Card Game Review - Agoniste

There are lots of days I wish I could borrow pieces from other people. I don't want to completely be someone else - I'm pretty happy with my own life - but how cool would it be to have a body like that werewolf kid from those Twilight movies? Or a face like George Clooney. Or money like Bill Gates. I don't want to be Donald Trump, you understand, I just want to be able to make a phone call and destroy a local economy.

Today, though, I want to have the convoluted mind of John Clowdus. I don't know how he comes up with the games he creates, but I want to be able to do that, just for a couple hours. I would whip out some genius masterpiece, and then he could have his brain back. But since I don't think I can take manage my Calvin-and-Hobbes-style mind meld machine, I'll have to settle for playing his wacky games.

Agoniste is a good example of a game where you go, 'how the hell did you think of that?' It's about a bunch of Greek people fighting for various locations in Greece. Of course, anyone who has seen 300 knows that Sparta would win by default - they would just walk up to the other Greeks and yell, 'This is SPARTA!!' and then kick them into wells. But in this game, you don't get to win just because you're the meanest motor scooters in the known world. No, in this game, you have to play Blackjack.

See, every round, a new location card will tell you where you're fighting, and then you'll all muster armies to grab that region. One guy is the defender, and he lays down a couple cards, and the other guys attack by building armies. You'll each try to get the best army you can by playing numbered cards, but if you accidentally get more than eight points of troops, your supply train breaks down and the troops all go home, leaving you to have a huge fire sale on bronze letter openers. So you try to get as close to eight as you can without going over, and you try to beat everyone else for that piece of property.

There are lots of wrinkles that make this a pretty damned interesting game - interesting enough that we played several games in a row, when we usually call it quits after one game and move onto whatever other crap I have to play that week. Like you don't get to shuffle your discard back into your deck automatically, so if you want your cards back, you may have to pass on a fight. Or how, when you win one territory, you can use it to invade another territory, and steal cards from other players. Or the coolest twist in the game - the gods.

The god cards all have a default value of one, but you can use them for their god power instead, if you want. You might double your army strength (good if you're at four, bad if you're at five). You could shuffle all your cards together without having to pass your turn. You might just have an automatic eight, which is an instant win every time. Other cool powers can be accessed through the god cards, and these cards will let you manipulate your deck and win more fights, if you use them right. They will not let you see Xena the warrior princess naked, but if you watch that new Spartacus show, you can get all the naked Xena you ever wanted, anyway, so it's OK there's no god card for that.

One neat design consideration is that you get a pretty small number of cards, so if you're adept at counting cards, you can keep track of what other players might pull, or even get a feel for what you'll find next. This one decision means that you can have a fully functional card game with a minimal number of cards, and it's pretty darn clever in the implementation. You don't even have to be Rain Man, which is handy because you probably didn't want to shop at K-Mart anyway.

Now, as much as I love playing Agoniste, there are a few issues. For starters, the rules are fairly typical of Small Box Games, which is to say that they are slightly convoluted and confusing, with a few things that should be mentioned but are not. It will take you a few times through the rulebook to understand what you're doing, and then the first time a defender leads with an Ares, you'll wonder if that means he won, or if he's just screwed, and go to the rules, just to find out that it's not in there. That can be frustrating.

The second problem is the art. Clowdus is a good designer, but he could pick up some tips on the art. The drawings all look like badly Photoshopped clip art, and while that doesn't really impact game play, it does make you grimace a little when you look at the picture of Athena and realize there's no way you want to see that chick naked. The maps are smudged and the hoplites look like plastic action figures that got left in the oven. It's not horrible, but it's not awesome.

But you gotta cut some slack. Well, I do, anyway. Small Box Games is making these games on a miniscule budget, and if he had to put big-box graphics on everything, he could never afford to turn out so many brilliant games. While it would be nice if he could afford to have every card professionally illustrated, it's not even remotely reasonable to think that he could break out all these games and still pay for art. So I shrug, and accept the good with the bad, because in this case, the bad is barely irritating, and the good is just about awesome. It's the closest I'm going to come to hijacking John's brainpower for an afternoon.

