Card Game Review - Irondale Expands

This review covers the expansion for Irondale, and not the game itself. If you want to understand what in the burning blue blazes I'm talking about here, you may want to go back and read the original review.

Technically, Irondale Expands is not a card game. Technically, it is an expansion for Irondale (which explains the name). But when you add Irondale Expands to the base game, what you wind up playing is a completely new game. It works with the same rules, but the additional parts will have you wondering why you ever bothered to play Irondale without them (that's assuming you've played Irondale before, and considering how head-spinning it is to play, you may have missed it in favor of something less complex, like air traffic control).

Irondale Expands is a modular expansion. You can decide exactly how much extra game you want, and then just add the parts you dig. I'll go through them one at a time, as if I was a dead-boring hack reviewer at some hugely popular gaming website, and then save my opinion for the very end of the review, at which point you will have wondered why in Hell I didn't just tell you if I liked it at the beginning and save you all that reading. But let's face it, half the time, you're only reading this retarded website to see if I make a really witty joke about one-legged crossdressing prostitutes, so you'll probably read it all, anyway. I would hate to disappoint, so I'll do my best to be funny. Wish me luck (which won't really be necessary, because by the time you're reading this, I will have finished writing, and you'll be the one who needs luck, not me).

The first new addition to Irondale is the City Sprawl. These are 54 new building cards, probably the most predictable addition to a game about creating a city, one building at a time. Fortunately, every new card adds something cool that you haven't seen before. My favorites are the monuments, which act like wild cards when you're trying to decide if you can pull off a master plan and grab a few extra cards. My least favorite new card is the Seat of Judges, because not only does it sound like a very uncomfortable toilet, but it can make someone lose a turn, and in this game, missing a turn means you're going to be bored for a long time, and probably lose the game. It's just too damned mean. In the future, I will be removing Judge's Seat from the deck before I play. I also won't have one in my bathroom.

The City Sprawl also includes the Rector's Spire. This card earns an honorable mention, but not because of what the card does. I don't really care what it does. It just makes me giggle inside every time I see it. It reminds me of when I was a dumb kid (as opposed to a dumb adult, which I am now), and we used to say, 'Rectum, darn near killed 'em!' And it's not just the rector part that's funny - this building is a rector's spire. It's like an all-purpose crotch joke.

An interesting new twist is the New Start cards, which are four cards with no special powers, representing each of the four building types you can make in Irondale. These are not very cool. They don't really add anything to the game, to be honest, and I'm not sure why I would bother with them. But as an upside, they do finally clear up for me what the four building types actually are. Based on the pictures in the original, I previously thought the types were windmill, church, tower and Little Mexico. So it's nice to get that cleared up.

Two new building types make Irondale much more interesting, and by themselves are a great reason to buy the expansion. The first is the Banking Institution. Each player gets one of these, and puts it off to the side. When you complete a master plan, you can store the card, and then redeem it later for awesome bonuses that will make you plan even farther ahead than you were before. While I may not really care about the New Start cards, the Banking Institution is a great way to make Irondale a much better game. It gives you a great reason to work harder at getting those master plans working, and gives you a way to pull off some incredibly impressive turns that will make the other people at the table throw their cards down and stalk angrily away. Which means you win.

The Architect's Guild, by comparison, is not as cool. I didn't like it as much, but you might, so feel free to give it a shot. It just lets you put a card up for sale, and might earn you some points. Me, I generally want to keep my cards in my hand, because the trickiest task in Irondale is keeping up a healthy hand of cards, and most cards require you to have other stuff in your hand. Dumping a card to earn one point means you just have to spend a point later to get another card. Seems pointless to me, and aggravatingly worthless when we played.

So far, my opinions on Irondale Expands are sort of mixed. Some of the new stuff really makes Irondale a much better game, and some just bother me. But to push my opinion from 'somewhere in the middle of the cool zone' to 'you need this, right now, stop reading and go order', the expansion includes the City Square. This totally changes the way you play Irondale, and basically turns it into a whole new game. In fact, it's so cool that the explanation of the card merits an entire new paragraph.

