Expansion Review - Guild of Alchemists

Time now for another review of Russian gaming awesomeness (I would like to point out that my word processor believes that 'awesomeness' is actually a word, and so I intend to use it a lot more from now on). Tonight's review will address the final expansion for Potion-Making Practice, called Guild of Alchemists, which provides yet another way to play one of my favorite Russian games.

Guild of Alchemists asks players to create the ultimate alchemical product - the philosopher's stone. Harry Potter may have had to work a lot harder for this one, but you can do it at your kitchen table while you drink a beer and talk about girls. Of course, if you are playing it with girls, you may want to talk about something else. That part is up to you.

In Guild of Alchemists, each player will get a card that will tell him all the concoctions he has to make to get to the final big payoff. So you'll have to make the Love Potion, then the Molecular Doohickey, then the Unicorn Fart, and so on. Each progressively more complex creation will get you more points, so even if you don't actually manage to make all these items, you've still got a shot at winning, because making the philosopher's stone is worth a bunch of points, but it's no guarantee that you'll win.

If you've played Potion-Making Practice very often, you'll probably spot one particularly damning aspect right off the bat - it can be VERY HARD to make specific potions in a specific order. Usually you just sort of scheme your way to a big combo, but you only manage to get one or two really impressive creations. Now, though, you're going to have to find them, find the parts you need, and only then move on to the next one. This can be frustrating, especially to the new player, so if you're new to Potion-Making Practice, I really would not play Guild of Alchemists until you've got a good handle on the game. I played the original at least a dozen times before I ever tried this crazy difficult expansion.

However, it's not all bad news. There are a bunch of new spells in Guild of Alchemists that can help you get what you need. There's nothing like the painful groan you get when your opponent puts the potion you need in the table of elements, and you can't get it because now it's just a ball of Firelight (that's a stupid exaggeration - there are plenty of things just like that painful groan, most of which are other painful groans). But thanks to the spells that let you just pick up a card and put it in your hand, the path to your magnum opus is quite a bit easier than it seems to be on the surface.

And if you really want to release the hogs of war (or dogs of war, whatever farm animal of war, Lana), you can add in University Course, which is chock full of spells that pretty much mean all bets are off. In fact, this is now the only way we play the game. With the base game and both expansions in play, potions will be made left and right, monsters will be summoned, talismans will be crafted, and scores will reach triple digits. This is not Sparta. This is just madness.

But it's fun madness. It takes about two hours to play now, at a minimum, but it's a wild two hours. Even if you wind up twenty points down, you're not out of this one as long as the cards you need are still in the game. And in two hours, most of the cards will show up sooner or later, so eventually, someone will probably make their final concoction, and usually, that big payoff will be enough to eke out a win, even from last place. You still have to manage your hand. You still have to think about every play. But with more to do, and more to do it with, you won't feel as tightly constrained as the original game tends to be, and you won't have anywhere near as many frustrating turns where you can't do a damned thing.

Potion-Making Practice has become a staple of weekend gaming in my house. We'll set aside a whole evening to whip up wild elixirs and devious schemes. In fact, I'm considering making some card trays out of wood that will let us organize all the various elements and hold the three decks, just to make it seem more official (I could probably just draw a chart on poster board, but this would be an excuse to do some woodworking). If you're a serious fan of Potion-Making Practice, definitely consider snagging a copy of Guild of Alchemists, and get University Course while you're at it. If you're just dabbling, or if the original only hits your table once a year, I would save your money.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Adds a sense of direction to the chaos
Makes a simple card game into an evening of entertainment
Adds more options, more decisions and more action

Cons:
Will double or triple the amount of time you need to finish a game
Can be very frustrating if you don't know what you're doing

Do you have any idea how cool it is that you can order Russian games from anywhere in the world? I'll tell you. It's pretty cool. Here's a link:
WHIP UP SOME STONES

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Fantastic Board Game Review - Rex: Final Days of an Empire

I sometimes question my gamer credibility. I read stuff written by all these really impressive nerds who have tons of references and who have all played all these old-school games that I ignored when they were out, because I was playing HeroQuest and lots of NES. For instance, I've never played Magic Quest, and that's supposed to be a really big deal. I haven't even seen a copy of Titan in my whole life, and those big-shot nerds are always talking about what an impressive game it was. And the most relevant to tonight's discussion is that I never played the old Dune game, and what is worse, I don't even like the books.

