Games Review

The first thing I have to say about Felinia is that I cannot decide how to pronounce the name. I'm not sure if it should be 'Fel-eye-nee-uh', which sounds like 'vagina', or 'Fel-eh-nee-uh', which sounds uncomfortably similar to 'fellatio'. Neither word is one I want to call out when asking close family members if they would like to play a game. But then, maybe it's pronounced so it rhymes with clamidia, though that's not an enormous improvement.

I do understand where the name came from, though, because the game is full of cat people. Felines, if you will. And the nation of Housecatia (I made that up) has just discovered the land of Felinia, and wants to set up trading posts. But the ruling bodies of Felinia (wild jungle cats like tigers and jaguars and stuff) have decreed that in order to cross the sea, they require specific trade goods. They want glassware and cloth and hard liquor, for instance, but each nation wants different stuff. None of the nations wants catnip or rubber mice, though, so the theme starts to fail a little.

The players will all start off every turn by running their businesses, deciding whether to spend their three turns buying merchandise like Justin Beiber t-shirts or champagne flutes, trading their Boone's Farm raspberry wine for Star Trek novels written by William Shatner, or just selling crap to run up their bank accounts so they can afford to do the other stuff.

If you wind up with the right conglomeration of trade goods, you can board ships for Felinia and set up trading posts. This is how you win the game, so it happens pretty frequently. Different trading posts offer different rewards, so you have to think about how you want to group your merchants to develop trading cities across the ocean, and if you want to try to get a monopoly on the panther trading circle.

One notable thing about Felinia is that there is absolutely no reason I can see for there to be cats in it. They're not even sexy cats in bikinis, which would appeal to men with a soft spot for very bizarre fetish porn. They're just people with cat heads. But they trade in human goods, get on human boats, and set up human trading posts. While the game is a whole lot of fun, it has absolutely nothing to do with cats in any way beyond the art.

It's kind of funny, actually, that the game has the cat theme, because it almost disguises how good it really is. You go into it expecting something related to felines, anything at all, and instead play an intriguing game of limited options, clever positioning, and outright backstabbing. There's a lot of the kinds of plays that make the other people at the table look at you and swear violently, which makes it fun in my book. There's also a lot of long-term planning, strategies formed from the first moments of the game, and split-second thinking that stymies the plans of your opponents. There is not, on the other hand, anything to do with cats. Which is great, because I'm not all that fond of cats, except with teriyaki sauce and steamed rice.

The various phases of every turn create a constant source of tension. In the first part of every turn, you'll place your bid tokens and tell the other players what you intend to do on your turn. There can be enormous competition for limited resources, and sometimes you'll take a crappy option for your first play just so you can trump an opponent on your second. Sometimes you'll even take a weak turn, to save your resources for a bigger move next time.

Then you set sail. You can only board a boat if you have the right trade goods, and that changes for every boat. If everyone wants to get on the green boat, there will be a race - but if you can make everyone think you want the green boat and then switch out for yellow at the last minute, you can force your opponents to cash-strap themselves while you ease right into your destination with no competition.

Even deciding where to settle is a contest, since it's in your best interest to build groups of merchants close to each other. Choose a spot inside your opponent's big cluster, and you'll disrupt his whole plan and break his monopoly. But you have to decide if that play is worth what it will cost you, because you may not be able to further develop that fly-in-the-ointment position, leaving you stranded and broke and trying to sell Elvis memorabilia to Asian tourists outside a 7-11 in San Dimas.

The pieces in this game bear discussion, because they are inexplicably neat. For no reason I can determine outside pure cool factor, there are four three-dimensional boats that you assemble from thick cardboard. That had to cost a mint, but they are more fun than flat tiles would have been. The little wooden cat merchants look like Puss in Boots from the Shrek movies, except, you know, cut out of wood. I honestly could not tell you why the score cards needed rounded corners, but it's pretty cool. And then, of course, there's a lot of art with cat-people on it. Also for no reason, as far as I can tell.

I will caution any blood-and-guts, red-blooded gamers out there who prefer games with a body count - nobody dies in Felinia. I guess they all have nine lives, so they don't bother trying to kill each other. This is a strictly Euro game, to the point that the rules are translated into French, German, and Dutch (at least, I think it's Dutch. I'm not exactly fluent). It's got bidding and worker placement, and no dice.

But for being a Euro game about foreign trade with a cat theme in a game with no cats, Felinia is a really fun game. I'll play anything, if it's fun, and I've already played Felinia three times. My family likes it, even without bloodshed. I seriously doubt I will be trading it away, which is also a good sign, because I try to get rid of just about anything I don't really want. My office is cluttered enough as it is.

So I can't decide if the name of the game sounds more like a body part, a disease or a sex act, and there are cat people all over the place and nothing in the game remotely related to cats. Felinia is extremely European, with virtually no random element. And for my money, it's really, really fun.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Requires strategy, planning and quick thinking
Very nice components and pretty art
Tons of chances to make your friends hate you

Cons:
Theme is questionable, not for being offensive, but because I can't see why it was required at all
Very European
Name sounds like a social disease. Or sex organ.

Noble Knight doesn't have Felinia yet. They probably will at some point.

Blue Planet has always been kind of an elusive game for me. It's not that it's not interesting. In fact, it has one of the most compelling settings I've ever seen. It's incredibly well-developed, with a fascinating world that puts the 'science' in 'science fiction' and a system that makes hydrofoil gunfights and alien exploration feel real. You don't have to suspend much disbelief to play Blue Planet, is what I'm trying to say.

