Board Game Review - Entdecker

Sometimes, it's really hard for me to tell whether or not I'm going to like a game until after I play it. I mean, I try to approach every game with an open mind, but usually, I can finish reading the rules and know whether I'm going to love a game or hate it. But every now and then, a game leaves me with no idea whatsoever.

Entdecker was like that. It's a game of exploration in a fictional part of the Caribbean, which should make it pretty cool. That's a pretty sweet theme. The art is very nice, and there's even a little wooden pawn that looks vaguely like a sailing ship (it also looks vaguely resembles a sombrero, which really has nothing to do with the game, except you may find yourself saying, 'it's your turn to move the hat').

But then you read the rules, and for one thing, they're a little confusing, and for another, you do an awful lot of exploring uncharted areas and no time shooting stuff at all. Now this pretty game with the cool theme and the Mexican headgear looks like it might just be a pure, non-violent efficiency exercise, with all the fascination of the owner's manual for a 97 Skylark. Hell, it might just be Euro Tetris.

And then finally, after all that, you just knuckle down and play it, and you realize that Entdecker is a pretty damned cool game. You and your opponents take turns moving the explorer's ship and discovering island in the middle of the ocean, then claiming them and sending your scouts to hunt for wild berries and coconuts. (Really - you have to discover produce.)

At first, it can be difficult to see all the depth in Entdecker. Once you play a couple turns, though, you'll begin to see all the different paths to victory, and the way different strategies can provide different rewards, and how the island-conquering warlord might be defeated by the nickel-and-dime little guy who snags all the best shrubs, and they both might lose to the dedicated explorer who hunts down all the rare and valuable waterfalls.

OK, so you've read this far and you're thinking, 'when does this get awesome, again?' And you're right, from the description, this sounds like less excitement than the music in a department store elevator. But twist it and look at it from a different angle, and the kick-ass will shine through.

For starters, there's a ton of gambling. You can bet on the sure thing, but it'll cost you, and it might never be as rewarding as the long-shot. And there's lots of countering other players - steal their islands, steal their fruit, steal their waterfalls, and before you know it, everyone at the table is gunning for you like you Tony Soprano put a price on your head. The game also includes all kinds of planning, and strategy, and careful tactical maneuvers meant to block everyone else and get you paid. For a game about sailing in a hat and hunting up wild fruit, Entdecker has a whole hell of a lot going on.

Sadly, this review isn't going to do any more to tell you if you ought to buy Entdecker than you could get if you read the box. Euro fans might dig it, though there is a healthy amount of luck. Players of violent games might like it, because there are pirates, and there's lots of the interaction and daring risk-taking that make their favorite games so interesting. The theme might not expressly mention bloodletting, but there's no way you spend this much time sailing the Caribbean and nobody gets killed. So in a pinch, we can call it a man's game.

I like Entdecker. It's very cool. The art is pretty, the theme is exploration and discovery, and the rules practically beg you to take wild risks and hose your friends. It's enjoyable and interactive and, best of all, fun. The only question I have left is, what the hell does Entdecker mean?

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Lots of strategy, tactics, planning and risk-taking
Very pretty
Cool theme plays out well
Quick-start rules explain while you play your first game

Cons:
Some tweaky components decisions seem like an excuse to overcomplicate simple tasks
Doesn't look like it should be as cool as it is

Dogstar Games is carrying Entdecker, and not only can you save a bunch of money on it, the shipping is free!
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/MFG0499

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Board Game Review - Bridgetown Races

When I was a young man just out of college, I spent a winter in Portland, Oregon. It was effing cold, was the main thing I remember, and there were a ton of bridges. So I have no problem believing that when the creators of Bridgetown Races needed a city with lots of bridges where they could hold races, Portland was the logical choice. With the Willamette River running right through the middle of the city, they had to put in a buttload of bridges just so I could get to work. Of course, since these were drawbridges, any time I was late to work, the bridge would be up in the air.

