Board Game Review - Spin Monkeys

When I started Drake's Flames, Rio Grande used to send me a lot of games. Then they stopped, mostly because I was rather disparaging of one of their games. Then, several years later, I asked them for a particular game and they sent me three other games instead. This was my chance to make good, to get back in with one of the biggest game companies in the world so I could get free games from them again!

Well, so much for that. I got three games from Rio Grande, and all of them suck. Someone probably thinks some of these are OK, but not me. Because, as I may have just said, I think they suck. I don't think I'll probably even bother to ask for more games. It's reasonably safe to assume that I am burning that bridge once and for all.

Of the three games I recently got, Cavemen was the best of the batch, and it just had some major balance flaws and some questionable art. But the second one, the one I'm about to review, is really stupid. It's called Spin Monkeys, and instead of being a cutthroat game about managing public relations for out-of-control rockstars and politicians who are cheating on their wives, it's about actual monkeys. Which is doubly sad, because on top of being disappointed that the theme is dumb, now I totally want to play that game about the PR guys.

But alas, I'm stuck with the game that actually exists. In Spin Monkeys, you're each playing a monkey who has come out of the jungle and invaded the carnival. The bumper cars are all set up, and to sweeten the deal, someone has put fruit all over the floor. So naturally, you (being the monkeys) jump into your bumper cars and drive hell-bent for leather to pick up as much fruit as you can. Because that happens.

You play Spin Monkeys by choosing cards that tell you which direction you will head on your turn. If you want to play a sharp left, you play the 90 degree card. Or go the other way with the 270 degree card. Or don't bother planning at all, because someone is going to run into you anyway and you're going to get sent spinning in a random direction and it won't really matter what you played.

Once you get moving, you get to pick up every piece of fruit you can drive over, and then eat it real fast. You can tell that you are eating the fruit because if you grab a banana, you leave the peel behind. That would only happen if you are eating the banana, not just collecting it. This is important for two reasons. First, it's important because if you hit a banana peel, you go spinning in a random direction. Second, it's important because other monkeys can steal your fruit.

If you're squeamish, you may want to stop reading now. Because what I figured out was that if the fruit is being consumed, and if other monkeys can steal your fruit, then what they are actually swiping from you is fruit you have already eaten. Which means they are stealing your poop. It also means you have a wildly accelerated metabolism, because you're able to pass a banana in less time than it takes to say, 'pass a banana.' These are incontinent monkeys, and so what they steal from each other is even more unappealing.

I grant you that you do not have to sign off on the poop-eating monkeys to play Spin Monkeys. It is, in my opinion, the only explanation that makes sense, but you could just pretend the monkeys are peeling the bananas, throwing the peels and then stashing the fruit. I suppose that is also an option. But since I did not like Spin Monkeys, I am sticking with the excrement theory.

Scatological humor aside, Spin Monkeys is just a random act of chaos. Your decisions don't matter, because random elements will alter the outcome regardless of how well you plan ahead. You'll be hit by an opponent, spin out of control, then bounce into a banana peel and wind up stuck in a corner like that kid from Blair Witch. Planning is pointless. Strategy is essentially impossible.

Spin Monkeys is still better than Robo Rally, because you only have to plan one card at a time, but that's not high praise because I absolutely hate Robo Rally. On the other hand, Spin Monkeys doesn't force as much intellect. For one thing, you'll figure out early on that it's meaningless to try very hard, and you'll decide that you may as well smoke that bowl now, because you'll play just as well stoned.