But it's hard as hell to play. The system itself isn't too terribly tough to puzzle out, though it does use some counter-intuitive addition and subtraction to make it all work. The reason it's hard to play is because there's so damned much of it. The referee's guide, for example, is like 300 pages with no rules at all. It's all setting, discussing various settlements, corporations, political groups, and of course a wide variety of flora and fauna. There are discussions in there about how the vacuum of space actually works (turns out, it's completely different from a Shopvac. Who knew). You can read about how tides are generated, about how water pressure affects living creatures, and light sources on the bottom of the ocean. There's more than you ever wanted to know about oceans, unless you're a marine biologist, in which case we can only hope you get your information from something more reliable that a roleplaying game. Like, say, Wikipedia.

The reason you need all this intel on the ocean is because Blue Planet takes place on Poseidon, a planet covered almost entirely with water. A wormhole at the end of the galaxy drew mankind to this alien planet, which was inexplicably similar to Earth (except, you know, it's like a giant bathtub). Humans sent a colonization ship with the best and brightest, and they began to make Poseidon their home, and get ready for the relief ships.

Unfortunately, a little bit after sending those first colonists, Earth got kicked in the ballsack by a crop-eating disease that threatened the extinction of the human race. Space colonies took a back seat to not dying. It took a real long time to get the corn fungus under control, and meanwhile, the colonists on Poseidon were on their own. With no resupply and no real access to stuff like power plants or microwave popcorn, they made a hard choice and decided to go native. It took less than a generation before they were all dressing like hula dancers and spearfishing for a living.

But then, after the colonists had decided they would get by just fine eating the local fish and building straw huts like Gilligan's Island, Earth got its act together and sent more ships. By then, the original colonists didn't much care, but Earth sent more people anyway. Then someone discovered this crazy mineral on the bottom of the ocean that unlocked the human genetic code, and there was a crazy gold rush as everybody with two dimes to rub together tried to board an outbound flight and cash in on what they thought would be easy riches.

Well, they were wrong. Poseidon is a mean-ass planet. There are sharks so big, they make Jaws look like Spongebob Squarepants. Just walking through the jungle on one of the few islands can get you eaten by lizards, stung by insects, or strangled by plants. And out at sea, it's even worse, because without land masses to break up the storms, whole towns can be swept right out to sea and vanish completely, and boats can disappear so fast that nobody even knows they were ever there.

But humanity is pretty mean its own self, and so before long, towns popped up, industry blossomed, and gigantic corporations moved in and declared eminent domain over any piece of land bigger than a toenail. Before you could say, 'what was I thinking,' there was organized crime, corporate shenanigans, and all manner of tiny wars (actually, it probably took a little longer than it took to say 'what was I thinking.' It probably took a couple years, and I figure you could say quite a bit in two years. But whatever, it was pretty fast). And that's where you start.

Characters in Blue Planet can come from a wildly varied range of background. You could be a native, one of the original colonists, genetically modified with gills and collapsing lungs so you can swim like a fish. You could be a silva or cat, genetic crossbreeds made by combining people with apes or, well, cats. You could be a prospector, or a frontiersman, or a corporate hacker. You could be a cop or a gangster, or even just the pizza guy (hey, pizza guys sometimes do interesting stuff. Just not my pizza guy. I'm pretty sure my pizza guy still lives with his mom). You could even be a dolphin. I'm not making that up.

One important consideration, no matter who you want to pretend to be, is that the system for Blue Planet can be seriously deadly. You're not going to rush into a room against superior numbers and just slash your way through. You can actually kill someone with a knife, and bullets are shockingly effective (you can kill someone with a knife in just about any game, really, but in most games, it takes a whole lot of stabbings. In Blue Planet, you probably just need the one).

Interestingly enough, once everyone has a basic understanding of the numbers, everything moves ridiculously fast. I've played games where a single fight could take an hour or more, and yet Blue Planet's surprisingly sophisticated system means that you can finish a running gun battle in less time than it takes to drink a beer (unless you drink like a sissy). It's also the deadliest system I've ever played, and this makes a game where you have to think a lot harder about what you would expect in a tense situation - resorting to violence as a first resort is likely to give you a good reason to make a new character really soon.

And you probably don't want to make a new character, once you've got one, because it's a lot of work. There are dozens of skills to pick through, backgrounds to choose, abilities to calculate, and that's before you ever decide where you were born or whether you still remember to call your mom on the weekends. You can make a quick-and-dirty D&D character in ten or fifteen minutes. It will take you an hour to make one for Blue Planet, and then you'll have almost no background, just a whole hell of a lot of numbers.

So you've got this incredibly detailed setting. You've got these imaginative but believable characters. You've got a system that does a pretty damned good job of simulating real life. What you probably don't have is any idea what to do with them, because while there is an overwhelming flood of information, there's no prewritten adventure to give you some idea what you should do. And it's downright daunting to come up with your own, because unlike most games that define character roles and potential hooks, in Blue Planet, you can do anything.

You could all be troubleshooters for a corporate mining initiative. You could be scientists aboard a research sub. You could be ecoterrorists fighting to stop the despoiling of your home. You could be politicians trying to bring civilization to the wild frontier. You could be cops fighting gangsters, or gangsters fighting cops. You could be bartenders working in a downtown tavern, and have all your adventures within two miles of your home, or you could be roving pirates whose hijinks take you all over the planet. There's so much you can do that it's nearly impossible to pick one direction, and that can leave a whole lot of work for the poor bastard who decides to run the game.

