Games Review

Remember when you were like nine years old, and you had your FAVORITEST GAME EVER, and you played it until it was falling apart? And then twenty years later, you pulled that game out of the closet, sweet nostalgia rushing over you like a waterfall of good will and joy, only to discover that stuff that appeals to fourth-graders tends to fall a little flat with adults?

We call that ‘Talisman Syndrome.’

If I were a child, if I still thought girls were gross and could actually sit through an episode of Thundercats without laughing at the retarded voiceovers, I would think Talisman was the most amazing game on the planet. Because if I was nine years old, I would be stupid.

The crazy thing is, I hear a lot of good buzz for Talisman. I don’t understand this. Nobody tries to recapture the greatness of Candyland, and Talisman is only marginally more interesting than Candyland. The only possible explanation I can find is that these people are the same people who spend days on end making supplementary material for HeroQuest when that game is actually only fun the first three times you play it, because when they were in junior high they blew an entire weekend on it and they’re trying to recapture the innocence of wondering why they didn’t get asked to Sadie Hawkins.

For the sake of clarity here, I’m reviewing the third edition of this ridiculously stupid game. I have to be specific because – I am not making this up – people have made four different editions of Talisman. For some people, that would indicate that it is obviously a brilliant game. For others (like me), it would indicate that there are an awful lot of people who have absolutely no common sense. After all, Apples to Apples sold a million copies, so standards for someone are obviously very low.

So that you can understand the way you play Talisman, let’s say you want to play Candyland. Only you want to make it an adventure game, so you let the players move forward and backward, and every time they land on Gumdrop Grove they can add some fat-ass points. Throw in some Licorice Bandits and the Caramel Creeper, make the entire game a random dice-fest with virtually no purpose or direction, remove nearly every single opportunity for decision-making from the game, and you have Talisman.

Every player gets a character (at random, because starting by letting you make a decision would set a dangerous precedent), and then you all wander around circular trails, encountering monsters and rolling dice and having virtually no control at all over the outcome of the game. You might start out an evil rat-dude, turn into a good guy, get eaten by a ghost and get a new character, and then have that morally-ambiguous dwarf get transformed into a toad because frankly, the dice hate you.

But even if the dice love you, you would still probably hate this stupid, stupid game. We had one guy win because halfway through the game he drew the Finger of Death spell, which instantly eliminates the super-villlain bad guy once that player gets to the tower in the middle of the hideous board (the board, incidentally, looks like it was drawn by a tenth-grader who was obsessed with metal bands in the early 80s. There are more skulls in the art for this game than you'll find in a French catacomb). While I was routinely losing my spells to evil wizards and severe head trauma, this guy managed to keep this one spell long enough to waltz into the dragon king’s tower and smoke him without rolling a die.

Call me crazy, but when I play a game, I want to have some control over the outcome. I want to practice some luck management, a little long-term strategy, and maybe a dash of practical common sense. I don’t want to have the entire game decided by a handful of die rolls over which I have virtually no control. I also don’t want to spend a quarter of the game bouncing back and forth between the witch’s house and the chapel because I’m attempting to give up my toad status.

I’ve played some really dumb games. Since I promise to eventually review any game anyone ever sends me, I have subjected myself to some of the absolute dregs of gaming society. I can definitely say that I have played games that were less fun than Talisman – Monster Quest comes to mind, for instance – but I would be lying if I said I ever wanted to play another iteration of Talisman. I have the second edition as well, and I think I even have the dungeon expansion for that one (my mind still reels that anyone thought this game was good enough to have an expansion), and I will be trading all of these copies as quickly as I possibly can.

It’s almost ironic that I just reviewed Tales of the Arabian Nights and loved it. Neither game offers a great deal of control for the players, and both games tend to be wildly random. Both games have you bouncing around the map like a kindergartner on crystal meth, and yet I really enjoy Arabian Nights and thoroughly despise Talisman. The difference is the story – where Arabian Nights leads you through an exciting and unpredictable story, Talisman plods through random, pointless fights with virtually no motivation or reason to continue playing.

I’m actually glad that a lot of people like Talisman, even if that does mean that a lot of people lack the sense God gave a hairless mole rat. Since a lot of people like this game, it means I shouldn’t have too much trouble trading it to some poor schmuck who still watches Voltron because it reminds him of eating sugary cereal in his pajamas while his parents slept off hangovers.