If I were a fan of unbridled chaos in my board games, I might like Spin Monkeys. If I loved goofy themes and poop jokes… no, wait, I do love goofy themes and poop jokes. If Spin Monkeys made me think a little more and rewarded me for playing better, I would probably be a huge fan, primarily because of the goofy theme and poop jokes. Sadly, it's essentially purely randomized absurdity, and that's only fun when they do it on Jackass. Mostly because it's not happening to me.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Goofy theme and poop jokes

Cons:
Utter chaos
No good reason to plan ahead
Rather plain art

I can't imagine why you would want to buy this game, but in case you do, you can find a copy here:
http://www.coolstuffinc.com/p/183462

Read More

Card Game Review - The Valkyrie Incident

In 1984, on a secret military base in Gun Barrel City, Texas, a crack team of scientists stumbled across a psychotically insane death's-head hawkmoth. As part of a program to develop a super-soldier capable of killing hundreds of unmarried anime fans, they cross-bred the killer moth with a large group of swimsuit models (this group is known in the scientific community as a 'night club' of girls) and armed them with explosives and super-powered robots. These Valkyrie warriors refused to follow the protocols assigned to them, however, and rebelled against their male masters. They blew up the world governments and took over, creating a dystopic alternate future in which giant robots and attractive women rule the planet, but fight each other all the time.

Happily, Professor X was able to communicate to Wolverine through a time breach and they managed to fix the mistake, so in our timeline, everything is pretty much hunky-dory. But in the alternate future, those giant robots and their sexy dame owners are routinely trying to shoot each other full of holes. And it's so cool that John Clowdus made a game about it.

The Valkyrie Incident is a card game about this wildly cool alternate future. You'll do a little recruiting, trying to capture the best cards to fight your battles, and then you'll fight with the cards you've recruited. It's a combination of deckbuilding and area control, with a healthy dose of messing with your opponent. It's only for two players, and it plays in a hurry, so you can try it twice if you didn't like it the first time.

But you'll probably like it the first time. The Valkyrie Incident is pretty cool. The deckbuilding is clever, full of nifty combos that score you lots of cards, and the fighting part is a tricky exchange of blasting your opponents and grabbing up land. It's got enough depth to keep you coming back for more, just to see what combinations you can build. Play a card that lets you slap down a card and blow up another card? Sure. But how about killing off the last three cards of your enemy's deck, and then following it up with a card that lets both players draw - but only you get cards because you just screwed your opponent out of her whole deck? Yeah. That's awesome. And mean. And awesome.

One great element of The Valkyrie Incident is that you're not focusing on just one part of the game. You don't recruit just to win fights, and you don't hurry through the fighting to get to the deckbuilding. Both parts are a big deal, because in the end, you win by having the best bunch of cards. Winning fights is important, but so is recruiting the right sexy soldiers and giant robots.

The art in The Valkyrie Incident is outstanding. I know some people don't love John Ariosa's sketchy style, but I thought it brought this game to life. The robots were bad-ass, and the death's-head chicks were tough, and the explosions were nice and toasty. There's not a lot of smokin' side-boob or anything - the art is pretty tasteful, for being a game about hot women with guns - but everything still looked rambunctious and exciting.

Now, I do have a major complaint with The Valkyrie Incident, and you'll have to decide if this is a deal-breaker for you. This game is a new direction for Small Box Games, in that instead of a small box, you get no box at all. Or bag. Or, for that matter, rules. You have to download the rules and find your own storage, because when you buy The Valkyrie Incident, you literally get just the cards.

I know the box might seem superfluous to some, but I don't just have card boxes sitting around my house to store decks of loose cards. I suppose I should buy a deck box to hold these cards, but then I kind of think maybe the company that sold me the game should sell me a box to hold it. I'm all for cutting costs, but there's a point where this is just silly.

If you can get past the complete lack of any sort of storage for the cards, The Valkyrie Incident is an engaging and clever two-player game with lots of violence and head-to-head competition. The art is great and you can finish inside half an hour, so it's also perfect to play with your buddy before the other two guys show up for your poker night.

Summary

2 players

Pros:
Cool art
Great combination of deckbuilding and conflict
Lots of tricky combos and smart planning

Cons:
No box

You can get The Valkyrie Incident from Small Box Games. No word yet on whether they will be changing the name to 'No Box Games.'
http://www.smallboxgames.com/valkyrie.html

Read More

Board Game Review - Viticulture

Every now and then, when I read the rules for a game, I get a pretty good idea how the review is going to go. Like, when I read the rules for Viticulture, I was thinking, 'I am going to be talking about how charming and relaxing and family-friendly this game is.' I always play the game before I decide for sure, but I am usually pretty close.

