RPG Review - Deadlands Reloaded

It's funny, for a guy that grew up playing roleplaying games and amassing a considerable collection of oddly shaped dice, I actually enjoy a very small number of roleplaying games. Some are too much work, and others don’t have enough meat on their bones. Some are just board games with options, and others have so much drama and baggage that they should be played on a headshrinker’s couch. Some have convoluted and twisted rules that try too hard to fit onto the setting, and most make almost no effort to make rules that fit the world you’re supposed to be visiting. And of course, whole bunches of them are just stupid (no offense to anyone who actually really loved RIFTS).

That leaves me with a good-sized pile of games that I tolerate, a few I enjoy, one or two that I really love, and just one that I will play nearly any time I have the chance. That one game is Deadlands. Between 1996 and 2001, I procured every book ever published for classic Deadlands, and didn’t stop buying them until they started making d20 and GURPS crossovers. Then I cried a little (but only on the inside), because making a d20 version of Deadlands is an affront to all that is holy.

Deadlands is a brilliant mix of dark and campy, horror and sci-fi, monsters and cowboys and steam-powered robots. It’s a game where your heroes can get stronger and faster, but they can also lose limbs and develop debilitating speech impediments. It gives me everything I want, sacrificing nothing to deliver great stories, exciting scenes of derring-do, and more flavor than a Kansas City barbecue joint.

If I had one beef with classic Deadlands, however, it was that the game tended to drag if you fought more than one bad guy at a time. I recall one battle against mud creatures that slowed so badly, I would have sworn the slop critters had left the game and were actually in our living room, making every turn take three times longer than it should. I loved the game, but I regularly found myself cheating to make stuff happen faster (I ran the game, so I could fudge a die roll now and then and just say, ‘wow, you got him in one shot!’)

I was hopeful when I decided to check out Deadlands Reloaded. It’s the same setting I know and love, but now it uses Savage Worlds, which runs like a road runner on amphetamines compared to classic Deadlands. On the other hand, I was worried that trimming down the rules meant I was going to lose a lot of the flavor that made Deadlands a wonderful marriage of setting and rules.

It turns out, I had nothing to worry about. For starters, Deadlands Reloaded dumps a few of the problems I have with Savage Worlds and goes back to its roots. There are no ‘bennies’, which I feel compelled to put in quotes because I’m embarrassed to be typing the word at all. They’ve been replaced with fate chips, which is as it should be, because fate chips are Old West, and ‘bennies’ are ugly guys who mop up after wild nights at the gay bar.

I did kind of like how classic Deadlands gave each player a roll at the beginning of each round, and then you got cards based on how well you rolled. So if you had a very high Quickness, you were likely to get to act many times in a round, and if you were slower than Christmas, you got to go once. However, this was also the main reason classic Deadlands is so slow, and so when Savage Worlds replaces it with just dealing out a single card to each player, I can see why that happened. I don’t like that my lightning-fast gunslinger has to count on getting lucky if he wants to shoot before the bad guy can pull a weapon, but on the other hand, there are edges he can take to make sure he gets a good draw. It’s not quite as slick as the original, but it gets the job done.

Deadlands Reloaded also does away with many of the cool spells, and kind of lumps them all in together. I actually really liked many of the hexes, miracles and other arcane madness, and don’t really like that mad scientists just build devices that cast spells. That seems like too great an effort to make everything work the same, and I don’t want everything to work the same. I want the hucksters to throw a soul blast while the mad scientist calibrates his fluctuating defrabinator and the preacher sings Glory Hallelujah while swinging a hickory stick and firing a righteous shotgun. That still happens in Reloaded, but now it all basically works the same way. And that’s not as much fun.

Anyone who knows classic Deadlands knows how every different character type had his own book, from the hucksters and voodoo priests to the Texas Rangers and the walking dead known as harrowed. Each book was chock-full of specialized powers, arcane knowledge and secret handshakes. Half the fun of taking one of those specialized characters was finally being allowed to read through the book and find out what you had been missing. Unfortunately, Reloaded distills all those crazy archetypes into a few pages in the player’s book, which again, is not as much fun.

Ironically, all those things I loved about classic Deadlands were also its biggest failings. Information overload became almost impossible to manage. When I had four players, and they were a huckster, a preacher, a mad scientist and a harrowed, I had to know where to find rules in almost 400 pages of books. After a while, it became a running gag – ‘a shaman, a nun and a harrowed walk into a bar. Hold on while I look that up.’