Summary

Pros:
Great trade fodder

Cons:
Stupid
Random
Pointless
Grinding
Soulless
BORING

If you just have to go out and recapture some part of your lost youth, don't do it with Talisman. Try this:
http://www.toyarchive.com/HemanSeries1.html

My favorite kinds of games are the ones that tell a story. Like when I was 12, and got my first copy of D&D, and we were able to tell a story about a bunch of heroes who went into some goblins’ home and killed everyone and then stole their crap. As I grew up, our stories got more interesting, until we were carrying out home invasions on a wide variety of bizarre creatures, most of whom had skin problems and anger-management issues.

Another thing I loved as a kid was the Choose Your Own Adventure line of books. These had really stupid stories that starred you, and you made choices, and those choices would send you to a page in the book where you would find out if you made the right call or if you were dead from an overdose of retarded. Like if you chose to steal the witch’s vase, then broke it, then you had to spend the rest of your life cleaning it up. I confess that nostalgia makes a lot of those books a lot better, sort of like the grown gamers who just have to break out Dark Tower once a year to try to remember why it was cool when they were nine, only to discover that it’s actually a pretty repetitive game with virtually nothing to appeal to an adult.

And apparently, I wasn’t the only one who loved these things, because somebody thought it was so awesome that they made Tales of the Arabian Nights, in which you and up to five of your closest friends take on the roles of characters from those stories, travel a map of Europe, Asia and Africa and spend an evening flipping through the mother of all Choose Your Own Adventure books. The game sort of died out, until Z-Man Games found it and re-released it, so that we could return to the days of hiding in dead cows in order to steal diamonds and escape from snakes.

The adventures in Tales of the Arabian Nights are a little bit random, but then, the stories in the book were often equally nonsensical. Am I the only one who thought the Sinbad stories were the result of some serious nights on the hash pipe? I mean, how long does a whale have to sleep on the surface to have trees grow on his back?

Players will take turns wandering the world, far and wide, and trying to get into the mystical places where they can have amazing adventures. Along the way, they might be thrown overboard by greedy ship captains, be hunted by brigands, romance the sultan’s wife or zoom around on magic rugs. All these wild adventures are guided by the enormous tome full of numbered entries and a matrix that tells you where to turn if, for example, you discover an angry efreeti in the desert and decide to punch him in the face.

Your characters will learn skills as they progress, and they may also pick up a variety of unpleasant statuses, a little like the way lots of late-night partying can get you a decent array of social diseases. You might wind up hunted, imprisoned, insane and wounded – and if you’re really lucky, you can get a magical sex change and have to spend the last half of the game trying to get your bait and tackle back where it belongs. Different effects have different cures – you may have to let the bandits catch up to you, or you might have to trick a servant into giving you a key. You might have to complete a pilgrimage to Mecca, or bring back a treasure for the vizier. Unfortunately, you don’t have a whole lot of control over these events, and may wind up losing your loved ones to a plague of gout, for which you are cursed to be really depressed. The only cure for that is to eat a gallon of ice cream and sit on the coach in your pajamas for a week watching reruns of Matlock.

The nice thing about all this unhappiness is that nearly anything that happens gives you either story points or destiny points, and since the goal of the game is to have amazing stories and great adventures, even bad stuff can help you win. You might wind up transformed into a jackass, but man, does that make for a good story. Get back to Baghdad with a whole bunch of amazing tales, and you’ll be the winner, even if you did spend a couple years lost in Europe while a rhinoceros chased you and fire demons stole your pants.

As wildly random and unpredictable as Tales of the Arabian Nights might be, it’s also a stupid amount of fun. You’ll laugh as Aladdin gets turned into a woman, carried away by a giant bird, haunted by a sad ghost and fed to a giant fish. You’ll chortle with glee when Ali Baba becomes cursed, diseased, grief-stricken and crazy, and then still ends up marrying the vizier’s daughter and ultimately becoming sultan. The pieces are absolutely beautiful, the illustrations are amazing, and the story is just as convoluted and random as the original Arabian Nights.

The story book is an amazing piece of work. It’s staggering to imagine the amount of effort that went into making it so that you found monkeys in the jungle, beggars in the city and magical islands at sea. It’s fascinating to see how your choices, environments and plain-old Lady Luck can present every visitor to the same space with a different adventure. It’s not perfect, or anything – a couple times I wound up having ocean encounters while I was in the middle of a Saudi Arabian desert – but considering the enormity of the task that confronted the writers, it’s more than understandable.