In this case, though, I was wrong. I was thinking Viticulture, a game about making wine in Tuscany, was going to be light and cute and jovial. I guess I was looking at the subject matter more than the game itself. I mean, if you see a game about growing grapes to make a nice pinot in the hills of Central Italy, you're thinking it will probably be long on charm and short on tension, right? Not too competitive, just easy-going and mellow.

So, so wrong. Viticulture is wildly competitive. There's so much you can do to screw your opponents that winning can be a matter of stopping the other players from doing what they need to do. It's important to manage your own resources to get ahead; it's more important to deny your friends the chance to do the same.

What I thought was going to be a rose-colored sunset game of picking grapes and swishing wine in my mouth before spitting it into a bucket turned out to be pretty ruthless. It really comes down to the limited actions. In a two-player game, only one person can plant grapes in any given year. Same with harvesting grapes, or crushing them into wine, or selling wine to people who want to buy wine, or training a new worker for next year, or any of the many other things that you need to do to win this game.

And that makes Viticulture a very competitive game. Sometimes you'll harvest before you're ready because you need to make sure you can beat your friends to the opportunity. You might grab a spot when you don't need it just to keep an opponent from getting to it first. It's fun, if you're in the mood for some cutthroat strategy, but it's not the relaxing charm I thought it was going to be.

Which, to be honest, disappointed me. The art in Viticulture is so beautiful that it made me want to quit my day job and move to Italy to make wine. It can take a couple minutes to understand all your options, but a surface look at the game makes it seem like everyone will leave smiling and relaxed. The only way you'll all be smiling and relaxed after this game about making wine is if you each actually drink a whole bottle while you're playing. I wanted to drop into the theme of this game like falling slowly into a warm bath, but while there's a great, competitive game here, it just doesn't match the theme.

Sometimes, the rules don't even make sense with the theme. When you can't harvest your grapes because your friends beat you to it, it's hard to see how that works, thematically. I mean, you've got a worker ready to go pluck grapes all day, and he's looking forward to it because you've been telling him since July that he was going to pick grapes. And then he goes out to the field, and you have to send your foreman running after him, and the foreman goes, 'Stop! Ernesto! You can't pick those grapes!' And Ernesto says, 'Why not?' And the foreman explains, 'Because two other vineyards a long ways from here already picked their grapes.' And then Ernesto says, 'Eff this. I'm moving to Napa Valley. You people are idiots.'

The thing about Viticulture is that it's a very fun game. It doesn't really do anything Agricola didn't pretty much cover, but it's a tense, competitive game, even if you can't send ninjas to the other vineyards to burn down their tasting rooms. The problem is that it doesn't look like it should be tense and competitive, it looks like it should be relaxing and charming, and the theme doesn't go with the mechanics. The theme is great. The game is great. But the theme goes with the game like peanut butter and ranch dressing. Both are awesome, but they're not exactly a perfect match.

Still, though, there's a lot to love about Viticulture. It's strategic and relentless and fun, with great art and beautiful design. There are wooden counters for everything, custom cut to be trellises and wine cellars and bottles of cabernet sauvignon. Everything about the game oozes charm, and so I'm very excited to see the next game from this publisher, Euphoria. That game is on Kickstarter right now, and I'm hoping to land a review copy of that when it comes out, because if Viticulture is any indication, these cats know how to make games.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Great strategy and planning
Tense and competitive
Beautiful art and amazing production values
Very charming theme

Cons:
Mechanics don't seem to go very well with the theme

You can score a copy of Viticulture right here, and also see what a beautiful game it is:
http://www.stonemaiergames.com/buy/

And while you're at it, check out Euphoria. If it's half as good as it looks, it's going to be awesome.
EUPHORIC

Read More

Board Game Review - Panic on Wall Street

There are all kinds of board games. You've got your dexterity games, which generally mean you have to flick a piece of wood with your middle finger in an attempt to put out your brother's eye. You've got your abstract games, which are almost always made out of wood and have no theme at all and tend to only accommodate two people. You've got your card games that play like board games, and board games that play like card games, and strategy games and party games and train games and kids games and stupid games that you wish your mom would lose so you could play something else when you visit for Thanksgiving.