However, if your referee is up to the grunt work it will take to really have a grasp on Blue Planet, the game can be marvelously rewarding. There are no dungeon crawls in Blue Planet, and while there are plenty of opportunities for bloodshed, this is not a game for which you ever need miniatures. It's all story, and the gunfights are meant to further the game, not be the reason you all show up in the first place.

I would say it's a shame that Blue Planet is out of print, but happily, a company called Redbrick has the license for it. You can still get all the books from them, though I think you have to download them and print them at work while your boss is out for another two-hour lunch with his 'client' (who is actually the mistress he's banging on the side). They're not making any more books, so that kind of blows, but more than nearly any other RPG you could play, Blue Planet doesn't need much more than the core books. There's so much information that you'll be drowning in it before you ever need to expand. If you've got the appetite to digest a game this deep, you can send your fellow nerds all over one of the best sci-fi RPGs ever made.

Summary

Pros:
Exceptionally detailed and realistic setting
Fantastic and well-grounded, at the same time
Great system that makes the fight part of the story, not the story part of the fight
Immense variety - be whoever you want

Cons:
Considerably inaccessible without a lot of work

Out-of-print or not, you can still run right over to Noble Knight Games and pick up the hardcovers for this amazing game.
GO DEEP

Quick reminder - Enter the contest and grab yourself some decks for The Spoils:
http://drakesflames.blogspot.com/2011/05/ccg-review-spoils.html

I don't try to hide the fact that I'm a sucker for a good theme. It's more fun to play a game when it feels like you're doing something else. That's also why I'm a Star Wars nerd - I want to fly spaceships around a planet far, far away. It's probably also why I can't stand romantic comedies. You're not escaping anything if you wind up pretending that you're a dorky kid with a crappy office job who falls for the cute chick from the typing pool, unless you're an alien who has spent his entire life pining after the princess while you fight bad guys with electric glow sticks.

But as much as I like a theme, a game still has to be a good game. A reader asked me to review Oh Gnome You Don't, which lets you all be money-grubbing gnomes who race each other to through the forest and try to get paid. Along the way, you give each other wedgies and steal money. That sounds like a fun idea, but unfortunately, the game is what you get your kids to play after they outgrow Candyland.

Now, I should point out that there's a hell of a lot more to Oh Gnome You Don't than there is to Candyland. Sure, it's a basic roll-and-move race to the finish line, but you also have cards you can play, and you can stop in at various gnome businesses along the way to trade your blueberries and small mice for gems. Plus you can boot the other gnomes in the ass and steal their crap, and you don't have to win the race to win the game. That's way better than Candyland.

And the art is outrageously fantastic. You'll fall in love with the silly little bearded dwarfs and the pissed-off squirrels. You'll laugh at the funny ways that gnomes like to hurt each other. Everything visual about Oh Gnome You Don't begs to be played, if only so that you have an excuse to flip through the cards and look closely at the beautifully detailed board.

Unfortunately, while many of the pieces are here to make an impressive game, it falls short of being really interesting because there's just not enough to do. You roll a die, move that far, and then play a card. If you have goods to sell, you'll stop in and sell them. If you have cards that can hurt your opponents, you'll play them because otherwise, what's the point?

In other words, while the game has more charm than a Hot Topic tennis bracelet, it's just not that much fun to play. Instead of being a light and cute addition to a fun game, the art and theme end up saving an otherwise slightly boring game. And there are too many games in the world for me to play a dull game just because the picture of the gnome yanking another gnome's drawers up his ass crack makes me giggle.

Then again, if you have kids who want to play but lack the mental agility to challenge you at your grown-up games, Oh Gnome You Don't might be exactly what you need. You won't want this game if you always play with other adults, but if your regular group consists of you, your wife and your three dopey grade-schoolers, you'll probably find yourself glad you've got this one in the closet.

Because if you don't, your kids will probably make you play Candyland again.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:
Cute theme
Gorgeous art
Easy enough for kids

Cons:
Not enough decisions to make an interesting game

If you need a game to play with kids, you could do a lot worse than Oh Gnome You Don't, and you can get it right from Gut-Bustin' Games:
GIVE A GNOME A WEDGIE

The Internet has created hundreds of new kinds of businesses, enterprises that just could not have existed when we all had to go to the library for our information, instead of using Google for bizarre misinformation and randomly erroneous semi-factoids. Facebook, for instance, would never have worked as a mass-mailing campaign, and how lame would Twitter have been if it were just random postcards tacked to the office bulletin board?

My current favorite, however, is Kickstarter. I don't have a lot of use for it, personally, but it's a brilliant idea. Take your undeveloped game prototype and chuck it up, then see if you can generate enough preorders to actually print your game. And Kickstarter, in turn, has created a kind of sub-industry for reviewers. It has turned many of us into pimps for non-existent games.

That's how I got my copy of Startup Fever. I scored a copy of this game so that I could tell you about it, and then you're supposed to get all excited and go preorder it, and then hopefully enough people will buy in that the guy can afford to send it to the printer and make it an actual game. That's the theory, and so far, it's working like gangbusters.

Startup Fever is a game where you're all creating Internet startup companies. How crazy is that? It's a game about Internet startups being promoted on a successful Internet startup. It's like one of those things where you put two mirrors facing each other and then the bald spot on the back your head just gets smaller and smaller. Sadly, so does your head, or I would make a hat that does that and wear it everywhere.

