Silly Card Game Review - Princess Bride: Prepare to Die!

It seems silly to be writing a review of a game that is basically two cards that you put together to make something kind of dumb, but Game Salute has been very good to me and Dan Yarrington is a bad-ass (and he's the head dude at Game Salute). So I'm mentioning their Kickstarter promotion for Prepare to Die, because I've seen the cards and they're funny.

The game is essentially a gimmick - take the greatest line from Princess Bride and substitute other funny stuff. Like this:

Hello! My name is Arnold Schwartzenegger. You collapsed my souffle. Prepare to die.

That's it. That's the game. In fact, the rules for this game are so short, they printed them on three of the cards. And in case that sounds like a lot of rules, that covers three different ways to play the game. So it's not very many rules.

Really, though, the rules are that you're going to combine a person with a thing that person did, and pretend that's a good reason to kill them. Then laugh.

Game Salute sent me a few of the cards for this game. They're clever, and some are even funny. I have to be honest, I wouldn't buy this game, because it's almost completely pointless, but I also have to admit that I laughed when we were coming up with some rather silly combinations.

A few more samples:

Hello! My name is Harriet Tubman. You branded my stallion. Prepare to die.

Hello! My name is Nikola Tesla. You drank my milkshake. Prepare to die.

OK, two samples.

I don't think I need to keep going. Either you want to play this game or you don't. If this sounds like fun to you, check out the Kickstarter and buy yourself a copy:

HELLO! MY NAME IS PETER PAN. YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP. PREPARE TO DIE.

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Drinking Game Review - DrunkQuest

As a younger man, I was something of an aficionado in the world of drinking games. Or, it might be more accurate to say, I was really good at drinking, games or not. Or, if we're being completely honest, I was drunk a lot, and sometimes we played games.

Through my extensive experience with drinking and the occasionally associated games, I have determined that one important factor in drinking games is the ability to play them while absolutely thunderballed. You should be able to explain the rules of your drinking game in two sentences or less:

If I can bounce this quarter and get it in that shot glass, you have to drink. Otherwise, I have to drink.

We'll deal cards until someone gets a queen, and then that person has to come up with a category. The first person who can't name a thing in that category has to drink.

Every time a TV reporter places unnecessary emphasis on a Hispanic name, we all drink.

If you put a drink in my hand, I will drink it.

I was especially good at the last one, but all of these drinking games shared a common characteristic - they were an entertaining way to get drunk. The best thing about a drinking game is that nobody actually loses - the goal of the game is to get drunk, and so the only loser is the guy sipping a glass of water. That dork has to drive us all home afterward.

DrunkQuest is an attempt to reinvent the drinking game and make it actually competitive, instead of just a convenient way to become inebriated. Unlike most drinking games, which are open-ended and are only done after everyone stops playing, DrunkQuest invites players to try to level up their heroes before everyone else.

DrunkQuest presents a fantasy game where monsters appear, and in order to defeat the monsters, players must drink. For example, a monster might require a player to take six drinks in order to kill it, and then the player would be awarded five treasure cards and a level. The first player to get six levels is the winner, and probably also the drunkest.

However, there are a few considerations that make DrunkQuest slightly questionable as a drinking game. For starters, the treasure cards you can play on your turn have lots of words on them, and as anyone who has tried to program their iPad while blitzed can tell you, it is not easy to read when you're very drunk. At one party, I changed the same tape four times and still ended up listening to Joshua Tree every time because I couldn't tell if I was holding U2 or The Police (and yes, this was so long ago that we had tapes. And listened to U2.).

For another thing, DrunkQuest has lots of stuff to track. You've got a realm ability that might let you drink less, and a hero ability that could add drinks to monsters your opponents have to fight. Some cards might specify that they affect other cards, but only specific kinds of cards, forcing you to re-read carefully and make sure you're playing correctly. Which is great when you're all sober, but not as awesome if you're trashed.

If DrunkQuest were just a game that you didn't play while drinking, it would be on the light side. But I'm not sure I want to play a drinking game with four pages of rules, even four light pages of rules. If you can't sum up your game in a paragraph, I will be too besotted to comprehend it while in my cups.

