Games Review

If you've never played a game from Small Box Games, you're depriving yourself. The entire company is basically one dude and his wife, and they print everything locally and ship it all over the damned place. The designer, John Clowdus, has a thoroughly twisted mind. Not like baby-oil-and-shaved-badgers' twisted, but more like how-the-hell-did-you-think-of-that twisted. His games are simple to play, once you learn the rules, but they're so unlike anything else that you'll have to read the rules six times before you understand what you're supposed to do. The ironic thing is that the rules are usually one piece of paper. It takes some serious mental hijinks to be able to come up with really simple rules that make perfect sense, but only after you read them repeatedly. I've said before that John's games are absolutely brilliant, even when they suck.

Irondale is classic Clowdus. The cards are kind of cheap, because it's really hard to find a high-quality linen-stock printer willing to do a 100-piece print run. The rules are printed on both sides of a single piece of paper, and the design is all home-grown. Unlike many Small Box Games, Irondale contains only cards, not the copious quantities of hand-assembled pieces that have been in John's game in the past. Since Irondale is part of the Pure Card line, that kind of makes sense. It also makes sense that the Clowdus clan doesn't feel like spending two hours assembling each of 100 games to make enough money to buy a nice meal.

But if the cards are a little on the cheap side, the rules are pure gold. The way the game is built means that you'll make your brain sweat every turn as you try to come up with the highest-scoring combinations as you build the city of Irondale. Each card is a building, and you score points according to the kind of building next to the one you're building now. You can build two buildings on your turn, so often your first play is to set up a big scoring opportunity for your second play. Unless, of course, you're as confused as most of my family, in which case your first play is to put down a card, discover that you can't play it there, then pick it up and stare at your hand a while longer.

To make your head hurt a little more, different buildings do different things. They might offer extra points if you build specific buildings next to them, or let you draw cards, or let you steal stuff from the other players. So now you're not just trying to put down one card to build another card, you're trying to put down the right card in the right spot so you can follow it up with another right card in another right spot, and all the while you're trying to draw more cards and steal from your opponents and get more points and plan for next turn.

In case you're not completely paralyzed with indecision at this point, on the off chance that you're still able to put together a useful play without thirty minutes of pondering, Irondale adds in the master plan. If you build two of the right kinds of buildings on your turn, you can get more points or draw more cards. So now you plan how you'll put down the one card to benefit the second card, all while keeping an eye on all the cards placed so far and trying to walk yourself through the convoluted series of events leading up to your inevitable win. You'll place the bath house next to the gay bar, which will get you two extra points and a social disease, then you'll put the county lockup in the corner formed by the bath house and the Baptist church, which will earn you the eternal gratitude of the Bible-thumping zealots and just might cost you the next election. The jail will let you make other people throw away cards (theoretically, I'm making this up now - there are no gay bars or Baptist churches in Irondale, in case you were wondering), so you'll wait for all the discarding to happen before you reveal your master plan, which was to build a jail and a bath house, which earns you two more points and a jail full of inmates who are more likely to share makeup tips than stab each other.

In case I'm not conveying this properly, Irondale is a very complicated game. The box says it is medium weight, but I think Clowdus lied to us. There is an insane number of elements to consider when you take your turn, and if your brain is not capable of juggling a dozen things at once, you're going to get completely lost. That, or you'll just slap the clown college down next to the military academy and watch the bodies pile up like cordwood. It's incredibly well-designed, and all goes together brilliantly, but it's a hell of a lot to take on board.

Unfortunately, a couple design decisions confuse the hell out of me. The main game play is great, but I fail to understand the purpose behind trading a card away when your turn is over. Not only do the rules not tell me what to do if nobody wants the card, but the trading makes it more difficult to plan for next turn, because it's harder to control what I keep for later. Not to mention the fact that it seems largely pointless. If the game needed to let you toss your old cards to get new ones, it could have just let you discard to draw new cards. That's a fairly simple solution.

