Games Review

I think we've hit the board game equivalent of peak oil when it comes to theme. We've got so many games about farming that they're starting to make up a substantial portion of the German gross national product. We have games about selling silk, parking cars, and even one about shipping containers. But you can tell we're running low on ideas when we take a pure abstract and slap a theme on it where spiders and ants try to surround a bee.

In fact, the theme for Hive is so interchangeable that I've seen versions that use everything from Space Invaders to Pokemon, with lots of other weird variations. People make their own Hive sets, and I've even seen one custom set made with chess imagery.

The chess thing is especially apropos because Hive has a lot in common with chess. There's a lot of planning moves, setting up plays three moves out, smart opening moves, traps for the unwary opponent, and other elements that make chess the kind of game where very boring people who have very little sex write books about how to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about a game, and not that much actually playing. Hive is not quite as popular as chess, but for a very small game, this puppy has a ton of fans.

It's pretty clear to see what hooks all those fans. Hive is an incredibly strategic game with the kinds of simple rules you find in chess, and an astounding amount of depth. It's the epitome of strategy games, with every move being vitally important and every mistake costing you dearly. Every piece moves differently (you know, like in chess) and a very short set of rules explains everything you need to know.

The different moves define Hive. Every hexagonal playing piece has different rules for moving. Ants can run like the wind, but can't fit into tight spaces. Grasshoppers just launch themselves over the tops of everyone else and land wherever they wind up. Beetles, spiders and even the queen bee all move differently, and since the goal is to get your opponent's queen surrounded, understanding how to exploit those moves is critical to success.

For instance, since you can't split the Hive, moving a piece onto the outside of an opponent's ant locks down that ant until you move your own piece. If your opponent's grasshopper is interfering with your ability to bring in your pieces, you can hop on top of it with your beetle. I prefer not to know why the beetle is mounting the grasshopper, but at least I can bring out my bugs. Let's just hope that beetle is using protection, or there might be little baby beetlehoppers running all over the place.

I've played more than a half dozen games of Hive at this point, and I'm just barely scratching the surface of how to play. I understand the rules, and know how everything moves, but I discover more strategy and flexible tactics every time I play. I love it, and would love the opportunity to teach it to more people and learn a lot more as I play.

On the other hand, half of the people I've played would prefer to scrub grout than play Hive, and frankly, I understand entirely. Hive is very much an abstract, and it's one where the best player wins - there is literally no luck in the game, but there is remarkable strategic and tactical decision-making. If you would rather play Talisman than chess, Hive is going to appeal to you almost as well as an actual nest of insects you found in your attic. It's faster than chess, but still contains an impressive amount of difficult decisions and abstract maneuvers.

If you like chess, you'll probably like Hive. If you think chess blows donkeys, you'll probably hate Hive. And if you like a good story behind your games, then you're really out of luck. Maybe the best thing to make Hive more popular would be for the game's designer to pretend he's German, and to replace all the bugs with stuff about farming.

Summary

Pros:
Intense intellectual challenge
Every move counts
No luck
Requires planning, seeing the moves, setting traps, and lots of other tricky strategic stuff

Cons:
Ants and grasshoppers surround a bee - that's not a theme, it's a Disney Movie
Pure abstract - if you like theme, you'll hate this game

Dogstar Games doesn't have Hive, but if you check Thoughthammer or FunAgain, they can probably help you out.

North Texas gets snow about twice a year, and it's usually for about fifteen minutes, and normally it melts into slushy mud before you can do anything with it. But today is different. Today is a full-blown snow day.

Now, not everyone thought that three inches of snow was enough to call it a snow day. And maybe if the temperature had been over freezing, and maybe if we were even remotely prepared for weather that wasn't hotter than Satan's crotch, that might make sense. But just to be on the safe side, a bunch of school districts closed - just not ours. And when I called work, they were quite clear that there was no inclement weather threat. So off I went, dutifully, taking my daughter to school and then driving to work.