But until now, I had never played a yelling game. The Resistance has a tendency to create some yelling situations, but it's not technically about the yelling, it's more about the deceiving your friends, who then yell at you for lying to them. Panic on Wall Street, on the other hand, is all about yelling.

It's a pretty basic idea. You take a good-sized group and split it in half. Then you make half those people stock-brokers, and give them companies whose stock needs sold, and the other half are investors. The game has two winners, the best broker and the best investor. And there is a ton of yelling.

How you play is, you flip over a timer, and then you all start yelling. "I will sell this green for twenty!" you will yell. And "Yellow for thirty! Yellow for thirty! Yellow for thirty!" And "I'll give you fifteen for blue!" And "Shut up you slackwit asshats, I'm trying to watch television!" You won't be yelling the last one. That will come from anyone in the same building.

This yelling segment of the game is called the negotiation. There are other parts of the game, namely the parts where you try to get everyone to quiet down so you can figure out how much money they made, but the yelling part is the fun part. As long as you like yelling. If yelling very loudly and very often makes you uncomfortable, or if you like to relax and not get wound up trying to sell stock to your friends, you are unlikely to enjoy Panic on Wall Street. Me, I like yelling very loudly and very often, so I thought this was a hoot.

Once you finish the part of the game where you're not yelling, you will auction off more companies (this may involve some yelling) and then the next round begins. In the next round, just to mix it up and try for some variety, there will be a lot of yelling. Because it's basically the same thing again.

I did enjoy the vigorous and extremely noisy game of negotiation and yelling that we played. Unfortunately, I'm not likely to play it many more times. For one thing, you need a decent-sized crowd. There are rules for playing with three, but it wouldn't be the same game. To truly experience Panic on Wall Street, you need lots of people for maximum yelling. And it's rare for me to have eight other people willing to play a yelling game.

In fact, that's the second barrier that will stop me from playing Panic on Wall Street again - most of my gamer friends are not going to want to be involved in a yelling game. We usually get together, drink a few beers, crack wise, laugh, and play games that don't have overly complicated rules. The rules for Panic on Wall Street are easy, but it's very loud and not at all conducive to a relaxing evening. It's conducive to lots of high-energy yelling and possibly stress migraines.

 So will you like Panic on Wall Street? That depends. Do you know five or six other people who like to yell at each other? If so, you will like it. If you only like to play games with your wife over a glass of wine, you will absolutely not like Panic on Wall Street. Or pretty much any other yelling game, although I don't know of any other yelling games.

Summary

3-11 players

Pros:
Hilariously fun if you like yelling
High-energy negotiation and some smart money management
Neat pieces that make you feel like a stock-broker

Cons:
Boy, is there a lot of yelling
Only a good game with a whole bunch of people

Whew, this is a good price on this game. If your pile of games is missing a yelling game, and you need to fill in that hole, you can get it right here:
YELLING GAME

Read More

TV Review - Defiance

Usually, if I'm reviewing a TV show, it's because I loved it and I want other people to enjoy it. Tonight, unfortunately, that is not the case. Tonight's review is a caution sign, a warning. Tonight, I watch bad TV so you don't have to.

I probably should have known going in that Defiance was going to be lame. It looked like it had promise in the ads, but then again, if I had been watching, I probably would have noticed the cheesy costumes, or the video game tie-in, or the fact that they played that wretched Imagine Dragons song non-stop during the TV spots. But I didn't. I saw space aliens on television and I wanted to watch it.

Defiance tells the story of a world destroyed by intergalactic war. Or, more accurately, it tells how aliens came to Earth and wrecked the piss out of it, then when they moved in, they broke everything and then somehow lost the ability to move back out again. So it's essentially post-apocalypse with aliens.

But these are not very alien aliens. They have taken a page out of Star Trek's book and made all the aliens just basically people with bad make-up. These aliens are so similar that they can get all Barry-White-Get-It-On with each other and with humans. Although so far, it looks like the only species interested in scoring a little extra-planar booty is the human race. The white-haired albinos don't seem interested in getting jiggy with the forehead-bone people. Humans, being a randy lot, will pretty much hook up with any of them.