The scoring method is particularly wacky. To keep track of your points, you take two cards and line them up next to each other. Spin the 1 so it faces the 11 and you've got 12 points. What the game needs in a desperate way is a scoring track. We kept track of our points on a piece of notebook paper, because this card scoring thing is just unnecessary complication and it looks really silly. I think it might also be the reason that there are three different decks, all containing pretty much the same selection of buildings and making me wonder why half this stuff happened at all.

If I do play Irondale again - and I might, I enjoyed it quite a bit - I'm making some changes. For starters, all the cards go in the same pile, and I don't care what color the backs are. For another thing, we're killing the trade step and just letting you buy new cards with discarded ones. Third, I'm painting the doors on all the outhouses I can find. That actually has nothing to do with the game, it's just a recurring dream I keep having.

I wouldn't say that Irondale is my new favorite game. It's way too tricky to play with most casual gamers. But if you like to do mental calisthenics when you play games, Irondale will rock your world.

Summary

Pros:
So much going on, you'll need to plan ahead for every turn
Brilliant interaction and smart card plays
Neat buildings on the cards

Cons:
Can be very confusing
Cheap cards
A few questionable design decisions

You can find out what new mad science Clowdus is making all the time at his site:
http://www.smallboxgames.com/

This will be quick, because I'm posting from my phone. I'm Geek of the Week, so if you want to ask me a bunch of questions, now is your chance.

I have a theory. I'll walk you through it, and then you can tell me I'm an idiot, and I can tell you that you're retarded.

Dominion is one of the most influential games of the last ten years. Whether or not you like it, it's tough not to see that a whole new kind of game has been invented. The game has drawn a huge audience, and people from all over the gaming spectrum have been drawn to it like skeeters to a bug zapper. That kind of success draws more than just fans, too - it draws people who would like to tap into the money well of gamers who have found some new shiny thing.

In fact, it reminds me of Magic: The Gathering. Before Magic, the collectible card game was, for all intents and purposes, non-existant. Suddenly this game comes out where you buy massive boxes full of cards, spending hundreds of dollars (if not thousands) on a game where you only need 60 cards to play. This makes a ton of money, so there are more CCGs being invented, almost overnight. The core idea behind the CCG is brilliant, and both gamers and designers can see lots of potential. It's not just the money pit - the whole idea of building your own game and then playing it is just plain fun.

Enter Dominion, the current game generation's version of Magic. Right now, when a deckbuilding game is released, the first descriptions of it will inevitably say something like, 'it's like Dominion, except...' But wait ten years, and people will just call it a deckbuilding game, the way Ra is a bidding game, Age of Steam is a train game, and Apples to Apples is a dumb game. We're only now beginning to see more deckbuilding games emerge, but give it ten years, and they'll be everywhere. And like CCGs, the draw is not just the money. Dominion created a whole new kind of game, and the whole concept behind the game is just plain fun. It adds a new weapon to a game designer's arsenal and gives us a new evolution in gaming.

So my review here is not actually about Dominion, it's a review of Thunderstone (the picture at the top of the review may have been a bit of a giveaway in that regard). And Thunderstone is a deckbuilding game, but it is not Dominion. Thunderstone uses the deckbuilding concept pioneered in Dominion, but it implements the idea in a rather different way. The question that remains, however, is whether or not that different way is a good one.

Thunderstone has two areas of cards. The village contains 16 different stacks, including four basic cards like food and daggers and untrained grunts, plus four hero types, and then eight random village cards that range from flaming sword (great for cooking wieners, not so useful if you have a tendency to wipe your knife on your pants) to magic spells, useful equipment and helpful villagers. Apparently the bartender does not mind being purchased, which makes him not unlike many bartenders I have personally known.

The other stack of cards is the dungeon, and at any time, three monsters from the dungeon are visible. The thunderstone is somewhere near the bottom of the dungeon stack, and you have to plow through the monsters, earning trophies, experience and victory points on your way to recover the not-very-valuable magic rock. To kill these beasties, you have to display a hand of heroes whose attack is stronger than the defense of the monster in question, and you have to show a light source, or you can't see so good. When the thunderstone finally makes it out of the dungeon, the game ends, and everyone counts up the victory points they got from killing monsters and having epic heroes (plus the points you get from owning googleberries, which despite the way that sounds, are food, not testicles).