On the other hand, DrunkQuest actually tells us how much drink is in a drink, and says that a 12-oz beer has 24 drinks inside. That is not much drinking. Following these suggestions, we played a game of DrunkQuest, and at the end, one of us had consumed two beers, one had sipped his way through just one, and the last was kind of a girly-man who had managed to win the game after consuming less than half a beer. So sure, this might be a drinking game, but you're in more danger of having to urinate a lot than you are of being unable to drive. Play with hard liquor if you've got a tolerance, or if you want the art to get blurry before the game is over.

Speaking of the art, it's very attractive. The cards are large, so you can handle them easily while intoxicated, and the pictures are simple and pleasing to the eye. Of course, if you decide to play this game with Johnny Walker Black instead of Pabst Blue Ribbon, you won't be able to see the art when the game ends, so that may be irrelevant.

I could go either way on DrunkQuest. On the one hand, DrunkQuest doesn't get me drunk, and it's a little weak as a regular game. But then, it could also be a nice balancing point between normal games and the full-on drunk-express games I played in college.

It's sort of unimportant what I think of DrunkQuest, personally. I'm a grown man now, and I only drink on two occasions any more. I like to have a nice imported stout when I'm eating a good meal, and I drink lots of whiskey on holidays so that I can tolerate family time. Other than that, I don't drink much, so DrunkQuest doesn't appeal to me, personally. I don't generally like being ripped, mostly because it just means I am about to take a nap.

However, if you're younger than me (or just more prone to alcohol in general), you might get a real kick out of DrunkQuest. And if you might dig this game, you can also check out the expansion they're selling on Kickstarter right now. Personally, I can't think of a reason I need an expansion for a drinking game, but then, I don't play drinking games any more. If I did, this entire idea might make more sense to me.

Summary

2-6 potential drunkards

Pros:
A fun way to get a headstart on your hangover
Neat art
Amusing cards
Attractive design

Cons:
Four pages of rules in a drinking game is three-and-a-half too many
Not intended for play by the seriously intoxicated

You can go here to learn more about DrunkQuest:
GET YOUR DRINKETH ONETH

And you can go here to see about the expansion:
KICKSTART YOUR BUZZ

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Board Game Review - Galaxy Defenders

I love playing games that have come from foreign lands and been translated into English, mostly because the rulebooks tend to be very amusing. I've seen strange phrasing that sounded like references to blowjobs. I've seen words that are absolutely not in the English language. And Galaxy Defenders, a tactical co-op that is currently on Kickstarter, provided me with the option to see game rules that use unintentional stand-in profanity. Watch, I'll show you what I mean.

In Galaxy Defenders, you'll each play a GD agent sent to defeat aliens. The game plays out on a tactical hex grid and uses card-based AI to tell the aliens what to do when they get to go. Kill enough aliens, and you can earn some GD wings, which will let you improve your character and call for more resources from your GD headquarters.

Right now, you can't actually buy Galaxy Defenders. It's only available on Kickstarter, and it's not even in a published enough state that my review copy looks like a game. It's definitely a prototype. The hex pieces are square, for one thing. But I could mostly tell what it's going to look like when it's an actual game, and it's going to be a hoot. The GD art is comic-book cool, and it's all over the place. The maps are really excellent, because they're both easy to read and full of fun details. Like if you're playing in the desert outside Area 51, the sand might be hiding half of a flying saucer, or a road sign warning drivers of possible alien activity. It's fun and quite functional.

The game itself is fun, as long as you're ready for a tactical cooperative game with a few tweaky rules and some exciting violence. It's not made by Fantasy Flight Games, but it sure seems like it could be, with all the GD miniatures and cardboard GD tokens and thick-ass GD rulebook. There are a whole bunch of GD minis in the box (the exact count being undetermined and waiting for stretch goals and add-on orders), and they're really fun. They are, however, rather large - if you were thinking of porting the figures to another game, think again. They call them 32mm heroic scale, but they look more like they could be fighting against the plastic toy soldiers you picked up at the dollar store, in terms of size. In terms of detail and what-not, the one GD miniature I got with my review copy looks sweet. If I end up really loving this game, I'll probably paint them.

One thing to keep in mind is that my review of Galaxy Defenders might not be completely accurate when you actually get your game. If you could read the GD rules in Italian, they're done, but the translation is rough. I mean like 40-grit toilet paper rough. I am virtually certain we did something wrong at some point. The basics aren't going to change - it will be fast and action-packed and explodey (explodey being a word that is not a word, but someone used it on the Internet and so I did, too). But I can't tell you how refined and clean it will be until I actually see the finished game.

