Games Review

I must be on a roll. Last night, party games, and tonight, drawing games. If this is where Drake's Flames is heading, I may as well just start writing about games you can play while sitting on the toilet.

I shouldn't have a problem with a drawing game. I'm an artist for a living. But anyone who ever played Pictionary knows that drawing games have virtually nothing to do with actually knowing how to draw. Identik, for example, is all about drawing the right thing as fast as you can, even if it's butt ugly.

It's not really a complicated game. One player gets a card with a goofy picture, like a worm who built a clothesline between two apples, or a cartoon hobo with a cardboard ukulele. He has to describe the picture to all the other players, including how many hairs are sticking out of the hobo's nose or whether or not you can see both of his ears. It's important to be detailed, because the other players have to draw what this guy is describing.

Once the timer runs out (you know games like this have to come with sand timers. It's like the way Subway sandwiches always come with too much lettuce, or foreign hookers come with crabs), everyone puts down their pencils and passes their horrifyingly bad pictures to someone else to grade. Then the guy with the card reads off the ten things that have to be in the picture, and everyone gets one point if they drew the right thing.

The problem is, neither job is interesting. The reader might get all wrapped up in describing how many windows are showing at the Taj Mahal and completely fail to mention that there's a guy playing a flute while he gets a gigantic woody through a straw basket (in all fairness, that may have been a snake - I could have been confused by the fact that it only had one eye). And if the 'art director' forgets to mention that one of the maids has her hair in a bun, nobody will draw that, and then nobody gets any points for that bit.

I'm not really sure why a game where you describe art and then make everyone draw it in less than a minute has any appeal to anyone. However, I don't have to understand it to know it's true. My kids thought this game was a hoot, and asked me to keep playing even after the first game was over. I declined, because Identik was not fun from where I was sitting.

However, unlike many other lame games I play with my family, the wonder wore off pretty fast. While they did ask for one more game, they have never mentioned it again. By comparison, I get requests for Buzz It! nearly every night, and it has even fewer rules than Identik. But where the one game has you laughing about the ridiculous things you might answer for 'reasons you can't make it to work', the other game just makes you scribble furiously and then have other people make fun of your work while you cry, 'No! It's a party hat! I don't know why it's in her pants!'

So I didn't like Identik very much, but props to the creators for a cool idea. Someone out there might get a kick out of the game, but it just seems too frantic to be any fun. Maybe it's because I am an artist that I like to take a little time when I'm drawing stuff, but I can't really claim to get any enjoyment out of creating picture that might be anything from a giraffe juggling chainsaws to a Roman orgy.

Summary

Players: 3-6 (more if you score a few more pencils)

Pros:
Cool idea, sort of

Cons:
Frantic and unfocused
Leads to prolonged arguments among teenagers (and probably adults, too)

Dogstar Games doesn't carry Identik any more than they carry Buzz It!. But I'm sure someone is. Give me a couple weeks to get my eBay account updated, and I may be selling it, too.

One day I'm going to figure out why people think party games are fun. For the most part, they're stupid. They're essentially a tiny handful of largely nonsensical rules meant to force social interaction for people without enough creativity to simply talk to each other. Half of them are centered around knowing something about the other people in the room, and most of the rest are irritating wordplay.

But I must confess that every now and then, I find one I can more-or-less tolerate. It doesn't mean the game is any good, mind you. It merely means that I can play it without wanting to do violence or take a nap (or violence followed by a nap). Buzz It! isn't a great game. In fact, I used to play a similar game when I was in college, only when we did it, there was a lot of alcohol involved.

The rules for Buzz It! are about as complicated as plugging in a hair dryer. One person reads a theme from a card, then everyone names something that fits. The guy with the buzzer decides whether the answer is worth a damn, and either hits the button on top (making a beep that tells the next player to say something) or lets the clock run out so the buzzer can make a sound vaguely similar to a mountain goat running head-first into a dishwasher full of plates stored inside a gigantic tin can. I can only assume that's supposed to be a buzz.

If the buzzer makes its broken glass sound before you can answer, you take the card and the buzzer passes to the next person. After a handful of cards have been played and passed around, the game is over. The winner is the one with the fewest cards, but really, you're not going to bother to keep score. It's a party game. Nobody cares who wins.