Happily, in Bridgetown Races, the bridges are never up. That's convenient, because there's a flag on every bridge, and you have to race your ass off to go pick up one of each color. You can only pick up a yellow flag, for instance, if you're in a taxi, and a white flag can only be nabbed if you're hoofing it. The blue flag is a bitch, because the only way to get that one is in a streetcar going across the Steel Bridge. But it could be worse - the damned bridge could be up, and then you would be screwed.

When you open the box to play Bridgetown Races, you're not going to be instantly amazed at the beauty and wonder of the stuff in the box. Instead, you might wonder if you're about to play a game as underwhelming as the cartoony art and slightly hideous color palette. Wooden pawns and plastic flags in a rainbow of fruit flavors might mean a delicious sugary breakfast cereal, but they rarely indicate a thrilling game.

But just play it once, and you won't care if the art is on the bland side. This game will make your head swim, as you try to plan a turn with a motorcycle, a car and a pair of roller blades that will manage to score the orange flag on Burnside and the purple on Hawthorne. If you don't watch the other players, they might just grab the flags before you can get there, and if you don't count the spaces just right, you'll wind up one space short of the flag you need in the wrong kind of vehicle.

Another thing that you can't see from the uninspiring graphics is how fast-paced and exciting this game is. You might even want to turn on some high-energy rave music (ecstasy pills are optional), because you'll really feel like you're hauling ass. The more people you add to this game, the more frenetic it will feel, with the chaos factor rocketing like your grandpa's heart rate at a titty bar.

The whole thing is over in half an hour, maybe less, but that just means this is a short game. That does NOT mean it's a filler. Fillers are light games that require minimal effort. Bridgetown Races demands that you pay attention, and while it goes fast, you'll need a lot of brainpower to stay ahead.

The graphics may not be top-notch, but they're really not that bad. They're especially forgivable when you see that Bridgetown Races is a lean, mean, fast-action racing game that's just a big fat pile of fun. This is the best game Gryphon Games has produced yet, and if they keep making them this good, maybe I can overlook all the crappy Reiner reprints.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Fast and exciting
Much deeper than it seems it should be
Tactics, planning, and a good long-term strategy are all required to win
None of the bridges are up

Cons:
Not as visually awesome as it could have been

You could probably buy Bridgetown Races at your local game store, but you know what I want you to do. I want you to get this game, because it's a blast, and I want you to get it from Noble Knight:
GO BUY THIS GAME

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Toy-Slash-Game Review - Broadsides & Boarding Parties

There are gamers for whom a game is only a good game if it's a mental exercise. If they're not stretching their Mensa muscles and proving their intellectual superiority, these gamers cannot have fun (if you ask me, they're probably not that good at having fun, period). For those gamers, I recommend more fiber.

For those gamers who, like me, regularly use games as an excuse to play with toys, Hasbro made Broadsides & Boarding Parties. This is a game that is basically a box full of toys with a few rules to make it seem legitimate. It's like playing with toy soldiers when you and your little brother come up with rules that incorporate Lincoln Log buildings and shooter marbles.

The main feature of this humongous toy pretending to be a game is the pair of plastic ships. You get two sailing ships, one to be a pirate and one to be the Spanish galleon, and these puppies are honking big. If you weren't too particular, you could wear them as shoes. Plus you get a mess of plastic sailors and pirates, cannons that actually poke out through little holes in the sides of the ship, and a beautiful game board depicting a completely fictional section of the Caribbean. You have little plastic ship models that you'll maneuver around the fake sea, and cards that you use to plan your moves and try to fake out your opponent.

Broadsides & Boarding Parties is composed of two different phases, predictably broken into the broadsides part and the boarding parties part. It's not particularly difficult. You sail your ships around, firing cannons at each other, and then your ships bang into each other and you send your pirates over the rails to capture the enemy captain. The broadsides part of the game is played out on the map, but when your ships finally tangle and it comes down to swashbuckling swordplay, you push the ships next to each other and actually have your plastic pirates climbing around on the decks of these gigantic ships.