Here's the thing. We are the worst cold weather survivors on the planet. We can crash our cars on a four-inch-long strip of black ice, and we get all kinds of black ice because local businesses turn on their sprinklers overnight right before the mercury drops to 20 degrees. In other states, I would have snow tires, and government trucks would be out throwing salt on the roads. Here we just have sand trucks, and they only come out when there's virtually no possible excuse for throwing garbage on the roads. When there are actual dangerous conditions, and the roads seem to be covered with a layer of KY sex lube, those truck drivers get scared and call in sick.

I should have known after the third time I spun out trying to leave a stop sign that the roads were a little sketchy. They weren't as bad at 7:15, but by 8:30 there was so much slush on the road that it was a little like driving on jello. Sometimes your tires would grab, and sometimes - not so much.

By way of example, to illustrate how slippery the roads were this morning, I will tell you how I wrecked my car.

To get on the freeway, I have to drive over a bridge. The bridge makes a turn at the bottom so that you can point your car the same direction as all the other cars that are driving at 70 miles an hour regardless of whether the road is covered with more ice than an Olympic skating rink. So as I came over this bridge and headed down the other side, I had to turn the car. Only the car wouldn't turn, because the road was slicker than dog crap on a freshly watered lawn, and I was headed directly out onto the freeway, but sideways, so that I could have a semi truck t-bone me into a fine paste.

The wheels grabbed at the last minute, which probably saved my life, but sent me into a mad fishtail. My car dodged back and forth like a punch-drunk boxer before slamming into a guard rail and spinning 180 degrees, so that I was moving backwards but still able to look at the oncoming traffic on the freeway as it barreled toward me and my nearly disabled train wreck of a car.

Happily, I didn't hit anyone else, and nobody hit me. I was able to limp home, after which I was able to cuss like a sailor about the fact that the sand trucks weren't out and the office still wanted to see me. Then I called work and told them that, thanks to the fact that my front bumper was ripped off and the right side of my car had been compressed enough that I could no longer open the doors, I was not going to be able to make it to the office.

Anyway, now I'm home, have been for several hours, and the snow is still falling out of the sky in chunks the size of grapes. My daughter is home now (I went and got her, because the roads were just getting worse and I'm not sure I'll be able to leave my driveway this afternoon), and she proposed to me that we make the best of a bad situation.

We made a snowman.

This is a big deal, because this is the first time in ten years of living in Texas that I can remember getting enough snow to make a serious snowman. We probably could have made a good eight-foot tall monolith and named him Gargantua or something, but we settled on the trusty three-ball, four foot version, and then decorated him with a hat, a couple glass beads for eyes, and an old pair of glasses.

I took pictures, so that I could share with the class. Here's the snowman. Like me, he prefers Winston full-flavor shorts.

Grouchy snowman thinks you suck.


My daughter was outraged, so we made the snowman happy. Plus my daughter decided it was a snowgirl, not a snowman. I should probably affix boobs.

After that, we had a huge snowball fight. She hit me in the side of the head with a snowball the size of a grapefruit. All's fair, I suppose, so I pick up a double handful of snow and shoved it down the back of her shirt. Then I ran in the house.

Now we're waiting for the pizza and the tow truck. I don't much care which one comes first.

While I have a group of good friends I meet for games just about every weekend, I end up playing more games with my wife than anyone else. This might have something to do with the fact that we both live in the same house, and it might just be that my wife is totally kick-ass and, on top of being one of the finest chefs you can imagine, also loves to play games with me. But either way, it means I'm always scouting good two-player games. And when we find one that we can enjoy with two players, we play the hell out of it.

I was surprised to find that Blue Moon was one of those 'play all the time' games. For one thing, it's from Reiner Knizia, and I have about a 50% success rate with Reiner games. Some of his games are pure genius, and some are so boring that I would rather clean the cat box. On top of the Reiner thing, it's also got a rather bizarre theme, being set in a trippy fantasy world where fire people do battle with old men and naked girls in body paint. And if those weren't already two strikes down (not that the naked girls are a strike, there just aren't enough of them), there's a weird capture-the-dragon thing working that can lead to some near-instant ass-kickings.