I wouldn’t say that Tales of the Arabian Nights is a clever, well-designed tactical game with great strategy. If I did, I would be a liar. This is not Puerto Rico. I would say that it’s a marvelous way to spend an evening with your family. You don’t play Tales of the Arabian Nights because you want the mental challenge. You play because you want to experience the story, which makes it a little like D&D, but without the armed robbery.

Summary

Pros:
Incredible art
Immersive, entertaining story
Tons of replay – you might never see the same tale twice
Great family fun

Cons:
Random as a Terry Gilliam movie
A few errors in the guide book

Dogstar Games carries Tales of the Arabian Nights, so if you're in the mood for a game that's all about telling a story, you should hop right over there and pick it up. Shipping is free, and the game is discounted to boot, so you can save some scratch and have a great night with the family. You'll be a hero!
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/ZMG7031

Claustrophobia is a board game that takes place in the world of Helldorado, which is a miniatures game where humanity decides to invade Hell in a land grab that is epic in its shortsightedness. You know you're in trouble when you need land so bad, you decide to move to Hell. Sure, you can get property really cheap, but you know it's going to be in a horrible school district, and odds are, taxes are way steeper than they have any right to be. And if you think it's bad for your home value when someone builds a parking lot next door, how much worse would it be if you're located next to a portal to Satan's Pawn Shop?

In Claustrophobia, the demons (you know, the guys who actually live in Hell, and are probably a little bit ticked that someone has decided to put a lean-to on their manicured front lawn) inhabit tunnels and caves under the city of New Jerusalem, and they're making life a little rough for the humans above. That's only fair - New Jerusalem takes up space the demons used to use for a hellhound park. But the humans are dead set on hanging onto the land, despite the fact that even lake-front property is unpleasant (probably because the lake is on fire).

So the humans recruit a redeemer - a holy warrior with serious power against the forces of evil - and give him a handful of condemned prisoners to go with him into the uncomfortably balmy caverns underneath the city. To stop the redeemer and his gang of misfits, the demons are going to send hordes of troglodytes - Hell's answer to cheap labor - and maybe the odd uberdemon with exceptional skill at snacking on people. So basically, this is a dungeon crawl.

The map is composed of beautifully illustrated tiles depicting the twisting, narrow caverns that wind just beneath the surface of Satan's Playground. All the combatants are really cool pre-painted plastic miniatures, and they look fantastic. Sure, there are only five different sculpts, but there are 17 figures in the box, and they're all cool (though it is worth mentioning that the troglodytes look like that dog alien from Lilo and Stitch). To depict the various equipment and abilities of the various warriors, you've also got a few different decks of cards, all with stunning art. Basically, the production values for this game are completely off the scale. It's not quite as jaw-dropping a Space Hulk, but it also doesn't cost $100. There's a ton of value in this box.

There's also a superb game in this box. One really cool mechanic is how you assign abilities to every human at the beginning of the game - you roll some dice, which go into a little slot on the human character cards and match up to one of six slots each human has. Depending on the assigned dice, a human character might be defensive, offensive, or fast, and maybe have some cool ability he can use that turn. When humans take wounds, they plug one of those action slots, which has two effects. First, if you have to assign a die to a slot with a wound on it, that character is going to spend the turn gasping for air and feeling his wounds, and can't move or attack. And second, when all six slots are gone, the human in question is just dead (and depending on his life choices, his soul may not have very far to travel).

Combat is a simple die roll, and movement is as easy as moving a figure from one tile to the next. But there are still several important tactical maneuvers in every round, and there's a fantastic amount of depth for a game whose rules are as simple as these are. If you don't practice some intelligent strategy, planning for the long haul and making the right move when you need it, your characters will probably wind up becoming permanent residents, instead of just owning a timeshare.

Claustrophobia is a pretty clear example of a kind of game we see a lot recently. It's got all the classic markings of a quantity versus quality game, where the humans are skilled fighters and the demons come in droves. It has a heck of a lot in common with Space Hulk, except this is a fantasy dungeon crawl in Hell and Space Hulk is a sci-fi dungeon crawl on a space ship. If you enjoy this kind of game, Claustrophobia should be a no-brainer. And despite there being a lot of similarities, the two games are also very different, so there's no reason not to own them both (you know, unless you're not rich).