The reason that's relevant is that I'm reviewing Rex: Final Days of an Empire, and it's a reprint of Dune. Which I've never played. So if you're reading this review and hoping I will answer that burning question that goes, 'why does it burn when I pee?', then I will tell you to take a break from loose women. And if you ask me how Rex compares to the original, then I will tell you that you're an idiot, because I just told you I never played Dune.

However, if you ask me if Rex is an awesome game, I would be inclined to say yes, it is an awesome game. Because it is. At first, it looks like a fairly simple battle game, where you try to grab up specific power points to try to control the city. But as you play, you realize that there are layers to Rex, and as you peel back one, you discover yet another way that the game will blow your mind. Peel them back enough, and you can get to the gooey center, which, it turns out, is just saltwater taffy.

The most obvious secondary level to the game is the negotiation. Every turn, a card tells you where influence will be placed, and you'll all rush around to grab it up. But sometimes, before that card pops out, a different card will tell you that there's a ceasefire, and you can talk alliances. When that happens, it can be a total free-for-all, with everyone jockeying for position, trading influence for favorable alliances, and possibly stabbing allies in the back to win the game alone. When alliances occur, they change the landscape of the game, and make previously weak targets into powerful friends - or enemies. Or ex-wives.

Then you've got your various factions. One player might be the humans, holding onto their last vestiges of power and trying to stave off the fall of their empire. They get free troops by the bucket, but they're almost always broke. If they team up with the merchants, though, they can offer protection from the random acts of violence that sporadically occur around the city, and in exchange, the merchants can toss them a few bucks now and then, to keep them competitive. Mind-readers and psychics face off against peace-loving turtle people who can see the future, and nobody wants to come up against the political assholes, because they might just turn your leaders against you and send your entire army into the crapper.

Another fantastic element of Rex is the dreadnought fleet that circles the city and routinely bombs the piss out of residential neighborhoods. These mean motor scooters simply cannot be beaten - but they can be anticipated. They move on a specific path, and while only the humans know how far they will go, it's always safe in whatever place they just left. Although there's probably a mess.

It's impossible to relate every brilliant aspect of Rex. It works on so many levels that if you approach it as one kind of game and ignore the others, you won't stand a chance. If you don't plan for future traitorous possibilities, they're virtually certain to rear up and bite you. If you focus all your energy on getting powerful cards, you won't have anything left to buy troops. And if you spend all your time looking at internet porn, you won't get any work done (though that's just basically how life works, and has very little to do with Rex).

One potential downside of having all these layers is that you really need a full crew to see them all. With four people, the negotiation is limited, and with only three, it's pretty much out of the picture completely. Plus the game is more interesting when you have to take into account the various capabilities of your opponents, and with fewer opponents, there are fewer considerations. If the political backstabbers aren't there, you can feel comfortable using more leaders, and if the turtle-people are gone, you don't have to worry that they're going to keep you from playing the cards that would kick their shell-covered butts. This is one game that really begs for the most people you can gather, and if you only ever play with the same person, I wouldn't bother with Rex at all.

Like most of my favorite games, Rex is not one that you can set up and knock out in thirty minutes. It's several hours of investment, but the time will fly by so fast that you'll wonder why your stomach is rumbling, until you look at a clock and realize you haven't eaten in six hours. It's not a marathon, or anything, but don't think you're going to just play real fast and then break out something else. When you decide to play Rex, you have to be ready to sit down and have a few hours of fun, and not try to rush through so you can get to the next game before the store manager closes down the food court where your weekly game club meets to play Euros in public.

So maybe I haven't played all these amazing old games that big-shot nerds are always bragging about. Maybe I was playing old-school D&D and bookshelf war-games with my old man when all those super-cool geeks were enjoying all-night Twilight Imperium marathons. But I am hoping that by reviewing Rex: Final Days of an Empire, I have restored just a couple points of gamer cred. I need those cred points. I was just about to trade them in for a pony.

Summary

3-6 players

Pros:
Deep and engaging
Requires strategy, tactics and negotiation skills
Your faction will influence your play style without forcing you into a role
You'll be talking about the game three days alter

Cons:
Much, much better with more people - three people loses a lot

I heartily recommend Rex, if you've got four or five people you can get together to take it for a spin. Run over to Noble Knight Games, and tell 'em I sent you:
GET MEDIEVAL ON THE EMPIRE

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Expansion Review - Ordonnance

I am growing increasingly fond of Russian games, which is kind of odd, if you ask me. I grew up in the 80's, when we were all pretty sure that the Pinko Commies were going to start a world war that would kill us all in a nuclear Armageddon. The only people we hated more than the Soviets were the guys who dug through a freshly opened box of Lucky Charms to get the toy before the cereal was gone. But all that changed after Reagan took down the Berlin Wall by telling someone else to do it, and now I'm finding out that those wily Russians have some pretty awesome stuff going.