Summary

Pros:
Surprising amount of depth in a game that is basically Greek blackjack
Cool follow-on actions let you plan and exploit weakness

Cons:
Rules are a little muddy
Art is just not good

It can be tricky to get your hands on a Small Box game, because they tend to sell out, real fast. Run over and preorder this one now, while you have the chance:
http://www.smallboxgames.com/agoniste.html

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Card Game Review - En Garde

Reviewing games is kind of a mixed bag. I get a lot of games, but I don't always want them. I would love to only get the games I want, but it doesn't work that way. I'll get Arkham Horror one week, and the next week I'll get a box full of Reiner Knizia games.

To be fair, I do like some Reiner Knizia games. I love Blue Moon, for example. But so often, a Reiner game is just boring math wrapped around a stupid theme and packaged with two rules and some winning conditions. When I opened En Garde and saw the little metal fencers, I was somewhat optimistic. When I read the rules, I was less enthused.

Since this is a game about two people trying to stab each other, it's no surprise that only two people can play it. Each player gets a metal figure that they put at each end of a numbered board, and then they play numbered cards to move closer to each other. If you play a card that puts you right on top of the other guy's metal dude, you stab him. When you manage to stab the other guy five times, you win.

And yes, it really is as lame as it sounds.

That's the basic game, though, and if you play it once, you'll wonder why it was included at all. There's absolutely nothing interesting about the basic rules. The pieces are nice, and the card art is pretty darn cool, but you might as well just throw cards on the table at random. It's boring. Happily, there are two more sets of rules - standard and advanced.

Standard rules add the ability to parry, which adds a little hand management to the game. It's still not enough to be fun, though, and you're definitely not going to want to play to five points. You could end up doing the same thing ten times, and that's going to get old in a hurry. So the standard rules are still boring, even though they are not as boring as the basic rules.

Finally, the advanced rules add charging attacks, ripostes, strategic retreats and other stuff that finally makes this a game, and not just half an hour you'll wish you could get back. Now you have to do more than just manage your hand and do math in your head. Now you have to time your attacks, pace your advance, and continue to do math in your head.

When you play with the advanced rules, with the charging and retreating and parrying and riposting, En Garde is a pretty fun little game. You'll discover strategies, plan your moves, position for defense and bluff for attacks. You'll try to draw your foe into a charge that leaves him open, and you'll try to maintain the distance you need to prevent swift hits you can't block. And then, right when the match gets really good, you run out of cards and have to reset.

This happens way too often. There are only 25 cards, and you waste a bunch of them just getting close enough to fight, and then by the time you're really hip-deep in strategic positioning, the round ends and everyone goes back to their starting positions. It's a little like when you're getting busy with your woman, and you make it all the way to third base, and then the phone rings and you have to go bail your cousin out of jail again. Just when it gets good, you have to drop everything and start over. Sure, there are some hokey-pokey endgame rules where you see who had more cards, but I don't want to win because I had more cards, I want to win because I stabbed you in the kidney.

I think the best way to play En Garde is to buy two sets and give each player a set of cards. Now play until someone loses an eye. If you run out of cards with these rules, it's because you're both sissies who are too scared to do violence, and then you can play with the 'both players are sissies' end rules. If you don't want to buy two sets, I suppose you could reshuffle when you run out of cards, but then it would be harder to count cards, which is an important element of winning this game.

Right out of the box, En Garde has a bunch of promise, but not enough cards to really play the game properly. I'm sure someone who loves this game would say that I'm doing it wrong because I want the round to end in a brutal stabbing, but frankly, I don't care. If I play a swordfighting game, I want there to be some bloodshed. Trust Reiner to make a game about sword duels that you can win without cutting anyone. But it is a pretty cool game, and the maneuvering part is fairly well done. The pieces are really cool, and the art is neat. If they had just put a few more cards in the box, it would feel like a fun sword game, and not a bad case of coitus interruptus.

Summary

Pros:
Cool card game that actually feels a little like fencing
Advanced rules offer a good amount of tactical maneuvering and short-term strategy
Neat art, great cards, and cool figures

Cons:
Not enough cards - too often, feels like it stops just as it's getting good

Dogstar Games isn't carrying En Garde right now, but you can run over and get it from the nice folks at Eagle Games. You just might want to get two, and put the cards together to make a whole game.
http://www.eaglegames.net/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=GRY00232

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Big Announcement - Drake's Tales

I've decided to try something new. I had an idea based on a few different factors.