Deadlands Reloaded may have cut a lot of the stuff I loved about classic Deadlands, but at the same time, it trimmed the fat until Deadlands is a lean, mean, Old West horror machine. I can run a zombie invasion with a terrified town and a posse of deputies in half the time it used to take me to fight two drunks in a saloon. When a player asks me how long it will take to climb under the burning wreckage, I can tell him so fast, I still have time to send a trio of angry prairie ticks to rip off his face when he’s stuck under a fallen rafter. I don’t have to work anywhere near as hard I used to, and that makes running Deadlands a lot more fun.

I wouldn’t say that Deadlands Reloaded is the perfect replacement for classic Deadlands. I like the flexibility of the old system, and the way everything about the game oozed Weird West. You could meet Doc Holliday, get in a shootout with the Clantons, then have some nightwalking demon scare you so bad you soiled yourself. You can still do that in Deadlands Reloaded, though, and now those two shootouts won't take the better part of three hours. Now you can kill Ike, run from the manitou, find its weakness, change into clean drawers, and go back to bury the bastard before everyone gets tired of asking if it's their turn yet.

I was on the fence about whether I liked the new Deadlands better than the old, to be honest, until I considered a few things. First, those long fights can really suck the fun out of a game night. Second, there's nothing stopping me from adding some of my favorite parts back into the game. Third, none of my current group of players made characters with any kind of supernatural ability, so until somebody croaks (and possibly comes back), I don't have to worry about asking anyone to build poker hands to throw unholy death at their foes. Finally, the Pinnacle website has a PDF specifically made for converting old Deadlands stats into Savage Worlds - and that means I can still use the bookshelf full of classic books.

And I guess that brings me to my final conclusion. Deadlands is my favorite RPG ever - and I like Deadlands Reloaded better.

Summary

Pros:
Fast and lean
Rules are easy to learn and easy to remember
All the flavor, half the calories

Cons:
Not really all the flavor. I lied about that part to make a diet food joke.

Hey! Guess who has Deadlands Books! Yep, Noble Knight Games!
FILL YER HAND, AMIGO

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Card Game Review - Nightfall

Groff Deathbloodfang, squire of East L.A. and fire marshal of the apocalypse, spread his leathery vampire wings and swooped down out of the night. His prey was below him, hot blood filling his nostrils like the cream in a chocolate eclair. He dove down, down, down, down, down, down and one more time down, claws extended to pluck his dinner out of the inky blackness and devour the human's terror. He was a wolf on wings, a wolverine in a hang glider, a badger on roller skates.

At the very last possible second, Groff's prey turned and looked up at him, and a high-powered rifle exploded in an orgasm of gunsmoke and muzzle suppression. Groff's last thought before the bullet tore into his face and sent his brains flying out the back of his head like a water ballon filled with orange marmalade was, 'son of a bi-' He wasn't able to finish the thought, because he died halfway through 'bitch.'

Derek Coolaselvis smiled grimly. 'You won't hunt in my town again,' he said as he lowered his rifle and wiped vampire brains off his cardigan. Then a werewolf ate him.

The unending night had consumed another victim. Well, two victims, if you count the vampire, but he was a bad guy, so he's not so much a victim as a statistic. The werewolf had a little indigestion, too. So maybe three.

If you play Nightfall, you too can join in the brooding darkness where the sun never comes up and humans are walking snack cakes. Vampires fight werewolves, and they both fight humans, and all this drama and violence and sadness and angst is played out in the only feasible way it could ever work - as a deckbuilding game.

Nightfall brings to your table the epic struggle between vampires and werewolves, with humans caught in the middle, by letting you buy cards that represent vampires and werewolves and sometimes humans who are caught in the middle. You can also buy actions that simply do what the bestial animal inside every immortal demon longs to do - hurt your friends. Only you do it with cards, which is not quite as dark, unless you're giving them paper cuts or throwing the cards at them really hard. Then it's as twisted and evil as the soul of the abominations hunting through the neverending night, where streetlights cast watery shadows and nobody anywhere has a tan.

When your turn arrives in this abyss of hopelessness and long black leather coats, you will have the chance to unleash your minions so that they can ravage your opponents in a festival of blood-soaked anarchy and freeform dance. But beware, because each of your minions and actions shows colored moons, and if your opponents have matching colored moons, they can play on your turn. They can also steal your Lucky Charms. Then not only will their actions resolve before yours, possibly ripping out your spleen and eating it with fava beans and a glass of Not-Very-Sunny Delite, but you will not have any breakfast cereal.