This is a thoroughly European-style game. There are dice, sure, but there's no death, so right off the bat, you know it's not a red-blooded American game. There is implied sex, however, so that puts it in the same category as Agricola. In terms of play style, Startup Fever has a lot in common with all kinds of games about farms or zoo animals or silk trading.

Your goal is to have the most users for your Internet products, and so you'll hire lots of software engineers and marketing experts, and then offer them stock options to keep them around. But then when they're with your company long enough to actually cash in their options, they'll be prone to jump ship and go work for the competition. This is rude, but it's business.

In fact, for a game with no body count, Startup Fever is ruthlessly cutthroat. To succeed with a launched product, you have to have more tech geeks than everyone other competing product. So if you're trying to sell MySpace, and you've got six nerds on the project, and the other guy is peddling FaceBook and has eight nerds, he'll steal all your fans and the next thing you know, your entire site is dedicated to washed-up garage bands and child predators.

Startup Fever is an exercise in extremes. In the first half of the game, it's frightfully dull. You'll plod through boring hiring routines and wonder why turn order even matters. If you're not overly patient, you may give up on the game before you even get any products launched, because the game feels flat and you'll be bored.

But then you have a couple products launched, and suddenly competition heats up, and now the game is absolutely bloody. It's wickedly cutthroat, with other companies stealing your tech nerds and filing lawsuits and running off with your patents. What was a dry game with almost no interaction is suddenly an escalating game of backstabbing and dirty tricks. If the whole game was as exciting as the last half, you could get gamers everywhere to play, even if they normally prefer to spend three hours shooting at each other with plasma tanks and flying elves.

Which brings me to my conclusion about Startup Fever. First, it should have spent a little more time in testing, until the creator could come up with rules to make the beginning of the game more fun. Second, it's going to appeal to a lot of people, but it's going to piss off almost as many. It's not bad, but it's more European than hairy armpits and runny cheese.

I would love to tell you all about how cool the graphics for the game are going to be, but my set was made before all the art was done. So downside - my art isn't as cool as yours will be. Upside - my game is all made out of wood, even the box, and it's seriously bitchin'. I'm confident that the final product will look fantastic, because anyone who puts this much effort into a playtest version is going to turn up the heat when it comes to the finished game.

One more upside - the creator of this game contacted me just after my Gaming Gluttony article, and told me that if I liked the game, he would repurpose the 'Scandal' card to include Vietnamese prostitutes. While Startup Fever is not going to appeal to every gamer alive, it will most certainly find fans in a pretty sizable Euro-gamer community, and so I'm giving it a thumbs up. In other words, Louis, I'm holding you to it - I want to see Asian hookers.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Crazy cutthroat tactics in the last half of the game
Plan ahead from the start, or pay the price later
A constant balancing act to stay just one step ahead

Cons:
First half is dry as a Spanish desert
So European, it has a German accent (not necessarily a con)

If you want to find out more about Startup Fever, and maybe reserve yourself a copy while you still can, check it out here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/meetpoint/startup-fever-the-board-game-0

Just last week, I reviewed THE SPOILS, which is one heck of a good game. The only problem is, I never even heard of it before a reader mentioned it to me, and that means more people need to be playing this game. Considering how much better it is than Magic, it distresses me that The Spoils doesn't have more avid fans.

I intend to remedy that. And the way I will get more people playing The Spoils is to give people the game and tell them to play it. Brilliant, right? The only problem is, I only have ten decks. And that means I need some way to narrow it down.

But how do I do that? Why, I have an idea! How about a contest? Crazy, I know, but it just might work.

So here's what I want you to do. If you want to try The Spoils, or if you already have it and just want more cards, all you have to do is show me how bad you want 'em. It's a simple two-step process.

Step 1: Visit The Spoils website and flip through these links:

THE PRIMER
THE PRODUCT GUIDE
THE TUTORIAL

Get a bit of a feel for the game, read about the wacky world of The Spoils, and see the kinds of bruisers you can expect to see when you play.

Step 2: Come up with your own character for The Spoils. It can be anything, and it doesn't even have to be feasible. Hell, I'm pretty sure the guys who make cards for The Spoils don't even bother trying to make them feasible. And all you need is the name. No need to come up with card abilities and witty taglines and stuff. Just invent a name, and email it to me at matt@vixentorgames.com. Include your address, so I know where to send your cards.

The winners will be decided in two phases. First, I will pick my favorite entry, completely arbitrary, as the sole and final judge. The person who sent me that name will get four different preconstructed decks. Each deck has enough cards for one player, so you'll have enough to play with someone else.

In the second phase, I will randomly select three other people who entered. You have to come up with a character name, but it can totally suck, and you can still win. These other three people will each get two preconstructed decks, so you can sit down with a friend and give it a whirl.

The contest starts right now, and I will be accepting entries for four weeks. That means you need to get me your idea by June 17. I'll pick the winner over that weekend, and declare the winners on June 20.

You can enter as many times as you like, but every entry needs to have a different character name. The various entries will be used in deciding the grand prize winner, but your name will only be entered in the random drawing once. If you win the grand prize, you can't also win one of the random drawings. Don't be greedy. Oh, and you have to give me a few weeks to get your cards to you. God only knows how long the mail will take, and I'm shipping these the cheapest way I can, since I'm paying for them myself.

If you have questions, stick them in the comments section and I'll answer them if I can. Otherwise, put on your thinking caps and get yourselves some cards.