The only real problem I have with Claustrophobia is a question of theme. While the game play is fast and fun, and I definitely have a dungeon-crawling vibe from the game, it doesn't really deliver on the 'Hell Ain't a Bad Place To Be' storyline. I might have been in a cavern in Hell, or might have been fighting goblins in the mountain caverns. The troglodytes are not particularly demonic in appearance, and could just as easily have been kobolds lead by a particularly ferocious bugbear. The game is stunning, and tons of fun, and I'm more than willing to overlook the theme issue - but just because I'm giving it a pass doesn't mean it's not there.

If you're a fan of dungeon crawl games, and you like your eye candy as much as I do, Claustrophobia should probably be on your 'man, I should have asked for that for Christmas' list. I think it's a hoot, and I'm looking forward to playing it again, even if I do still wonder what the commute must be like if you live in a suburb in Hell.

Summary

Pros:
Amazing production values
Fast game with easy rules
So much fun, you'll want to play it a whole lot

Cons:
Odd theme that doesn't feel effectively communicated

Dogstar Games has Claustrophobia. If you like dungeon crawl games with amazing components and buckets of fun, you should run over and get it right here:
http://dogstargames.com/product/ASMClaustrophobia

It may come as a massive shock to my regular readers, but I really don’t like Christmas. So on the eve of this most blessed day, commonly known to the retail industry as ‘that part of the year when we make a bunch of money off of people who are too stressed to breathe,’ I thought I would commemorate the holiday with a nice rant about Christmas. And when I say ‘nice,’ what I mean is ‘mean-spirited and crotchety.’

I would like to know who thought it was a good idea to have a two-month long holiday that causes people to drive like assholes, park like idiots, shop like lemmings and kill themselves. That last one, that’s literal – more people kill themselves at Christmas than any other part of the year. Some people think, ‘oh, it’s all those shut-ins who realize nobody loves them.’ But I think that’s horse apples. The people killing themselves are the ones who know their kids are going to take a dump in the living room when they find out Santa didn’t bring a Zhu-Zhu Pet.

Except really, I know who thought this whole thing was a good idea – people who sell things. We complain every year about how the holiday keeps getting earlier, and how much we hate the commercialism, but then we spend an inordinate amount of time shopping for gifts and food and decorations and music and scented candles and all kinds of crap, and that’s why Wal-Mart starts advertising Christmas specials before Halloween is over. If you ever got a headache trying to figure out how you were going to afford all the gifts you had to buy, you’re part of the problem.

What makes the whole thing even worse is how the retailers try to dress it up to get you ‘in the spirit.’ Ten months of the year, it’s fine to let your shoppers listen to Kenny G and Celine Dion, but for those last two months of every year, you can’t even use a public bathroom without having to hear the same irritating Christmas carols that you’ve heard every year since you were five (with the addition of George Michael singing about how you stole his heart last year). Some people would travel back in time to kill Hitler; me, I would kill Bing Crosby.

I should clarify that the day itself is nice. Wake up early, hang out with your family, eat a big meal, enjoy the people you love – there’s no downside here, unless you don’t get along with your family, and that’s why we spike the egg nog. I’m a lot more sociable after a few shots of Johnny Walker Black.

And as much as I despise Christmas, it’s still Christmas. People who get their shorts twisted when you tell them to have a nice Christmas should shut the hell up and celebrate their Ramadan in peace. I don’t care if you wish me a Happy Boxing Day. I don’t celebrate that, but it’s nice that you want me to have a good day. Is anyone delusional enough to think that all this crap came about because of Kwanzaa? You can’t rewrite the history books. We’ve been doing Christmas for the last several centuries, and we’re not going to suddenly decide it’s a non-demoninational holiday just because you’re a Moonie.

If you’re so offended because you’re a Jehovah’s Witness and never got a birthday cake, how come I don’t see you at the office (aside from the fact that I’m also not at the office, because I’m celebrating Christmas)? I don’t take off for Passover. I don’t pull my kids out of school for Tom Cruise Day (I think that’s a Christian Science holiday). If you’re going to throw a hissy when I mention that we’re celebrating the birth of Little Baby Jesus, why don’t you just pay full price during that season and report to the office?

I don’t guess there’s much for it, really. I’m kind of tilting at the windmill here. I have a tree in my living room, and my wife has done hours of Christmas baking, and my kids are anxiously awaiting tomorrow morning when they can open their gifts and make a huge mess in the living room. Christmas is as inevitable as hot Texas summers and income taxes. You can tell me you don’t celebrate the holiday, but unless you go to work on the 25th of December, I don’t really want to hear it. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, as long as you’re a big fan of stress headaches, credit card debt and obnoxious decorations, but you can’t escape it, so suck it up and get through it like the rest of us.