The entertaining factor in Buzz It! is the silly things people will say to answer the theme. For instance, when asked to come up with uncool ways to break up, my wife said, 'e-mail,' my daughter said, 'write a mean song,' and my son said, 'murder.' I laughed uncontrollably, and made a mental note to check the locks on my bedroom door.

In fact, the real reason Buzz It! is even playable is because the creators of the game spent a long time coming up with some rather amusing things. You might be asked to name things you should not buy at a garage sale (my daughter recommends you not purchase small children), cartoon heroes (again my daughter amuses with 'Green Ivy', by which she means Poison Ivy, who is, for the record, not a hero at all), or things said by moody teenagers (in this case, my children could not lose, because every single word either of them said was, by definition, a correct answer). This is better than the way we did it when I was in college, because our rules went as follows.

Rules for My Favorite College Drinking Game

1. Buy a case of Keystone Light. Consume all of it between three guys and two girls.
2. Return to the 7-11 across the street and purchase another case of Keystone Light. Consume that, too.
3. Now that you're out of money, but still half-sober because you've only been drinking Keystone Light, rummage around the kitchen for a nearly-empty bottle of tequila left behind after last week's party, and only still around because it was shoved behind the milk, which had gone visibly sour, and everyone in the house was avoiding having to move it.
4. Pour a shot of tequila. The loudest person in the room (who, by sheer coincidence, is probably also the one who has consumed the greatest number of beers) announces loudly, 'I've got one!' He then declares a theme that probably has something to do with sex, unless there are no girls present, in which case it probably has something to do with stupid things girls say.
5. Everyone takes turns naming something that fits. 'Rubber fist' is perfectly acceptable. 'Live animal' is not.
6. When someone cannot come up with an answer in a timely fashion, he must drink the shot of tequila. Preferably, this person is a girl, but in nearly every game we ever played, the girls were smart enough not to play this game until we were all too drunk to win.
7. The person who lost (probably a guy) comes up with another theme, unless he is throwing up into the kitchen sink.
8. After ten minutes, get bored and go back to watching television.

As you can see, this game is not acceptable for families. It's only barely acceptable for college students. And Buzz It! is not only more fun, it also involves far fewer cases of alcohol poisoning. Also, nobody has to move the spoiled milk.

So the rules are practically nonexistent, and really just there to take my favorite college drinking game and make it socially appropriate. But the cards really do make the game more fun, and if I were still in college, we would own a copy merely so we could shout down the loud drunk when he says, for the third time that night, 'things you can put in your butt!'

Summary

Players: 3 or more

Pros:
A fair amount of thought went into the cards, so that it's actually somewhat entertaining

Cons:
Still a lame party game
Does not include tequila or college girls

There are probably cheaper places to find this blast from my past, but here's a link in case you want to buy it right from the publisher:
http://us.asmodee.com/ressources/jeux_versions/buzz-it_5.php

If publishers were athletes, Fantasy Flight would be some NFL star who occasionally gets caught in motel rooms doing cocaine off a hooker's ass. Rio Grande would be a Major League Baseball superstar who rarely does interviews, but always manages to hit the homer when the team needs it to finish off the series. And Gryphon Games would be a minor-league batter with a respectable hitting average, for the minors.

Gryphon Games doesn't make those games that get everyone all riled up. They have a lot of Reiner Knizia reprints, and a handful of light, interesting games that appeal to about one in four gamers. So when they have a game as good as Charon Inc., it's worth taking a look. The game might not be a grand slam, but it's a solid double, possibly a triple, if it can find its legs and really hustle.

Charon Inc. has a handful of players competing as rival corporations for control of Pluto's largest moon. Only instead of simply battling for space, players will find themselves working to grab up the resources they need to build the best buildings on the planet. Actually controlling an insanium mine is worthless, unless you really need some insanium to build a space dock.

The planet is broken into a whole bunch of sectors, and each sector is going to produce some quality resources every turn. They might be purple resources, or blue or yellow or black or green, but either way, you'll probably need some. So you'll take turns placing control flags, though it will never seem like you have enough to grab all the stuff you want, and you'll have to be particularly clever if you want to have enough mineral resources to build your interplanetary gentleman's club, complete with three-breasted prostitutes (those may just be on Mars, though).

The flag placement is the main part of the game, and you have to be really careful here. Place a flag at a crossroads, and you'll exert influence on four different sectors, but you'll lose ties to the player who builds between sectors and only influences two. More than half of the control contests will be decided by tie-breakers, so there's a tricky balance between grabbing for too much and attempting too little.