This game is undeniably fun, unless you're one of those fun-sucking sandbags who insists that every game be intellectually difficult. You're going to sail in circles and shoot at each other, then as masts come crashing down and water starts flooding into the cargo hold, you set grapples and swing over to the enemy vessel, cutlass between your teeth and blood on your mind. If you can't have fun doing that, then your imagination must have packed up and moved to Alaska, where it is now dating Sarah Palin's daughter and trying to get her knocked up again.

Two key skills are required to do well during the broadsides part of the game - luck and clairvoyance. If you can sucker your opponent into zigging when he should have zagged, you can shoot him when he can't shoot back. Make a poor calculation, however, and you could find yourself floating around like a waterlogged rubber ducky. Fortunately, even if you play poorly, you can still do pretty well here, just by being lucky. There's an absolutely amazing amount of die-rolling here, and you might just blast the crap out of your enemy with two dice while he splashes all around you with five. Brilliant maneuvering will get you a statistical advantage, but luck can win the day.

To win the boarding parties portion of the game, you only need luck. There's virtually no cleverness required. You move, you roll dice, the low roller loses sailors. This part is a blast, because you can practically see Errol Flynn swinging over on the rigging and doing all kinds of violence. Unfortunately, Errol has about as much chance of taking a cutlass to the kidney as he does of surviving the fight, so it's a little arbitrary. Sure is fun, though!

One thing I should mention - this game is pretty damned old. Not like Monopoly old, but it's no spring chicken. It's one of those games Hasbro put out in the mid 80s, alongside Shogun and Fortress: America and Axis & Allies. That means I was in high school when it was first printed, and now my kids are in high school, so this is an old game. It's frightfully expensive, assuming you can find a copy at all. And considering it's basically a bunch of toy pirates with some incredibly basic rules, you may not be able to justify the cost, especially if you can only enjoy games if they come with a minimum of 27 wooden cubes in at least four different colors.

There are never going to be tournament games of Broadsides & Boarding Parties, and there will never be national player rankings. It's not a deep or smart game, and it's not supposed to be. What it is supposed to do, it does brilliantly. It doesn't pretend to be a brainy game. It stands tall and says, 'I'm a toy, dammit!' and it makes it work. Buzz-killing abstracts be damned - real men play games where people die.

Summary

2 players

Pros:
Huge, awesome ships
Plastic pirates and cannons
Stunning board and simple rules
A goofy amount of fun, especially for grown men who play with toys
A decent amount of bluffing and maneuvering in the beginning of the game

Cons:
Woefully rare and painfully expensive
Almost completely luck in the last part of the game

I didn't expect to find a copy of this game anywhere, unless they were overpriced at eBay, but my newest sponsor, Noble Knight Games, has one right here:
LINKAGE

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Card Game Review - Botswana

I think I've finally figured out a little something about Doctor Reiner Knizia. I used to wonder what kind of doctor he is. Is he a foot doctor? Is he a neurosurgeon? Or maybe he's just an over-qualified dentist? But I think I have come up with a plausible answer - he's a doctor of environmental studies. Clearly, he understands just how life in the African savanna really works.

And to educate those of us who did not know about the circle of life in the sweeping plains of the subcontinent, he created Botswana. Not the country - that was already there. He may have donated a hospital wing or something, but I'm pretty sure the country existed before Reiner showed up. No, he made a game called Botswana that will teach the youth of the world about the ebb and flow of the African animal kingdom in the heart of darkest Africa (please note that Botswana is not actually very dark - it's quite sunny).

In order to focus the educational potential like a laser, Dr. K only included five kinds of animals. Botswana has more, maybe as many as nine or ten, but we just get elephants, zebras, rhinos, lions and leopards (the limited animal count may have been due to the fact that there are five plastic animals of each kind, and they didn't want to have to figure out where to score a few thousand plastic vervet monkeys). And to further distill our education, rather than one of those dull, unimaginative games created for grade-school teachers, this is actually an abstract card game.