Let's say you decide there's a good reason there are eight alien races on the same planet and they are all so similar as to be sexually compatible. Maybe you just give the uncreative assholes who made the show a pass and go on to see if there are exciting alien stories to be had. And then you will find out that no, there are no good stories, just mile after mile of blatant plot holes and logical inconsistencies.

Good sci-fi shows (as opposed to good SyFy shows, which would seem to be an oxymoron) often have lots of mysteries that unravel as you watch. Defiance tries to have a good mystery, but sadly, the mystery is so lame that I don't care. The mystery might be capable of saving the show if the show itself weren't so horrible. Or if there were enough good actors for it to be worth saving.

There are actually a few decent actors on Defiance. That chick who is in Warehouse 13 as HG Wells, and in the second season of Spartacus as a woman who has a lot of sex, is on this show. Unfortunately, her makeup is so unsettlingly bad that despite her being frequently close to nude, it's tough to watch her. So when the scene flips over to the lead character, you'll be grateful for the respite, especially because this actor is cool enough that if they had made him the mercenary bad-ass on Revolution instead of whatever daytime soap opera star they have in the job now, I might have actually believed that he had, at one time, killed a bunch of people.

Sadly, there are also the bad actors, and they're hard to avoid. Acting while wearing five pounds of rubber prosthetics on your face must be hard, because the sidekick girl seems to be incapable of facial expression. The albino husband is such a bad actor that he almost makes the guy who plays the son seem acceptable. He is not, by the way. The albino son is the worst actor on the show, and this is a show with a lot of bad actors, so that means he is a very bad actor.

But this is SyFy, so bad acting and cheap makeup is just about what we expect. We can overlook those factors if we can find something cool about the show. Cool tech, spaceship battles, exciting alien throwdowns, or plausible plot lines - any of those would make this a watchable show. If it had them. It does not.

I did give Defiance a decent shot. I watched the first four episodes. Now that I am writing this review, I can gladly go about not watching any more, and go back to trying to figure out how to get caught up on Falling Skies, which my wife insists got a lot better after the pilot, though I have a hard time believing that because the pilot was so dreadfully dull.

I just want someone to make something as good as Firefly, but until sci-fi writers realize that great characters make the show, not face putty and computer-generated spaceships, I guess I'll just have to watch Star Wars again on Blu-Ray.

Read More

Card Game Review - Cavemen: The Quest for Fire

One of two things has recently occurred. One, Rio Grande Games forgot who I was. That, or they have forgiven me for my trespasses. Either way, they recently decided to up and send me some review copies. Only instead of sending me the game I was hoping to review, they sent games that haven't really grabbed the attention of the gaming populace at large. The theory being, I suppose, that a little more press would help push a few more of these games off the shelf.

Cavemen: The Quest for Fire was the first one I've played. And I hate to say it, but I think I can see why it hasn't been the surprise hit of 2013. It's not a bad game, precisely, but it's also not one I'm itching to play again. Plus the art looks like a junior-high kid made it out of Playdoh.

The object of Cavemen is to be the first player to invent fire. If you are, the game ends immediately, which I suppose means that technically, you would be the only player to invent fire, not the first, as 'first' suggests that there might be a second. And there's not, because the game is over after the first one. So I'm screwing this up already.

In order to invent fire, you have to improve the size of your gang of pipe-hitting cave-dwelling gangsters. Some of them will hunt for you, some will scout. Some will find food. Others will just do lots of thinking - and the thinkers are the ones you need to win, so they probably ought to get a raise.

The problem is, getting a bigger tribe is tricky. You need to feed them all, which means you have to either waste time running around after nuts and berries or you have to hunt dinosaurs. Yes, you hunt dinosaurs. Because whoever made this game was evidently one of those nutty goofballs who thinks the world is 1500 years old and cavemen had dinosaurs for pets. I like to call those people Flinststones paleontologists. Maybe they just wish they could have had a dopey pet dinosaur who thought he was a dog. Whatever, it's ridiculous, because dinosaurs were all dead way before cavemen came along, but we can overlook it because this is a card game, not a scientific debate.