Thunderstone is not anywhere near as tightly designed as Dominion. It relies heavily on an adventuring theme and some brilliant art (not to mention really nice cards) to draw you into the game. It's fun, but it's kind of chaotic, and you'll find yourself buying crappy stuff in the village just because you can't get enough attack points to clear out the mean critters you need to end the game. I suppose that if you play this lots of times, you'll figure out good combinations to speed up the game, but in the meantime, Thunderstone plays bad house guest and thoroughly overstays its welcome.

And I think that's the biggest issue I have with the game, really. It's an interesting use of the build-your-deck-as-you-play thing that was introduced in Dominion, and there's certainly some potential for huge awesome factor with cool art and fun stuff to play. But after about an hour, you're good and ready to see this thing come to an end, and you'll find yourself coaching the other players to try to get them to beat the bad guys so you can put it away. That's a huge shame, really, because it's definitely fun, until it's not any more. Basically, it's fun for about 45 minutes, which would be cool if it didn't take an hour and a half.

Thunderstone is interesting simply as a study in game evolution. Without Magic, there would be no Dominion, and without Dominion, there would be no Thunderstone. Thunderstone alone is not interesting enough to be the next step in the chain - there will be many more deckbuilding games, and Thunderstone will soon be lost in the historical shuffle. But it is cool to see another twist on the idea Dominion presented, and it will be fun to watch what other neat games we see in the future. Thunderstone is fun, even if it is too long, and it's super pretty, so it will amuse me until the next shiny bauble crosses my game table.

Summary

Pros:
Interesting new deckbuilding twist
Great art
Cool theme
Really nice cards
45 minutes of fun

Cons:
Not as tightly built as Dominion
90 minutes of game

I think you should check out Thunderstone, if only for a study in things to come. And it is a fun game, and the more you play it, the more you'll like it. So run over to Dogstar Games, thank them for letting me review Thunderstone, and while you're over there, pick up a copy.
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/AEG5012

I hate gross-out horror movies. For one thing, they're almost always really stupid. Take the first Saw movie, for instance. The cops are completely mentally handicapped - they get a tip on the biggest serial killer in the world, and decide just the two of them will go check it out. I watch Cops, and real cops call for backup if they pull over some bonehead and find out he's got a joint in the glovebox, but these two flatfoot dicks go tromping into the trap-laden house of horrors and never even bother to let the dispatcher know that they're at a crime scene.

Another big issue with gross-out horror movies is that they seem to be an excuse for some twisted writer and sick-ass director to show us the most unimaginably horrible ways people can die. I have no desire to see people skinned alive or butchered for meat, but those are practically light-weight compared to the awful acts that get perpetrated on innocent people in these ferociously disgusting films.

So, when I tell you that I went with a friend to see The Crazies this weekend, I want you to understand that I went to spend time with my friend, not because I wanted to see the movie. The ads make it look like a sick horror movie, and I didn't want to see that at all. But then my friend pointed out that the movie is from George Romero, the reigning king of zombie movies, and so I decided I could live through it. I do love zombie movies.

Boy, was I surprised to find out that the movie was a whole lot better than I thought it would be. That's not to say that it had a wealth of redeeming features, or anything, but for starters, this is not a blood-drenched festival of the disturbing, the way the commercials made it look. It's actually a pretty smart movie, and while it's still campy horror with a fair number of dead bodies and a huge budget for red corn syrup, it's actually got a cool plot, sympathetic characters and some exciting scenes.

Now that I've summed up a bit, I'm planning on spoiling a little. If you're one of those 'don't tell me anything lalalala I'm not listening you'll ruin the movie' people, you'll want to stop reading. I don't think my review will ruin the movie for you, and I'm sure not telling you the ending, but I will mention a few things you may not want to know.