Carefully selecting your minions and special actions is paramount to survival in the dark world of Nightfall, where policemen carry loaded pastrami sandwiches and every action could be their last, especially if they carry their sandwiches past werewolves who really like pastrami. It's important that you choose actions that you can chain together, because you may be able to play five cards when everyone else is playing one or two. Of course, it's also nice if the cards you choose actually work well together. It's not as helpful as you might imagine to destroy a summoned minion if you're the only stupid vampire lord with any minions summoned. Then you kill your own guys and your friends laugh at you, and in a fit of hideous anger you rip off your shirt and feel very bad about yourself.

As with any game where the goal is the complete decimation of your foes and the eventual consumption of their internal organs in a nice cobb salad, the hunters in the darkness win by giving more wounds than they receive. To represent this tragic and violent goal, Nightfall uses the one thing at which it excels - cards. When Bad Fart and Cheese Toe, your werewolf aggressors, rip through your opponent's meager defenses and savage his leader with their very scary claws and razor-sharp teeth, that leader will have to add wound cards to his deck, which will then take up space and irritate him to no end as he receives hand after hand with a bunch of cards that aren't good for anything.

Ultimately, nothing can adequately express the horror and misery of unending night, unless that something is black eyeshadow and false fangs that make you talk with a lisp. No card game could ever really convey the darkness in your soul. Only by wearing fingerless gloves and dying your hair, and then reading fan fiction you found on a Masquerade website, can you truly understand the powerful urges of the monstrous rulers of the night. And when I say all that, I mean the theme in Nightfall is almost as weak as the theme in Dominion, but with better art.

However, no matter how easily you rest in your comfortable chair, gathered around the dinner table as you hold your cards close and pretend to be from Transylvania, nothing can prepare you for how damned much fun it is to play Nightfall. It will hurt your head, though it will hurt considerably less than if a vampire were to really eat your face. Carefully buying the right cards and playing them in swift, damning moves destined to wreak havoc on your foes will aid you in your quest for bloody victory. But buying the wrong cards and playing like a chump human will have you reeling from the constant stream of painful blows to the face that your opponents will heap upon you.

So many things about Nightfall make it one of the best deckbuilding games you can encounter. A redraw for wound cards provides an edge you might need if you are losing badly. Personal archives of cards that only you can buy force you to form an overall strategy from the very outset of the game. A beginning deck erodes as you play, forcing you to buy wisely before your resources are depleted and the other werewolves all pull your underpants up over your head and give you a nightmare of a wedgie. The greatest feature of the game is the chain, where you plot and scheme to take advantage of the weaknesses of your enemies while building towering attacks and unbeatable defenses. In other words, Nightfall is a very, very good game.

And if you don't buy Nightfall, Goat Raper the werewolf will come to your house in the middle of the night and run off with your Magic cards. Then all you will have left is the black of your soul and your red-tinted contact lenses.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:

A deckbuilder that really lets you lay into your opponents with your bloody talons of doom

The chaining card play makes this a thinking-vampire's game

Never any morose pauses, because you could play on your opponent's turn (could be a con if you need to touch up your white foundation)

Neat re-draw rule helps players who are losing to get back in the game

Excellent depth and plenty of room to grow

I totally dig the art

Cons:

Theme is a little weak, but it gets the job done

Nightfall kicks ass. If you like deckbuilding games at all, you should check it out. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's out yet. That sucks for you.

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Worm Game Review - Worm Up!

One day, aliens are going to come to the planet long after we've all died out. They'll be exploring the ruined husk of our planet, and using the odds and ends they can find to determine what kind of society we had. If they find Worm Up, they will assume that we were pretty darn stupid.

Worm Up is another in a long line of reprints coming out of Gryphon Games. In this latest rehash, players will partake in a particularly asinine activity - they will race worms. When the aliens see this game, they will probably deduce that humanity died out because neither our brains nor our bodies moved very fast, and so we were actually capable of being entertained by worm races.

Each player's worm is made up of a bunch of wooden balls, only they're chopped in half. These half-globes all sit in a line that you tell people is a worm, even though you know they're actually just a pile of wood buttons laid out in a line.

To move your worm, you bid a movement number, which you indicate by turning a humongous die with numbers on it. If someone else bids your number, then you don't do a damned thing. If you're the only one bidding your number, you get to take the those wooden beads from the ass end of your worm and put them in front of his head. That's how worms move, too - they just suck their butts up through their faces. It's quite fascinating, or it would be, if it actually happened that way.

If this were one of those reviews where I just tell you the rules, I would be done now, because that really is most of the rules. Fortunately for you, that's not all I do here. For one thing, I haven't made any boob jokes yet, so I need to work those in somewhere. I also haven't reached the part of this review where I tell you that I actually really liked Worm Up.