Blue Moon is a card game. It's expandable, which means you can get more decks for it, but you can also play it right out of the box, as long as you like setting the Vulca against the Hoax (that would be the flame dudes and the octogenarians I mentioned before). Each deck has 30 cards, split between leadership cards, characters, support and boosters. Some tricky rules tell you when you can play each kind of card, but the basic concept of the game is that you use the cards in your hand to compete in battles where you constantly try to one-up each other for the high score in either fire or earth, with the winner attracting a dragon (told you this was a wacky theme).

Character cards are the driving force for the battles in Blue Moon. Each has scores in both earth and fire, though sometimes those values might be '0', in which case they're really not much use in a fight. If your opponent hits you with four flame, you have to come back with at least four flame, or you retreat and he swipes a dragon off the middle of the table. These characters are all colorful and often a little silly. Like the old men are mostly gray-haired, tubby academics. They kind of remind me of Jack Nicholson when he thinks he's still a viable sexual candidate and does a scene without his shirt on. Only since it's just a card game, it's less disturbing.

The booster and support cards add a ton of strategic possibilities. A support card might tell your opponent he can't draw replacement cards, or play some kinds of cards, or it might just add to your total. Boosters might give you a huge kick for one round, but if your opponent can beat your numbers, you lose the booster and have to go back for more. Leadership cards can give you some cool one-time bonus, like drawing a big hand or throwing out all your opponent's support cards.

And that's just for starters. Add in the crazy icons that let you break the rules even more, and now you're starting to see some pretty wicked card play. Battle getting a little too rough? Drop out the guy with the shield and the '2' and bring it back down a notch. Want that extra boost without losing all your cards? Play the booster with the retrieve icon, and take the card back into your hand. But be careful - if your opponent bails before you get a chance to pick it back up, you lose the card (though you do win the battle, so it might be worth the sacrifice). And to just completely twist your head around, many of the cards have special powers that break all kinds of rules. It's madness. Cats and dogs, living together - mass hysteria.

It's not really that crazy, honestly. It all goes together smoothly into a clean, quick, clever game that is easy to pick up and play. But since knowing how to play a deck depends largely on knowing what other cards you can count on seeing, both from your deck and your opponent's, experience is the best teacher. Knowing the cards provides an immeasurable advantage, and so there's a bit of a barrier here for new players. Study up and learn your deck, and you'll have a better idea how to play it. The different decks have drastically different play styles, and so you have to know your own cards and what the other guy might break out. You may want to keep a card ready so you can counter those one or two cards that always seem to catch you with your pants down, or you may want to be overly aggressive even if it means you're weak towards the end of the game.

One complaint that might plague the novice player is that the game can end pretty suddenly if you're not careful. It's supposed to go until someone runs out of cards, but if one player can bogart all three dragons and then capture one more, it's over early. And since it's not all that rare to score three dragons in one fight (using some horrifying card combinations in a long fight), it can be very discouraging. It's just no fun when you play one fight and then the game is over. And sometimes you just can't get the cards you need, and while there are ways to get to what you need, the new player isn't going to know when to do that.

If you're just playing with the base set, the only way to play is to use the preconstructed decks. That's fine, because they're balanced enough. They can be tough to learn, though, and after a while, it can get pretty boring to be playing the same thing over and over. It's like a really good pizza - awesome, but after a while, you just want some decent Indian food. So if you buy some expansion decks, you can either play them the way they come, or you can build your own. There's enough meat on the expansion decks to warrant their own review, so I'll write another review later. It's not worth buying the expansions until you decide if you like the base game anyway, so there's no rush.