Once the flags are placed and everyone snatches up their rocks, you can try to build stuff. The really good buildings require lots of rocks, so you have to hope you nabbed the right resources. This part of the game isn't all that tricky, except that you had to prepare for it or you're going to wind up without enough magic Pluto rocks to build so much as an all-night gas station.

There's a lot more to the game, too. You don't place your last flag, you just leave it on a special ability space that might let you store some resources for next turn, or trade stuff at a favorable rate, or maybe move a flag after everyone else is done. You can also trade your unwanted minerals for stuff you can use, which means that if you can't get those two purplonium crystals, you may be able to mine enough yellonium to swap out for it.

Once you get the hang of it, Charon Inc. plays fast, though it will take you a few games to really understand the tricky parts. Planning your flag placement is critical to success, and you really need to choose a bonus action that dovetails with your strategy. Will you build a bunch of low-rent tattoo parlors, or go for the gusto and slap down an embassy? Save your resources for one turn and really come on strong the next round, or burn everything to make the best stuff you can get right now?

Charon Inc. is a very fun game, even though there's no body count anywhere. These are very polite corporate executives, and shooting at each other is out of the question (though it would have made the game a bunch more entertaining). The art won't blow your mind, but it gets the job done, and the quality of the rest of the components is very nice. Like I said earlier, this is a really good hit - not a home run, exactly, but enough to drive in an RBI if the last batter got on base. I definitely recommend it, especially if you're able to enjoy a game where nobody gets stabbed.

Summary

2-5 players

Pros:
Decent art and very nice components
Tricky placement of influence combines with limited resources to create considerable tension
Good family game with a nice mix of tactics, strategy, and tough decisions

Cons:
Possibly a little bland if you're a theme-whore

Unsurprisingly, Dogstar Games does not carry Charon Inc. They tend to have more of your major league games. But you can probably find it at the Eagle Games website.

I think it's time I raved all about the brilliance of small-press games. Specifically, I want to rave about Alien Frontiers, one of those incredibly rare cases where a pint-size publisher proves to have some serious staying power. The first game from Clever Mojo Games, called Ogre Castle, was fun, but it smacked of small-press corner-cutting (a cloth game board seems like a neat idea, but it's really just a neon sign that says, 'we can't afford to pay the printer'). But Alien Frontiers is not only great for a fledgling publisher, it could hold its own against anything cranking out of Rio Grande or Mayfair.

And I'm not just saying it's a good game, either. Everything about the production of Alien Frontiers stands tall and demands to be taken seriously. The art is absolutely brilliant, not only because it's fun to look at, but because it delivers the theme with more consistency and clarity than you'll see on 75% of the games you could buy at your local game store. The board has a delightfully smooth matte varnish. The cards have that sweet linen stock that makes them really durable and easy to shuffle. Even the dice are bright and chunky and attractive. This is one slick product.

Even if the eye candy sucked, Alien Frontiers would still be a really fun game. The object of the game is to settle an alien world. Each player gets a handful of colonies, but you can't just put them on the board. You have to develop them into colonies, or convert your ships into cities, or get really lucky and come across a ready-made colony waiting to happen. You'll need fuel and ore to build colonies, and you'll need them to make more spaceships, which you'll need in order to grab more resources that you can turn into more spaceships and more colonies.

The twist, and the reason Alien Frontiers is so damned much fun, is that your ships are represented by dice. At the beginning of every turn, you gather your fleet (which means you pick up your dice) and deploy them (which means you roll them). Then, depending on what you roll, you place them at the various orbital facilities around the planet to do stuff for you. You might put a 5 at the solar converter to pick up some fuel, and put a 1 and 2 at the lunar mines for some ore. You might use a set of doubles to start work on a new ship. You might use a 4-5-6 as a raiding party and go steal the stuff you need from the other players. You could even dump some dice at the alien outpost, to grab up the swanky cards that let you do stuff like change your dice or clear out the space you need or maybe just send freeze-dried steak dinners to the astronauts.