Wrath of Ashardalon is one of those games that can be problematic for a reviewer. It's not exactly an expansion for Castle Ravenloft, because it is a complete game all by itself. The problem from where I'm sitting is that it uses the exact same rules as Castle Ravenloft, which means it can be tough to tell you anything new when I already reviewed the first game. It's still fast, still smart, still fun, and still crazy expandable. It's still a dungeon crawl game that you can play solo or with your friends, and it's still a D&D spinoff. Basically, it's the same game, but completely different.

However, for a variety of subtle reasons, it's also a better game than Ravenloft. It uses the same rules, sure, and mechanically, does the same thing - but it has a bunch of different things that make it work better.

For starters, it's not as easy. The original was too predictable. You knew what the monsters would do, and you had a lot of control over where they went, which made it relatively simple to manipulate the dungeon into what you wanted it to be. But in Wrath, some of the monsters are a lot more imposing - the gibbering mouther that keeps everyone dazed, for example, or the grell with his stinging tentacles. And far too many of them are sentries.

When you draw a sentry monster, he doesn't just come rushing at you like every other monster. Instead he just stands there and calls up his buddy, who comes running over with pizza and a six-pack to crash your party. Then he spills the pizza on your sofa, drinks all the beer and throws up in your refrigerator, and starts a fight that breaks all the floor lamps. Basically, monsters will show up at random, a lot more often, so you can't control your monster flow as well in Wrath as you can in Ravenloft.

Thanks to a few basic changes, Wrath also feels less academic than Ravenloft. Maybe the biggest factor that helps it feel less bland is simply the change in locale. Ravenloft is supposed to be scary, and isn't. But Wrath is supposed to remind you of an old-school dungeon romp in a dragon's lair, which is a heck of a lot easier to do in a board game.

The random factors in Wrath also add to the tension. Both games have encounter cards, but the encounters in Wrath of Ashardalon tend to swing wildly from 'whirling death trap of death' to 'stepped in gum.' You're never sure if you can afford to lose some momentum, because the next encounter card you draw could double the number of monsters on the board and leave you up to your armpits in rabid man-eaters. Then again, it might be completely silly and produce virtually no effect whatsoever. Instead of an academic exercise, now you've got yourself a chaotic rumble. And that says 'dungeon crawl' where I come from.

Even if the changes in Wrath didn't make it a better game, there would still be plenty of reasons to buy it. Like the plastic - Strahd might have been a scary villain, but his miniature is just a little plastic dude. Ashardalon, on the other hand, is a big red dragon, and that is WAY cooler. There's also an otyugh, which is as difficult to type as it is to say with a straight face.

Plus there's just a lot more in the toolbox. Doors that could be locked or trapped, hostages to rescue, cool spell effects, and randomized treasure are just a few of the additions. Long hallways and huge chambers change the way the dungeon evolves, so that it's not just a random conglomeration of squares. The villains are more fun, too - the rage drake (no relation) that gets meaner the more you hurt him, and the hunormous dragon that spits fire all over the place just so he can roast marshmallows on your head. And that's not all, but I should let something in the box be a surprise.

If you don't have either game, you should pick up Wrath of Ashardalon first. It's better. If you like it, you can get Ravenloft to expand the experience. You can combine both games for more dungeon-crawling good times, and you'll be able to play for days before you ever even have to start making your own adventures. And then there's the rapidly exploding community of people designing new ways to play, so you'll never run out of reasons to play, unless you just get bored and want to play something where you build pig pens and bring in the mail.

Summary

1-5 players

Pros:
Feels like a dungeon crawl should feel
Chaotic and challenging
Lots of fun new additions
Makes a good game better

Cons:
If you hated Ravenloft, you're not going to like Wrath of Ashardalon
Silly name you may not want to say out loud at work

Noble Knight Games carries Wrath of Ashardalon. If you're going to buy it, I sure would appreciate it if you bought it from them:
BUY WRATH HERE

Everybody knows the saying that good things come in small packages. Whether or not it's true depends entirely on what's inside the package, of course - if you're comparing a package containing a diamond ring against a crate full of urine-stained packing peanuts, it's true, but box up a couple pounds of cat litter and put it next to a package with a car inside, and the saying goes right out the window.

Slightly less known is the saying that goes, 'good things come in ugly packages.' In fact, I may have just made that up. Wait… yep, I did. But I made it up because in at least this particular case, it's absolutely true.

Viktory II is an ugly game. The box is bland and unattractive. It's gray, with a photograph of the entire game board all over the front of the box. Even the pieces inside the box are boring. They look like they've all been stolen out of Monopoly and Risk, except for the hex tiles, which depict various terrain types, like mountains (gray with streaks), plains (flat green with cotton balls), and grasslands (yellow. Just yellow). Looking at the rules and the pieces in the box, you may be inclined to decide that Viktory II is a bad game.

But that's where the saying comes in. Viktory II is one of the most innovative, interesting, and tactically challenging world domination games you'll ever play, which surprised the hell out of me because the box is so dismal. The board isn't the least bit sexy, but the game will tax your brain and blow your mind.

The reason the board is all hexes is because it starts upside down, and you explore as you play. It's critical to unearth new land and build new towns, because the only way you get more soldiers is to have settlements to support them. You can't just hide in Australia and build every turn until you're sitting on top of 75 troops when everyone else has three, because your troops max out at what you can support.

Another fascinating thing about Viktory II is how you get better troops. Turn a town into a city, and it gets you more warriors - but the type of warrior you get depends on the terrain. Mountains support artillery, and forests support boats. If you don't control a city in a forest, you just don't get any boats. Sorry. No boats for you.