If you're a total theme hog, Blue Moon will seem too much like dropping acid. It's very odd, and there's very little connection between the pictures on the cards and the effect they provide. And if you like your card games to be intense, lengthy duels of luck, will and wit, Blue Moon is going to bore you to the point that you wish you were dropping acid. However, if you like to play short, intelligent games that require quick decisions, or if you like games where experience allows shrewd play, or if you just like card games with really pretty art, Blue Moon should be high on your list.

Summary

Pros:
Very pretty card art
Tricky card effects require quick thinking
The more you play, the better it gets
So interesting, it doesn't even feel like a Reiner Knizia game at all

Cons:
Potential for sudden 'oh crap I lose' events
Very odd theme

Sadly, Dogstar Games does not have Blue Moon. They have a listing for it, but considering how long this game has been out of print, it's no shocker that they can't keep it in stock. However, there are probably other online retailers who do have it, so you could look them up, if you feel like it.

Open Letter to Mayfair Games:

Dear Guys Who Make Settlers of Catan,

It is my sad duty to inform you that you are not Fantasy Flight Games. I apologize for the rude awakening, but I felt it important that you realize as soon as possible that you should not make Ameritrash games. You make some of the finest Euro games on the market, and you do it very successfully. I have personally enjoyed a great number of your European-style games.

However, I do believe you are not very well suited to creating games with heavy themes and lots of creepy monsters. Lovecraft games are best left to companies who specialize in hundreds of little pieces of plastic and too many cards, and who hire artists who get kicked out of LucasArts for being too nerdy. Rules for these games are supposed to be long, but generally somewhat intuitive, not short and confusing as hell.

I am referring, of course, to Witch of Salem. This absolutely stunning game seems to be an attempt to breed Arkham Horror with Pandemic, and winds up more like a watered-down version of Ghost Stories. It is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, but sadly, the game itself ends up with a bad case of identity crisis, and can't decide if it wants to be an underwear model or a librarian, and just sort of ends up like a boring Kathy Griffin.

I will give you credit for having made a set of rules with the potential to be interesting. Witch of Salem has players traveling the board using location cards that can't be retrieved until you've gone back to Miskatonic University, so right off the bat, it feels like a dry European game. But then monsters pop up every round, and this evil Necron guy advances to the point where he will unleash a Great Old One on the city of Arkham, so you've got a theme that should guarantee brilliance.

The monsters can be killed if you show up with the right magic items, but of course, we never seemed to have the right items when we needed them. And if two of the same monsters come out, something real bad happens, like you lose magic stuff or all go a little more crazy. The titular character (if there's a word in the language funnier than titular, I don't want to know about it), Robert Craven, will help when he can, but that creepy Necron character keeps trying to pee in your Wheaties and accelerate the coming apocalypse. If you can follow the witch dude around, he can help keep the monsters from pestering you, but he can't be everywhere at once, and he pretty much wanders at random, so it can be a little hard to track him down.

And all the while, Necron is advancing, and the Great Old Ones keep popping up at Miskatonic University to irritate you, and you have to reveal all of them while you're sealing magic portals and killing monsters and trying not to go completely wackadoo until you wind up wearing a straight jacket and giggling at the male nurses. It sure does seem like time is against you - until you figure out how easy it is to win the game.

And this, dear Mayfair Games, is where you dropped the ball. By attempting to make a European game with an American feel, you have missed the most important element of a cooperative game - tension. Every time I have played this game, we beat the slick green snot right out of whatever bad guys were threatening the city of Arkham. More characters made this even easier - it's supposed to scale by bringing out more monsters, but we just ignored the gathering monsters, since the penalty for having a bunch of them out is weak and unintimidating (and might not happen at all), and they were completely unimpressive. There's no fighting mechanic, just a die that tells us if we lose a magic knife down a sewer grate that leads to Hell, and killing monsters is supremely anticlimactic - you just point to the stuff that matches the monster's stuff, and the monster goes to the discard pile. So even if you do bother to kill monsters (which you almost don't need to do), smoke-testing a boogeyman is not the achievement it feels like it should be.