For starters, the crazed killers in this movie are not the most horrifying element of the film. Sure, the psycho killers are sketchy, but they're nothing compared to the soldiers that get called in to deal with the menace. The scariest parts of the movie (for me, at least) feature the U.S. military as the villains, instead of the warped psycho killers. Like zombies, the crazies are unable to control their killer instinct, while the soldiers are heartless and evil and terrifying in their willingness to inflict harm. Ironically, the soldiers believe they are completely justified - but they wear protective masks the whole movie, turning them into faceless killing machines reminiscent of Terminators or German shock troopers. One interesting scene involves the humanizing of one soldier, and serves as the bright spot of light that makes the rest of the military actions that much darker.

Timothy Oliphaunt does a good job as the sheriff who goes through Hell to save his wife, but he's completely outshined by his deputy, a relatively unknown actor named Joe Anderson. If this performance is any indicator, Joe Anderson has one hell of a promising career ahead of him. The sheriff's wife is almost a throwaway character, basically uninteresting, but it's almost worth watching The Crazies just to see the loyal sidekick portray a level of depth that you just don't expect to see in a scary movie.

I've been talking like the movie is smarter than you might expect, but before I sound like this is high-brow fare, let me make clear that there are still some seriously nasty parts. Pitchforks to the chest cavity are pretty bad, but the guy with the bonesaw is worse. And the walk-in fridge full of bodies is even nastier. Romero has never had a problem showing us ugly deaths, and he doesn't switch it up on us now. Blood and guts and painful demise are the order of the day, and the lucky victims get shot. The unlucky ones get their faces sewn shut.

In the end, I was surprised at how much I liked The Crazies, but that's not because it's a great movie. I was surprised because I was expecting total suck, and got watchable. This is not a great film, but it does pick up some credibility from some good performances and a bit of impressive intelligence in the story (although there were some stupid parts, like the idea that the town water hits one side of the town several days before it gets to the other side). There are some clever uses of horror movie cliches, a few cool fights, and the scariest car wash in the history of film. Several times I knew something bad was going to happen, but still jumped a little when it did.

If you like Romero's zombie movies, you'll probably at least be entertained by The Crazies. But you might just wait until it comes to your local Red Box, or throw it in your Netflix queue and watch it where you can have a plate of nachos that don't cost you a second mortgage. This isn't destined to win any Oscars, I can tell you that.

I like a game with a lot of theme, and I don't pretend to apologize for that. But sometimes a game can be fun, even if the theme is totally weak sauce. Example: Jaipur.

Jaipur is one of those games made by European people who think that mundane crap like sorting mail and stacking boxes is exciting enough to make into a game. In this two-player game, you're each merchants in Jaipur (which explains the name). You're competing to make the most money by buying and selling stuff like silver, leather and very nice scarves. To emphasize to the casual passerby how boring the theme for Jaipur is, the box cover has a strange-looking Indian dude who appears to be really enjoying the opportunity to go shopping. He may be gay, but it's hard to tell through his ludicrously bushy beard.

What you have is two players, each with a hand of cards, and a row of five cards between you. Most of the cards are trade goods like gold and jewels, but a bunch of the cards are camels. You don't actually sell the camels, but they are wicked important to making the game work, because of the way you grab sellables.

Like many European games, the rules for Jaipur are really simple. On your turn, you either grab cards or sell cards. That's it. If you buy just one, you replace it from the deck, and if you want more, you have to swap them from your hand. You can also grab every camel in the market, which fills it back up again, but gives you a heck of a chance to trade stuff later. The idea is that you use these camels to swap out for goods, thereby loading up on the cards you need to make the big sales.

If you sell cards, you take whatever you have in a single color and discard it, then take some points. The first person to sell a particular good gets more for it, and sometimes you'll run out, leaving your opponent with worthless crap that nobody wants to buy because the market is flooded. After a while, the round ends and you add up points. To win the whole game, you have to win two rounds. It's pretty straight-forward.