There are six cards for each animal (30 total, in case you suck at math), ranked zero through five. You take out a few, and pass the rest out to everyone equally. Then you take turns playing one card and grabbing one little plastic animal. You can put down any card you want, and take any animal you want. At the end of the round, each animal you grabbed is worth however many points are on the last card played with that animal's picture.

When I first read the rules for Botswana, I had two thoughts:

Thought #1: "Oh, great, another crappy Reiner game."

Thought #2: "What the hell does this have to do with Botswana?"

But then I played, and I realized that Botswana is actually a pretty cool game. Sure, it's a Reiner game, but it ain't bad. My daughter liked it a lot. She also won by a wide margin. I kind of suck at card games, and this game would be best played by someone who is very good at games like Hearts and Spades, two games I lose nearly every time I play.

There's an almost overwhelming amount of strategy to employ in Botswana. You get your hand and have to decide right off which animals you want to see become very valuable, and which you want to destroy. Then you try to con your fellow players into taking the ones you're going to ruin, while attempting to grab up all the ones you mean to make rich. This is not anywhere near as easy as it sounds, and it doesn't really sound easy. Because all the other players are trying to do the same thing, and if you're playing with my daughter, at least one of them is far better at this than you are.

Timing is critical. Because there comes a point when the game could end at any moment, you're never sure if you can afford to play the low elephant or if you should play the high zebra (high zebras, incidentally, are how zebra-mule hybrids got started). If you play the wrong card, you could hand over the game on a silver platter. Play the right card at the wrong time, and again, you could hose yourself. But time your plays perfectly, and grab the right animals at the right time, and you'll completely destroy your opponents. Kind of like my daughter.

So how is this educational? OK, I lied, it's not. It's an abstract game. You could swap out the animals for flavored condoms, and have the same exact game (and potentially, a much better time afterward). The only reason this game has anything to do with the country is that both have animals, only in the card game, they're not real (it would have been incredibly difficult to fit 25 actual animals in the box, and it would have smelled absolutely horrible). But it is still a pretty cool card game. Just don't try to figure out what it has to do with Africa.

I guess I still don't know what kind of doctor Reiner is. He might be a proctologist - he seems to make a lot of games that stink - but something tells me his work has a lot more to do with math in a classroom than sick people on a gurney. But I do at least know that Botswana is a fun game, whatever Dr. K studied for his big, shiny degree.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:
Simple mechanics create a disproportionately impressive amount of strategy
Plays fast, but still challenging
Decent art, very nice cards, and a box full of plastic animals
Great for families

Cons:
Theme? What theme?

Noble Knight is carrying Botswana, and you can save a couple bucks, too.
LONG LINK

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A Note About Advertising

If you see the little 'Because I'm a Whore' box to the left of the main column, you'll notice three small, square ads. Those are there because I'm a whore. Well, not all of them are explicitly there for whoring, but I'll explain.

First, there's Dogstar Games. I talk about these guys all the time, because for the last couple years, they've been hooking me up with the review copies I could never get otherwise. Dozens of the games I've reviewed at Drake's Flames have come from Dogstar, and because I'm a whore for free games, I promote the hell out of them. If it weren't for Dogstar Games, you would have been unable to read about games like Horus Heresy, Runewars, Galaxy Trucker and a whole hell of a lot more. See, the downside to all my hilarious ranting (or irritating and juvenile complaining, depending on who's reading) is that lots and lots of publishers would rather I never even had the opportunity to review their games. Because of Dogstar Games, I'm able to get the review copies I need and still be honest about how I feel about them. Most reviewers do not have that luxury, so I'm very grateful to Dogstar.

The next ad down is from Noble Knight Games. These guys have an incredible web store, with tons of stuff that's out of print or obscure. They have an awesome inventory of new stuff, and bucket loads of old stuff. Like Dogstar Games, they are there because I am a whore. They're a new sponsor, and they're setting me up with roleplaying games and CCGs when the publishers blow me off. Noble Knight got me Gamma World, which I never would have reviewed otherwise, and they hooked me up with The Burning Wheel, which I'll be reviewing in a week or so. So if you're looking for games and accessories, do me a favor and check out Noble Knight.