If you're using the City Square, each player gets one. It counts as a sort of wild card, so you can build anything you want next to it and score the maximum points. You don't build just one city any more. Now each player has a city, and you can build on any city you want. You don't score for how your city develops, so you're not screwing anyone by building in their town, but now you have a nearly limitless number of places you could build. You're no longer stuck trying to wedge your buildings into the corners. Now there are corners everywhere, and open spots, and just a whole ton of new things you can do on your turn.

Of course, if Irondale confused you before, the cards in Irondale Expands are going to make you feel like a short-bus-riding potato-head. If you didn't have the mental agility to keep up with the original game, you're totally screwed now. But if you do like Irondale, and you can play it even reasonably well, Irondale Expands makes it a whole new game - and a much better one.

Irondale Expands does exactly what an expansion should do. It doesn't just add a few new cards or a couple additional rules. It takes the entire game, reinvents it, and provides you with lots of options that you can apply to fine-tune it into exactly what you want to play. I could play the original, but I rarely found myself wanting to. Now that I have Irondale Expands, I look forward to getting this one on the table a lot more often.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Many new options
Add what you want, and ignore what you don't
City Square makes this a whole new game that's better than it was before
A great reason to own the original

Cons:
Some of the options suck (but you might like them)

If you haven't bought into Small Box Games yet, you're missing out. Get over there and put in a preorder now. You won't be sorry, unless you don't like them, and then you might be sorry, but that's really not my problem, is it?
http://www.smallboxgames.com/games.html

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RPG Review - Dragon Age

I've played games based on comic books. I've played games based on movies. I've played games based on historical events, novels, and geographical oddities. But until I played Dragon Age, I don't believe I ever played a roleplaying game based on a roleplaying game (well, not counting every RPG that came out since D&D).

The guys at Green Ronin decided that the video game Dragon Age: Origins was so bitchin', it needed to be a tabletop game. So they figured out how to turn a video game RPG into a tabletop RPG, and they did a really good job of it. When you play Dragon Age, you'll feel like you're traipsing around Ferelden fighting darkspawn and getting cussed by mistreated city elves.

The setting for Dragon Age starts off with your basic Tolkien ripoff - dwarves and elves and dragons - but then twists it up and takes it to a dark place. Dwarves are reclusive and anti-social. Elves are downtrodden and abused, either working as servants for humans or wandering around in nomad caravans and being hated by everyone. Humans even have bad hemmorhoids. Everyone is miserable.

And then, because there's already too much joy, unholy monsters crawl out of the ground and overrun entire nations. These boogeymen, called darkspawn, have poisonous blood, brutal intelligence, and a hard-on for killing people. They come in lots of varieties, which means when you're facing a bunch in a fight, you can take your pick of what you want to kill, kind of like a Chinese buffet restaurant. Avoid the eggrolls. They bite back.

What you don't have in Dragon Age are a whole bunch of nonsensical monsters and various races of critters. There are undead hordes, but they're created when demons break through from the dark side and possess dead bodies. There are no orcs, goblins, kobolds, fish people, dog people, snake people or magical floating eyeballs. The bad guys basically come in three flavors - demons, darkspawn or regular ol' people. Those last ones can be the worst - the demons and darkspawn might be hell bent on destruction, but nothing rivals the twisted power of a decent man driven mad by hatred, greed or an overwhelming addiction to cough syrup.

Despite having a limited array of foes to kill (what, no land sharks?), Dragon Age has a wonderfully involved and compelling setting. Sure, the Bioware writers did all the heavy lifting, but I finished the video game and still didn't know half of the stuff I learned when I read the first couple chapters of the player's book. There are decadent Orlesians, the Trevinter Imperium assholes, the barbaric Avvar and the rough-and-tumble Fereldens. There's a history here that actually makes sense, instead of just being a chronicle of various magical wars and invasions by dragons. The players will have a place in this world, and they'll be part of the stories beyond simply the mechanical constructs that plod through the dungeons. In fact, the history is more than just an overlay to help us pretend that this next dungeon matters. The stories you play will be part and parcel of the background of the world. That ruin you're investigating to find the rage demon was once part of the Imperial Road, and it has a reason for being deep in the forest, beyond being a convenient place for a lich to set up shop and hire out a squadron of rotting corpses to fetch his slippers.