Maybe next year I’ll forget the whole thing and spend two months at a beach in Maui. For the amount of money I spend every year, I could probably afford it.

Anyway, have a Merry Christmas, and come back tomorrow night, when I'll review a game with so much Christmas spirit, it has flesh-eating demons.

I think it's pretty clear that James Cameron is a Kevin Costner fan. I really liked Avatar, especially in 3D, and I liked it even more than the first time I saw it, when it was called Dances with Wolves. In fact, I wonder if the working title for Avatar was 'Dances with Cat People.'

I'm not going to deliberately throw out any spoilers here, but if you're one of those people who avoids hype like a social disease, you may want to wait to read this review until you've seen the movie. Me, I don't care about hype, but then, I'm jaded enough that I assume nearly every movie ever made is going to suck.

Avatar, for the record, does not suck. It's not particularly deep, and it's fairly predictable, but it sure is fun. In case you haven't seen one of the eighteen million ads for this movie, there's a dude who takes over an alien body so he can explore an alien world, and so he can chill with the indigenous cat people and swap body fluids with the blue-skinned hottie with the big eyes and the nipples that are exposed for half the movie. There's more computer-generated imagery than a Star Wars movie, and tons of really cool effects and monsters and stunts and all kinds of stuff that makes your average sci-fi movie fan get all soaked in his trousers.

(Ironically, my favorite effects were not the phosphorescent tree tubers or the leaping alien jungle cats. My favorite effects were the robots, because they were bad-ass. They have these huge guns and they're wicked powerful and meaner than hell, and the marines (who are the bad guys) are so believably cool that half the time, I wanted the humans to win, even though we're supposed to be rooting for the blue furries.)

I wouldn't generally be a fan of a movie that is as predictable as Avatar, but it was actually kind of comfortable, like watching Wrath of Kahn for the sixth time, waiting for Spock to say that 'good of the many' line. It doesn't really matter that the movie doesn't surprise you, because you don't want it to surprise you. You want it to take the course you know it will take. You want to see the romance, and the fights, and everything else you know is going to happen because you're over ten years old and you've seen more than three movies in your life.

In fact, the movie is so comfortably predictable that you don't even mind the heavy-handed 'humans are a virus' message that we've been enjoying for the last fifteen years. You know the message is coming, but the characters are so likable and the story so exciting that it doesn't really matter if you can spot the impending morality play. If you've seen just one trailer, you know the plot, and you probably know how it will end. What you don't know is how cool the huge elephant guys will look, or the flying dinosaur thingies, or the intensely cool robot jocks.

And really, the actors may have had top billing, but the real star of Avatar is the computer that made everything look awesome. I guess it compares on some level to the first Transformers, where you could overlook a stupid plotline, horrible script and even that douchebag lead actor because at one point, the jet turns into a robot and punches the other jet and then turns back into a jet. Only this is far superior to Transformers, because the story actually works, as opposed to Transformers that didn't make any sense whatsoever, but was basically an excuse to see robots punch each other in the metal junk.

In fact, more than just a story that works, Avatar delivers characters that are believable and sympathetic. Even the bad guys seem like they have some history to them, including the head bad guy who was actually just a really good marine. The characters don't surprise you, but their actions and dialog seem natural, which is more than I can say for a lot of action movies that include smooching.

(On the matter of smooching, can I just say how convenient it is that the aliens are so much like humans? It would have made the romance a lot more uncomfortable if the human skinwalker had been doing weird alien butt probes on the sexy chick in the loincloth.)

If you're looking for the next Citizen Kane, or you're the kind of movie snob who can't enjoy anything if it wasn't made in France, you're going to hate Avatar. It's not a particularly original tale, but it is a boatload of fun, and a complete visual feast. The characters are as likable (or not) as they're supposed to be, the fighting is fast and furious and fun, and the story manages to avoid any truck-sized plot holes. Avatar is enjoyable, entertaining and gorgeous. That makes it good enough for me.

Summary

Pros:
Amazing visual effects
Story is comfortable, if a little predictable
Characters are believable and likable, except for the bad guys, who are believable and unlikable
Doesn't rely on 3D, just uses it to make a very cool movie

Cons:
Really, really predictable
Club-to-the-head environmental message

I've played lots of card games in my day. Poker, canasta, bridge, plus stuff like Mille Bornes and Race for the Galaxy and other non-standard card games. Without getting up from my desk, I could list fifty card games I've played, and some of them were really awesome games. I say this so that when I tell you that Dominion is one of the best card games I've ever played, you know I'm not working with a limited frame of reference.

