually, there are cool ideas in this box. There are two things you can rely on Dan Verssen Games to deliver - one, they will be ugly, and two, they will be meticulously researched and developed. The dogfights are short and brutal, with maneuvering and card management and lots of luck when you're drawing cards. Dive or climb? Shake your tail and get clear or jink sideways to get a better position? Fire full out, or spread the attack over a few different trigger pulls? Lots of neat ideas create excellent decision-making conundrums (should that be conundra? Probably).

Unfortunately, if you play this game in its most basic mode - two opposing airplanes in a sky duel - it's not particularly interesting. Sure, there's card play and stuff, but it mostly comes down to being luckier than the other guy. There's a little maneuvering, and a few smart card plays can tilt the balance, but mostly you just hope you get the right cards to keep your ass in your plane and your finger on the trigger. If you only bought this game for the mano-a-mano dogfights, you would be disappointed. Because not only did you get a game that looks like the south end of a north-bound pack mule, but the game itself is kind of on the dull side.

Which is why there are like a hundred planes in the box. Not literally, of course - the printers would be furious, trying to fit all those airplanes into one box. No, they're all on cards. There are fighters and bombers and - well, there are fighters and bombers. That's about what we had in WWII. But there are enough different planes, plus lots of different scenarios, that you can run a complicated bombing run over Germany or a kamikaze attack on an aircraft carrier. You can fly through flak attacks or send whole fighter squadrons after other fighter squadrons. You can even team up, and have British and American planes battling two squadrons of German Luftwaffe.

It's actually a really good thing this advanced play is in the box, because in my book, they were on two strikes with no balls up to this point. The more complicated scenarios are no grand slam, but they're a solid base hit, maybe a double to left field. With this more interesting format, what starts as a dry, ugly dogfight game becomes an involved, strategic, ugly dogfight game.

This is where the game really comes to life. You can build big airborne battles, count victory points, jockey for position, and otherwise play out a really interesting fight in the sky. There are several scenarios to pick from, with their own special rules, and there's no reason you can't play the ones you like more than once. This is really the redeeming feature of Down In Flames, because these big battles introduce a much greater degree of intelligent card play.

If you're looking for a clean, smart, attractive game about airplane battles, this is not the game you've been hunting. It's busy and ugly (though it is smart). DVG makes involved games for people who want to spend some time using their heads, and if that's the kind of dogfight game you want to play, Down In Flames should be just your cup of tea. If they hired a couple really good artists, it would be my cup of tea, too, but as long as the cards make my inner artist want to choke on its own inner vomit, I am not looking forward to the expansion.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros
Some cool dogfighting card play ideas
Exciting theme
A great expanded mode makes for much more interesting aerial battles

Cons
Super ugly
Played as a straight-up two-plane dogfight, it's a little weak

If you want to learn more about Down In Flames, maybe because you prefer ugly things, you can check the DVG site right here:
UGLY PLANES KICKING UGLY PLANE ASS

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Holiday Report - Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Hopefully you got stuck at a relative's house after a really long, exhausting drive, then got to eat tons of overcooked, dry turkey and listen to your cousins fights over whether Obama is actually from Kenya. My Thanksgiving was WAY better than that, mostly because we had it at home and nobody came over.

That's not entirely accurate, actually. My daughter did have a friend over, so I shared my dry-ass Thanksgiving turkey with two giggling, insipid sixteen-year-old twits. Then, after dinner, this little girl used my bathroom and clogged the crapper. The damned kid must live on a diet of roofing tar and two-part epoxy, because it took thirty minutes to plunge that Godzilla-movie monster out of the plumbing so I could enjoy my after-dinner constitutional.

That's not all we did, of course. I did the shopping for the meal, so I had canned vegetables, a pre-smoked turkey and stuffing from a box. My wife, who is something of a gourmet chef, was not about to let a meal this big get away from her, especially because it was my son's last Thanksgiving as a dependent. So she made some creamed corn and cranberry compote that were both better than anything else we had to eat.

Then we played Borderlands 2. We did that a lot, because once the girls went to hide in the bedroom, listen to crappy teeny tripe on the radio and talk about boys, we didn't have much better to do. Sure, we had stuff we could have done, but nothing better than Borderlands 2. We won the game and everything. Turns out when we both have the day off and the turkey takes twenty minutes to get warm, we have plenty of time. More than usual, at least.

The best part about Thanksgiving, though, is the timing. Everybody gets Thursday off, unless they work at Denny's or some crap-sniffing retailer who opens at 8:00 for Black Friday deals on whatever-color Thursday. So you don't just get the day, you get a whole four-day weekend. As I write this, I'm not even half-way through my holiday weekend. I finished painting all my Mice & Mystics minis Wednesday night, and I've already got a date to play it this evening. We're going to cram some Zombicide in there before the weekend is over, and my best friend is supposed to come over tomorrow and bring some kick-ass new minis that I can spend three weeks painting before we play a forty-minute skirmish.