So you'll hunt dinosaurs to harvest food and teeth, and you'll bid teeth against the other tribes to grab the conch shell, and then you'll be the only one allowed to talk at the beach meetings until Piggy gets chased across the island and beaten to death before the crazy kids set the trees on fire. Wait, no, wrong conch.

Oh, right, you'll bid teeth to grab the conch and get first pick of the cards that come up. You'll have first access to the best dinosaurs, the smartest cavemen, and the most thrilling inventions. Not only that, but you'll be able to go twice when everyone else only goes once, so having the conch is really pretty awesome. In fact, it's so good to have the conch that this is my first complaint about this Cavemen game (outside the cavemen hunting dinosaurs thing, and that's mostly just my personal pet peeve about people who let their religion replace their common sense).

 See, it's so important to have the conch that it will almost always go to the guy who can bid the most teeth. And then that person will have the pick of the cards that come up, and he will probably decide to do whatever gets him the most teeth so that he can have the conch next turn. And then he'll still get another turn, so using his turn to make sure he gets first choice next turn is actually a good tactical decision. And that means that you stand a very real chance of having one person control the entire game while everyone else just throws up their hands and is bored. And that is one hell of a complaint.

But that's only my first complaint. The second complaint is that there are too many cavemen. Sure, it's a game about cavemen, and so there should be a lot of them, but there should also be enough caves and dinosaurs and inventions and stuff. If you can grab all the caves and keep the other players from getting their hands on them - which you can do if you can control the conch the whole game - you can effectively remove any chance at all that they might have to build a bigger tribe. Once again, one guy runs the game and everyone else sits there irritated.

The problem is, and the thing that really made me upset about the horrible balance issues in this game, is that the basics of this game are a good idea. The implementation is horribly flawed, to the point that I hope to never play Cavemen again, but the idea here is brilliant. Honestly, I think that if you just have the conch pass to the left every time, with no bidding anywhere, you would have a pretty decent game. But I don't know because I'm not testing it because right now I'm kind of irritated. Plus there's that Flintstones thing and the Super Sculpey art.

OK, that's it. That's all my complaints. I actually think Cavemen is a pretty cool game, but it has a couple things in it that just plain ruin it for me. The conch bidding and the unbalanced card counts make this cool little game into a mistake, but if you really want to play this one, just house-rule it a little and you might end up liking it.

Not me, though. I'm not playing this again. Which probably means I'm not getting any more games from Rio Grande.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:
Neat concepts - shared resource pool, tribe management
Fun core game

Cons:
Conch bidding lets one player run the whole game
Card imbalances can ruin the game completely
Art is just plain not very good

Bad news: Cavemen is kind of broken. Good news: It's very affordable.
GET IT CHEAP

Read More

Excellent Idea Review - Fantasy Gaming Figures

Last weekend, I wrote about Galaxy Defenders, and explained that I will only review your Kickstarter game if I am really impressed. And then, to prove that I am a lying bag of koala poop, I went on to review nothing but Kickstarter stuff all week long (though to be fair, the DrunkQuest game is actually a game, which you can buy now, and I just referred to the Kickstarter expansion).

This is relevant because tonight I am reviewing yet another Kickstarter thing, but this time, my money is where my mouth is. Before I wrote this review, I went and backed this Kickstarter, because I really want the figures they're selling. Plus they're cheap! Mine were like half a buck each!

In all fairness, they're cheap because they're laser-cut out of wood. These are fantasy gaming figures (tough to call them miniatures when they are more like silhouettes that stand up). Only they are cut out of wood like the little wooden men you find in every boring game that German people ever made about farming.

These flat wooden dungeon meeples elevate wooden game pieces to an art form. These puppies are awesome. I conned the guy who makes these figures into sending me a bunch from a game he already did, and I love 'em. I only got a dozen, and I really wish he had sent me many, many more, but at the same time, I did just buy like 150 figures, and I got them stupid cheap. So I'm probably set either way.