Basically, Alien Frontiers is like a cross between Yahtzee and Carcassonne, but without the near-obligatory medieval theme that seems to dominate every third game that comes out of Germany or England (the French, God bless 'em, seem more prone to making games where demons with machine guns fight flying robots for control of horrifying deathtraps, which is why I have a hard time hating the French). When you execute a well-planned turn, it comes together like a thing of beauty - use two dice to buy a card, use that card to bump a die, use that die to establish a colony and grab a bonus, use that bonus and another die to score an indecently enormous stack of fuel cells, then finally use those fuel cells to re-use one of your dice and establish yet another colony and steal points from the guy in the lead.

Which brings me to another reason Alien Frontiers is awesome - you can totally screw with people. And you can do it a lot. This isn't just the Agricola thing where you grab the cow to keep your buddy from putting it in his living room. I mean, you can do that - put a 6 on the moon mines and you'll block everyone else until your turn comes back around - but you can also straight-up ruin people. You can steal their cards. You can kick them out of their colonies. You can eliminate the bonuses they get for controlling an area. You can do just about anything short of standing up and kicking them in the privates, and depending on your regular gaming buddies, you might be able to do that, too (though that's not in the rules, and I wouldn't normally recommend it unless you play with some really useless bastards).

So I'm raving so much about Alien Frontiers that half of you are thinking, 'as soon as I finish reading this, I have to go buy a copy.' Well, before you rush out and spend your hard-stolen currency on it, let me warn you - if you like games where prepainted miniatures take turns shooting off each others' faces with plasma rifles, and hate any kind of game associated with phrases like 'resource management' and 'worker placement', this will not be your bag. It's not dry, by any stretch of the imagination, and it's certainly not some boring, multi-player solitaire economics simulator. However, it has a lot more in common with Puerto Rico than HeroScape, so if you're not able to enjoy the kinds of games that tend to be translated from German, you're not going to enjoy this one very much. Essentially, if a different publisher made Alien Frontiers, it would be Rio Grande, not Fantasy Flight.

If you're in the market for a slightly brutal family game with great art, killer components and nearly addictive gameplay, you should definitely check out Alien Frontiers. It's fast, smart, fun and pretty, and is a definite sign that Clever Mojo Games is going to be a serious contender in the endless contest to gobble up our gaming dollars.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Fantastic art channels space pulps from the 1920s
High-quality components show a commitment to quality
Easy rules and fast play
An excellent mix of long-term strategy and quick decision-making
Plays just as well with two players as with four
Everyone has a chance to win until the game is over

Cons:
Feels pretty European, which is not a con unless you hate games that feel European

You can't buy Alien Frontiers yet, but you can pre-order it from the publisher. If you do, you can save ten bucks, and at the same time, support the kinds of people we want making games:
http://www.clevermojogames.com/alienfrontiers/

I have got to revisit my policy regarding review copies. I've always said that if you send me a game, I'll review it, period. This has resulted in an awful lot of very bad games arriving at my house, to the point that sometimes, I think someone is pranking me. It's like that gag where you sign up your boss at a bunch of gay porn websites. But without that policy, I may never have received review copies of some of my favorite games, like Caladea or Alien Frontiers (review coming this week). So it's hard to think of changing it. Or it was, up until a couple weeks ago, when I received...

Battleship.

Battleship is one of those games that I was all excited to try when I was about eleven. Back then, it was Electronic Battleship, and the theory was that the board would tell you when you hit the enemy ships. Only my copy was second-hand, and instead of alerting me to hits and misses with exciting explosions and dramatic splashes, it would burp out warbling tweets at random moments that sounded like a dying giraffe, until we finally took out the batteries. Having played the game as well, I decided the entire affair was best donated to some other poor bastard - in this case, my little brother.

In case you entirely missed grade school, or maybe you were born deep in the jungles of Borneo and just recently got Internet access, Battleship is quite possibly one of the lamest games of all time. You set up your ships at random on this little hidden grid, and then your opponent does the same on his grid, and then you call out grid numbers to see if you hit anything. If you did, your opponent lies about it and moves his ship. At least, those were the rules in sixth grade.

U-Build Battleship is Hasbro's latest attempt to make Battleship even remotely marketable as an enjoyable way to kill time. They decided to do this by adding the one thing all children find irresistible - Legos. Only they're not called Legos, because Legos are German or Swiss or something. These are just U-Build blocks. And to be fair, not all children are obsessed with them, even when they are the European variety. I was, but neither of my kids ever had any interest in them, much to my personal dismay.