Thanksgiving is easily my favorite holiday. No religious baggage, no commercial promotions, just family and food and four days off. I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday as much as I did, because I've got bad news - Christmas season starts to today, and that is, as the man says in the song, the most miserable time of the year.

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Movie Review - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Ask the average American what the Civil War was about, and they might tell you slavery. Some (especially throwback rednecks who think the South should rise again, as if that would be anything other than completely disastrous) might tell you it was just about Northern Aggression. Ask a tweed-jockey academic, he might just tell you all about how it was about the rise of industrialism and the decline of agrarianism. But they're all wrong - it was about vampires.

If you want the true story behind the Civil War (and when I say 'true,' I mean 'silly'), you need to watch Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Then you can learn all about how Honest Abe killed the nightwalking dead with a special axe coated in silver, because a vampire killed his mom when he was a kid. Then he tried to outlaw slavery, since vampires were eating slaves, and the South got kind of pissed and started a war.

Interestingly, the war is not the biggest part of this campy action flick. The bulk of the tale is about young Abe Lincoln as he learns about the evil beasties of the night and learns how to chop down trees for no reason. There's a love story, as he falls for Mary Todd, and lots of actual historical factoids are woven into the tale in an attempt to make it even semi-believable.

Of course, the story is not believable. I mean, even if you accept that vampires exist, and that they can turn invisible, and that they can live forever if they eat your face, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is still a little tough to swallow. Young Abe develops super powers when he… trains real hard. He's not bitten by a radioactive vampire or granted an emerald vampire-killing ring. He just discovers the hidden powers of the mind and uses them to deliver vengeance to the inhuman predators that are turning South Carolina into an all-you-can-drink blood buffet. Why is he suddenly able to run across the backs of stampeding horses to chase his evil prey? Because it looks cool.

But if you're watching a movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, you're not here for an intellectual treatise. If you want that, read Gore Vidal's book. Instead you get to see one of the greatest presidents of our nation do backflips and choreographed ass-kicking with a sweet wood-chopper and a stove-pipe hat (though when he's fighting on the top of a train, he doesn't wear the hat). The action sequences in this movie are larger than life and twice as silly, but they're really fun. Acrobatic synchronized slaughter, complete with slo-mo blood spatters and grim expressions of rage, are the real stars of this movie. The actual character could be almost anyone, but the fact that it's such an absurd combination makes it that much more entertaining.

Also entertaining is that the acting is not half as bad as it ought to be, given that the biggest name in the movie is Alan Tudyk (who plays Steven Douglas, and is on-screen for maybe two minutes total). These are a bunch of actors you probably don't know, and yet they do an admirable job of making you really want to believe that any part of this campy blood-bath is even remotely possible. A few stretches were required in casting - Mary Todd is extraordinarily pretty, and considering she actually had a face that could curdle milk, the choice of actresses was a bit of a stretch. But they did get an actor who looks quite a bit like Lincoln, then shaved off that dorky Amish beard so he could be a kid instead of a president.

The real beauty of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is it delivers almost exactly what you think it should. There are vampires, obviously. There's vampire hunting. There's blood and fighting. There are explosions and bullet holes and gruesome scars. And as young Abraham Lincoln takes on the mantle of leadership to save the nation from the undead menace, there's blatant silliness. This is a movie that knows what it is. It's campy and violent and cool. It's about as deep as a New York pizza, but it's exactly what you expect it to be. If all filmmakers believed in this much truth in advertising, I never would have seen Magic Mike.

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Board Game Review - Archipelago

Asmodee understands that theme is important for gamers. That's why, when they make a game, they use the same exact theme for every fourth game. Settling the New World from Europe may have been done about seven hundred times, but people keep buying it, so it must still be popular.

Archipelago is a game about settling a bunch of islands in the middle of the Caribbean. It covers a wide span of time - each turn is supposed to be about fifteen years, which is enough time to have babies and add them to the work force, as long as you're cool with child labor. Given that the game takes place during the 1500s, I think it's safe to assume child labor is just fine.

(Quick aside - Archipelago is not an easy word to pronounce. That's probably why they chose it. They could have just called the game Settling Islands, and we would never have worried about how it sounds, except that nobody would have bought it. So they went with a title that I've been pronouncing incorrectly for decades, and found out when I played a half-dozen times that I was saying it all wrong. I was putting the emphasis on the 'lah' sound, which is wrong. And the French dude I hung out with at BGG Con kept saying it 'arsh', not 'ark,' which is probably right if we're in France. Which we were not. So it's actually 'ark-uh-PEL-uh-go.' In case you were wondering. You probably were not.)