What is not straight-forward is the strategy and timing required to be good at Jaipur. Grab a bunch of camels, and you might offer a market full of expensive stuff to your opponent. But if you do it right before the round ends, you can score extra points for having the most camels (not sure how that makes you a great trader, but it won me the game, so I'll overlook it). Hold on to those jewel cards, and you can steal the whole stack, but hold them too long and the other player will snatch the best ones off the top and leave you with a handful of garbage. Ignore the cheap stuff, and you let your opponent collect the five-card trade bonus. Pay too much attention to the cheap stuff, and your opponent gets all the good stuff.

It will take you a round or two to figure out how to play Jaipur well, but you'll enjoy learning. For one thing, the art is so nice it's practically decadent, and the cards are that swanky linen stock that make them a breeze to shuffle and deal. There's even the coolest insert I've ever seen in a game - it has this sculpted mosque and the name of the game embossed in the bottom of the tray. You gotta see it to know what I mean, but it's really sweet. Some people might argue that components don't make a game, that you can enjoy a game just as much if it has flimsy pieces and ugly art, but I challenge them to go to a bar and choose between a smokin' hot dame in a miniskirt and a ferociously ugly girl with an ass like a phone book. Either way, you're having sex, but it's way more fun if the chick looks good.

I still say the theme is nearly as gay as collecting tea, and that no self-respecting, red-blooded, American meat-eater should enjoy the game. But on the other hand, it is a really fun game, and the theme is just not that big a deal. Hell, I love Blue Moon, and the theme for that one is sheer drug-induced randomness, so just about any game can be great if the rules work. And in Jaipur, the rules work. The game is fun, challenging and smart, which means I'll probably be playing it a whole lot more.

Summary

Pros:
Simple rules that make a ton of strategy
Easy to learn, fast to play
Surprising depth
Great cards with great art

Cons:
What a thoroughly boring theme

I have the coolest wife in the world. Many of you might dispute that statement, possibly arguing that you, not I, have the coolest wife, but in order to prove my case, I present the following three pieces of incontrovertible evidence.

1. My wife is a gourmet chef. Not for a living, or anything - just for me. I eat like a king. That's not an exaggeration, either - on any given night, there is a remarkable possibility that I am eating better than the British royal family. She's that good. For instance, what did you have for Thanksgiving? Turkey? Because I had foie gras and lobster.

2. Once, when we were in line at the movies, the college-age girl in front of us, probably exhausted from copulating like a rabbit with her similarly youthful boyfriend, was sitting on the floor. I only noticed her enough to keep from kicking her, but my wife not only noticed her, but pointed her out to me. The reason this was interesting was that the girl was wearing very sexy thong underwear, and because of the way she was sitting, I was able to see almost down to the promised land. And I would have missed that if my wife had not brought her to my attention.

3. Last night, my wife took me to a whiskey tasting. And she drove.

If you don't really drink much whiskey, that may not mean anything to you, but whiskey is my favorite liquor. I love to sip at a tumbler with two fingers of Johnny Walker Black while I play a game or watch a movie. It's raw and tasty, and takes very little to get a nice, mellow buzz. Beer makes me feel like I've got cotton stuffed behind my eyes, but a scotch buzz is just light-headed fun.

The tasting was held at an Irish bar, which means that right off the bat, scotch whiskey was off the menu. Considering my taste for smoky, smooth scotch, that was a little disappointing, but we were still set to drink an awful lot of seriously expensive booze, so it didn't take me much effort to be just fine with the selection.

I was not quite as accepting of the company. I probably should have figured that the kinds of people who attend whiskey tastings would not be my cup of tea, but I was delighted to find out that at least half of them are total freaks. The tub of ass-lard across from me could not eat without spilling food on his lap-desk of a belly, which would have been less disgusting had he not eaten the food that landed on his shirt. I guess he felt that the three-second rule for dropped food still applied if it fell onto his portable dining room table of a gut. Someone should have told him he was in public, however, because his shirt had holes in it. I wanted to ask him, 'do you know that people can see you?'

But he still looked better than the guy who showed up looking like a homeless guy and coughing all over everything. I was hoping the whiskey tasting came with a bottle of Purel. He left early, probably because the trash truck was about to empty his house so he could go to bed.

