Games Review

If you're going to play games with kids, they should be educational games. Everyone knows that. No, the kids might not have as much fun as if you just played a fun game, but it's really important that your children learn things. Way more important than having fun.

But if you can make them have fun and fool them into learning, that's the best of both worlds. That's why Bruno Faidutti and some other people made Bugs & Co. They wanted kids to learn that germs are cute and entertaining, so they made a really fun game that will trick your kids into developing a lifelong love of microscopic antibodies.

Because this is an educational game for kids (known as 'edutainment,' a word invented by a soulless corporate marketing executive to sound smart in a meeting), Bugs & Co is easy to set up and play. Just flip over the germ discs and shuffle them up. Take out a few to confuse and frustrate everyone, then in a crazy smorgasborg of action, everyone dives in at the same time and starts flipping up the discs to see if they can find matching sperms. You can only flip one at a time, and if you decide to keep the herpes amoeba you drew, you hide it in your hand and keep going. Otherwise, you just put it back, face down, and try to remember what it was.

There's an element of Bugs & Co that resembles one of those Memory games that Sunday School teachers use to trick kids into learning about Moses and his apostles. Only instead of a handful of cards laid out in a grid, you have to remember where you put your bug in the gigantic free-for-all chaos of the middle of the table. And to screw up your memory entirely and make your head hurt, someone else can take the tiles you've carefully memorized and move them somewhere else. This is likely to make your job of memorizing things a great deal more difficult, and may result in an aneurism. Only you won't notice that your brain just threw a clot and killed you, because you'll be too busy flipping discs and looking for the little booger with claws and two wieners (I'm pretty sure he's crabs).

When you finally decide that you've searched through enough e-coli and dysentery germs, you can pick up a trophy. When the last trophy is snagged, everyone else has to stop searching. Then you see if you made matching sets. If you do, you get points. If you did not, you lose points. And if you're me, and you totally suck at Bugs & Co, you will then add up your gains and losses and discover that your total is negative four, and your adolescent child has scored fifteen, making you look like a senile coot with bladder control issues.

This game happens really fast. If you hate it when one of your group gets up to go take a piss right when it's that guy's turn, and then he can't find the toilet paper or he clogs the crapper and you have to wait ten or fifteen minutes, this is the right game for you. Because by the time that guy gets back from washing his hands (unless he doesn't wash his hands, in which case you have another opportunity to teach your kids about germs), you could play a whole game, set it up, and play it again. We played several times, and our longest game lasted six minutes. I don't know why we timed it.

Yet for being an insanely fast game that allows no time for contemplation or organizing your thoughts, Bugs & Co will task your brain. You need to actually have some sort of strategy going into the game, but you have to also be able to shift strategies on the fly when the one thing isn't working. That, or you just grab willy-nilly without thinking. I'm pretty sure that's what my wife did when she trounced me. Maybe I'm just overthinking it.

In all seriousness, Bugs & Co is a fun game, it's not educational, and you can play it with grown-ups without having any kids at the table. It does have squiggly little germs which may or may not be mucus, but they're cute and different enough that you can remember if you're already holding the tapeworm or if you still need to find the third gonorrhea. Plus you can seriously knock out a whole game in under ten minutes. The only problem is, as soon as you finish, someone at the table is going to say, 'let's play again!' and you're going to wind up sinking forty-five minutes into a game that ends after five. It's not all bad, though - you'll have fun every time.

Summary

2-8 players

Pros:
Super easy to play
Crazy fast
Cute germs
Energetic and chaotic and fun

Cons:
Bet you can't play just once

In case I haven't said this recently enough, the best way to support Drake's Flames is to just show up and read. The second best way is to buy your games from Noble Knight Games, because they send me review copies of games I could not otherwise score, which lets me review the games you ask me to review. So if you're going to get Bugs & Co (and you probably should, it's fun), go here to get it:
PICK UP SOME DISEASES

I like to play games with other people. That sounds like it should go without saying, but I bring it up because if I'm getting out cards and dice and cardboard, I do not generally plan to use those things to play with myself.