Know what else is awesome? Everything. Combat is all about diversity - you get more dice for having different types of attackers, so 5 infantry divisions will roll fewer dice than one horse and one cannon. The infantry guys will take a while to kill, because there are so many more of them, but the horses and guns will kick their asses all day long, especially if the smaller force is defending in a city (that gets you more dice, too).

The sum of all these fascinating new directions for big-battle throw-downs is a game where nearly any decision is important, and a three-hour game will pass you by so fast that you don't even know the day is gone until your stomach starts rumbling. Viktory II demands tactical brilliance and sound strategy, and no small amount of looking at the whole board even if you're tied up against one enemy. You can't afford to make mistakes unless you can count on your opponents to do the same, which leaves the best players rising to the top - unless their opponents are really, really lucky.

From reinforcements to movement, exploration to building, everything about Viktory II takes all the rules you think you know about large-scale combat games and turns them on their heads. The rules are not really intuitive until you've played a few turns, because they're not like anything you've seen before. Everything works different - but in this case, that means everything works better. Viktory II is just a fantastic game, even if the box does look like a cat barfed on it and you tried to clean it up with a Kleenex.

If I had my way, some serious publisher with an eye for talent would buy Viktory II from its creator and turn it into a blockbuster. I could see Asmodee or Fantasy Flight turning this game into an award-winning good time. Skin it out with a slick theme and some dead-sexy art, include a couple pounds of sweet plastic people, and you've got a game that would shame every other wannabe world-conquest game on the market.

They probably won't. But that's OK, because you can still buy Viktory II from the creator, and if you're a fan of this kind of game, you should. Never mind how ugly it is. Just play it. You'll love it.

Summary

2-8 players

Pros:
Scales well with a variable-sized map
Strategy and tactics in equal measures - and lots of both
Innovative and unlike anything you've played before
Fast turns that still feel like you did something

Cons:
Pretty damned unattractive

I've played a lot of world conquest games, and Viktory II just shot right up the charts. Like, top five of all time. You can get it right here:
http://www.viktorygame.com/#order

I'm in a rut.

I like writing game reviews. But now and then, I just get bored. I have dozens of games I love to play, but I never have time because I'm always playing the new crap that shows up in the mail. I have to write about these games, and I've set myself a pretty lofty goal of three articles a week, which is sometimes pretty tough to do. When I'm tired and dragging and working on deadlines, I just don't feel like making boob jokes about board games.

And then there's the fact that I've been doing the same thing for three and a half years. I checked a few days ago, and I've got more than 550 reviews, rants or announcements. The jokes are not getting more interesting. They are just variations on the same stupid gags, and I'm getting tired of my own jokes. I can only say 'bunghole' so many times before it's not shocking or amusing. It gets to be more like a talking parrot repeating a pirate's bathroom habits.

Finally, this feels more and more like a vanity project. It's the Matt Drake Show, where I use this space to brain-dump whatever I feel like discussing without even trying to get anything interesting happening here. Crude gags fill out drive-by discussions of whatever I played that weekend, and they're getting a little old.

I know this is starting to sound like a big fat 'I quit' notice. But it's not. I don't intend to quit writing reviews. In fact, I plan on writing just as many as I ever have (which would be three a week, unless I feel like talking about something else). I'm still going to get free games in the mail, and I'm still going squeeze humor out of prostitution, drugs, and human suffering. The fix to my problem is not to do less. The fix is to do more.

What I want to do is create something with a little more life of its own. I would eventually like to see Drake's Flames be a place where game nerds come up with off-the-wall ideas and build those ideas into something useful (or at least amusing). Here's an example of one idea. I call it The Game Building Game.

First, I get everyone who wants to be involved to submit ideas for a wacky/stupid/crazy/hilarious theme for a game. Bums playing ice hockey, for instance. Then I put all the ideas into a poll, and we all vote for our favorite. Once we have a theme, we submit ideas for game mechanics, like flicking wooden discs into miniature trash cans. We vote on those and pick three, which we combine to create the game. Finally we have everyone send in art, and then I build the whole thing into an actual game, which we can all download and play whenever we want to play a game that could have been designed by a team of acid-dropping squirrel monkeys. The point is not to create a game that wins awards and sells a million copies. The point is to have a bunch of people put their heads together and come up with something truly horrible.

I've got other ideas, and loopy stuff I want to do on top of talking about whatever I'm playing. They're all just bouncing around my skull like a tennis ball in a paint mixer. I want to try some of them, ignore some of them, and flat-out reject a whole bunch just because they're only there due to sleep deprivation and reality TV.

What I don't want to do is make some lame website that tries to be Fortress Game Geek Info. I'm not looking to be a catalog, or a database, or a happy community of like-minded Chatty Kathys. What I want to do is something different, something I haven't seen before, something more like a mad scientist's laboratory crossed up with a mushroom hallucination.

Here's the problem, though - I can barely manage to work this Blogger site. I was writing here for almost a year before I fixed the graphic at the top and made it a full-page layout. I surely don't know how to make a site with a forum, a chat area, regular news releases and all the other crap I would need to turn Drake's Flames into a gamer version of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Lucky for me, though, somebody else does.

I don't know who that might be, just yet. It might be you. If it is you, and you know how to put together a website with all the bells and whistles we need to turn this into an experimental drug den for game geeks, let me know. I can pay you in games. God knows I have enough of them. Plus you can be the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain, the magician throwing all the smoke and mirrors while I come up with ideas that sound so ridiculous that people stop and throw spare change.