I've done a few reviews from the Russian publisher called Right Games, including Kingdoms of Crusaders, which is the base game for the expansion I'm reviewing right now. For what it's worth, I also have a Russian game with plastic robots and stuff that was called Robogear when it was published in English, but the rules (and the box) are in Russian so I don't know how you play it. That's not really relevant, but it's pretty cool anyway.

Kingdoms of Crusaders is a really clever two-player game, with lots of tension, a little luck, and enough hard thinking to make your brain smoke. If you regularly play two-player games, and you're looking for a really good one, Kingdoms of Crusaders should be part of your library (assuming you can find it - it's from Russia).

The thing is, the only way you can play Kingdoms of Crusaders with more than two people is to have multiple copies of the same game. If you combine your set with your friend's set, then you can play four players, and after that, have no idea who owns which cards. So what the game needed was an expansion that would let you play with four people without having to buy an entirely new copy, which is where Ordonnance comes in.

(Quick aside - 'ordnance' means weaponry. An 'ordinance' is a law. And an 'ordonnance' is a law in France. So obviously, this expansion takes the basic idea of the Crusades in the Middle East and adds Parisian attorneys, who as history tells us, were frequently launched over the walls of besieged cities to spread disease and frivolous lawsuits. That, or this expansion wasn't translated very well.)

If you just want to play a four-player game of Kingdoms of Crusades, Ordonnance can do that - but that would make kind of a lame expansion. So to make it worth your while, Ordonnance also has crazy expansion cards that do all kinds of different things. Has your opponent claimed an indomitable lead in Jerusalem? Now you can negate his knights and leave him trying to hold the area with a couple spearmen and an incontinent poodle. Are you hiding the cards you need to rule a spot with just three cards? Slap down an area limit and lock down that cocky bastard.

There are also some crazy double-up cards that put all your eggs in one big, gun-toting basket. These make it really hard to beat your banners - but if you lose those banners (thanks to the cards in Ordonnance, probably those French lawyers), you've got a big bag of nothing. Usually, these cards are really hard to beat, but it only takes one card to make them a liability.

So where there was one tense, smart game, now there are three ways to play. You can go with the original, with its tight, clean design and razor-wire decision-making. You could mix it up and play with a couple more friends. Or you could add the wacky cards and throw a little chaos into that game.

The original is, as I said, a very smart game. There's bluffing and feinting, power plays and strategic retreats. Every move is a combination of an attempt to gain ground and a mental misdirect. It usually comes down to a very close three-to-two split, and it's a rush getting to the end.

With more than two players, though, Kingdoms of Crusaders is a very different game. With two, it's focused like a laser pointer. With three or four, there's an injection of anarchy that makes it a lot more unpredictable. The game becomes more interesting, but less of a duel of wits. It is still fun, but it's just not quite as cerebral. Honestly, I didn't like it anywhere near as much as the two-player version. It just loses that every-card-counts feeling, and that's my favorite part.

The two-player game with Ordonnance, however, is exactly the opposite of what I expected. I was counting on the game to lose some control and tension, because now there are all these unpredictable rule-breakers that change up the game while you're playing it. I was wrong, though - the added sneaky element actually ramps up the paranoia. You may think you've got an area nailed down cold, but until the final card drops, there's just no way to know. You have to plan ahead, maneuver more cautiously, and take into account all the various ways your opponent could steal the win with a last-minute play that may cause you to throw down your cards in shocked rage. You would be a total bitch if you did that, but you may want to.

If you're ordering Kingdoms of Crusaders, maybe because you would really like a great two-player card game, I would recommend picking up Ordonnance at the same time. Even if you never intend to play it with four people, the added game play options will make your game even more exciting and variable than it was before. If you're just buying it for the four-player game - well, you may want to hold off. It is fun with a group, but nowhere near as teeth-grinding and agonizing as the original.