The real problem here, Really Impressive Publishers Who Dropped The Ball On This One, is that you didn't really understand what makes Ghost Stories or Pandemic as much fun as they are. When a completely novice group can sit down and whip the piss out of this game without even breaking a sweat, you did something wrong. Ghost Stories is intense and exciting and fun - and hard. I've never even won Pandemic, though we came close twice. But Witch of Salem just kind of feels like an exercise in planning out some rather dry moves, and any theme that might have made its way to the game by way of monsters and sanity points is lost in the thoroughly unthematic rules.

I don’t want to give the impression that I completely hate Witch of Salem. It was enjoyable the second time I played. It wasn’t a complete waste of time, unlike many games I’ve played since I told people I would review anything they sent me. However, even if we did have fun, the entire time I kept thinking, ‘man, Ghost Stories is SO much better than this.’ When I would rather play a remarkably similar game with far superior execution, there’s just not much point to playing this one.

Please don't feel bad, People Who Make Bang! You have some really fun games. There is no reason to feel bad, aside from the fact that you made a mediocre cooperative game that is easily outshined by half a dozen games that are out there. We still love you. You still bring us some pretty bitchin' titles, from time to time, and so it would be a shame if you hid your head and cried. I don't want that. I just don't want you to make crappy Euro games that think they're Ameritrash games and then end up sucking on both counts. And the game really is incredibly pretty - prettier than both Ghost Stories and Battlestar Galactica. However, both of those are incredible examples of cooperative games that rock my face off, and Witch of Salem is an example of a gender-confused game that doesn't know if it's a man or a woman (or Euro or American).

Yours truly,

Matt Drake

Summary

Pros:
Flat-out gorgeous
Very Euro-style cooperative game
Great theme
A few interesting elements

Cons:
Never really gets to the point that all the parts come together
Theme gets lost in nonsensical rules
Way too easy
Not bad, but not as good as a lot of other cooperative games

If you're a Cthulhu fan and like cooperative games, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Witch of Salem. And if you like this site, and read it with any regularity, you know what I'm going to ask you to do - buy from Dogstar Games. Without them, this review simply would never have happened, and so the best support you can give Drake's Flames is to buy from Dogstar Games.
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/MFG3309

I don't run across a whole lot of dungeon crawl games I don't like. Even really bad dungeon crawl games usually appeal to me on some level, because I'm a fan of the theme. So for me to play a dungeon crawl game that a lot of people like, and then come back not liking it, seems like there's something a little bit wrong. I don't know if it's me or the game, though I'm pretty sure my friends who like Tomb will tell me it's all me. But I say it's the game.

Here's the concept - you start at the inn, recruit adventurers, and then send them into the tomb to raid crypts and score treasures. You get the XP, not the grunts, because you're apparently a Bear Stearns CEO and profit mostly by the work of other people and produce next to nothing yourself. This is especially unfair because those adventurers get the piss knocked out of them every time they show up anywhere, between traps that cut off their legs to monsters who eat their eyeballs with brie and dry crackers. That tomb is a ridiculously deadly place to hang out, and it's only made worse by the other players.

You can't actually attack the other adventuring parties (usually), but you can rob them blind, which is painfully irritating when they steal the one magic item that was keeping you from getting your ass kicked by Zed the Redneck Manlover in the next crypt. And that rule about attacking the other parties? That goes away whenever a card says it does. And that happens a lot.

The actual game moves pretty quickly. On a turn, you can move, check out a crypt, recruit some help, or equip your guys. Since some other asshole is going to steal all your crap anyway, gearing up seems a little pointless, but spells can sure come in handy later. The only lengthy part of the game is the actual crypt exploration, where one of your friends picks up the cards that describe the contents of the death trap and describe to you exactly how painful the next beating will be. Then you roll a bunch of colored dice to see if your adventurers can avoid having their testicles used as monster hacky sacks. Usually, they don't.