Factor 1: I like writing stuff. I may not be the next Steinbeck, but I do enjoy working in the English language. And frankly, writing game reviews all the time can get stale after a while, and I want to write different stuff.

Factor 2: For many people, writing is not a strength. Many people struggle to put together an email that doesn't sound like it was originally drafted in Portuguese and translated by a pirate. They're probably good at a lot of things at which I would fail completely, but they still can't communicate in writing.

Factor 3: Almost everyone has at least one really good story. Even if you grew up in a boring town with boring parents and went to a boring school, you probably had at least one interesting thing happen to you in your life. Whether you escaped drug dealers in Mexico City or made out with the head cheerleader in tenth grade, something interesting must have happened to you at least once in your otherwise grayscale life.

You can probably see where this is headed - I want to tell your stories. I'm starting a new blog called Drake's Tales, where I'll be writing one story a week. They'll all be true... mostly. For one thing, all the stories will be feature either John or Judy. Even if your name is Drewbert, I'll be changing it to John for the purposes of telling your story (which would be a shame, really, because Drewbert is a hilarious name). I'll even be telling some stories from my own life, if I run out of interesting stories from other people, but you won't really know if they're mine because they'll be about John.

Also, I'm taking all kinds of creative license. I'll do my best to keep your story as true as I can, but if I need random details, I'm adding them. I may describe the shocked look on your mom's face when you came in the house with your pants on backward, but that's just because you forgot to mention that your mother was upstairs with the postman at the time. I won't change the details you tell me, but I'll embellish at will.

One thing that's exceedingly important - if your story includes illegal crap that could still get you arrested, do yourself a favor and don't tell me about it. As much as I would love to tell the hilarious story of that one time when you cut up a body and lost the left arm in a gas station unisex bathroom, the first time some police officer asks me for details, I'll sell you directly down the river. I'm no priest, doctor or lawyer, and I'm not going to do time just because you weren't smart enough not to tell me about the night that got your face on America's Most Wanted.

And finally, there's the legal garbage. If you email me your story and I write it up, you can't sue me for royalties. You're granting me permission to relay that story to anyone who might read it, even if I manage to make a couple bucks at it one day. I'm not sending you a check for your titillating tale of college hijinks, even if you managed to put a VW Bus on top of the Empire State Building. Newspapers and magazines might pay their sources, but I'm not a newspaper, I'm a dork with an email address.

So if you want to let me tell your story, send me an email. Your story doesn't have to be funny - it could be frightening, exciting, or sad. It could be a silly tale about your first kiss, or it could be about the time you raced ostriches in Kenya while being chased by smugglers on jet skis. Give me as much or as little as you want, and I'll spin you a yarn. My email address for this project is:

drakestales@gmail.com

And you can already read the first tale at drakestales.blogspot.com. I'll put up a story a week, even if I have to write about my vasectomy surgery.

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Board Game Review - Robosoccer

It's been my slightly unpleasant experience that small-press publishers tend to make ugly games. This is not always true, but it seems to me that most of the do-it-yourself game creators want to publish their games without debt or investors, and this usually means they get a little skinflint with components, printing, and art.

Happily, Nestorgames gets it right. They could have made cheap boards with crappy pieces and ugly art, but instead, they have come up with a brilliant way to make durable, portable games with easy rules and great pieces. Boards are printed on mouse pads, playing pieces are laser cut acrylic, and the games come in round canvas zipper bags. Roll the durable pieces up inside the smushable board (I just invented smushable, and will be applying for a trademark on the term) and cram it all into the bag, and when you zip it up, it looks like a burrito. A logo printed on the end of the bag tells you what game is inside, so if you have a bunch of Nestorgames you can stack them up and spot just the one you want.

I must confess that I have not played all of their games. To be precise, I have only played Robosoccer. But I have spent some time at the Nestorgames website, and I've looked at all the games they have listed at BGG, and this mouse pad/canvas bag thing seems to be their standard format. Now that I have played the game, I can tell you that the format works great. The board can be rolled and crumpled, and still lay flat on the table when you're ready to play. The pieces are all kinds of sturdy, so you can knock them together a little inside the package and pull them out ready to play. Basically, this is a fun concept that will let you shove a game into a backpack and play wherever you wind up having to kill half an hour.