The neat thing I found playing Galaxy Defenders is that it might not reinvent any part of the cooperative board game market, but what it does, it does well. Turns are fast. Violence is a matter of a few die rolls leading to dead bodies. Aliens spawn, move and fight in a hurry, and most of the complication results from stuff that's added on to the GD basics, like searching stashes to find alien artifacts and trading it for goodies from your GD headquarters.

I would really love to comment on the production value of the GD miniatures, the plastic they used, the art on the GD cards or the design of the GD rules, but as I mentioned, my copy of this game is a rough prototype, and while I can tell it will look cool, it's impossible to be perfectly clear as to how pretty it will be in the end. But if you check out the Kickstarter page, and then consider that this is the company responsible for the War of the Rings reprint, I think you can probably assume it will be fairly sexy.

I know I swore off reviewing Kickstarter prototypes, and that moratorium is still mostly in place. But two things made me decide to make an exception for Galaxy Defenders. First, the miniatures look cool and the game looked fun. Second, the publisher is established and has some big titles, so I felt confident they could turn out something impressive. I guess that I can revise my solid boycott of Kickstarter review copies - if you want me to review your Kickstarter prototype, you can email me, but it better be God-damned impressive.

Summary

1-5 players

Pros:
Fast cooperative tactical game
Bitchin' miniatures
Cool art
Fun and exciting

Cons:
I don't really know. I haven't seen the whole game.

If you would like to find out more about Galaxy Defenders, you can check out the Kickstarter page here:
SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB

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Movie Review - Gangster Squad

I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of mob movies. Scorsese movies in particular, but really, pretty much anything where organized criminals shoot each other in the face. But even with an exceptionally wide tolerance for error when it comes to movies about mobsters, I wasn't sure I wanted to see Gangster Squad. Mostly because it was called Gangster Squad.

Would you be as excited to see Jurassic Park if it were called Dinosaur Island? How much anticipation could you have mustered for Star Wars if it had been called Space Battles? If The Godfather had been Mob Boss, would it have been as well received? Those are all rhetorical - no need to come up with an answer in your head. The point is, the movie needed a better name. It sounded cheesy.

We watched it anyway, despite the silly title. I watched it because A) it had gangsters and tommy guns, and B) it had Emma Stone, and she makes my pants fit tighter. I wasn't expecting it to be great, and it delivered pretty much exactly what I expected, except it surprised me because I ended up enjoying it despite its ridiculous parts. Though I think I liked it because it had gangsters and Emma Stone, not because it was a good movie.

Gangster Squad takes place in Los Angeles in the late 40s, during the same time period as that boring LA Noir cop game. A shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later cop forms his own squad of undercover cops to take down Mickey Cohen, the mobster running most of the Los Angeles crime racket. This loose cannon copper gets a bunch of sidekicks, like the cowboy gunslinger who never misses and the playboy kid and the smart guy who is good at fixing things. It's like a pitch for a comic-book movie:

"A hard-boiled cop. A gunslinger. An angry young man. Together, they are the Gangster Squad. They fight crime."

Come to think of it, this movie could have been a comic book, but only if it were published by Marvel, and probably only in that era when Batman got all dark and everybody started reading Punisher. It's a ham-fisted, over-the-top story full of big action scenes and characters who can be summed up in a sentence. There are car chases and gun fights, fisticuffs and jail breaks. It's riddled with more cliches than there are bullet holes in the side of a rum runner's Packard.

If you're trying to decide if you might like Gangster Squad, ask yourself if you liked The Untouchables. This movie wanted to be that movie, with lots of big-name stars, occasionally cheesy dialog, and deaths meant to make the viewer upset. However, unlike that classic, Gangster Squad left me completely uncaring when people died, not particularly invested in the defeat of the villainous mobster, and definitely not quoting any cool lines. Remember this exchange?

'You got 'im?'
'I got 'im.'
'Take 'im.'

Or:

'Where's Nitti?'
'He's in the car.'

Well, if you do, hang onto that, because you're not going to find anything that memorable in Gangster Squad.

But maybe the creators of the movie didn't want you to remember it. At least, they didn't want you to remember it long enough to check up on Wikipedia, because there's virtually no historical accuracy to be had. I was wondering if they were going to pull a Tarantino and kill Mickey Cohen, because they were so far off actual events that they could have gone any direction they wanted.