But all this consistency and depth doesn't do you any good if you can't play the game, and one thing about Dragon Age is that it's incredibly easy to play. You don't need a bucket of dice in various shapes and sizes. Each player just needs three regular dice, the kind you can find in Risk or Monopoly. Want to know if you can cross the slippery bridge? Roll three dice and add your dexterity. Want to know if you can stab the ogre in his soft parts? Roll three dice and add your strength. Want to know if you picked up gonorrhea from the farmer's daughter? Yeah, so do I.

Another thing that's brilliant is that unlike many games, everyone is in the fight, all the time. You know how in D&D, the wizard kind of hides in the back and waits to see if anyone needs him to blow something up, but he rarely does because he's only got four spell slots left and the fighters can probably handle the giant rats without help? That doesn't happen. The rogues can handle themselves in a fight, and the mage can throw a magical ranged attack for free. When you really need some firepower, the mage can light it up, but he doesn't have to. He can probably hit people pretty well with a stick, too.

A system this easy means you're going to find that your fights run a hell of a lot faster. We routinely ran into players saying, 'it's my turn again already?' You roll once, you roll damage, and you're on to the next guy. You can handle a pretty big fight with minimal fuss, and thanks to a really cool stunt system, there's plenty of room for big maneuvers and surprise assaults. For a game with limited rules, there are a surprisingly high number of options when violence breaks out. The simplicity of the system leaves plenty of room for cinematic takedowns, last-minute saves and courageous acts of heroic proportions. Plus you can totally stab stuff.

The rules for Dragon Age come in two books - one for the gamemaster, and one for the players. But unlike many roleplaying games, these books are short and succinct. You'll know how to play after just a couple hours of reading, and you won't have to read them all twice just to be able to remember how to do a five-foot step. Quite frankly, it's a relief to play a game with rulebooks that are only 64 pages long, instead of the enormous tomes required to play nearly any other game. For the sake of comparison, War and Peace is a shorter read than most paper-and-pen roleplaying games - but not Dragon Age.

Dragon Age is easy to play and easy to run, but in order to accommodate this simplicity, it has to get rid of some of the customization that you see in lots of other games. The rules tell you to create goals for your characters, but there's no reason to do so unless the GM specifically intends to use them. Character creation involves very few choices, and allows for little in the way of creative optimization. Sure, you dispense with a lot of the rules, but you don't get to create the glib conversationalist who can talk his way out of anything because his Diplomacy score gives him a bonus to Sense Motive and Bluff. You can't combine spells for creative experimentation, or train in a series of powerful moves that let you behead three rabbit people in a single blow.

Personally, I don't care if I do lose some of that tweaking, because all that fine tuning is a pain in my ass. When I'm running a game of D&D, I end up feeling like the master accountant and treasurer. Plus Dragon Age doesn't send me spelunking down endless, incoherent tunnels, stumbling across random conglomerations of monsters who never have toilets, and simply advancing from one room to the next like an overnight cleaning crew. In fact, the introductory adventure has exactly one dungeon containing only three areas. There's a fight at a farm, a monstrous demon slaughtering innocents, a harrowing battle across a yawning chasm and a terrifying night attack by gibbering lunatics, but no home invasions. When you go somewhere, you have a reason.

Dragon Age doesn't have the character-based storytelling of Burning Wheel, or the endless customization of Dungeons and Dragons. Instead, it has a solid background, a rich history, and consistent plots. It's quite possibly the easiest time I've ever had running a game, and it doesn't ever leave anyone completely out of the action. It's exciting, dark and just plain fun. Plus you can totally stab stuff.