The game itself is pretty nifty, too. Thematically, it's about a couple teams of plastic robots trying to get a plastic ball to the other side's starting line. But in practice, it's essentially an abstract game with more in common with chess than Blood Bowl. Big robots can push smaller robots, small robots hop over bigger robots, and directional arrows on the board make a quick trip across the board an impossible task.

It doesn't seem like this game should take long, but a few very interesting elements make it incredibly strategic. You move the ball by passing it, which really means you trade places with your robot and the ball, as long as nobody is between the two. You can move one robot a turn around a six-by-six grid, but lots of the squares have arrows that prevent movement in specific directions. Walls block robot movement, but you can boot your ball right over them. With three different sizes of robot (in three very cool sculpts), you have to figure out when to block with a big bruiser and when to hop with a little cruiser.

Each side only has six total robots, so it's not like this is going to get too confusing. The rules are pretty basic. What's not basic is the maneuvering and planning and strategy you'll have to master to get really good at Robosoccer. On top of being incredibly inventive with components, this Nestor guy appears to be pretty darn good at designing games. Robosoccer isn't as deep as chess, but it's no limp-wristed wannabe abstract. It's a serious game that can be enjoyed nearly anywhere - and that makes it a pretty smart buy, if you ask me.

In fact, I can think of several really great reasons to buy this game. It's a perfect road trip game that you can set up in a truck stop while you wolf down a short stack of blueberry pancakes and a cup of hot coffee. It's a great stocking stuffer, because the whole game really does fit inside a sock. It's really easy to store, so you could buy it just to add it to your collection of fun two-player games. You could even stuff it down the front of your pants and make it look like you've got an armadillo in your trousers (imagine her surprise when she finds out you had a game in your underwear!).

If you like abstract games, or know someone who does, you should seriously consider picking up Robosoccer. It's fun, portable, and attractive. Unfortunately, right now it can be tough to get unless you're in Europe, because Nestorgames is in Spain and doesn't have any US distribution (at least, not that I can find - it's entirely possible that he has paid unwed mothers ungodly amounts of money to swallow the games and fly them into the country illegally). But seriously, companies this small should be supported directly, by ordering right from their site. Hopefully shipping won't cost more than the game.

Summary

Pros:
Nifty, fun components add a lot to the game
Easy rules with smart game play
Super portable

Cons:
Just for two players
Very abstract (which might be a pro, if you like abstracts)
Only available direct from Nestorgames... which is in Spain

You can peruse all the offerings from Nestorgames right here:
http://www.nestorgames.com/

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Board Game Review - Catacombs

I like dungeon crawl games. I also like flicking games (you know, where you flick a little wood disc with your finger in an attempt to put out an opponent's eye, or lose the piece under the refrigerator). The question before me tonight, however, is whether you can mix flicking with crawling and make a fun game. I contend that if you do it properly, you wind up with Catacombs, which is, in fact, a fun game.

If you had asked me to create a dungeon crawl game where you flicked things, I probably would have butchered it. I would have added a silly number of extra rules, unnecessary components, and possibly some cheap, ugly art. Catacombs brilliantly sidesteps the extra rules and unneeded pieces, though they seem to have adopted the ugly art, maybe to make me feel better about myself.

Four heroes romp through a dungeon constructed of a series of rooms. Each room is listed on a different card, and corresponds to one of six large dungeon boards with holes in it. The holes get filled by obstacles like pillars, rock formations, or tables, though all obstacles are actually represented by gray wooden discs (which I suppose means the obstacles could be discarded tires or unruly grade-schoolers). The heroes and monsters are wooden discs as well, and you all take turns shooting them at each other (that should be clarified - ideally, you shoot the monster discs at the hero discs, or vice verse, and not at the other players). Hit a hero with a monster, and you cause some pain. Hit most monsters with a hero, and the monster is trashed.

So far, this is a pretty simple game. What makes it work really well is that considerable thought was put into two important factors. For starters, the components are all very nice - linen stock cards, a beautiful varnish on the boards, and nice, clean discs. The game looks really swanky, as long as you're looking at physical quality and not art. The discs slide easily across the room boards, ricochet perfectly off the obstacles, and knock each other right through the non-existent walls (frankly, walls might have been nice - it would have been awesome to bank an arrow off the wall).