So it sounds like I didn't like Gangster Squad, but I really did. The writing may have been poor, but the acting was actually pretty good. Josh Brolin, Sean Penn, Giovanni Ribisi, and Ryan Gosling are pretty big hitters, and they can do a lot with a crappy script. Plus it had Emma Stone, who could lisp her way through a Sunday-morning Bible reading and still give me a stiffy. The production was excellent - gun battles were thrilling, car chases were exciting, fisticuffs were brutal, and jail breaks were intense. Costumes were immaculate and sets were great. If there had been compelling dialog and a clever story, this would have been an incredible movie.

Instead it was just a really fun gangster movie that you only need to watch once (unless you're developing a thoroughly inappropriate fascination for Emma Stone). It wasn't smart or tightly scripted. It wasn't restrained or introspective. It was just a high-octane go-cart race of a gangster movie, and if you can just strap in and hang on and not look for the serious parts, you might enjoy Gangster Squad, stupid title and all.

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Card Game Review - Cards Against Humanity

I played a horrible game this weekend, one that has me questioning my moral compass. And not even questioning whether my moral compass is having trouble pointing due north; after playing Cards Against Humanity this weekend, I'm not entirely certain I have a moral compass at all.

I do, however, have a fully functional funny bone, because while I may have suggested that I think about Auschwitz while making love to my wife, I laughed about it for a very long time. I laughed until my eyes were watering. I laughed until I couldn't breathe.

Our group actually played Card Against Humanity twice this weekend, but I passed on the first game because someone told me it was like Apples to Apples but for horrible people. And I absolutely despise Apples to Apples. That is such a pathetically stupid game that it calls into doubt the sentience of any human being who likes to play it. So when I heard Cards Against Humanity described as an Apples to Apples clone, I was out. And then as I was sitting on the couch catching up on emails and overhearing the game underway, I was disappointed I had missed it.

The thing is, Cards Against Humanity really is just an Apples to Apples clone. But the designers of the clone were not willing to just put a zany twist on a boring classic. They wanted to kick it up a notch, to make Cards Against Humanity a truly horrible exercise in word association. So instead of having cards that say stuff like 'penguin' or 'bomb' or 'Apples to Apples is boring,' their cards have answers like 'African children' and 'pooping back and forth.' I am not sure what pooping back and forth is, because I am a little scared to look that up in Google, but it is a good indicator of the caliber of card you'll find.

The questions, the ones that you're answering with your cards, are set up to allow you to make the answers even more disturbing and hilarious. A highlight of the game was when one friend was judging 'I've got 99 problems but a [BLANK] ain't one.' The answer he chose was 'an erection lasting longer than four hours.' And the person who gave him that card? His wife.

There were several other exceptionally memorable combinations in our game of Cards Against Humanity. I'm not going to go into all of them because they're not as funny if you're not all sitting around the table, laughing hysterically while you're grossed out and horribly offended. After a point, it's almost a contest to see who can come up with the most deviant combinations of cards. References to pornographic acts, religious bigotry and criminal proclivities will have you all falling down laughing. Some of them will be so offensive that you will start to wonder about the caliber of friends you have - but you will be laughing so hard, you may also question your own morality.

It should be stated clearly here that Cards Against Humanity is not a game for children. It's not even a game for adults with weak stomachs. There are cards with outright profanity, and those are the tame ones. Some of the sex acts described on these cards will have to be explained to people who don't watch a lot of porn. The cards you play will haunt you for weeks, but the haunting will be relatively benign because it will take the form of inside jokes your group of friends trots out every thirty minutes for the next six months. The game will make you wonder if you're going to Hell, but it will make you laugh so hard you won't care.

Summary

Players: It's a party game. Don't try to play it with two other people. That's stupid.

Pros:
Hilariously stupid and offensive

Cons:
Hilariously stupid and offensive

There are three ways to get Cards Against Humanity:

1. Go to their site, download it, and print one.
(http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/)

2. Go to their site, pay $25 for it, and they will send you one.
(http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/)

3. Find someone who owns it and steal it.

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Barely a Game Review - Rumble in the House and or Dungeon

I'm reviewing two games at the same time tonight, but they're basically the same game twice, so I think that's OK. For that matter, there's so little to either one that they barely deserve a review at all. In fact, by the time you finish reading this review, you could have read the rules for either game and set up to play. Read this review twice, and you could have played the whole game. The games in these boxes are barely games at all.