OK, yes, the game is stupid. It takes almost a whole minute to set up, then you can finish in ten more minutes, then you sweep everything into the box and you're done putting it away. There aren't very many decisions to make, outside trying to second-guess your opponents. But even without a lot of flash, or excruciating decisions, Worm Up is cute and a lot of fun. And that's not something you can say about a lot of games (which makes me wonder why those other games get made in the first place).

When you think you're the smart one and you bid the X, and then someone else does, too, you're both going to slap your foreheads and groan (make sure you slap your own forehead, and not the forehead of the other guy. This is a pretty important consideration). When you get one turn where you're leading the pack, you might twist your worm so he's cutting off all your opponents and forcing them to swing wide. You can move the finish line to get it closer to your worm. You can laugh at the light silliness of the game, and then laugh at yourself for playing it.

I was dreading Worm Up when I broke it out. Like the alien archeologists, I was sure the game was dumber than a bag of hammers. I could only surmise that babbling idiots were responsible for its creation, and that someone was playing a joke on me. But the rules and pieces don't show the goofy charm of Worm Up. To understand how much fun you can have with a ten-minute game about racing worms, you really have to try it.

If the aliens try it, they're going to decide we knew how to have fun. But they will still think we were stupid for playing a game with wooden nipples.

Summary

3-5 players

Pros:

Incredibly quick to set up and play

Fun for all ages

Light and silly and charming

Cons:

Kind of dumb

You can get yourself a copy of Worm Up at Noble Knight Games, and then you can also feel stupid while you have a good time:

GET WORMS

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Board Game Review - Earth Reborn

A couple weeks ago, I heard some Metallica on the radio. Then I got to work and someone mentioned Zombieland, and since I was already humming Whiskey in the Jar in my head, I leapt to For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I had a kind of shot of inspiration. And here it is:

We need some heavy metal board games.

It's not like there have been no solid attempts at making a metal game. Space Hulk should have been pretty hardcore, but while it is awesome, it's not quite loud and raw enough to go with a little rowdy Quiet Riot. It's fun, but it has a little too much polish to be metal. Space Hulk is more like the kind of music young people play at raves while they ingest ecstasy and have sex with strangers. The same can be said of a lot of other games with lots of violence but streamlined rules - they start out metal, but then they get all cleaned up and corporate.

The very next day, still pondering a kick-ass headbanger board game, Earth Reborn showed up at my house. It was like fate was in my head, guiding me to the answer I had silently asked. No, not that question. I still haven't heard back on that one, but I have a tarp and a shovel in the back of my truck, just in case.

I'm not sure it was intentional, but it sure looks to me like when Cristophe Boelinger was making Earth Reborn, he was staring at an Iron Maiden poster and listening to Sabbath. I'll run down a few elements, to illustrate my point.

1) Raw and unpolished
2) Loud and fast and violent
3) Zombies and machine guns
4) A guy with a giant saw blade permanently attached to his arm

Add it up, you get headbanging metal. You also get Earth Reborn, the most thrashing, hardcore, flat-out heavy metal game I've ever played.

The first indication that Earth Reborn is a heavy metal game is the post-apocalyptic setting. This isn't just post-nuclear armageddon. In Earth Reborn, China and the US are threatened by Greenpiece (yeah, I spelled it right), and so everyone builds underground vaults and hides for five hundred years. The NORAD guys get all paranoid and military, and while they build mechs and learn how to shoot heavy weapons, the people living underneath Salem learn how to make zombies. So now you've got heavy machine guns and robots fighting creepy guys who make zombies in an irradiated wasteland. And just in case you've been listening to Michael Bolton and Air Supply for the last ten years, that is heavy metal.

Of course, when guys in powered armor shoot vicious aliens in a derelict pile of space junk, that's also pretty metal, so there has to be more to Earth Reborn to make it truly metal - and there is. For starters, look at the art. Zombies with glass tubes attached to their heads to give them superhuman intelligence. Top-heavy women with guns nearly as big as their boobs. Guns and claws and kevlar and night-vision goggles. The illustrations in Earth Reborn look like they could have been taken directly from a Judas Priest album cover.

And then we get to the game, and if we weren't sure if this was heavy metal before now, we are now. In an age of gaming where we've become used to universal resolution, elegant rules and streamlined mechanics, the insane variety of things you can do in Earth Reborn is like a Thin Lizzy guitar solo to the brain.