The game also works pretty well because the designers put a good amount of effort into creating a reasonably balanced game. I suck at flicking games (I like 'em, I just can't play 'em), so when I was the bad guy, I got my tail kicked, though I did manage to exterminate one of the heroes before my dragon took a painful boot to the face. Had I been more competent with the flicking, I might even have managed to kill a couple more, and then it would have been a far more interesting contest. Not that it was boring at all - it was like playing a live-action miniatures game, as long as all the action is provided by hitting things with your fingers, and the miniatures are round pieces of wood.

This is not a massive brain-dump of a thinking man's game. It's fun, light, and fast-paced. You flick your discs, count your dead, and do it again. It sets up fast, plays fast, and can easily be enjoyed while sampling your favorite adult beverage. A group of intelligent game nerds can knock this one out in less than hour - maybe a lot less, if everyone is paying attention and not mocking the drawing of the troll. You won't find yourself paralyzed by a staggering array of choices, but there are still a few decisions to make, like when to play the wizard's spells and how to arrange it so that the thief gets to steal more money. It's basically an easy-going opposed cooperative game, so the only ruthlessness will be from one of two sources. Either the bad guy player will do some underhanded shenanigans to try to kill you (which kind of comes with the territory on games like this), or one of the other players should be immediately expelled from your circle of friends and possibly shunned any time you are in public.

So far, Catacombs is just a fun game. The creators spent a whole lot of money on components, and healthy amounts of testing on the rules, but must have run out of budget when it came time for art. One room looks like crinkled green aluminum foil, and the fire room looks like an old lady's varicose veins. All the art is amateur-hour pencil work - no color anywhere. The graphic design and illustration got the very short end of the budget stick, and it hurt this game pretty badly. The art doesn't cause it to totally suck, but it's definitely less fun than it could have been, just because it could have looked a hell of a lot better. You can tell me art doesn't affect game play, but I'll tell you there's a damned good reason I'm spending hour after hour painting my Warhammer Quest figures. When the game looks cool, it's more fun.

Happily, Catacombs is a fun enough game that you can get past the lowest-bidder visual problems and just enjoy shooting wood discs at your friends. The boards are big enough to accommodate some pretty big battles, and the variety of monsters you can meet means that the game should be playable for a good long time before you find yourself wishing for more stuff to kill. For any long-term replay factor, this game is going to need some expansions pretty soon. Hopefully it will sell really well, and they can afford to do a reprint - only this time, they might actually pay a competent artist to make some swanky cool art that could replace the pencil drawings and ninth-grade Photoshop textures.

In fact, I hope this does sell really well. I would definitely buy a graphically-enhanced reprint, and I would collect expansions like they came with blowjobs. There's a whole lot of fun factor in Catacombs, and it's really nice to see a small-press company spend the money needed to make a game that won't fall apart after you play it twice. If you like dungeon crawlers and flicky games, you'll almost certainly enjoy Catacombs.

Summary

Pros:
Easy rules let you jump right in and start shooting things at each other
High-quality components
Dungeon crawls and dexterity games work great together - who knew?

Cons:
Unfortunate art decisions make this a rather ugly game

This game is fun, and I really hope it does great. It's not actually out yet, but you can follow it and check for updates here:
http://www.sandsoftimegames.com/

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Board Game Review - Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype

I should have a warning label or something. I would think that the title page alone - 'crassly opinionated game reviews' - would be a pretty decent hint that I'm not always a very nice guy, but it seems many people ignore that completely. But just to be perfectly clear, to put any budding game designers out there on notice:

The surgeon general has determined that letting me review your crappy game can be bad for sales, not to mention what it will do to your ego.

Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype is a good example of a game where the designer would have done well to read that warning label. Alas, he was inattentive, and apparently never read reviews of stuff I didn't like. Well, Uncle Chestnut, you probably should have done a little more homework. Table Gype is rife with examples of things that make me walk away in a hurry.

For instance, the board is a napkin. I don't mean it's a board that has napkin art on it, I mean the game board itself is silk-screened onto a black cloth napkin. And this napkin does not want to lay flat, which makes the game slightly irritating to play. A napkin is what you use in a restaurant when you need to write something immediately and can't find a piece of paper. It is not a game board. I've seen nice cloth game boards, but those boards are actually cloth, not napkins. This game board looks like it was stolen from a neighborhood Mexican restaurant.