Now you can customize your aircraft carrier and submarine with more guns than normal, so that instead of firing one shot at a time, you fire as many as your best-equipped boat, and as your ships get blown up, you have fewer shots. This little twist is honestly as good as it gets. Customized Battleship is still, unfortunately, Battleship, and has all the intellectual appeal of pre-chewed gum that you found stuck under the table at the pizza place.

I'll say this for Hasbro, though - the stuff in this box is really nice. The blocks fit together great, and if you've ever played with old-school Megablox, you know that's not a given. The board is swanky, with cool art and neat little standups, and there are little storage trays and a recorder board. All things considered, this is way better than Electronic Battleship, because for one thing, it won't electrocute your fifth-grader. It's still Battleship, which is one of the worst things anyone can say about a game, but it sure is pretty.

In fact, in my history of playing games, only two games have stood out to me as being worse games than Battleship. One was Candyland, and the other is Snakes and Ladders. Neither has anything resembling a strategic component, which is a feature they both share with Battleship. But at least in Battleship, there's violence. And in U-Build Battleship, there are fake Legos and customizable violence.

But it's still Battleship.

Summary

2 very bored or very stupid players

Pros:
Neat pieces
Not Candyland

Cons:
Still Battleship

If you somehow manage to wind up owning U-Build Battleship and needing an opponent, consider calling this guy:
http://morethananelectrician.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/corky.jpg

Here's a short list of some things I like:

Pralines and Cream Ice Cream
Scotch Whiskey
Video Games
Backpacking in the Mountains
Woodworking
Strippers

If you offer me any one of those things, I will like you more. Many of these things would even go well together, like ice cream and video games. Some of them would not go well together, like scotch and woodworking. And some go great with anything (strippers make nearly anything more entertaining).

But if you put all those things together, you will not have something amazing. You will have something weird and potentially felonious. I will, of course, be delighted to attempt having all those things at once. But in the end, it would be overwhelming, and I would probably end up passed out in a bowl of pralines and cream with my fingers stuck in a table saw and lipstick stains on my pants.

To relate this to board games (specifically to Horus Heresy, which is what I am reviewing, and not strippers, though I certainly wish I could review strippers and get free strippers in the mail), there are times when you can combine a whole pile of great game ideas and wind up with something that is way too much. Horus Heresy practically embodies this concept.

For starters, this is a wargame based on the 40K universe, where some bad guy from outer space comes to Earth to kill the emperor, who may or may not be something of a penis. Violent hijinks ensue, with a delightfully brutal body count. This is an enormous point in favor of Horus Heresy, and for many people, is enough to buy the game without knowing anything else about it.

Then you've got plastic. This is Fantasy Flight, so when I say there's plastic, I don't mean a couple dice. There are more than a hundred tiny plastic soldiers, from titans and space marines to demons and tanks, and lots more besides. They come in green and purple and gray and blue and red, all colorful and destructive, like a hurricane at a gay pride parade. This much plastic makes the game prettier, and that means it's more fun to play.

Even the game board is tricked out. It's got holes in it so you can insert plastic fortresses and a huge plastic palace from underneath, and it's ginormous, with all this art that makes the future look extraordinarily depressing (which is kind of an ongoing theme in Warhammer stuff). There are eight different decks of cards, coming in two sizes, and they're all beautifully designed.

Beyond the components, there's a hell of a game here. There are all these different regions, including four spaceports, half a dozen forts and factories, and even the palace is broken up into different, three-dimensional areas. You'll put whole bunches of plastic guys on the board, plugged into plastic stands that tell you if they're damaged and how hard they fight, and then you'll move around and hit each other with heavy things that cause massive internal bleeding (and possibly death).

Doing stuff requires you to have order cards, which could mean you're stuck without a move, except that you have extraordinary control over which order cards you have in your hand. If you really need to be able to attack the emperor in his palace, just make sure you get the card you need, which isn't hard to do, if you're patient. The orders are useful and smart and add a ton of strategy to Horus Heresy.

Then you've got the initiative track, which rewards players for careful planning and penalizes them for being overly aggressive - though there are, of course, plenty of good reasons to just jump in and get dirty sometimes. Sure, you may give your opponent four turns in a row, but after you destroy his main force and beat the crap out of his heroes in a surprise move you've had planned for half an hour, it's worth it. This initiative track is pure brilliance, and really helps to make Horus Heresy incredibly deep.