Forget about having some carefully worded special ability on a character card that lets you use one particular guy in one particular way. Screw that - send your wounded gunfighter to the infirmary to heal up, and drop a mine on the way to discourage pursuit, then send the crazy scientist to fill up his syringe in the chem lab before he runs to the bathroom to drop a deuce (I didn't make that up - it's in the game). You'll roll a bunch of dice - the more the merrier - and you'll do anything from firing guns or stabbing people in the gizzards to activating the radio scrambler or torturing a captured opponent. Search for enemy plans in their stronghold. Blow up the command room. There are so many things you can do in Earth Reborn that you'll play dozens of times and still never try everything. And most importantly, not one of those things is neat and tidy and streamlined. They do all make sense, though. They're just not so abstracted that you're placing a clue token and acting like that means you bribed a gate guard.

Most of all, Earth Reborn is like heavy metal because it is fast, violent and fun as hell. There are rules for playing with three or four, but mostly you'll be across the table from one guy, who will be doing everything in his power to kill the living and raise the dead, and it will be awesome. I can't remember a time when I had this much fun playing a two-player face-off shoot-em-up game. It's just plain incredible.

But like any good heavy metal band, Earth Reborn is not perfect. In fact, the list of flaws may threaten to drive off people who would otherwise become huge fans. For example, the graphic designer for this game never even heard the word 'restraint.' There are icons everywhere. garish colors, sloppy lines, confusing backgrounds, and endless arrays of needless Photoshop layer effects. If Pantera is supposed to make your ears bleed, Earth Reborn targets your eyes. The rules and character cards are painfully cluttered and sloppy.

I could easily forgive the slop on the cards and rules if not for the fact that it flows over to the room tiles. You've got this infinitely versatile building set to make all different kinds of interesting locations, but they're hideous. I know it's the apocalypse and all, but would it kill you to use a bright color? It's been 500 years since the bomb. Could we maybe put in a request to get the grass green instead of gray?

It's bad enough the colors are a mess, but when they make it harder to play, that's a serious problem. I don't know how many times I plotted an entire move, shot at a guy, and ran off to make my escape - only to run smack into a wall that I didn't see because it was the same color as the floor. The artist clearly knew how to use Photoshop. Would it be too much to ask that he learn how to adjust the contrast?

The last thing that is going to intimidate anyone who is not really committed to Earth Reborn is the length of the learning curve. A book of tutorial scenarios teaches you the game, one scenario at a time. The first scenario teaches you about moving and close combat - and when that's all you can do, Earth Reborn is stupid. Then you get to do running and stabbing, but with interrupts - and it's still stupid. Add in guns, and you've got some great opportunities for covering fire and suppression and other cool violence, but you still can't use the mission cards or the surveillance room. In fact, you have to play five or six times before the game really gets good, which means some seriously lame games early on.

But here's the good news - those downsides are lame excuses for nancy boys who can't take the heat. The visual assault of the cards actually makes them easier to play. After you set up a couple times, you'll remember where the doors are. And once you work through three or four of the scenarios, you'll start to realize that you're playing a piece of two-player genius that will rock your face off like Queensryche opening for Motorhead.

If you're a fan of two-player gridded miniatures games, Earth Reborn should be at the tippy top of your wish list. It's crazy amounts of wild fun, with so much flexibility and brilliance that even if you lose every game, you'll have fun. If there's another reason to play games besides having a good time, I don't ever want to know about it.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Fast and fun and violent
Wacky and exciting and over-the-top
If Megadeth and Black Sabbath collaborated on a board game, this would be it

Cons:
Rookie design mistakes
Wicked learning curve

Noble Knight Games has Earth Reborn for a pretty good discount. If you like games where you shoot zombies and play with cool toys, you really ought to pick this up.

SHOOT SOME ZOMBIES

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Expansion Review - Railways of England (and Wales)

It's been a while since I was able to get Railways of the World to the table. Until a few weeks ago, it had been more than a year since I broke it out and played my favorite train game. Four days of ice-covered roads and a mandated vacation, however, gave me boatloads of time to spend with my family, whether or not I wanted it. So to kill time while we shivered in our poorly insulated house and waited for the pipes to thaw so I could crawl around under my house and fix the leaks while lying in frozen mud, we broke out the trains.

And when we did, I realized that I have owned Railways of England and Wales for a year and a half and never actually wrote the review. It wasn't because I didn't want to review the damned thing, because I did. But there are two sets of rules in the box, and one of them was so completely foreign to anything I understood at the time I first got it that I gave up and put it away, then forgot it was there.

I sure am glad I dug it out again. Going over the rules again, I realized that the reason I didn't understand the advanced game was because I couldn't wrap my head around a railroad game where you didn't actually own the railroads. But after I forced myself through Baltimore & Ohio, I was embarrassed that I was ever confused by the advanced version of England and Wales. Compared to Baltimore & Ohio, England and Wales is a breeze.