Also, if you do intend to include quotes around the outside of the board, do yourself a favor and hire a damned editor to check your work. Do not put sloppy mistakes right there on the board, especially when the only reason the quotes are there is to show that you have a fondness for GK Chesterton.

Another irritation point is that the game comes with 32 blank dice and about 200 stickers, and you have to peel all the stickers and put them on the dice. And since there are six different symbols, you also have to be really careful so that you don't end up putting two of the same thing on one die. Because then you will feel retarded, and worse, you will have spent an hour putting together your game just to decide that you would rather play Parcheesi.

And you know what? I don't give a flying hairless rat's ass about GK Chesterton. HG Wells has some stuff that would make great games. CS Lewis had awesome material that could be mined for a fun theme (I mention those two because they were writing at the same time, and they shared Chesterton's unfortunate luck of having two letters for a first name). But I have trouble imagining what makes a master of Catholic apologetics into theme fodder. I certainly have no desire to read a whole bunch of quotes, completely out of context, to explain why one side of every die is decorated with a human ear.

The final piece that makes this one of the worst-produced games I've ever seen is the box in which the entire bundle is contained. I'm sure the box was very affordable, but I still question the wisdom of using those flimsy plastic boxes that Save the Children uses to send you cheesy Christmas cards as a way to thank you for giving them ten bucks a year.

Now, here's the worst thing - this is a fun game. It would be a lot more fun if I didn't have to assemble it myself and then play it on a cocktail napkin while I read failures of subject-verb agreement, but it's actually very clever. It's like Chinese Checkers, but with dice instead of marbles, and you play it on a square grid. Your dice have to move from your home row to that of your opponent, and if you have four people playing, the middle of the board can turn into one heck of a sloppy mess.

Each face of a die has a different move it makes. The swords move diagonally. The book moves straight. The hat hops. The ear just sits there, which I guess kind of makes sense, because how the hell would a disembodied ear get anywhere at all? The potential answers to that question are more than a little creepy.

On your turn, you can move a die or roll it. If you jump over other dice, you have to roll them, which is a great strategy if your opponent has a fire about to do some immense string of jumps. It's best if you can turn it into one of those freakish ears. And then if you get your dice turned into ears, you'll want to jump them yourself, to see if you can't turn them into trees.

It will take about an hour to put the game together. Then it will take you about ten minutes to figure out how to play. It will take less than half an hour to actually play the game, unless you spend any time reading the game board or complaining about having to play on table linens. It's way more fun with four people, but it's still very enjoyable with two. It's a cool abstract with a bizarre theme, and if the components were not total bargain basement, I would be saying all kinds of nice things about it.

Look, I understand that the guy who made Table Gype might be an academic on a short budget with an immense fondness for Victorian Age literature. I can forgive a lot in a game, especially small-press stuff, but there are just too many things about this game that scream, 'I can't afford this!' Kudos to the guy for trying, but this is not a success. It's a fun game. It's just a pity that it comes in a recycled gift box and is played on a napkin.

Summary

Pros:
Fun abstract with chances for strategy, planning, and quick thinking
Interesting derivative of stuff created by some literary geniuses

Cons:
Seriously underwhelming components
Straight-up rookie night production
Odd choice of theme inspiration

You can check out Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype for yourself at:
http://eternal-revolution.com/266/uncle-chestnuts-table-gype

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Board Game Review - Infinite City

I think we need a national push toward a little corporate honesty. For starters, I think all MacDonald's commercials should, from this point forward, include only fat people. Wal-Mart ads should quit featuring perky suburban housewives with lovely children, and start showing us mullet-wearing throwbacks in camouflage hot pants. And publishers who use the word 'infinite' in their games titles should be forced to make games that last longer than half an hour.

Sure, Infinite City is a tricky tile-laying game with a massive eff-you factor and a bewildering array of complex decisions cropping up every turn, but it most definitely ends, and so I maintain that the name of the game should be Finite City. In fact, you can finish a three-player game inside 30 minutes, and we finished a five-player game in less than an hour. This is clearly a case where the name of the game is directly at odds with how long it takes to play.