Let's not forget the innovative combat system. I've heard complaints about the way cards are used to handle bloodshed, but it's really quite cool, and dice would never have worked as well. You can save your troops from the worst of the beatings, but if you do, you may not have the cards you need to retaliate, so you might just sacrifice a pile of your soldiers for the option to punt your opponent into orbit later in the fight. It's intuitive and smart and really fun.

Oh, and then there's the various movement and combat rules that go beyond the cards, like Thunderhawks that can pick up friendly hitchhikers and drop them off on their way to a rumble. There are dozens of little details that can be used to really add punch to your fights, and provide an incredible array of options at nearly every juncture.

But that's not all! There are also orbital lasers, and boarding parties, and multiple winning conditions. There are advanced scenarios, event cards, activation markers and a whole lot more! In fact, all this stuff adds to all the other stuff that goes with the enormous box of yet other stuff to make a game that, after giving you wave after wave of incredibly awesome stuff, completely overwhelms you and makes you nostalgic for when you were a kid and could just make explosion sounds while you reenacted the disturbing violence that spawned in your imagination, without having to refer to a rulebook every time you want your hero to board a plane.

Horus Heresy is indubitably a very good game. It's deep and strategic and tactical and full of complex decisions with far-reaching implications. It's also a painfully disjointed Vegas bachelor party, complete with hookers, frozen desserts and power tools. There isn't one single thing in the game that I don't like, unless you count the fact that after a three-page FAQ was released to cover the pile of questions posed by players, the fans still had to go back and make another FAQ to cover all the questions that the first FAQ didn't answer. I don't even mind the 44-page rulebook, because all that great stuff had to fit in here somewhere.

But while I can't pick one thing I didn't like, I can tell you that when you combine all those awesome single things in one place, you wind up wondering why you thought it was a good idea to take a gallon of ice cream on a six-mile hike through the Rockies. It has all these great pieces, but collapses under its own weight. If you like wargames and 40K, you'll have a lot of fun playing Horus Heresy, but even if you're an obsessive compulsive who reads the rules four times before his first game, you're going to miss something or forget something or do something stupid halfway through the game, because there are just too many different things going on.

The overdose is obvious beyond the rules, too. The stacking limit for a fortified area is three guys from each side, which means you could have six of these big clunky bases all competing for space in one spot. And to really spice it up, heroes (which are cardboard art mounted on big plastic stands) don't count toward that limit. Neither do orbital lasers, which are also little plastic sculptures. And none of this would be a huge problem were it not for the fact that the detailed plastic bunkers are all dimensional and textured, and use up most of the real estate for slanted walls and power stations, so that when you actually try to put all those guys in one place, you have to lay down the heroes and stack your units on the flat side of the standups, and even then you'll be balancing them so carefully that you'll wonder if you've taken a quick break to play a couple turns of Jenga.

I should repeat one more time that every time I've played Horus Heresy, I had fun, and I would play it again, and I don't plan to trade it off any time soon. But it could have been so much better if it had just been streamlined a little. I know lots of the bits are in there for the purists, but if Fantasy Flight has just exercised a little restraint, Horus Heresy would have blown my mind with a blast of awesome. As it is, I'm just hungover and wondering why there's a naked girl in the linen closet, sawdust in the bathtub, and an Xbox controller dropped into a half-empty tub of ice cream. But I know I had a good time.

Summary

2 players with a lot of time on their hands

Pros:
Incredible components
Fantastic depth and nearly limitless options
Challenging and smart
Brilliant initiative system rewards planning without overly penalizing bold risk-taking
Quick-playing combat system layers on the genius
Order cards that let you plan your turns and don't remove flexibility

Cons:
Near-criminal lack of restraint

So you're probably thinking something like, 'that sounds fun, and I'm up for it, but $100 is way outside my budget!' Well, not to worry - Dogstar Games has an amazing deal on Horus Heresy.
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/FFGGW02

Recently, a reader asked me what I thought about the future of board games, especially as related to the progress of technology. Being something of a dirty old man, I immediately began to wonder if in the future, blow-up dolls would be hooked to USB ports so you could watch videos of yourself banging a porn star while you pretended to bang a porn star. After all, nearly any innovation in technology is first utilized by the adult film industry, and it would make sense that first advances in interactive technology would relate to sex toys.