The theory behind Dominion is brilliant. Basically, you're building a deck of cards that you'll use to grab the victory points - and this isn't the preparation, that's the game. You're going to buy a militia to get more money to spend and a moat to protect you from enemy militia. You're going to buy a workshop to get small properties easily, and a market so you can afford the big stuff. Some cards let you draw more cards into your hand, some let you take more actions, and some just screw the hell out of everyone else at the table (those are some of my favorites).

On your turn, you'll have a hand of cards. You fill that hand with cards from your deck, which starts out really small at first and grows as the game progresses. When you run out, you shuffle and draw again from the same pile. You can use action cards to do stuff like get more cards in your hand and have a little more mad money, and you can chain these cards together to have this whole display of extra money and more actions and a hand of cards so big you could buy Paris. And you could just focus on buying those victory points, but that's not a great idea. For one thing, those victory points are completely worthless cards until the end of the game, and for another, the best victory cards are wicked expensive.

What ends up happening is that you'll spend the first two-thirds of the game competing to grab the cool cash-in cards, and then once your deck is a well-oiled machine built to churn money like butter, you'll spend the rest of the game rushing to grab up the victory points before they're all gone. This basic element of the game doesn't change much from game to game - you build up your hand, and then you use it to cash in.

There is, however, a significant part of the game that changes every time you play, and this is because there are like 30 little mini-decks in the box, and you only ever use 10 at a time. So you won't have the adventurer in every game, or the thief, or the throne room, and that means the strategy changes dramatically every game. You'll want to play a whole lot to understand the winning strategy for different combinations of abilities. For instance, if there's a garden and a fair, you can use the fair to get additional buys, which will let you fill your deck with cards, and then buy up the gardens which score more points based on your deck size. Since there are hundreds of possible card sets for any given game, the winner tends to be the guy who can see winning combinations popping up like lesbians at a California liberal arts college.

I absolutely love Dominion, to the point that I would not only never consider trading or selling it, but I'm actually considering blowing off a few reviews so that I have more time to play it. But it's not all wine and roses (or crack and hookers - I don't know what you're into). For one thing, there's supposed to be a theme here, but I was never really feeling it. It's got that European stodgy fantasy thing where throne room politics are more interesting than stabbing people, and there's a minimal amount of interaction (unless you're playing with the screw-yer-buddy cards). Compared to Arctic Scavengers, Dominion's theme feels almost like an afterthought. Why dropping a moat lets you draw more cards is beyond me, and doesn't really fit into any kind of story.

Plus, depending on what cards you're using when you play, Dominion could almost be a solo game where you have to wait for your turn. It's more fun than shooting ill-behaved children with a BB gun, but it can wind up leaving you curious why you need the other people at the table at all. Of course, if you're playing with the guy who always breaks out the attack cards, this is a different story - you'll spend the whole game trying to defend what you're building while you take shots at everyone else.

In a game this good, I don't much care about theme. It's so fun, the theme could be Mister Rogers, and I would recruit homeless people to help me put together the King Friday/red cardigan/McFeely combination. And if you don't like the solo-style game, just make sure you play with the cutthroat cards. Any criticism I might have of Dominion is completely overshadowed by the fact that this is a staggeringly awesome game.

I figure that by now, if you're reading this, you've probably played Dominion, and don't need my opinion to help you decide whether you like it. But if I don't review this one, I can't review Intrigue or Seaside, and since those are coming next week, I figured I better knock this one out. Plus I love this game more than Cinemax soft porn, and really wanted to make some noise about this awesome game.

Summary

Pros:
Incredibly brilliant concept
Simple in design, but layered genius in execution
Requires quick decisions and a good long-term strategy
Really makes you think, and has no pity on the crappy player

Cons:
Theme doesn't work very well
Decent potential to wind up being a four-player solo game

In case you're one of the last eight gamers to decide whether or not you like Dominion, and now you really want to buy a copy, you can run right out to Dogstar Games and pick up a copy. And you should, because they're wicked awesome. Not only do they support this site, but I've had occasion to talk with some customers recently, and Dogstar makes a point of taking care of the people who give 'em money. Here's the link:
http://dogstargames.com/product/RIO370