Archipelago is a cooperative game with a winner. Or, more accurately, it's a highly competitive game that everyone can lose. In fact, it's only cooperative because it's so damned easy to have the natives of your little island paradise rise up and throw every last imperialist dog out on his ass. There's a population track that tells you how many people you have working for you, and there's an angry dude marker that tells you how close you are to open rebellion. If you piss off your people until they rebel, everyone at the table loses.

(Another quick aside. The population marker is a white meeple. The discontent marker is a black meeple. I was not responsible for these color choices. When I tell you that if the angry black dude catches the white guy the game is over for everybody, I need you to understand that this sentence was not my idea.

I mentioned this odd color decision at BGG Con, slightly worried about sounding like a racist asshole, but then realized that I had almost nothing to worry about. It was a board game convention. There was only one black guy.)

Anyway, in Archipelago, you're all European imperialists raping the islands under your control to wring every last drop of wealth out of them, and at the same time, you're wealthy benefactors making sure that everyone stays happy. Doing both things is almost impossible - if you keep all the pineapple to sell to the French court, thereby making a ton of money on exotic fruit, the locals will get scurvy and start burning effigies on your front lawn. If you put all your resources into keeping the people employed and fed, you won't have anything left to build those great statues back home that let everyone in London know how awesome you are.

Attempting to describe the rules to Archipelago would make for a long, boring review (which will not stop a lot of people from doing it anyway). But there is one interesting element in Archipelago that I haven't seen in games before, and it bears some discussion.

You know how in most really diversified games, the end game is based on one thing? Like if you're harvesting wheat and mining iron and building troops and establishing brothels, the only thing that matters in the end is how much money you have. That's not how it works in Archipelago. In this crazy complicated game, you don't know what will make you the winner. You have to prosper - build towns and ports, harvest stone and iron, build a happy population and a fat wallet. You don't know what specific things will be the deciding factor, so you just have to do your best to do your best.

This exceptionally cool development in gaming is made possible through hidden objective cards. You have one card that tells you one thing that will be worth a bunch at the end of the game, but everyone else has one, too. So in a five player game, that makes five different things that could be scored, and you have to score on every one of them. Weakening your fleet might save money, but in the end, you might be scoring ships for victory points. The end result is that instead of focusing on one single aspect, you all do make the most prosperous, well-rounded civilization you can create.

Speaking of civilizations, Archipelago has a lot in common with those heavy, all-nighter games you used to play in college, back before you had a family, when you still had free time. If you like Through the Ages, there's a real chance you'll dig this one. Play time on the back of the box says it could go 240 minutes - four hours - and that's not an exaggeration. We never finished inside three hours, except the one time where we all lost because we ran out of cows and the islanders decided to eat us instead.

It's not just long for no reason. There are immense decisions to make, and unlike most games where you have pretty good information on what's coming up next, Archipelago keeps you guessing and preparing all the time. You'll need to increase the population - but should you hire workers or breed your own? Can you afford the additional mouths to feed? And once you have those workers, should you send them out to explore the world, or should you have them gather papayas? Maybe they would be better off running a port or a town, so that you can sell your resources to Mother England and line your pockets.

There's so much to do in Archipelago that it can be quite daunting the first time you play. If you think you've got the mental cajones to work through the rules, and then you've got the Saturday afternoon to spend playing the game, you might find that this is exactly your kind of game. But if you prefer six-page rule books and games you can finish on a lunch break, you really ought to save your money for something easier. Archipelago is fun and deep and intense, but it's not a light game. It's heavy. And I don't mean just because it's complicated. It's more like if you eat at TGI Friday's and get an appetizer and a huge meal and a slice of ice-cream cake, and then you have to unbutton your pants before you throw up. I mean it's heavy.

Happily, the guys at Asmodee know that if you're going to spend an entire night playing one game, it should be easy on the eyes. The island tiles are gorgeous. The colors are bright and pleasant. The illustrations on the cards are the same quality you can always expect from Asmodee, which is to say they are outstanding. The game looks amazing, all laid out on the table, and it's a pleasure to play even if you're just there to look at the pretty pieces.

So what if the theme has been trotted out more times than a street walking trollop. The theme fits, and plays out beautifully as you play the game, and what's more, you can really feel the passage of time (and not just because you're there for three hours). If you like to really get into a game, if you like difficult decisions and rewarding intellectual investments, Archipelago is a powerful fun game.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:
The theme comes to life
A new kind of winning condition that I suspect we're going to see a lot more as time passes
Engaging and deep
Seriously pretty

Cons:
Massive play time (not a con for me, but I know not everyone has a lot of time)
Seriously? Settling the New World AGAIN?!

Check with your brain to see if it's up to play Archipelago, and if it is, get a copy from Noble Knight Games and save more than 20 bucks:

BIG STEAK DINNER

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