Finally, there's the Project Wonderful ad at the bottom of the box. That one is not there because I'm a whore. That one is there half because I'm curious, and half because I think it might have something readers might want to see. It's almost like a public service announcement, but without Erik Estrada telling you not to smoke because it makes your hair fall out.

The first reason I dropped in a Project Wonderful ad is because I was curious to see what kind of money you can earn with one of those little ad boxes. You see them all over the Internet, and they seem like an interesting concept. People are either publishers or advertisers, and they either carry ads or they sell ads (often both). You bid on these ad boxes, and there are thousands of them, possibly millions. Really impressive sites with tens of thousands of readers can make ten or fifteen bucks a day from those ad boxes. Tiny sites buried in a back corner of the Internet, like, you know, this one, are lucky to earn a penny a day. So experimentally, I've discovered that I need each person reading this site to tell about seven hundred people about Drake's Flames if I want to make more than a nickel a week.

The other thing, though, is that there are a few cool places out there in the Internet series of pipes that I would have missed. I found a soft-porn interactive comic site read by adult actresses, a few oddly fascinating online games, and a handful of interesting webcomics. That ad box is set up to let me approve or reject every ad, and so I've been able to dump anyone with an obnoxious flashing ad, slimy quasi-bankers trying to rip off people with bad credit, and a metric assload of crappy Etsy sites selling jewelry made by nerdy housewives who think they're original because they fashion earrings from bathroom tiles. If you see an ad over there, you know I've checked it out. I'm not sending you to get a free credit report or a dozen magazine subscriptions. I know who's buying my ad space, and they're always sites I think had some merit, even if that merit is being slightly amusing.

I'm not looking to add more advertisements to Drake's Flames, though I don't rule out the possibility. If you know someone who really wants to pimp something, and if it's cool, have them drop me a line. If it's a publisher who could use a little bit of promo, I'll probably run their ad for free. If it's the coolest thing since plastic miniatures, I might even make the ad myself. And if you know someone who wants to give me free games in exchange for ad space, for God's sake write me now. I mean right this second.

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Humongous Game Review - Battle Masters

A few weeks ago, I was doing a little cleaning in my closet. Way at the back of the closet is a tiny cubbyhole under the stairs. If my house was empty, it would be hard to reach, but I've lived in my house almost ten years, so finding the back of that particular closet consists of wading hip-deep through a decade's worth of discarded exercise equipment and old dog beds. It was herculean, is what I'm trying to say.

Anyway, while I was under the stairs, I remembered that I had a box full of games under there. Because, yes, I need more games. These games were stored more than six years ago, so it was kind of like finding buried treasure, except that in this case, the treasures were games, and they weren't buried under dirt, they were buried under the VCR, old Playstation 2 games and an incredible number of couch pillows that did not leave when we got rid of the old couch.

The real hidden treasure in that rediscovered box was an old game called Battle Masters. I traded for this puppy a long time ago, because I wanted an incredibly unwieldy game in a box the size of a lifeboat with literally hundreds of plastic miniatures and a map that small children could use to create a pillow fort. I played it when I got it, but for some unfathomable reason, I decided to put it in an even larger box and store it for later. Fast forward half a decade, and I run across it while searching for the Lost Ark (apparently the American government found out how hard it is to look under my staircase, and decided to move the Ark after Indiana Jones found it).

Come to think of it, the reason I initially stored the game is not that hard to fathom. In fact, once I pulled it out, dusted it off, and played it again, I was reminded why I stored it - it's not a very good game. Sure, there's a ton of plastic, and a plastic mat the size of a child's bedsheet (that's not an exaggeration - it's over 5 feet long). But it's about as deep as a puddle of warm dog piss, and so painfully random that it is exceptionally difficult to have a good time playing it.