Now, if every player on the board was having the same trouble at the same time, this would be different. But all it takes is a couple crappy card pulls and you're up a creek, watching your whole party get completely destroyed then eaten then crapped out and set on fire. Now you get to go back to the inn and see if there's anyone left (and there probably is not, unless you count the crappy characters that nobody recruits because their main talent is being hit and falling down). Meanwhile, some other jackass has hoarded all the good adventurers and is in the process of waltzing through crypt after crypt, disarming traps, killing monsters and carrying so much treasure that he has to put it in the bank because nobody has any more room for it.

I think the reason that I get angry every time I play Tomb is because so many of the cards have some arbitrary middle-finger-of-death that takes you from competitive to completely ruined in one bad die roll. In one game, I had a great magic item that was keeping me in the running, and another player had some assassins dagger that said something like, 'no matter how tough the other guy is, and no matter how well he's rolling, go ahead and kill him and take all his crap.' And another time, I pull up the trap card and it says, 'if you didn't roll like Jesus was blowing on your dice, everybody in your entire party dies and you get to go back to the inn and stare at the walls because every single potential recruit is deader than disco.'

And that's my real beef with Tomb. It's not that it's not fun, because it is. It's rough and tough and full of raw beat-down action. There are fights and traps and great treasures and exploration and everything I love about dungeon crawl games. But then, just because the designers wanted to make me punch a puppy in the mouth, there are these 'eff you' cards that completely and arbitrarily ruin your entire day. It's not even fair, and there's seldom much you can do to avoid going from romping to ruined inside five seconds.

If you have a longer fuse than I do, and you like dungeon crawl games, you would probably really like Tomb. The art is great. The game play is compelling and exciting. If you're OK with the fact that the other guys at the table are going to kick you in the jimmy and steal your wallet, and you're completely cool with doing it back to them, then you'll probably get a big kick out of this game. But if you don't like having the rug yanked out from under you, or if you don't like twists of fate that you can't control, you'll probably wish you had played something else. Like, I don't know, Parcheesi or something.

Summary

Pros:
Cool dungeon crawler theme
Really kick-ass art
Good combat and trap rules and lots of great treasures and stuff

Cons:
Doesn't even try to be fair
Sometimes the game itself just feels mean spirited

Dogstar Games has Tomb. If you would like to be kicked in the man junk at random moments while exploring a cool dungeon, you can run right over there and get it:
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/AEG5001

I'm not always very smart. I'll wait for the smartasses in the back of the class to compose their witty comebacks, and then I'll explain.

I started writing game reviews about ten years ago. It took a little while to get rolling, but after a few years, I managed to land a huge contact - the PR guys for Wizards of the Coast. They loved me. They sent me EVERYTHING. I have a huge collection of Third Edition stuff, all of it read exactly once and then shelved. It was great, but the problem is, I don't really play RPGs any more, and really wanted to write about board games.

And then I scored with the Avalon Hill contact, and it was brilliant. I got Monsters Menace America, Skull & Bones, Betrayal at House on the Hill - and Nexus Ops.

This was a long time ago, which is the only way I can explain the next statement: I didn't like Nexus Ops the first time I played it.

I know why I didn't like it, though. It was because I played a two-player game against my wife's friend who was only a gamer when she came to visit us, and frankly, Nexus Ops confused the piss out of her. Had I been a better reviewer then, I would have realized that the problem was that the game is a little too involved for a casual gamer, and that I didn't enjoy it because I was doing it wrong. Sadly, I did not realize that, and not only did I give it a fairly lukewarm review, but in a move I have regretted for years, I traded it away. It took me five years to get another copy.

And now that I have played Nexus Ops against capable, intelligent gamers, I can tell you that this game is frickin' AWESOME. It's just as involved as I remembered, but if you're playing against someone who can handle a game more intense than Scrabble, you should be fine. I'm not saying there isn't a fair amount of stuff going on, it's just that any halfway serious game nerd is going to pick it up by the end of the third turn and be all over it.