At this point, more than any article or piece I've ever written, I need some feedback. Where do we go from here? Brave new world, or more of the same? Is the answer a simple, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', or is there potential for insane genius? And are there enough goofballs and wackadoos out there to make something this wildly bizarre actually work? Use that comments section. That's why it's there. Plus I never could figure out how to turn it off.

The Spoils has to be the strangest collectible card game I've ever seen. Admittedly, I have not played them all, but I would wager there are not very many games that pit elves who only write in 733t speak against bankers who are, quite literally, fat cats. And that's before you roll in a commodities market that buys and sells natural forces like gravity, tiny illegal aliens that are actually inch-tall robots, or any of the other exceptionally odd things you'll find in The Spoils.

It's also the darkest card game I've played. Now, I never did try that Vampire card game they made, but I am still pretty sure that this one is actually more twisted. Professional cat hitmen bludgeon innocents to death with lead pipes. Arcanists make twisted deals with demons that grant them immense power - and make tentacles and eyeballs grow out of their heads. A dreadful demonic disease turns people into creatures that just might be confused with vampires, and honestly, I'm not sure what the difference is.

But for being the strangest and darkest card game I've ever played, it's also the funniest. Other card games might have had jokes dropped in here and there, but The Spoils puts the comedy front and center, right next to the depravity and horror, making a delightfully quirky mix of silliness and oddity that appeals to me even more than it repels me. For example, one card shows a powerful warrior with the tagline, 'Tonight we dine in Hell', and at the very bottom of the card, 'Or maybe Arby's.' For being more twisted than a Neil Gaiman short, The Spoils absolutely refuses to take itself seriously.

Except when it comes to being a solid game. When it comes to game play, The Spoils is as serious as the kind heart disease caused by too much Adkins diet. With a bizarre theme and very involved play, this is not gateway game, and so to sell to hardcore CCG nerds, it has to be a serious contender. The rules are short and easy to learn, but the game is deep, smart and tough to play really well.

On the surface, The Spoils looks an awful lot like just another Magic clone. You have a starting influence score, and the goal is to reduce your opponent to zero. You bring in guys to attack your foe, and block his guys when they attack you. You pay card costs with resources exclusive to the faction you've chosen. All of these are so similar to Magic that you may find yourself wondering why you're not just playing the original.

Once you see the differences, though, you'll understand. For starters, it's almost impossible to get mana screwed. You can play any card as a resource just by placing it face down, but you still need faction-specific resources if you want to bring in anybody. Only you don't have to pay with those resources - if you control enough of the right resources, you can pay with whatever's handy. Tricky to explain, but it works incredibly well, and removes the single greatest problem I ever had with Magic.

And even more than Magic, hand management is critical. Every turn, you can either draw or play a resource. Not both. You can pay to draw again or play another resource, so you're not entirely hosed - but it's not cheap, so you have to be very smart about what you play. Sometimes it's worth it to take a couple cheap shots just so you can keep building your power base, and sometimes you just have to make hay while the iron is hot.

There are five different groups in The Spoils, each with its own demented resource. Rage fuels the Warriors, while the Banker thrive on Greed. The Arcanists are powered by Obsession and the Rogues use Deception, with the Gearsmiths banking on Elitism. As you can see, The Spoils is not a very happy place. Not one faction is powered by Rainbows or Giggles or Unicorn Farts.

Each faction has the same basic goal - bring in characters to attack and thereby reduce enemies to skidmarks in their own boxer shorts. But each faction handles this goal differently. The rogues strike fast, and have remarkable flexibility, while the warriors rely on dealing damage directly to their foes and laying waste to your defenses before they charge screaming into your living room to eat all your Cheetos and bogart the remote. The gearsmiths specialize in boosting the power of their characters, while the arcanists are great at ruining your chances of getting anything useful into play. The bankers are kind of the anti-arcanists, and rule at managing their hands and providing themselves lots of options.

That's a really crude summary, of course, and there's a lot more to playing The Spoils than that. There are preconstructed decks available, if deckbuilding gives you a headache, but honestly, this isn't a game you're going to want to play if you never intend to get any boosters. Unlike the Living Card Games, The Spoils doesn't really come to life until you start buying more cards. So if you love it, it will eat your money.

I really like The Spoils, and now I'm probably going to have to start donating plasma to afford boosters. I have only played a few games, but I haven't spotted a single flaw yet, and it's vastly more entertaining and enjoyable than Magic.

However, I do have one complaint. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where to get more resource cards. I've gone all over the website. I've looked at online stores. I've sat with credit card in hand, trying to figure out if buying a particular box of cards will yield me more resources. The boosters are completely unpolluted by resources, which means you get more bang for your buck, but at the same time, I can't even play the gearsmiths because I don't own a single Elitism card. If you know where to get those resource cards, for the love of God, please tell me.

The Spoils bills itself as a conglomeration of Tolkien, Lovecraft and Lewis Carroll, and that sounds about right. It's funny and dark, twisted and entertaining, and solves every problem I ever had with Magic. If you like CCGs, I cannot recommend it highly enough... assuming someone tells me where I can get some damned resources.

Summary

2 players

Pros:
Funny, dark, and strange
Easy rules and very deep gameplay
Fixes a lot of things that Magic breaks
Surprisingly affordable, for cardboard crack

Cons:
Definitely a collectible game - if you hate random boosters, stay away
Can't figure out where to get resources

Noble Knight Games carries The Spoils. But even they can't tell me where I can find more resource cards.
SPOIL YOUR APPETITE FOR MAGIC

UPDATE

Here's an update. A few people responded to tell me where you can get resources. It seems the competition packs and preconstructed decks come with plenty of them. So if you buy a bunch of those, you'll have all your need.