But sometimes it can be hard to find someone to play with me. You know, it's late, the wife is in bed, and I am overcome by a desire to play a game. I don't want to wake her up, so instead I just take care of it myself. It's not quite as enjoyable, and it can be hard to be satisfied that way, but sometimes you just gotta take things in hand and get them done.

Which leads me to Toe-to-Toe Nu'klr Combat with the Rooskies, because it's a solo game. You're piloting a B-52 and you have to drop nukes on Russia. Russia takes some offense and tries to shoot you down. Every turn, you'll fly toward different targets and try to rub one out.

This is not a tricky game to play. Every turn you'll move one step closer to your final target, and then you'll blast it to glass and turn around to fly back. MiGs and SAMs will shoot at you and try to blow you out of the sky, and you can choose how high to fly and when to fire flares or chaff to try to make them miss. If you choose poorly, they'll blow your wings off, but if you're lucky, they'll shoot blanks.

There's not a ton of reasons to play Nu'klr Combat over and over, but there are four different missions with varying levels of difficulty, so you can choose how hard you want it to be. The first one I played was easy, but they can get downright gnarly.

The game has a lot of luck, and your decisions are less crucial than your ability to get lucky, but this is meant as a light distraction, not a full-on simulation. It's quick and fun, with not a whole lot of meat to beat.

I wouldn't say Toe-to-Toe Nu'klr Combat with the Rooskies will be completely changing my mind about playing solo games, but it can be tough to find decent solitaire games, and this is a good example of a game that won't overstay its welcome. You can sit down, set it up in two minutes, and knock it out in fifteen more. It's fun, and it scratches that late-night gaming itch without keeping you up too late. In places it's even funny, like when you play the card that lets your bombadier ride the nuke all the way to the ground.

Of course, you might skip the game completely and just masturbate.

Summary

1 player

Pros:
Easy rules
Varying difficulty levels
Plays out in fifteen minutes
Fun and light
Quick solitaire game

Cons:
Typical Victory Point Games production, which means 'not very good'

If you want a quick solitaire game with a dark-but-campy theme, you can run over to Victory Point Games and pick up Toe-to-Toe Nuk'lr Combat right here:
http://victorypointgames.com/details.php?prodId=119

I first discovered A Game of Thrones in 2004, when my wife bought the book for me as a Christmas present. I had never even heard of it before that Christmas morning, but I discovered pretty quickly that I had been missing one of the best fantasy epics ever written. You can have Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks and Michael Moorcock. The Xanth stories barely held my interest, maybe because they seem like they were written for an audience composed mostly of twelve-year-old boys. A Game of Thrones was powerful, exciting, fascinating, and incredibly well written. Tolkien's work might be better, but A Game of Thrones is still my favorite.

And yet somehow, I never managed to play any of the games based on the books. There's a board game that's supposed to be decent, and a card game that has been in production since 2003, but I never tried either one. I was even content to leave it that way, until I reviewed Warhammer Invasion, and a reader mentioned that he preferred the Game of Thrones LCG. After that, I checked out a couple reviews, and it seemed like it might be worth investigating. Plus my wife likes CCGs, and when I mentioned the game, she went and bought us a copy.

It turns out, this is one hell of a game. Like the books, the game has a whole lot happening all the time, with hundreds of characters, plots and intrigues, wars and assassinations, and enough supernatural to keep things interesting without turning the whole thing into a D&D Monster Manual. You don't have to keep track of two or three different effects every turn. You have to keep track of a dozen, maybe more, and an inattentive player is almost guaranteed to take a very painful ass-kicking.

Some things work like nearly any CCG. Every turn you'll get money, and then pay it out to play your cards. Different cards have different abilities, and different characters are stronger than others. But what makes a game is not where it is the same as other games. What makes a game is how it's different, and A Game of Thrones has a whole lot of important differences.