Here's how this works. The base set of wooden fantasy figures comes with 30 different figures, all painted in different colors so they're easy to tell apart on the table. There's a knight and a wizard, a thief and an archer, plus a few other heroes, plus some we'll get if enough of you agree that these things are great and go promise to give this dude some money. You also get scads of monsters - spider, rat, goblin, orc, troll, skeleton, and a whole bunch of others. But just one of each, so if you need a horde of kobolds, you will need to buy a metric buttload.

"But!" you cry, "I don't need six knights just so I can have six kobolds!" And no, you don't! That's the beauty! For 20 bucks more, you can just get a monster pack that has three each of the monsters you're likely to need more than once. Three zombies, three kobolds, three spiders, three rats - you get the idea. Need more than that? Buy more than one set!

Oh, and there's a dragon. No, strike that, there are TWO dragons. And if you get the figures from Dungeon Heroes (the ones I have) you will have three dragons! I think you would have to agree, that's pretty cool. Even if you don't ever need a dragon, they're like handguns - better to have one and not need it that need one and not have it. Except that I don't have a handgun, so I just have to stick with giant reptiles.

So we've gotten this far and you're reading along at home (or, more likely, from your desk at work) and you're saying, 'But Matt! I want regular old miniatures with sculpted faces and tiny brittle swords and for some reason all the girls are half-naked when they're supposed to kill things for a living!" And this brings me to a great excuse for me to explain exactly why you definitely need to buy these fantastic wooden figures. I present my reason with a sample scenario.

You are the DM. Your friends have just entered the lair of the goblin king, and you have thrown down a great map that you painstakingly built in Photoshop knowing full well you would use it for ten minutes and then throw it away. The heroes have lovingly painted miniatures, except for the one stoner who never bothered to buy a good figure, so his paladin is represented by a miniature depicting a disproportionately well-endowed woman in a bikini. And she is all gray, because he does not paint.

YOU: "Before you is the lair of the goblin king! He leaps up and directs his goblin minions to attack, then releases his pet mustard jellies as his shaman summons a small horde of giant wasps!"

GARY: "I cast silence on the shaman!"

YOU: "Oh, sorry, that's the warg rider. The roll of pennies is the shaman."

RALPH: "I throw a bottle of flaming oil at the mustard jellies!"

YOU: "Wait, no, those are goblins. This poker chip is one mustard jelly, and the river troll mini is the other one."

BETTY: "I scream a battle cry and charge the river troll!"

YOU: "No, there's no river troll. I just don't have a miniature for the jelly."

BETTY: "So what is the braineater with the squid head doing here?"

YOU: "He's a goblin."

BETTY: "And the salt shaker?"

YOU: "Sorry, that's leftover from breakfast. I had eggs."

See how confusing that is? It sucks. Why bother having miniatures at all if you have to substitute all the time? You could use paper standups, except then there is always at least one person at the table looking at the pieces from the side and he can't tell what any of them are supposed to be. Or you could try to buy enough figures that you've got enough for every situation - and that will cost you two thousand dollars and you will spend the rest of 2013 and most of 2014 painting them so that the table is not full of gray metal, except that you want to play before you're done so you wind up with big battles involving three painted figures and ten ugly gray lumps.

These wooden figures are colorful. They are expressive. They are FUN. That's actually the most important thing - they're fun. And you can substitute at will, because they already assume a level of imagination. You won't get people asking you if that orc is really carrying a crossbow just because you ran out of orcs holding spears. You won't have to put a saber-toothed tiger on the table and tell your friends it's a dire wolf. People will ask for descriptions, and have to use their imaginations to improve the scene in front of them, and yet it will still look like a battle and it will still be fun. And since you don't have to use a dildo as a purple worm any more, the table will look consistent.

Now, I want you all to head over and pledge to buy some of these fantastic miniatures, and there are two reasons for that. First, I want this to succeed, because I think it's a great idea. And second, I have a stake in this now. If we can hit some of the stretch goals, I can get even more figures! And by God I want them!

Get over here and throw your money at this guy:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/coe/fantasy-gaming-figures

Read More