Summary

Pros:
Rich background that provides a purpose for your adventures
Compelling stories
Simple, flexible system with plenty of room for exciting moves
Fast and fun, for a game where the rules get out of the way and let you play
An emphasis on difficult moral choices

Cons:
Very little customization
Not a lot of support - yet

The starter set for Dragon Age comes with both books, a map, and three dice. That's everything you need to play characters up to fifth level, and hopefully Green Ronin will come out with set 2 before you get bored with what you have. You can get a pretty good price on the game at Noble Knight Games:
MY, WHAT A LONG LINK YOU HAVE

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Board Game Review - Battle for Slaughter Gulch

I love Deadlands. The setting, specifically, is amazing. You've got the Wild West, which is awesome on its own, but then to really mix it up, there's this supernatural, mad science, pulp monster, impending doom horror thing working. It is, in my opinion, one of the best settings for a game ever created.

I figured I would enjoy a board game based in the Deadlands Weird West. I mean, the card game was excellent, why wouldn't the board game be just as fantastic? But thanks to Twilight Creations, I have the answer to that little brain puzzler. It would not be fantastic if they made an ugly game that was not very fun to play. Which they did.

The disappointment starts early. The game has up to six different factions competing to claim the ghost rock in Slaughter Gulch. The Texas Rangers and the Agency, the mad scientists and the hucksters, even the shamans and the blessed men of the cloth are in on the action. You all descend on this little town and try to recruit the townspeople and control the various buildings.

If that premise sounds like a bad case of deja vu, it's because it was already done to death in Doomtown, the Deadlands CCG. With the entire nation of the United States and monsters of every stripe available, why rehash the same thing we already did once? We could have been monster hunters killing the walking dead, or salt miners evading Mojave rattlers, or Maze pirates swiping cargo. We could have had so many different games, but every time they make a Deadlands game, it's about taking over a town. Even that rather silly discwars-style game they came out with was about controlling a town. That well is dry.

But let's assume you could get past a game premise this dull, ignoring the vast potential for games that actually would have been entertaining, and pretend you just want to talk about how the game plays. It's fairly straight-forward - you have up to six guys, and you have a little mat hidden behind a screen, and you put tokens on the mat that indicate where your guys will go and what they will do.

Here's a second massive failing. Your actions are limited by the tokens you have. So if you're the hucksters, you can only send one guy to fight, even if five guys all go to the same place. Only one guy a turn can run. You can only prospect once a turn. And when you actually build up your whole team and have all six of your goons in town, they won't have anything to do, because you'll send one guy to rob the train and the rest of your team will stand around with their thumbs up their asses, wondering how they're supposed to recruit someone when they've been sent to an empty graveyard.

It gets worse. The rules are about as clear as a puddle of warm mud on many points, and overly complicated in others. We played twice before we figured out when we were supposed to reveal the townspeople cards. For some reason, your handicapped gunfighters can't move from one building to the one next door with a day to travel, possibly because their wheelchairs are powered by bright colors and the only color present in Slaughter Gulch is dirt brown.

That brings me to another problem - this is one ass-ugly game. The art isn't bad, exactly, but I am forced to wonder if it was created by a color-blind artist. Everything is brown. The backs of the cards and the fronts of the cards, the street, the buildings - everything in the game is some shade of turd. And it's not like they saved a bunch of money, either, because there are spots of color here and there, meaning that they had to pay to print full color, despite having a game less colorful than dirty athletic socks.

Slaughter Gulch comes with a bunch of miniatures. These are very small guys, but they are miniatures. Six for each faction, plus twenty townspeople, means you've got a lot of plastic in here. And you know what? They don't stand up. That would be a minor irritation, except that when your minions get shot, you put them on their backs, and since these sons of bitches won't stay on their feet anyway, you're never sure which guys are actually wounded and which are just looking for a lost contact lens.