What I really need to do now is find a bunch more Russian publishers who can send me stuff to write about. Maybe I can find out if, during the 80's, they were all worried that the United States was going to nuke them into the Russian version of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Maybe they have some bad-ass games about the US invading the USSR that was a classic back in the day. But really, if I really want to play Russian board games, I will probably have to learn to read Russian, which is not particularly likely. So for now, I'll settle for the cool stuff cranked out by Right Games.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Adds lots of intensity in the 2-player game
Makes a good game even better

Cons:
Loses some of the brilliance when you play with more than two

Right Games is serious about selling you some games. They've set up a whole eBay store where you can get all their killer Russian card games, and shipping is far more reasonable than it has any reason to be:
http://www.russianboardgames.com/buy_now.html

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Rant - We Are Not Important

I know I just recently did an article about gamer types, and then turned around Monday and asked people to help me find my wife's wedding dress. I really should review a game here. But something just occurred to me, and I want to talk about it, so lucky you.

Game reviewers are not important. We think we are, but we're wrong.

We provide a service, and it's really not that much of a service, all things considered. We're the functional equivalent of your buddy who already owns everything. We tell you 'hey, that was fun,' or 'that game was stupid' or 'playing games designed for children is going to impede our ability to get laid,' but we don't tell you anything you couldn't find out for yourself if you just sat down and played the game. We're about as useful as the corner dry-cleaner, except that the cleaner can press your pants and all we can do is pontificate.

We are not book critics or movie critics. Book and film critics can discuss the various interpretations of themes and dialog. They can discuss hidden symbolism. They can analyze the artistry found in the books and films they review, and draw comparisons to how those things affect us in real life. They can analyze the human condition as presented in the films they watch and the books they read, and then relate those findings to broader themes.

You can't do that in board games. Board games are an industry created by nerds who wanted to play board games. As an artistic medium, board games are slightly less viable than cooking desserts, and slightly more artistic than bowling. Even video games have the capacity to contain more artistic depth than board games. Board games are all about the rules, and rules are inherently not artistic.

You could, of course, argue that the narrative a game relates might have some depth. I would challenge you on that point, though. The story and the theme could be presented in a novel, a film, or even a video game, and be an order of magnitude more effective. Without the rules, there's no game. You can't say the same thing about the story, especially because the story could change when players take a different course of action, and often, there's no story in games in the first place.

If we want discussions of games to be a critical medium, we need better games. I don't know if it's even possible to create a game where the theme is moving and powerful. I have trouble conceiving of a game that asks big questions and begs us to answer them. I am not sure how you would make a game that forces us to examine ourselves and the world around us. But I do know that if you want game reviewers to be game critics, we need to be talking about games where fun is less important than the powerful message, and frankly, I don't want to play those games. Unless I miss my guess, neither do you.

Game reviewers who talk about the artistry of a game, and try to discuss the finer points as if they were connoisseurs of fine wine, seem rather self-absorbed in a best case, and horribly deluded in a worst case. There is an artistry to creating a boxed product that will cause a group of players to interact on the same level in a competitive and entertaining environment, but readers, for the most part, don't care. You want to know if the game is fun. You don't want to know if the game will help you understand the horrors of modern war. You're not hoping that the game will present a symbolic tale of the classic hero's journey. You just want to know if, when you play it, you will have a good time.

Really, we're just a selling tool. Reviewers set ourselves up as a sort of information dispensary, trying to get publishers to give us products so that we can tell you how much we like them. We are a marketing expense, a debit in the advertising budget. We work for free games because it gets us free games, and we don't mind trading a couple hours of writing time if it means we get a 60-dollar game we didn't pay for. We're walking, talking Superbowl commercials, and better yet, we do it for peanuts.

But then, there's no reason we have to be important. We write because we like it, and you read what we write because you like it. If you stop liking it, you'll stop reading it, but we're self-absorbed enough that we'll write anyway. We'll pretend that there's some deeper meaning to the discussion, that our analysis is somehow improving the overall caliber of the human existence, and that's fine because we like writing it and you like reading it.

I honestly don't feel any reason that we need to be important. I play games to have fun, and I write about them because that's also fun. If I can give you a reason to want to read what I write, that's great, but it doesn't make me important (unless you were just about to jump out a window and one of my dick jokes made you laugh so hard you changed your mind).

I read lots of stuff by people who are doing their damnedest to be game critics instead of game reviewers, and they're having fun and people are having fun reading their unimportant nonsense, and I say more power to 'em. I think a lot of reviewers would be a lot happier if they quit pretending that we were a big deal, but then, lots of those people probably wish I would take myself a little more seriously.