That was about the only thought I put into the entire idea, until I received a game called Scrabble Flash. Now, I'm not a fan of word games, and I find Scrabble painfully dull, but this appealed to me because it was all gadgets. The game is composed entirely of five electronic tiles, and when you line them up and turn them on, letters pop up on the little screens. Rearrange the tiles to create words, and the five tiles track how many words you've made.

This is almost ridiculously cool. The tiles detect when they are next to other tiles, and remember which words you have already spelled. Like if you spells 'PANTS' and then remove the S, you can score again, and then remove the P and you can score again, and then put the S back in, and you can be a little confused unless you're taking the time to follow along at home with pencil and paper.

If you get bored of using the same five letters over and over for a minute and a half, you can try one of the other games. You can try the game where you get five letters and only a few seconds, and you have to spell a word with all of them before time runs out. If you succeed, the letters change and you can do it again. Keep this going, and you could get a score of 20 or more. My personal best so far is 4. Apparently, I am not very good at this game.

The problem at this point, however, is that these are not exactly group activities, and I play board games because they let me hang out with other people (which is especially odd when we consider what a misanthropic shut-in I am most of the time). So to create a game that you can play with a group, there's one more option. You can choose the third game, which is like the second game, except that when you successfully spell your five-letter word, you pass the tiles to the next player, who hits the button and gets five letters of his own. If he can't do it, he's out. Keep going until there's only one guy left, and you will know that he is the biggest dork in the room. He will still probably be proud of himself.

I still don't like Scrabble, because to me, it's a little too much like work. However, Scrabble Flash appeals to the part of my brain that wants to do something for five minutes and then be distracted by something shiny. I can break it out while I'm waiting for dinner, play for five minutes, then put it away without a second thought. Or I can challenge my kids to a quick game and be humiliated within a matter of seconds with my inability to parse the English language. It comes in a handy black case, so putting it away takes less time than it normally takes me to pick out a pair of work socks.

So Scrabble Flash got me thinking about the possibilities for using electronics in board games. I mean, I just review Monopoly Revolution, which uses a fake credit cards to keep a balance and do away with money, and now Scrabble Flash actually knows where each tile is in relation to the others. The future is rife with possibilities - miniatures games that spot range and line of sight, board games that know when one piece is close to another, and even the ability to simulate true fog-of-war in a war game, by having the pieces find out accidentally if they just stepped on another guy's testicles while tramping through overgrown corn fields.

Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of people who can take advantage of technological advances this way. Hasbro had to have spent a ton of money figuring out how to make Scrabble Flash, and hired expensive programmers and engineers. Until someone else actually makes it work, other companies can't afford to do this. Maybe Wizards of the Coast, but then, they're still Hasbro, aren't they? Nobody else has the budget, the manpower and the financial pull to make this stuff work this well.

However, it won't stop them from trying. The problem is, the smaller publishers (by which I mean anyone who isn't Hasbro) will have to assume that their customers have stuff that's not in the box. There are already games that make you use a laptop, which is great unless you're 14 and you don't own a laptop. Or games that have an assist from an app on your smartphone, and let's face it, we don't all have those, either. Hasbro doesn't have to make you install an executable on your Windows machine, because they include the fancy electronics in the box. So why doesn't everyone else?

Because they can't. Hasbro can make a game out of five electronic tiles because they've got two things that no other publisher has. One, they have budgets so high they can hire engineers, and two, they have such an enormous market share that they could publish Electronic Turd Burglar and sell half a million copies off the shelves at Target.

For now, you can enjoy the cool factor in Scrabble Flash. It's cool and fun and makes me actually want to play word games, which is remarkable because of how little I like word games. And at some point in the future, when the stuff Hasbro is doing takes hold and everyone can afford their cool gadgets, you'll see card games that plug into scanners to have blind face-offs, or dungeon crawls that make creepy noises and have monsters ambush you out of nowhere.

But the porn stuff will still be on the leading edge. I'm pretty sure that sex doll is probably out there already. I'm a little surprised I don't own one.

Summary

1 player, or as many as you want if you play Game 3

Pros:
Super cool gadgets
Actually an engaging word game
Play for as long as you want, then stop when you get bored
Near instant setup and clean up

Cons:
Will hold your attention until you see something more distracting, like a USB-enabled sex doll

Scrabble Flash doesn't appear to be out just yet. But once it is, you should totally get it.