But the most grievous error, the one unforgivable mistake made by the creators of Battle for Slaughter Gulch, is that it just doesn't feel like Deadlands. Sure, you can learn spells if you're playing the hucksters, but for the most part you travel from building to building (very slowly) and try to get the townspeople to work for you. You don't banish ancient evils, battle demons in the swamps of Louisiana, or face down El Diablo so you can skin him and make a nice jacket. It has all the thrill and fast-paced action of a local campaign to be elected to city council. It could scarcely be less exciting. Sure, there's a hanging judge on one card, and a walking dead on another, but they don't do anything. In fact, you can get them both to join your team - and then they just turn into normal goons. One of the most powerful terrors of the Weird West just hangs up his magical shooting irons and decides to invent gyrocopters.

I tried to like this game, and my wife actually said she thought it was OK. But I have boxes of Deadlands books and Doomtown cards, plus an entire tool chest full of Range Wars, and I am absolutely despondent over the wasted potential. If Twilight Creations had made a cooperative, Arkham Horror-style game, it would have been a blast. If they had made a Railways of the World-style game where the railroads compete to reach the Great Maze, it would have had tons of promise. But they made an ugly game with sorry-ass miniatures, rehashed a dying premise, and sucked all the excitement and thrill out of one of the best fake worlds ever created.

Slaughter Gulch did do one thing, though - it made me want to play Deadlands again. My son will be happy. He's been pestering me to Marshal a game since last spring.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Based on Deadlands

Cons:
Ugly colors
Crappy figures
Confusing rules
Frustrating and repetitive
Boring, rehashed premise we've seen over and over
Doesn't feel anything like Deadlands

If you just feel an overwhelming need to have someone piss all over your fondest gaming memories, go to a Baptist church and tell them you play D&D. The Battle for Slaughter Gulch is too boring.

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Event Review - Christmas Eve

Usually, this time of year brings out the worst in me. I dislike the Christmas season, and my favorite time of year is when the whole damned thing is over. Of course, we still have to wait a week after the Big Holiday so that people can finish returning Rudolph sweaters and hitting the after-Christmas sales, but soon enough, the world will go back to normal and we can quit hearing seasonal favorites twisted into commercial jingles.

But tonight and tomorrow - Christmas Eve and the Big Day - those are awesome. You don't have to fight the crowds and wade through surly shoppers just to pick up a carton of milk. No more parking five miles from the store entrance and chartering a helicopter to buy a pair of jeans. The radio goes back to playing whatever simpering drivel is on most of the year, and they put away the entreaties from overzealous rock stars trying to convince us that they're actually still human by singing about starving children who don't have presents.

Instead, Christmas Eve can be spent with family. You can sit in a living room twinkling with colored lights, eat too much dessert, and put some brandy in the eggnog so you can survive your children. I love to watch It's A Wonderful Life, even though I've seen it like seven times, and then send the kids to bed so I can wrap whatever presents I haven't managed to get under the tree just yet.

This year we spent most of the day cleaning the house and refinishing the dining room set, because we're having a good friend over tomorrow and my drooling mutts are almost as messy as my drooling teenagers. Then we had a lovely dinner we obtained from Kentucky Fried Chicken and watched Love Actually (you can have my man card if you want, but that is a really enjoyable movie, even if it does feature Hugh Grant, and besides, it's very Christmas-y).

This isn't a very exciting event review. Usually I try to review really interesting things that I do, but unfortunately, it's been a while since I did something really interesting. Taking my wife to dinner and browsing the used bookstore are some of my favorite things to do, but they make for dull reading material. For that matter, painting the chairs and sweeping the living room aren't exactly adrenaline-fueled thrill rides.

But not every moment is made for Kodak, and while I may dread the Christmas season like a colonoscopy, I adore Christmas Eve. Christmas is great, too, but there's something about the night before the actual day that I find almost magic. Knowing that the next day will be happy and bright, that my kids will actually smile for several hours at a time, that the house will be clean and the food will be delicious and the company will be outstanding, it all just makes me feel lucky to be alive.