The theory is essentially the same. There are a bunch of train companies, and you buy stock in them. The guy with the most stock in one company decides what that railroad does, and the railroads pay dividends to the shareholders if they make enough money. So you need the railroads to make a lot of money, so that their stock rises and they give you a bunch of money. You win by being the richest investor, so having lots of expensive stock at the end of the game (especially if you bought it on the cheap) is, you know, good.

It's almost funny to me now that I actually gave Baltimore & Ohio a positive review. If I had just grown a pair and powered through the rules for England and Wales, I would have realized what a tweaky mess Baltimore & Ohio really is. The two games have a ton in common, enough that if you're going to own one, there's not much reason to own the other. And in this case, I'll be dumping my copy of Baltimore & Ohio as quick as I can. Railways of England and Wales is so far superior that there will never be a reason to play Baltimore & Ohio again. Like if you've only ever had one girl in your whole life, and then she dumps you and you wind up with some bedroom freak who reinvents your entire sex life, and you wonder why you thought that other chick was so hot when all she ever did was lay there. I'm not saying that either game is like sex, of course. And there is absolutely no good reason to lube your plastic trains, you sick bastard.

The concept of owning stock and controlling railroads with the end goal of getting rich is not exactly innovative. A bunch of those 18XX games do exactly that, as do England and Wales and Baltimore & Ohio. However, where Baltimore & Ohio is so overrun by mathematical minutiae that every player has to have a calculator (this is literal - every player will need their own calculator. It helps if you can program if for sine curves), England & Wales distills the math down to sheer simplicity while maintaining every bit of the strategy and planning required to excel at either game.

Another feature that ruins Baltimore & Ohio is needless historical accuracy. I can make plenty of tactical decisions and long-term plans simply by having varying starting values for stock prices. I don't need to be forced to run the cast of Jersey Shore to Buffalo just to be reminded that this is how it happened in real life (but with different stupid people, obviously). I'm all for granting a little historical feel to a game in the name of playing out a theme, but when it interferes with the game play, I just don't see the point.

Need another reason that England and Wales beats the balls off Baltimore & Ohio? How about the fact that it plays in half the time. You can have very nearly the exact same experience, but finish before your wife goes to bed, so you can still have time to kick your friends out of the house and maybe get a little before she calls it a night. Would you rather have a great game, or a great game and then sex? Don't answer that. I do not want to know.

One final improvement in England and Wales is that the map is a lot smaller. Even with just three players, you're going to run into each other by the end of the first turn. And then you're going to be scheming and plotting and blocking and competing right up until the end of the game. Make a good move early on, and it could pay off for the entire game. Screw the pooch right out of the gate, on the other hand, and there's still a little time to catch up.

So now that I've spent this much time singing about why England and Wales is so awesome, it may surprise you when I say that I'll probably stick with the normal game. The advanced game really is fun, but I like owning my railroad. I am pretty good at the standard rules, and I really like the England and Wales map. It's perfect for three players, with enough chances to get bare-knuckles with your opponents, and still enough room to spread out a little. For playing with my wife and daughter, England and Wales is just about ideal. It has that sweet spot of interaction without excessive brutality, and all the stuff I enjoy about Railways in general, like jockeying for cards and racing to complete rail lines and rebuilding cities so the game can go just a couple more turns.

If you enjoy Railways of the World, you're really going to like England and Wales. If you enjoy Baltimore & Ohio or some of those 18XX games, but don't like having to break out a laptop just to track dividend splits, England and Wales will totally be your cup of tea. But if you like a really small map, you can get Mexico in the base game, and if you like a really huge map, you can use Eastern or Western US. England and Wales is perfect for me, and my favorite Railways expansion so far. It works for me without making me do too much work.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:

Map is just the right size for three

Advanced game kicks Baltimore & Ohio in the balls and steals its lunch money

Everything I like about the Railways games, in a size and location that is perfect for my family

Pick the game you want to play - both are a blast, so play the one you like

Cons:

Still that stupid thing where you can't tell the blue from the purple

Simplified, which you may not like if you're a math nerd and a history dweeb

Noble Knight Games has a great deal on Railways of England and Wales. If you like Railways of the World and want to try something new and different, get it here, and save some money on it:

JUMP THE POND

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Expansion Review - Summoner Wars Reinforcements

One of the very few downsides to being a game reviewer is that I don't get to play the games that I really like as much as I want. If I have a spare night to play a game (and I'm not playing 500), I usually have to play something so I can write about it. This means that as much as I would love to break out some old favorites, I have to devote myself to playing crappy Reiner reprints far more than is pleasurable (of course, when it comes to a crappy Reiner reprint, one play is too many).