The premise of Infinite City is simple enough. In fact, the rules can be explained in the time it takes you to crack open a beer and find a glass. Every turn, you play a tile from your hand representing one of the architectural edifices of the titular city (if there is a word more fun than titular, I want to know about it). Then you put one of your tokens on it and follow the directions. Scoring is tricky enough that you'll have to explain it twice to anyone who wasn't paying attention the first time, but it's still not hard to grasp. In fact, you'll understand the game so quickly, you'll know for sure that the name of the game didn't come from the rules explanation.

And the game doesn't take long, either. You can usually plan your turn while you wait for it to arrive, so in most cases, the turns go pretty fast. Sometimes you'll set off a combination play that chains together for a couple minutes, but most of the time, you're in and out in 30 seconds or less.

So what, exactly, makes Infinite City so infinite? Well, I've carefully pondered the notes I took while I played (incidentally, if you believe that I take notes while I play games, you're high), and I think I figured it out. Basically, Infinite City provides a nearly infinite number of ways for other players to completely hose you. Every turn is another opportunity to be humiliated, degraded and abused. You can go from the top of the heap to the Fire Down Below in just one play. Hopefully, that play will not be your own, but it certainly could happen.

See, every building in Infinite City does something different. Some of the more innocent buildings, like the housing or the library, let you put together a few moves in a row. Some of the buildings are a little more aggressive, like the transit center or the post office, which rearrange the city and make your opponents plot your untimely demise. And some of the tiles are so rotten, so mean-spirited, and so just plain dirty that you'll be sizing your opponents for pine boxes and shallow graves.

Take, for instance, my son. He is a ridiculously smart kid, and he frequently provides me with opportunities to regret his intelligence. One of the rottenest cards in the game, the shopping center, requires you to swap hands with another player. So if you have four cards, and an opponent has ten, then you smile as you hand the opponent a pile of garbage that he can play instead of the wealth of brilliance he was holding. It's worth noting that when my son played this tile on me, my hand sucked - but it was nowhere near as bad as the hand I got to replace it. I spent the next three turns building crappy decorative water fountains miles away from the rest of the city, while he went on to dominate the world banking markets.

Another time, my son decided that I was doing much too well at the game, and played a stadium right in the middle of my occupied buildings. All of my tokens instantly rushed over to the stadium, leaving my entire scoring block completely empty. My score went from eight to zero in one turn. Meanwhile, his grandmother was buying up land like a turn-of-the-century oil mogul and protecting them with power stations.

I could go on and on... and on... but the point here is that, in only four plays of the game, I have seen an incredible number of ways to use Infinite City to completely ruin another person's chances of scoring anything better than one of those flimsy paper ribbons they give you in grade school because you showed up to the science fair wearing pants. I am quickly coming to believe that Infinite City, while a reasonably short game, may have its name because you just never run out of ways to stab each other in the duodenum.

Here's the problem, though - it's a blast. It's so much fun to try to build a good scoring pattern, maximize your bonus points, and break up your friends' plans, you'll find yourself playing it over and over. The tiles are really nice, and the art is beautiful. The writing tends to be a little tiny, which could bother someone with bad eyes, but after you play it a couple times, you won't even need to read the tiles any more. There are a finite number of building types (yet another failure on the part of the marketing team), and so you're not constantly inundated with new things to remember. By your second run through this smart, fast, brutal game, you'll know how most everything works, and be quite prepared to be completely ruined at the drop of a hat.

But fair warning, because AEG didn't provide it - this game is not Infinite. It most definitely ends, usually before you can figure out why you can't find your pants, or why your butt hurts so bad.

Summary

Pros:
Requires a great combination of planning and flexibility
Really easy to learn - the rules are on the tiles
Great art and high-quality pieces
Fast enough that it should be called something like 'Quick City' or 'Zippy City', if those names didn't sound like a small-town gas station

Cons:
One of the most back-stabbity games I've played in a long time (that could be a pro, depending on who you are)

If you want a quick, easy-to-learn game that provides a whole hell of a lot of good strategic game play, you should definitely check out Infinite City. And you should definitely get it from Dogstar Games, because without them, you wouldn't have been able to read about it here.
http://dogstargames.com/product/AEG5011

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