In Battle Masters, two players set up on the floor (because just about nobody has a big enough table to hold the mat) and set legions of plastic warriors against each other in a blood-soaked fantasy throw-down. It's obviously licensed from Games Workshop, with chaos warriors and beast men fighting the warriors of the Empire, and there's even a big tower that you can claim and rain arrows down on your foes. It looks so incredibly cool. Too bad it blows.

Battle Masters is one of the earlier games to use the skulls-and-shields, Stephen-Baker method of conflict resolution. You may have seen this rather popular game mechanic in a little game called HeroScape. Only where HeroScape is a brilliant game with depth and strategy and tactical genius, Battle Masters is barely fit to be a child's toy. The dice thing is great, but the game is a waste of time.

The reason Battle Masters is less fun than just playing with army men is because of the cards you use to figure out whose turn it is. You have a single deck of cards, and these cards have pictures of all the various guys in the game. If you pull the card with the knights, then the Empire guy can move his knights. Pull the ogre, and the Chaos player can send his ogre marauding and killing and trampling. Pull the goblins, and they're probably stuck behind the river and have to skip their turn entirely because the beastmen are in the way, only the beastmen also can't move because they're blocked in by the orcs.

Sooner or later, you're going to have one player sitting on his hands while the other player takes six or seven turns in a row. It doesn't matter how well you shuffle, either. It's just the odds. Give the game enough time, and eventually the Empire player is going to have to just watch while the chaos knights and evil archers run through the knights and men-at-arms like poop through a goose.

Using a completely random draw to determine the next player turns a lightly strategic game with objectively awesome pieces into a frustrating chance to watch the game play itself. It doesn't even feel like you're in charge of anything. You're playing with your toys, and you don't even get to say which ones you'll play with! No wonder this was hidden under six years of retired baby clothes.

But now that I've got it out of the closet, Battle Masters is staying out. My daughter and I have ideas for how we can turn it into an actual game, instead of a stupid way to play with action figures, and once we nail down our house-rule rewrite, I think it will actually be fun. And if it turns out to still be a dud, I can always list it as trade fodder, or maybe just use the archers and horses to make chop-shop centaurs.

Besides, even if it's a dud, the stuff in this box is just plain amazing. More than a hundred cool minis, a fully three-dimensional plastic tower, and a plastic game board that could double as a tablecloth - not to mention the piles of cards, flags, terrain tiles and other stuff in the box - make Battle Masters fun as hell even if all I do is set it up in the middle of the living room floor. It needs new rules, very badly, but for a grown man using games as an excuse to play with toys, Battle Masters is like a time machine to my youth. Or maybe like discovering a lost warehouse full of arcane treasures, but instead of priceless artifacts of mystical power, you find dusty plastic soldiers and all the pictures you took off the fridge after the kids finished third grade.

Summary

2 players

Pros:
Holy crap, there's a ton of cool stuff in this box
A decent implementation of the skulls-and-shields dice thing
Neat art and cool plastic - just plain pretty

Cons:
Playing the game reminds me why I stored it in the first place

I don't have the foggiest idea where you could find a copy of Battle Masters. Try eBay, if you just plain have to have it. Or just break out your Ninja Turtles action figures and play with those.

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Board Game Review - Guardians of Graxia

If you want evidence that board games are not like video games, you just have to look at Guardians of Graxia. Or, you know, pretty much any other video game, except that in this case, there's a video game and a board game version of the same game. So comparing Grand Theft Auto and Agricola is probably not as good an indicator, though it does make it pretty easy to tell which is not a board game.

The video game of Guardians of Graxia is pretty damned cool. You summon your guys using cards, which you pay for with mana, which you get from controlling land. It's a tactical wargame with a fantasy theme, and it's fun. There are more 3D animations than are strictly needed, and that makes it slower than tectonic plate movement on my computer, but it's a fun game, anyway. You can download it and install it from Gamers Gate, where it will set you back a mere ten dollars.