Interestingly enough, the Rumble games feature one of my favorite game mechanics - the hidden identity. I love the feinting and bluffing and guessing that comes with games where you're trying to figure out who is working for the resistance and who is a toaster. But those games (the ones I like) have other stuff, ways to throw opponents off the scent or provide perfectly viable excuses to lie.

The Rumble games do make an interesting experiment, I suppose. What happens when you strip a game down to its absolute minimum? In this case, you have a hidden identity and twelve pieces on the board, and at regular intervals, you get to kill people. The trick is to survive the longest by getting your opponents to kill someone else.

That is it. That is the sum total of the game. Well, Rumble in the Dungeon adds this thing where you win if you can get the treasure chest off the board, but nobody is going to let you do that so it's kind of a moot issue. You move, you stab, you die, and three minutes later the game is over.

I'm actually a little offended that Rumble in the House and/or Dungeon exist at all. They are only barely games. They are a half-step above the drinking game where you draw cards off a deck and do a shot when you draw a face card. They are just lazy, and rely on a fun idea to make up for the fact that there is no real game to play.

The thing that really chaps my ass is how much fun these games could be if there were more to them. If characters had special powers that you could exploit on your turn, even if they were not your characters, there would be more play options. If the games provided more ways to guess who was controlling which character, that would add some interesting elements. But as they are, there's a bare-bones idea and no meat.

The Rumble games look to me like a designer was having a talk with another game designer and he farted, and it reminded him of something he left on the counter at home, which made him check his phone to see what time it was, and then the other guy said, 'what about a game where you don't know who the other people are?' and the first guy said, 'yeah, sure, I gotta get my wife to DVR the game.' They're afterthoughts, half-conceived notions, only the slightest excuse for ideas. So much more was possible, but instead the Rumble games are tiny square boxes of missed opportunity.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Hidden identity

Cons:
There isn't enough here to define a 'con', per se

If you want a game that barely constitutes a game at all, you can find the Rumble games at Game Salute. I don't have a link because I'm posting this bitch on an iPad. Look it up, lazy ass.

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Announcement - Esoteric Order of Gamers

Many of you are probably aware of Universal Head. In case you're not, let me set the record straight - his screen name is NOT a reference to one-size-fits-all fellatio. He's Australian. I'm not even sure they call it that there.

Universal Head is my favorite Australian, a guy who tirelessly goes through crappy, poorly written rules and turns out hundreds of summaries that are both easier to understand and better laid out than the originals. He's a mad genius of making games easier to play. I couldn't tell you how many of his outstanding player aids I've printed out when I just couldn't understand the 46 pages of rules that were in whatever monstrosity of a game got delivered to my house.

The purpose of this post, however, is not to just tell you that Universal Head is a handy guy to have around, or to disabuse you as to the somewhat ribald nature of his screen name. The purpose of this post is to let you know that Universal Head has a new website, one that I heartily endorse because it is awesome and very useful.

For a long time, Universal Head has run Headless Hollow, a blog where he talks about... whatever crosses his mind, apparently. His most recent post is about the death of the lead singer of the Divinyls, a band I couldn't be bothered to appreciate in high school because I was too busy listening to whatever musicians offended my parents the most. He's a crazy good writer, but apparently he wanted something a little more focused, a little more useful, a better resource for people looking for the fantastic game aids he churns out like butter.

The new site is called the Esoteric Order of Gamers. There's this one page that's a bit of an introduction, and it tells you that you found the site because you were invited, and it's an exclusive club or something. And then he emailed me yesterday to ask me to tell you about it, so I guess you're all invited, even if the only games you play are Scrabble and Super Mario Brothers.

I checked it out at some length yesterday, and man, it's awesome. For starters, he's got all the game aids he's done, and they're all organized, and you can sort by genre or just see all 200 or so and find the one you need alphabetically. So that freaking awesome.

Plus he's got kind of a blog thing, only it's sort of below the fold so you might miss it. But Universal Head is a bad-ass writer with a serious gift for the written word, so make sure you scroll down so you can see it (and then tell him he ought to rearrange those parts so they're easier to find). The articles are really good, and he's got a sort of Kickstarter roundup - an idea I am pretty sure I'm going to steal.

Anyway, enough jibber jabber. Run over and check it out. Universal Head is wicked awesome, his site is full of cool stuff, and he probably writes better than I do, without having to resort to jokes about oral sex. He's right here:

http://www.orderofgamers.com/

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