While there are many games I would play a lot more if I had time, one of the most painful casualties of my mandated short attention span is Summoner Wars. I just plain love this game. It's quick to set up, quick to play, and quick to put away again. It's brilliantly balanced and deep in strategy and tactical plays. There's a lot of careful gambling and risky play. Sometimes everything comes together and you pull off an amazing coup at the last minute, and sometimes you're just plan screwed. However it goes, it's always fun.

But after a while, it can get a little repetitive. You might be playing the phoenix elves against the goblins and wishing you could swarm a little better, or wishing you could smash walls with a bit more reliability, or otherwise just want to change things up from time to time. And that's where the reinforcements come in.

There are two packs of reinforcements, one for each of the base sets you can get. One pack has replacements for the burny elves and the freezy orcs, and the other is for the dwarves and goblins. Both packs also include mercenaries, which can be added to your deck for even more variety. The reason for all these extra cards is so that you can customize your deck - your opponent can't really counter-draft against your orcs any more because you may not even have ranged units in there, and he can't count on you spawning a horde of weak-ass goblins that he can tear up like wet toilet paper. You can try different strategies than you've used in the past, because the new units give you all new ways to get your head chopped off and stuffed up your ass.

The additional elf and orc cards are very interesting. My favorite new tundra orc is a champion who makes your freeze cards more expensive to thaw, which can give you a huge advantage if you time it right. The elves have some new commons called fire beasts, and they're incredibly awesome, but frighteningly expensive. If the cost is scaring you off, though, you can also find the elf chick who brings them in cheaper, and who can still hold her own in a brawl.

On the other hand, maybe you just want to pull out a little flame-based horde to rush the field. In this case, you can add a bunch of fencers to your elf deck, and summon them for free. And bad news for the enemy who attacks and misses, because he gets to try out his own weapon as a suppository.

The dwarves were already pretty decent at crushing walls, thanks to some wicked event cards and some irritating engineers, but with the addition of the ballista, now they're flat-out frightening at it. Play your cards right, and you might be able to clear out all the walls before your opponent is halfway through his deck, and then mop up whatever he has left like the mess your dog made in the kitchen.

The dwarf champions are also impressive. You can send the protector dwarf to the front lines to cover for your engineers, giving you a better chance to tear down walls like Jericho, or you can send the scrappy little ass-kicker screaming across the board to wail on targets who thought they were far enough away to be safe. There are lots of new ways to break things and hurt people, and I like them all.

After all this new brilliance, I was surprised at how thoroughly I was disappointed in the new goblins. Both of their new commons have a summon cost of one, which would be fine except that so many of the goblin event cards only affect free goblins. It's actually possible to build a goblin deck in which more than half of your event cards are completely useless. Not advisable, I wouldn't think, but still possible. I was really hoping for some new zero-cost goblins, and while I like the beast riders and the wall crawlers, I'm a little disappointed at how much their absence limits my options with my favorite crazed horde.

I haven't mentioned the mercenaries yet, because I'm saving the best for last. There are two new champions and some cool new commons. The spear grounders are ten pounds of kick-ass in a five-pound bag, and the vermin have an incredibly cool plague attack - as long as you don't stand around your own guys too long. The champions are also pretty cool - one lets you hold a bigger hand, and the other can cut through the enemy ranks like poop through a goose.

I really like all the new ways that Summoner Wars is expanding. The reinforcements add so much to the starting sets that you'll have lots of new ways to build your armies. And since every pack includes all the commons and champions you'll need, you don't have to buy crates of them just to make them worthwhile. Plaid Hat Games may be a one-trick pony so far, but that one trick just keeps getting better.

Now if I could figure out some way to store this game when it's languishing on the shelf for weeks at a time, it would be perfect.

Summary

2 or 4 players

Pros:

Lots of great new cards to really tweak the decks you already love

New strategies and new combinations

I really like the direction the new art is taking

Cons:

The lack of zero-cost goblins seems like one hell of an oversight - if they weren't bundled with the dwarves, I wouldn't buy that set

If you haven't tried Summoner Wars yet, that's a mistake you should correct immediately. While you're correcting your grievous error, you can pick up the reinforcements and the expansion decks:

http://www.plaidhatgames.com/store.html

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Card Game Review - 500

I have more than a hundred games, and the reason that number isn't more like 400 or more is because I regularly donate heaping piles of games to churches and youth groups and homeless people who use them as blankets. I have set collection games and war games and miniatures games and dungeon games. I have bidding games and party games and sex games (well, OK, just the one, and we keep it in the dresser in the bedroom). And yet, with this cornucopia of games, I end up playing 500.