Well, bad news - I'm not important. I'm a game nerd who enjoys bathroom humor. When that changes and I start to think I'm going to change the world by talking extensively about plastic goblins, I'll give it up and start painting gravestones as a symbolic outrage against the eternal nature of death.

And then I'll tell you if it was fun.

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Help Me Find My Dress

Right out of the gate, for clarification, I do not wear dresses. That title was kind of an attempt to be all eye-grabby. But I am looking for a dress. It's my wife's wedding dress. She was wearing it when we got married (which makes sense, because if she was wearing it before then, it would have been dreadfully optimistic).

When my house caught fire last year, FRSTeam by Bibbentucker was hired to store our clothes until we moved back in. We did move back in, at the beginning of June, but somehow, in the meantime, the emergency drycleaners lost a whole big pile of our stuff. They lost my Navy dress white uniform. They lost my daughter' first communion dress. And worst of all, they lost my wife's wedding dress. They actually lost a bunch of other stuff, too, but those are the big three. I'm just glad I got any socks back (though they did ball them all up - half of my socks have the elastic all stretched out of them, so one will stay up on my leg and the other sort of puddles up at the top of my shoe).

The wedding dress was pretty important. We were going to give it to my daughter when she got married. Everyone was kind of excited about it. And now we can't, because FRSTeam by Bibbentucker lost it. But we still want to do that, so we're offering a huge chunk of our insurance settlement to get it back. It's coming out of the money I was going to use to buy my games again. Shouldn't FRSTeam by Bibbentucker pay for it, you might ask? I would agree. Sadly, they do not. They are trying to get out of paying anything remotely close to that, even though they lost the dress and we did not.

Anyway, in order to reclaim the missing dress, I have resorted to a low tactic commonly reserved for evil dictators, common thieves, teenagers and housewives with too much time on their hands - I have started a Facebook page. And at that Facebook page, I have placed a couple pictures of the missing garments. I will add more, if I can find them. Unfortunately, a couple weeks after our wedding, someone broke into our mailbox and stole all our wedding photos, including the negatives, so I don't have very many. That's just one reason this dress was so important - we don't have a whole heck of a lot from that day.

If you were to visit this Facebook page, maybe throw me a Like, and maybe mention it to your Facebook friends (or Google+ friends, or your Twitter friends, or your actual real life friends), it would seriously help me out. I want to reach as many people as I possibly can. If you know anyone living in the Dallas & Fort Worth metropolitan area, pay them special attention - I think I can be reasonably sure that my wife's dress has not left the country.

As an added bonus, if you do go to the Facebook page, you can see a picture of me when I was really young and a hell of a lot skinnier. It will not help you pick me out of a crowd - I've disguised myself with wrinkles, a receding hairline, and a short beard with lots and lots of gray hair. But you can still point and laugh at what a dork I was, and wonder how I got a wife that looked this damned good.

http://www.facebook.com/drakedresses

Thanks in advance for any help.

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Card Game Expansion - Potion Making University Course

Last year, the Russian game company with the horribly misrepresentative URL 'russianboardgames' sent me all their games (and they are all card games). My favorite of the bunch was called Potion-Making Practice, and it was a big hit in my house.
Then my house caught fire and all those cool Russian games went up in smoke.

Then the publishers, who are awesome, sent them all to me again, this time with all the expansions that they had just translated into English. Two of those expansions were for Potion-Making Practice, and they're good enough to warrant two reviews.

In my original review, I poked some fun at the title of the game. Potion-Making Practice sounds like a boring high-school class in a very interesting world. But now that I've played University Course and Guild of Alchemists, the 'practice' part makes sense. Because the original really is just a warm-up.

Quick recap - Potion-Making Practice is a tough game to play. It's hard as hell to make the potions you need, because there are 16 components in the game, and often less than eight on the table. The potion you need might be sitting on the table where you can't get it, or it might just be that it never gets made at all. There are never as many spell cards as you might want, and for the player who just wants to dive in and start putting together some cool magical cocktails, Potion-Making Practice can be frustrating.

University Course changes that dramatically. This expansion (with nearly as many cards as the original) introduces wild-card components, lesser talismans with ongoing effects, and gobs and gobs of spells (I recently started saying 'gobs' after I read it on a website out of Britain. I am hoping it makes me sound more refined, to try to balance out any potential references to genitals or poop). Now there are tons of ways to get the cards you need, and since you can play two cards in a turn, tons of opportunities to use them.