I'm not sure if you could do a completely different theme with this game and still make it work, but the theme that's there works great. You're all playing rival mercenary companies trying to mine a resource-rich planet, and in order to do that, you end up enlisting the locals. And since the locals are some seriously freaky aliens, that just means you get to party with mushroom people, giant spiders and dragons that look like blowflies. Each of the six different races of alien has its own sculpt, including the rather wimpy humans, and this is where this gets visually brilliant - the pieces all look like gummy bears. Not like actual bears, or anything, but they're cast in this neon translucent plastic that would look totally amazing under a black light.

The planet's surface is built from randomly assembled hexes, and each has a type of terrain, whether it's fungus forest, crystal woods, rock plain, or lava field. And every time you explore one of these spots, you might find a rubium mine (yes, it's called rubium. Yes, that's a little gay). You can spend the rubium to buy more wacky aliens to fight for you, and then you can send the aliens into battle, and try to get control of the monolith in the middle of the board. Because if you get the monolith, you get access to some really great cards that can totally turn things around for you when the chips are down.

The key to the game, however, is succeeding at the secret missions. Since the goal of the game is to get 12 victory points, and these missions all earn you points, you want to succeed at them whenever you can. That can be hard, though - if your card tells you to kill something with a lava leaper and all you have are rock striders, well, you better go shopping.

It helps that every different alien has a specialty. Lava leapers are more powerful in magma pits, and can leap over spaces if they start out in lava. Plasma dragons can burn enemies without having to get into the fight. Fungoids can mine, and are powerful in the fungus forests. The only units that don't have special powers are humans, and even they're useful because they're wicked cheap. Some units can't enter the monolith. Some units can't operate the mines. Some units are great fighters, and some are just cheap. With all the different considerations for each unit, it can be a little tricky to decide how to spend your rubium (yep, still gay) when you're buying troops.

And this is where my non-gamer friend got lost. You've got energize cards with powers on them, but you have to time them right, and you've got secret missions you're trying to accomplish, and you've got dragons that need to be at the monolith and humans that need to be at the mines and all the while you have to keep track of what kind of unit you want where because the enemy dragon is coming and you're about to be in one hell of a hurry. For the tourist gamer, this is way too much to handle. For the guy who can read 40 pages of rules and remember what happens when a Descent spider webs your ranger, these are just tactical factors to exploit.

The big picture here is that with all this happening all the time, there are lots of ways to make mistakes. There are critical decisions all over the map, and you need to be able to remember when to play an energize card, and where to move your support troops, and which guys to call up. Pay for a dragon when you can't afford it, and you're swarmed by crystal dudes. Buy a bunch of cheap guys when the other guys have a good number of hard-hitters, and you just wasted your money as they all get eaten. This is the kind of decision-making I like - tons of options, none of them exactly right, but some far better than others.

Nexus Ops is a very tactical game, and it's also decidedly strategic. You have to plan ahead. You have to try to outwit your opponents. You have to make the right move at the right time, or you might just wind up watching all your mines get claimed by one foe as you fight the other. It's an incredibly well-designed game, and while luck certainly plays a role (blow a couple battles you should have won, and you'll be cursing the dice), good game play is going to make a hell of a difference.

I am really glad I got Nexus Ops again. It's a seriously enjoyable game, and I'll play it whenever I can. It's not getting traded away again, I can promise that. If you like tactical strategy games with an element of luck and great pieces, you should probably run down a copy as soon as you can.

But you can't have mine.

Summary

Pros:
Meaningful decisions galore
Really cool alien troopers
Interesting premise and fun theme
Great tactics and great strategy equals a great game

Cons:
A lot to track (at least until you get it down)
Out of print

I wish I could send you to Dogstar Games for this one, but they don't have it. Instead, here's a link to a Troll & Toad copy that will set you back 70 bucks:
http://www.trollandtoad.com/pd2590961.html