Speaking of spreading disease, I somehow wound up seated next to a guy who felt a need to put his fingers on every piece of cheese on the appetizer plate. He would pick up a handful of pieces of cheese with his hands, though there were little cheese spears on the plate so that you didn't need to touch the food other people were going to eat. I guess he thought the spears were toothpicks, because after he ate the cheese, he used the little plastic spears to wedge the crumbs out from between his gap teeth and send them flying across the table.

I could go on - the oddly garrulous old woman with stringy gray hair and her boobs falling out of her top, or the trio of blocky lesbians who brought water droppers to the tasting, or the unkempt college kids who showed up halfway through - but I wasn't there for the circus side show (which is not to say I didn't love it). I'm here to tell you about a whiskey tasting, and that's what I mean to do (though I reserve the right to revisit some of the freaks at the bar, if it's amusing or pertinent).

The tasting was sponsored and run by Jameson Irish Whiskey, so we only tried whiskey from one company. This actually worked out really well, for several reasons. We were able to compare a wide range of flavors from a single distillery, which meant that I was able to get a pretty good understanding for which Jameson labels I preferred.

For example, the cheapest Jameson spent five years in the barrels, and tasted a little like paint thinner. The 12-year was smoother and pretty darn tasty, while the gold and the Red Breast tasted like what happens in your mouth right before you throw up. The 18-year was freaking delicious, and the Very Rare (which usually runs about $140 a bottle) was some of the best whiskey I've ever tasted.

Aside from now knowing what kind of Irish whiskey I enjoy, I also learned a lot about whiskey in general. The girl running the tasting was a cute little Irish girl who walked us through a PowerPoint presentation that told us all about the history of whiskey, the history of Jameson, and a bunch of stuff about the brewing process. Since my wife was driving, I was drinking her whiskey, so I didn't hear most of this, and wouldn't really have cared if I had been sober. Seriously, who gives a rat's ass if your booze spent 18 years in a sherry barrel? I only care if it tastes good. I think many of the guys there, and probably the three lesbians at the end of the table, were paying more attention to the girl because she was hot. Me, I get irritated at pretty girls who chew gum while they're supposed to be talking to people, so I just drank whiskey and felt groovy and tuned out her lilting brogue in favor of whispering to my wife about how much I wanted to stab that tubby jackass across from me.

There are a few hazards you should understand if you want to attend a whiskey tasting. If possible, avoid complete strangers who think they should be talking with you at length, especially if those people are crazy old ladies who jabber about worthless crap, forget your name, and force you to stare at their gray teeth that would make a dentist faint from disbelief. The other people at a tasting can really diminish your enjoyment. The sloppy fat goober across from me couldn't quit commenting on every glass like he had a yearly membership to Whiskey Aficionado, talking about the aroma and color and smooth taste and exquisite finish. I wanted to shove my pen into his eye socket, but I wouldn't have been able to finish my whiskey if I had gone to jail, and they had some damned fine whiskey.

Also, be aware that they may want to educate you, and if you don't really care about Irish history lessons when you're trying to strap on a buzz, you may need to ignore some relatively useless information. If I ever decide to take up brewing whiskey, I'll take a night class. Unless you're one of those 'student of life' people who thinks that you have to be learning something everywhere you go, just ignore that noise and enjoy the booze.

I suppose they might have other kinds of tastings, like tequila tastings at a Mexican restaurant or vodka tastings at a Russian roadblock. I prefer whiskey, so this worked out great, but if you look around, you can probably find someone trying something. I would probably go to another whiskey tasting, as long as it was a different company offering the whiskey. I know all I need to know about Jameson Irish whiskey now, especially since I still prefer scotch to nearly all of it (though if you're ever considering buying me a gift, a bottle of Jameson Very Rare would be exceptionally well received).

Summary

Pros:
Lots of tasty, tasty booze
Find out what kinds of whiskey you like

Cons:
Where do these people hide when they're not pretending to be socially acceptable?