In fact, University Course can be almost as bewildering as Practice, but for the completely opposite reason. Where the original made you watch like a hawk and manage your hand like a miser, University Course will allow you to whip up magical concoctions left and right. Now there are so many potions on the table that scores will skyrocket, and there will be so many low-level creations in play that it will become far easier to build the more expensive drinks, like the Supreme Elixir or the Unicorn or the Coronarita.

The difference is striking. Where Practice is an intense game about patience, timing and opportunity, University Course is a wheels-off free-for-all. Both are fun, but they are very different games (even though University Course is just an expansion, and you still have to have Practice to play it). Plus, since the end-game conditions require that both decks be depleted, the game is almost twice as long with University Course. This is not optimal if you start a game at 9:30 when you have to work the next day and end up staying up until one in the morning.

If you prefer your games subtle and cerebral, you are not going to want to play University Course. It is not subtle and cerebral. While it definitely requires some strategic decision-making and moderate card management, it's so easy to make potions now that some of those decisions just don't seem as important as they did before. Without the scarcity of resources, it's not at all difficult to put things together, and that means less caution, less analysis, and more wild romping.

Some people, of course, love wild romping. It is undeniably more entertaining to make potions than to sit there, looking at the table, seeing nothing you need and just slapping down a component card because you're stuck with no options. At the same time, however, one of the things I love about Potion-Making Practice is that you're making all these subtle decisions, but they can have a huge impact. Your decisions in University Course lack that anguished gnawing feeling you get when you wonder if you just threw down the wrong card, because now you can just pull a few cards off the blue deck and probably get that wrong card back.

If you have played Potion-Making Practice (and if you like it, which I suppose is an important requisite), I heartily recommend picking up University Course. It changes the way you play, but it lets you do what the game says you do - make potions. And after all, isn't that the name of the game? Yes, it is. It's written right there on the box.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Opens up the game and provides a lot more options
Makes it easy to make potions
Adds a lot of energy to the original
More of everything is just more fun

Cons:
Reduces the penalty for bad decisions
Makes it easier for a poor player to beat a good one

University Course takes Potion-Making Practice in a completely different direction - one where you get to actually make a lot more potions. You can find it on eBay, right here:
MAGICAL BARTENDING

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Sorta Sports Game Review - Blood Bowl Team Manager

So far, 2012 has been the year I had to keep making exceptions about not liking sports games. I still don't want to play a game about soccer or baseball or cricket or professional curling, but I'm considering changing my opinion about sports games in general. There are just too many oddball sports games out there that I wind up liking. Hell, a while back, I even liked one about hockey (though in my defense, that was just barely about hockey).

The latest game to challenge my dislike of board-game sports is Blood Bowl Team Manager. I was not expecting to enjoy this one. I never did like the original Blood Bowl, because it was basically a clusterhump football game with tomes of rules and obscene violence. Combine my distaste for sports games with my general lack of interest in Blood Bowl, and the odds of me liking Blood Bowl Team Manager were about the same as becoming an astronaut.

Blood Bowl Team Manager is, I suppose, essentially a sports game, but rather than fighting your way through a single game, you're competing in an entire season. You're not the coach, either. You're the manager of the whole team. Every game turn is an entire week of a five-week season, so you'll be handling your team as they head out to various matches and tournaments. You'll recruit hard-hitting dwarf linebackers, swift elf quarterbacks, and brutal orcish knee-breakers. Your team will learn new tricks, obtain sponsors, and otherwise get better at the sport of Blood Bowl, and in the end, the team with the most fans wins the game.

At first, there's an intimidating amount of stuff happening. You draw your cards (the guys who will be your team for this go-round), find out which matches are available, and plan your approach to the week ahead. This part seems pretty basic, but what happens here makes a big difference in what happens next. It might be that there's a tournament, and the winner is going to get a whole mess of bloodthirsty fans. Or maybe there are only the regular matches, but a random rainstorm means you can't over-commit. Your strategy for the coming round will depend heavily on this part, so it's crucial to pay attention. It might also be a good idea to hire the Saints to set you up a bounty system.