Of course, my kids are going to wake me up far too early (you would think they would grow out of that, but apparently, knowing what they're getting for Christmas is not enough to make them sleep until a reasonable hour. I may need to dose them with absinthe and Vicodin). There's about a 50-50 chance that I'll need three fingers of Irish whiskey before eleven in the morning, and the aftermath of the unwrapping is going to make my living room look like Chernobyl. But it's going to be a good day. I haven't had one go bad yet, and there's no reason to believe tomorrow will be any different.

I guess as my kids get older, I really end up putting a lot more value on happy moments with my family. Soon, they'll be moving out of my house (if I'm lucky), and these times of pure familial bliss will become ever more hard to find. In just a few years, we're not going to need fifty yards of wrapping paper or a ham the size of Wisconsin. The house will finally stay clean for twenty minutes, without dirty socks and homework piling up in the corners, but we also won't have those few seconds at a time when we actually enjoy our kids.

Christmas Eve isn't a very exciting event. It happens to all of us, regardless of whether or not we like it, and even if we're not religious. Hell, even if you don't observe the holiday, you still probably have the night off, and it's a little hard to avoid the music and animated television specials. It's not like you need me to tell you what Christmas Eve is like, because if you're old enough to read this, you're old enough to have lived through a few of your own. So maybe the point of this rambling and poorly executed article is to hope you can all enjoy this time and have as nice a night as I have.

Now I have to go wrap some presents and do a little last-minute tidying, then get to bed so my kids can wake me up early. Merry Christmas to everybody out there in Internet Land, and I hope your holiday is as fantastic as I believe mine will be.

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Board Game Review - Water Lily

DIRECTIONS FOR READING THIS REVIEW

At the end of each paragraph, you should ask, 'What will they think of next?' Asking this question aloud is optional, but if you do actually verbalize the question, you should do it in a low mutter, possibly while shaking your head in disbelief.

REVIEW STARTS NOW

In the world of board games, we've used just about anything as an excuse to make a game. Delivering the mail? Sure! Farming? Of course! Storing things? Obviously! So it should really come as no surprise when we see a game where frogs race across a pond for the right to marry the frog princesses.

(Reminder: this is where you ask, 'what will they think of next?')

In Water Lily, each player plays a team of four frogs who leap from lily pad to lily pad, bouncing off each others' heads to get extra distance. And in this race, you don't want to come in first, because you get more points for fourth place.

(That's your cue.)

To add a little confusion and delight to this highly improbable race, players will not know which color frogs the other players are representing. So not only are you trying to secure fourth place with your amphibious racers, but you are actually trying to make everyone else come in first.

(Yes. Again.)

The frogs are on wooden discs, and they move faster or slower depending entirely on how many frogs are underneath them. It behooves you to make frog piles, not only because then the frogs in question can move faster, but because the frogs underneath are stuck until your web-footed suitor gets his fat ass off their heads.

(You get the idea. You can take it from here.)

Apparently, there's already too much information available to the players of this game. You know who you are, and you know where you are, so to make things confusing for you, the game actually hides the frogs who are winning. The box has a plastic insert with slides on it, and you put the bottom next to the top with the board covering both, and when a frog finishes the race, he slides into the darkness. So unless you have a much better memory than I do, you won't even know for sure whether you just score fourth place (big points) or fifth place (no points at all). Not only do you not know who your opponents are playing, but you don't even know who's winning! Genius!

The art that goes along with this crazy, exceptionally unlikely game is absolutely gorgeous. The frogs painted on the wooden discs are nice, but the art on the outside of the box (which you see while you play because the whole game is propped up on top of the box) is absolutely brilliant. The board with the lily pads looks like a lovely place to take a dip, if you're a frog, and the frogs on the cover are painted in the same beautiful and evocative style as the rest of the game. They even have funny little hats, because these are apparently medieval frogs.