I've said before that I'm kind of a Risk whore. And by 'kind of a Risk whore', I mean I would be very likely to trade sex for Risk, as long as the person with whom I was trading was attractive and female, though in all fairness, if she was attractive and female, she would probably rather have sex with someone who was not interested in trading sex for board games. Now that I think about it, actually, I would make a horrible male prostitute, though I would be astonishingly affordable.

Being a would-be Risk whore, I was delighted to find a copy of Risk: Balance of Power, which Hasbro decided would not be sold in the United States, probably because they don't like money (or, apparently, sex). I would think that a two-player version of Risk would sell like it came with a blowjob, but Hasbro seems to know better. So the version I have came out of Canada, and has all the rules in both French and English, because Canadians can't just speak American like civilized people.

The neat thing about Balance of Power is that it is only a two-player game of Risk. It's still Risk, which means I know I will love it, but instead of the whole world, you're fighting over Europe, and there are a bunch of tweaks to make it work really well for two players.

Some of the extra stuff that makes this work so well as a two-player game include installations, which have no game effect outside being achievable goals, and rough terrain, where you can only attack with two guys, and thus have an extra bonus chance of getting your ass kicked if you try to steal them. Balance of Power riffs off the newly revised Risk, so the goal is not to win every spot on the board, but rather to achieve three goals before your opponent, so controlling both satellite stations is a pretty big deal.

The setup is completely new to Balance of Power, and reminds me of when I was a kid and had to share cake with my brother, and my mom would make one of us cut it and the other choose his piece. In Balance of Power, one player sets up the board, and the other player decides who he wants to play. So if you set it up so that blue is going to run roughshod over red, prepare to have several teeth loosened by your army placement.

Of particular note is that losing troops can often work in your favor. Every time you lose a guy, he goes on your troop counting card, and at the beginning of your turn, you can turn in some of those dead soldiers for bonuses. You could get more troops, for instance, or buy an airfield. You might get special forces who can roll all their dice when they attack the Swedish fjords, or you can get a statistical advantage if you attack an installation. This one little tweak means that if you really get beat down on your opponent's turn, you have all this ammunition to make a comeback. I don't think it would work very well in regular Risk, but in Balance of Power, this is a great balancing feature that prevents a humiliating loss just because your dice sucked for one turn.

But the coolest new bit that really makes this version of Risk brilliant is the neutral player. These tan pieces will be placed at the beginning of the game, but they don't attack. They just sit there and take up space. And if you spend some of those dead troops, you can get the neutrals all riled up, and they'll attack your enemy. This is really great if you're trying to get into a new space, because after they destroy all their own troops trying to knock out your enemy, they're ripe for the picking. A well-timed neutral uprising can virtually hand you some really key spots, which means that you may want to quit attacking your foe when he's in a position to stick his neutral boot up your ass.

The design shares the less-is-more look that you see with the new Risk, and I must say, I freaking hate it. It's ugly and dull and drab. The game is great, but the map is more boring than geometry proofs (in all fairness, I loved geometry proofs). And the pieces are total crap, too. Instead of little wooden squares, or little soldiers, you get flat arrows. These are supposed to make the board look like you're generals planning your assaults in the war room, but since the damned things are nearly impossible to pick up, the board ends up looking like a drunk guy giving directions on a map of the European Union.

The problem is, the game is a blast. It works great. But the map is so painfully boring that it eats a little bit of your soul when you sit down to play, and then you have to try to manipulate these ridiculous arrow-shaped wafers. So I think that since I love the game, but hate the pieces, I'm going to have to decorate it. It's going to need soldiers, and I'll have to redraw the map, but when I'm done, this will be gorgeous.

Oh, who am I kidding. I'm not going to take the time to do that. I'm just going to set it up and play it and complain the whole time, even while I'm having a grand old time invading Poland and laying waste to the Swiss Bank.

Summary

Pros:
Additional rules and elements make it work great for two players
It's Risk. I love Risk.

Cons:
The board is fugly
The arrows are in the advance running for most irritating boardgame pieces ever made
The Canadian version is actually missing a page of rules, which I had to get from BGG

I don't have the foggiest idea where you can find Balance of Power, but if you do find it, you should buy it. It's awesome, even if it is beat-down ugly.