It's not a game with lots of components - 500 is played with a regular deck of cards, after you remove all the 2s and 3s. You can't play it solo, either - you need exactly four people. Which, coincidentally, is exactly how many people live in my house (also a good number if I ever need to plan a bank heist, except my son would make a horrible getaway driver). It doesn't even come with everything you need to play, because you have to keep score, and it has this horrible scoring system where you can score anywhere from 40 to 500 points in one round (except in this case, instead of calling it a 'round,' it's called a 'hand.')

So why do I play a lot of 500? You would think I would be gravitating toward Warhammer Quest or Arkham Horror or 7 Wonders, or any of the ever-growing pile of games with expensive graphics and cool plastic pieces and oversized cards with pictures of half-naked girls. And while any of those would be my first pick, I don't live with four people just like myself (a blessing, really, because we would be constantly plunging the toilet, and we would never have any beer). I live with a wife and a daughter and a son, and while it can be like pulling teeth to get everyone around the table for a game of Irondale, we can all agree to play 500.

I may sound a little like I'm complaining, and that would probably be due to the fact that I am. I want to play Rush N Crush and Descent and Dominion. But my wife is a freaking shark at 500, and my daughter loves it (though she is an unrepentant table-talker), and my son... well, my son only wants to play poker, because he thinks he's Armadillo Slim and he's going to retire to Cabo on his gambling winnings. But we rope him into playing with us, and just tell him to suck it up, it will all be over in half an hour.

I don't know why I like 500 as much as I do. It's a trick-taking game, which means it's like a dozen other card games, and I suck at all of them (that may be another reason people want to play). I can never figure out if I should play the king of spades or the four of diamonds, because I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be leading my partner or throwing off trump or setting a heart with a backgammon. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what all those things mean. I'm pretty sure that last one was from a different game.

The rules to 500 are ridiculously easy to explain, but the strategy and card-counting that goes into playing the game makes my head swim. How a game can be this easy and still so freaking complicated boggles the mind. My wife's dad plays 500 nearly every day, and he's so good at it, sometimes I would swear he's got a camera behind my chair. He and my mother-in-law will have company over all the time just to play cards, and they only ever play 500.

I can't even begin to wrap my head around playing the same game every day, even if it is over in half an hour. I like to bounce from game to game like a pinball coming off a Ritalin dependency. I show up at my weekend group with a half dozen games, hoping we can get in most of them before we all have to go back to our families. I can't imagine inviting someone over to play the same game I've been playing since I was ten years old.

But it turns out, this is what lots of normal people do. Not all normal people, mind you, but nearly everyone knows how to play at least one card game, and lots of people play a bunch of them. A deck of cards is about the most accessible game component known to man, outside using your hands for rock-scissors-paper, and even your dull-witted Aunt Hetty can play gin rummy, hearts, or if she's been hitting the sauce again, 52 Pick Up.

Happily, I really enjoy playing 500. I learn more about it every time I play, and I'm getting pretty good at counting how many trump are out and keeping track of what suit my partner wants me to lead. I find it fascinating that a game with so little can do so much, and entertain so thoroughly. The other night, I bid a ten no-trick, which is nearly impossible to achieve unless you're holding a hand of cards that's nearly miraculous. By the time the last card hit the table, my heart was about to leap out of my chest - but I pulled it off, and I'm going to be crowing about that one for a long time.

It's funny to me that I can enjoy a game with no art, no playtesting credits, and where I have to keep track of the score with pen and paper because it doesn't even have a scoring track. But 500 is full of bluffs and misleads, planning and smart plays, and while luck will go a long ways, a good player can win with a bad hand while a bad player loses with a good hand. With these credentials, 500 is a sure-fire winner. Add that to the fact that I can get everyone to play while we're waiting for dinner to finish cooking, and it's going to hit the table on a pretty regular basis. A lot more regular than Nexus Ops, I can tell you that.

Summary

4 players

Pros:

Strategy and tactical plays

Fast and easy to learn

Incredible depth

An element of luck that you can beat if you know what you're doing

People will play it with me

Really, really affordable

Cons:

No art to speak of

No score track

No fancy box or storage tray or plastic bits

Really, just a deck of cards

If you want to play 500, go online and look up the rules. Then go to Target and buy a deck of cards. If you need a link for that, then it's time for you to get a hobby that makes you go outside every now and then.

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