(OK, you can stop now. Wallow in the incredulity for a while.)

With production values this high, and a game that must have cost a mint to make, it's a shame that the game isn't more fun. It works fine, I suppose, but I'll be damned if we could figure out a strategy to it. The best thing you can do for yourself is remember how many frogs are in each hidden slot, because any kind of planning is nearly worthless. Every clever plot I hatched to foil my opponents or secure my early success was an abject failure, and the one time I did well, I threw caution to the wind and just moved my frogs willy-nilly.

However, if you're looking for a game that plays well with children, boy, is this a big winner. Kids will love the colorful art and the chunky wooden pawns. And since they can put even less planning into this than they do into their next bed-wetting, they can actually have a shot at beating ol' Dad! It's not luck, exactly, because there are no dice or cards. It's more like you're completely at the mercy of everyone else at the table, and you can't possibly plan for every eventuality. Simply rushing the finish line with everything you've got is actually a viable strategy, which means just about every move will be pretty damned obvious, unless it's random and pointless.

I would also like to have a lengthy conversation with the guy who thought it was a good idea to hide the winning frogs. It's bad enough that you barely have any control over when you finish the race, but not knowing where you want to go makes this game an exercise in frustration. I don't feel like I'm doing anything meaningful, beyond providing entertainment for my children when I drop a frog into a chute and he sticks out the top, because I've apparently secured a place so far back in the race that most of the nubile girl frogs have already been married and are heading to Hawaii for their honeymoons (maybe that could be the next theme - a game for adults where you figure out how the newlywed pond-hoppers use their giant hotel beds. If someone can make Water Lily, they could make the Newlywed Frog Honeymoon game).

I can't entirely hate Water Lily, though, because my daughter loved it. It helps that she won twice, but she would have had fun even if she had lost. She liked the art and the chunky discs, and since it took her about 30 seconds to understand the rules, she was able to have fun bouncing off the other frogs and disappearing into the chutes. This game has a ton of appeal for youngsters, and while Mom and Dad may get tired of it after a couple runs, you can finish in ten minutes. So quit your whining and play a game with your kid, already.

Because the next game you play might be about ambiguously gay grasshoppers who collect seashells to make into drag queen gowns.

(It might be OK to ask it just one more time.)

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Spectacular art
Easy rules make this a good game for kids
Seriously impressive production
Over in ten minutes

Cons:
If there's a strategy to be had, we couldn't tell

Water Lily might be a rather ridiculous game for adults, but it could be a blast to play with younger kids. Noble Knight Games has it:
BUY THE GAME

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Card Game Review - A Lone Banner

World peace is highly overrated. I know it's a lofty goal, and everyone thinks it would be great. Big philanthropists like Bill Gates and Bono think it would be awesome. They even write songs about it, like where they wish us all peace on Earth and goodwill towards men, or when a bunch of Europop assholes tell us that it never snows in Africa (apparently Kilimanjaro is covered in dried wildebeast dung that only looks like snow from a distance). But I think world peace would be boring.

Maybe I'm just greedy and narrow-minded, but if we had world peace, what would we make games about? I'll tell you one thing, all the games would be made in Germany and feature such exciting pastimes as ironing clothes and storing unwanted bean sprouts. Maybe I'm a Bond villain just for saying it, but when I play a game, I want a little unwarranted bloodshed.

Which is why I like A Lone Banner. In this quick, smart game from Small Box Games, you're trying to take over the world in a massive military rumble. You get to destroy your enemies, take over entire continents, and throw the unpopular kids in the dumpster. It's fun and violent and easy to play, all of which makes it a big winner for me.

The game consists essentially of a bunch of region cards and a pile of dice. Each player gets a set of dice in his own color, which will be his troops. You roll your dice to see how strong your troops will be this turn, then send them out to conquer the planet. Then other people send troops, and they try to beat your troops so they can claim the regions and send your guys home in a black plastic trash bag.