But what if you don't want to buy preconstructed decks or competition packs? What if you just want resources? Well, I'm glad you asked. The kind folks at Hour11.com are right there, eager to help you out. They sell boosters and singles for The Spoils, and they bribed me to run an ad for a couple weeks. I'm a cheap bribe, by the way - they sent me some of those resources cards I need, and I built them an ad. In case you have trouble finding the ads, you can get to Hour 11 right here:
http://hour11.com/

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I'm going to try a word association exercise. I'll say a word, and then you can say the first thing that comes to your mind. Don't bother saying the word out loud, though. I can't hear you, and your co-workers will think you've been huffing the canned air.

Ready? The word is 'Eleminis.'

Ha! Got you, didn't I? You couldn't think of anything! Probably because that's not a word. That's like two words, only they're all scrambled and nonsensical. Word association is cool, right?

So instead of continuing this rather stupid exercise (which is even more stupid since I can't actually hear you, and you might have come up with something awesome and I just assumed you couldn't think of something, which is not really fair, but I already did it and I don't mean to take it back), I'll just tell you what 'Eleminis' means.

Hold on to your seats, because this may be a shock - it's a game. Yep, I know that's weird. You're at a website about games, reading an article titled, 'Card Game Review - Eleminis', and then I go and spring it on you that Eleminis is a game. I should probably try to be more obvious next time.

But there's something else, because eleminis are also very short skirts worn by grade-school kids (mostly girls). No, wait, that's not right, and would make a very awkward game that might require you to register with the city. No, an elemini is a very small pachyderm. No! It's not! I could do this all day.

Eleminis are actually tiny elemental characters. That's actually true this time. These cutesy little goobers are all over the cards for the game of the same name, and you win if you can get all five of them. Yes, there are five. There are the four traditional elements, which are fire, water, air and earth, but then there's the stand-in extra that got drafted at the last minute because the other four wanted to start a basketball team. The last element, in case you're curious, is vegetables. Well, OK, the game calls it plant, but calling a little guy 'plant' is nowhere near as interesting as calling him 'Rutabaga.'

Every elemini in this game is a brawler capable of beating the piss out of two other eleminis. For example, Fire can throw a beating on Air and Turnip Greens. Then Air can get all pissed and go take out his frustrations on Water and Earth, and then both of them go kick Fire in the groin for pissing off Air in the first place. This relationship is important, because it's how you play.

You only have five slots in front of you. So if you wanted to put a sixth card in front of you, well, you can't. You only have five. And to win, you need each slot to have a different elemini in it. Every turn, you draw one card, and you have to play it. If it's good for you, you probably want to play it on yourself. If it sucks, you may want to give it to someone else. And any time an elemini can beat up a different one, you can swap the bully out for the victim.

There are also a couple other guys in the game. They get bussed in from the projects. One is Star, and the other is Trash. Star has emotional problems, deep-seated scarring that makes him able to beat up anyone, anywhere, for any reason. It's sad, really, but it is this power that makes him also a great stand-in for any other elemini. So if the school play starts and Air isn't there, but all the other guys are, Star can stand in. Hell, if you want, you can forget the other nerds completely and just have five Stars.

Then there's Trash. He stinks. His mother doesn't bathe him often enough, and the other eleminis won't hang out with him on the playground. He just sits in one of the spots and keeps the other little dudes from coming in, which means that you can't win the game if he's sitting there. You have to get him to leave.

And that's why you have action cards. These cards let you swap eleminis, steal them from other players, and even discard them right out of the game (as long as you bring a tarp and a shovel. That body isn't going to bury itself, unless you had the foresight to make the poor guy dig his own grave before you killed him).

So far, this is a great example of seriously disturbing playground politics. What it is not is a very interesting game. You can only play one card on your turn, so it's not like there's any hand management. You draw a card and you play it. It's pretty obvious whether you should give it to yourself or hit someone else with it. And that is not exactly the foundation of rewarding game play.

However, a few factors should be considered before you simply bury Eleminis in a shallow grave next to Cucumber and Fire. For starters, the art is very kid-friendly. Like, if your kid is into Veggie Tales, he's going to think the art in Eleminis is a little too cutesy. And the rules are stupid easy to learn. You could teach this game to a four-year-old - which was probably the general idea.

If I were a grade-school teacher (and I had not yet been summarily dismissed, possibly held without bail pending trial), I would probably keep a copy of Eleminis in the cupboard. You can play it with a gaggle of kids, and anybody under ten years old might really enjoy the chance to play a game instead of learning multiplication tables or the alphabet. The cards have simple art, and each one has a really big word right on the card describing what it is (in case you couldn't look at the raindrop and tell that it's water). You might be helping kindergartners learn how to read! Or in my case, I could be teaching kindergartners how to run interference so I could steal from the bookmobile.

I don't think very many adults would enjoy playing Eleminis. It's got all the depth of a linen tablecloth. I'm not even sure smart children would enjoy it. But a handful of slobbering first-graders might actually beg their teacher for the chance to break out the cards, especially if their teacher tells them that Shrub can beat Air or Water in a cage match.

Summary

2-8 players

Pros:
Easy to learn
Very clear instructions
Probably great for young kids

Cons:
Not very interesting for anyone who can read the nutrition label on a cereal box

Do you want to know more about Eleminis? No? Me neither. But in case you teach second grade, or are a nanny for some kids with Down's Syndrome, you can get Eleminis here:
http://www.eleminis.com/

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