Then you get into the meat of the game, where you decide where to put your players to get you the rewards you want to build your team and earn some fans. Do you pit your passer against the skaven receiver, or put in your tough blocker to try to send the opposing passer to the penalty box (which I'm pretty sure is actually hockey)? Will you compete for the big payoff of fans, or hold off to try to pick up another star player? Will you get caught in a hotel room with an eight-ball and a couple hookers or go on Dancing With The Stars? The choice is yours. Except for that last one. You can't to go on Dancing With The Stars until your career nosedives.

The balance of aggression, careful card play, and long-term planning makes Team Manager an exceptionally interesting game. It's not just important to play the right card in the right place, you also have to choose the right time to play it. You'll build a strategy that takes into account the team you're playing, the cards you've acquired on previous turns, the opponents you face, the time left in the game, and lots of other factors that make it hard to decide what you want to do. Which, if you ask me, makes it more awesome.

The game also looks great. The cards all have art that will help you envision all the madness of managing the roster and yelling at players who don't show up for practice and trying to get the chaos warriors to quit oozing corrupting goo all over the guy who picks up the towels.

I do have a couple problems with the game, though these are largely my personal preference. My biggest problem is the same one I always had with the original. In a world where peasants squabble for food in the mud, where the highest technology available is a portable toilet, and where chaos demons make a regular habit of eating small villages, who the hell has time to watch professional sporting events? And I don't mean gladatorial fights where the rules are 'if you walk out, you win,' I mean there are sportscasters and locker rooms and cheerleaders. The anachronism is staggering, and I've always kind of just rolled my eyes at the sheer silliness of it. You guys don't have time to make professional sporting teams! There are man-sized rat-people planting diseased stinkbugs in your sewers!

But I know many people can get past the mental block that I've always had with Blood Bowl and still really love it. The original game was wildly popular for a long time, even after it was out of print, so I am sure plenty of nerds are completely willing to accept an established sports league in a time before anyone invented toilet paper. However, the other problems I had relate quite a bit better to the game itself.

For one thing, it can be a little complicated. It's no where near as complex as the original, and you don't have to paint up any miniatures or analyze rules for interceptions or penalty flags. But it can still be confusing to follow the abstractions that move the ball from midfield to your hands, or to understand how you divvy up rewards at the end of a week. It's not insurmountable, and I have fallen madly in love with games that are a lot trickier. I'm just saying that it's not hard to play your first game wrong.

But it's also kind of long. Again, this is a personal preference thing, and in this particular case I don't mind at all. If you're trying to decide if you want to play Team Manager, however, you need to understand that it can take a couple hours to finish a four-player game. Maybe longer, if it's your first time. Once you get it down, you can probably blow through those five turns in less than an hour, but until you're good at it, Team Manager is going to take a while. Like I said, that's fine with me, and I don't personally count that as a strike against the game. It might be a consideration for you, is the only reason I bring it up.

My final complaint is one that Fantasy Flight has practically trademarked - the FAQ. For no reason I adequately understand, nearly every FFG game ships with ridiculous mistakes. Fantasy Flight does not ask forgiveness for these errors, they simply post an online errata guide that tells you which cards are not supposed to be in the game any more, even though you paid for them, which rules were printed incorrectly, and other total boners that should have been caught and that you will never know about if you don't go online to find out what FFG screwed up this time. If you ask me, it's a little embarrassing that one of the largest game companies in the world has to issue updates every third time they put something on the market.

These complaints are minor, and for me, a non-issue (except the idea of playing football while trolls throw poop at the city gates). Blood Bowl Team Manager is a really cool game. There's plenty of tough decisions, lots of strategy combining with plenty of tactical plays, and a fun theme (even if it doesn't make any sense). When your dwarf rolls out on his giant rolling lawnmower and sends the entire opposing team to the emergency room, or when your nasty man-eating orc gains fans for eating the other players, you can almost hear Madden saying, 'we got a game where usually the team that scores the most points wins the game' and then eating a five-legged turkey.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Built on a wickedly popular theme
Great long-term and short-term strategy
Difficult decisions the whole game
Smart enough to satisfy the thinkers, and bloody enough to satisfy the fans of bloodshed
Really cool art

Cons:
Can take a while
A wee bit complicated
Theme is just silly (feel free to curse me for thinking Blood Bowl is ridiculous)
FFG is becoming synonymous with FAQ

I sure did like Blood Bowl Team Manager, silly theme notwithstanding. If it sounds like you might like it, run over to Noble Knight Games and pick it up. Tell 'em I sent you.
HUT HUT OH MY SPLEEN

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