One thing that really works for A Lone Banner is the way turns work. You resolve any fights involving your troops at the beginning of the turn, and then send out troops at the end, so that you generally get an entire loop around the table before you actually find out if you're going to win. If you're the first to announce a claim for some foreign soil, you might find that everyone else fights you for it just because you're there. On the other hand, if you go after territories that nobody wants, there's a decent chance that you can take them without too much of a fight.

The first time I read through the rules, though, I hit a snag that caused me some concern. Depending on what you roll with your troop dice, you might be able to use some Special Abilities. I've played enough Small Box Games to know that Special Abilities are more likely to add confusion and headache than versatility and excitement. But when you see how easy these abilities work, they become an asset, not a liability. If you roll doubles, you can place a powerhouse of overwhelming troop force. Roll a straight, and you can topple a government from the inside, claiming land without even having to send in the marines. I'm pretty sure that's how we wound up with Arkansas.

There's an indecent amount of luck in A Lone Banner, and that's as it should be. You roll to see how strong your armies will be, then you roll again to see if they lose even though they're the meanest motor scooters in Central Australia. It's entirely possible for one player to wind up crippled by his dice, never able to gain more than two pieces of South America while another player just keeps rolling straights and grabbing all the land with CIA-funded internal upsets, until Ollie North comes along and starts shredding every document with Reagan's name on it, including his driver's license. Then Reagan forgets he ever knew how to drive.

So let's face it, world peace might be great for campfire sing-alongs and infant mortality rates, but it would make for boring games. A Lone Banner shows us just how much fun you can have if you're willing to stop pretending we're all peacenik hippies, and just blow something up. The game is easy to learn, quick to play, and happens fast enough that even if you get stomped one turn, it's only going to be a minute or two before you get another chance to run amok like Napoleon with a nuclear arsenal. This is war, and it's fun.

Summary

3-4 players

Pros:
Easy on the eyes
Simple rules with just enough depth to make it interesting
Light-speed game play, so you're never bored waiting for your turn
Fun, smart and bloody

Cons:
Lots of die-rolling (only bad if you hate games with luck)

A Lone Banner is a very fun game that you can learn in five minutes and play in half an hour. Run over to Small Box Games and get yourself a copy:
http://www.smallboxgames.com/alonebanner.html

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Quick Question

Last month, I pointed out the ads on the side of the page over there. There's the Dogstar Games ad and the Noble Knight Games ad, both for retailers who support Drake's Flames with review product. And then underneath those, there's my experiment ad, the Project Wonderful box where people put in bids and it goes to the highest bidder (you can see that right now, I make less than a nickel a day).

But I was looking at the bids that advertisers have put on that ad box, and some are pretty cool. Like there's Distant Soil, a trippy sci-fi webcomic about a psychic girl whose powers, it turns out, are because she's part alien, and then there are also hot girl aliens who are into some really twisted S&M. One of the ads is for a place that makes steampunk accessories, like hats with gyroscopes and goggles with extra lenses. My favorite is probably the Roast My Weenie guy, who makes metal doohickeys that look like a man with a huge johnson, and you stick a hot dog on his man-rod so that it doesn't burn while you cook it on the grill.

The thing is, I only have the one ad box, so you'll only ever see the top bidder. That means you don't get to see the guy who Photoshops dog heads onto sparrows, or the non sequitur brilliance of Buttersafe, or the time-sink online tactical games that say you can play for free and then beg you for money every five minutes.

So here's the quick question that turned out to not be so quick - how do you feel about another ad box? I hate going to a blog and seeing a page full of so many ads that I can't figure out what the site is about, but I also don't mind a couple cool ad boxes, especially if they're actually good for something. I'll still be monitoring and personally approving every ad that pops up there, so it's not like I'm going to be allowing flashing orange annoyance ads or work-from-home scams. Another ad box isn't going to make me more than a penny or two a day, so I don't give a flying rat's ass about the cash. I just think there might be some cool stuff out there.

Let me know what you think. I'm willing to completely bend to peer pressure.

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