The board game version is pretty much exactly the same game, but instead of having a computer handle all the math, now you have to do it yourself. It's still fun, as long as you have the patience to do all the adding that the computer was doing for you. Which, unfortunately, means that it's a pain in the ass.

It's still fun, though. You use cardboard tiles to build this big board, with the tiles offset to make a sort of fake hex grid. The tiles have plains and villages and cities and swamps and maybe a little piece of New Orleans that broke off after Katrina. Then you summon your cards onto these tiles and move them the way you would if you were playing a miniatures game, only the cards are the miniatures, and they all have these different abilities that tell you how they fight. Between orcs and dragons, knights and elves, and lots of other refugees from a D&D world, you've got a pretty standard fantasy world, and lots of choices.

But unfortunately, all these guys have to be different, and that means they all have wildly different attack, defense, magic, life, and other stuff you'll have to track as you play. There's an entire board separate from everything else that you use to track all the adding and subtracting, the way you would use an abacus, only not quite as pretty (unless it's an ugly abacus). Here's an example, to let you see how much adding you'll do:

Let's say you start your turn with 35 mana. Then you summon a band of wolf riders, which costs, say, 8 mana, so you move your mana marker down. Then you cast a spell that lets you move that guy, and it costs 7, so you slide your mana counter down again. Then some orc guys move, and they attack, and then you do a bunch of adding and subtracting and playing cards that add and subtract and cost mana and add battle value and reduce the other guy's mana value and maybe add some mana for you and then you play some other cards that add battle value or subtract battle value, only these don't cost mana, but they do make you slide your battle value counter all over, and then you look at the scores and go, 'screw this, let's play Parcheesi.'

As you can see from this example, there's a bit of math. It's not hard, but holy macaroni is there a lot of it. Add 3, then add 2, then subtract 1 and add 3 and a whole lore more, and when you're done, that will be your shoe size minus your age.

If the math doesn't scare you off Guardians of Graxia, it's a pretty damned fun game. It's definitely better than the Panzer General games, because it's not as complicated (which is saying something about the Panzer General games) and it's easier to maneuver on the hex grid. You can even play it solo, if you don't mind keeping track of all that math for both sides. It's got some very nice illustrations, though the graphic designers seem to have been the lowest bidders, and it even has six plastic miniatures that you absolutely never need to use for any reason whatsoever.

On the other hand, if the complicated parts of the game annoy you, and your computer was created in the last two or three years, you might be a lot better off with the PC version. It's fun, it's just as pretty, and the best part is that the computer does the annoying math for you.

So now that I've finished that, let me get a little preachy.

Look, video games are not board games. Board games have to be simpler, because we're not all walking calculators. There are board games that provide just as much tactical depth as the Petroglyph games, but do it with more abstraction and less calculation. I'm fine with a little bonus or penalty here and there, but a good board game designer could have taken Guardians of Graxia (and the Panzer General games at the same time) and created something fun and fast and smart and deep. It doesn't need to be Reiner Knizia simple, but it would be great if these games felt more clean. As it stands, the video games are a blast, because Petroglyph is a video game company, but the board games are sloppy, because Petroglyph is a video game company.

Guardians of Graxia is an entertaining, tactically smart game, no matter the format. The board game certainly makes more sense if you can wade through the math and want to talk about beer selections with your opponent while you play, but if you're really just here for the game, get the PC version and let your computer do the work for you.

Of course, if your computer is as old as mine, it might actually be faster to just play the board game. I'm still waiting to see if I killed the dragon, and I started last Tuesday.

Summary

1 or 2 players

Pros:
Lots of tactical depth
Very cool art (not counting the rather weak graphic design)
Tons of replay factor

Cons:
Math - not hard, but lots of it
Defensive strategies are doomed to failure
A few poor design choices make the game unnecessarily more difficult to play

If you're the kind of person who likes games that make you think, and where playing well means you win more often, Guardians of Graxia might be for you. Noble Knight Games has it:
LUDICROUSLY LONG LINK

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