For instance, you don't just attack when it's your turn. There's no battle phase. Instead, you'll have a chance to perform military challenges, or intrigues, or power plays. Commit your forces to a game of cloak-and-dagger, sending in your best schemers, and you'll force your foes to throw away their best cards. Recruit entire armies to march against your enemies, forcing them to choose which of their loyal followers (or barely-loyal mercenaries) will fall before your might. Or maybe just cut right to the chase and make a grab for the throne, because in the end, the winner is the one who can grab enough power to name himself the king. If this sounds heavy, it is - but it gets worse, because you have to make these choices every single turn, and it's almost never an easy decision.

To make matters worse (or better, depending on how you like your games), nearly every character has multiple things he or she can do to help. A knight might be a fantastic military asset, but his best use might just be to sit on his ass and get more popular every turn. It might be a good idea to save your most powerful fighter to defend against the almost-certain assault your opponent will launch on his turn, but if that mighty warrior can succeed at a quick intrigue, he could grab a little renown, which will help ease the pain when he starts burying his friends after the inevitable retaliation. Some characters might be best used to prop up others, and some are just really good at taking a sacrificial spear to the soft parts, but nearly anyone you could bring into play has several different ways to help you win - if only you could manage to choose the right way.

One thing that really sets A Game of Thrones apart from just about every other card game is how brilliantly it plays with three or four players. Where most CCGs add multi-player rules as an afterthought, this one really shines when you're fighting more than one person. Every house has different strengths, so where the Starks are great at winning fistfights, they're weak in the early game and take a while to build up. The Baratheons, by comparison, may not be quite as mighty with a sword, but they can pull through with their winning smiles and widespread fame. The Lannisters and Targaryens make up the rest of the cards in the box, and they, too, excel in areas where the others are weak. When all four houses are in the game at the same time, there's a constant back-and-forth struggle to keep what you've gained and steal from your opponents. The leader changes from turn to turn, and just when you're one turn away from the big win, some sneaky bastard can come flying from the shadows to destroy everything you've built.

To really make the multiplayer game rock, each turn will have players choosing titles that will determine how they interact with other players that round. This choice can be excruciating, because there are lots of angles to consider and long-reaching ramifications of your decision. Be the commander of the Kingsguard, and you'll have a huge edge in military challenges, but then someone else will have a chance to grab Crown Regent and blow your doors off in power challenges. If you're short on money, it might make sense to pick up the Master of Coin and get a little extra scratch that turn - but be careful, because if the guy you meant to hit that turn decides to be the Master of Laws, you can't attack them at all. The different titles interact with each other on top of granting special bonuses for the turn, so just because you don't need the ability of the Hand of the King, you might wind up taking it just to get the bonus when you club the Master of Coin like he was a baby seal.

So many things about this game make it a very tight, intelligent game. It requires many of those words that hardcore card gamers throw around the way mechanics talk about carburetors and crankshafts, words like Hand Management and Table Control and other words that escape me because I don't really get that into anything that doesn't help me pay my mortgage. You have to think to play A Game of Thrones, not just react, and you can believe your plan to be airtight right up until someone plays an event that throws your delicate balance into disarray and leaves you scrambling to pull your bacon out of the fire before your goose is cooked (to mix some metaphors).

I think A Game of Thrones is about to be my new favorite collectible card game (I don't care if they do call it a 'Living Card Game', to try to make us think you're not going to be collecting cards; the only difference is knowing what new cardboard you're getting). All I have so far is the core game, so I still can't play House Greyjoy or House Martell, but from what I've seen so far, A Game of Thrones rivals some of the best CCGs in existence - and may just beat them hands down. It's based on my personal favorite fantasy world, has brilliant player interaction, and easily the best multiplayer format of any CCG ever made. It's a game made for people who like to use their heads when they play their games, and it has all the depth and genius that make me love a game, whether it's on a giant board or a deck of cards.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Most depth I've seen in a CCG
Difficult decisions every step of the way - and every one of them matters
Based on a simply fantastic series of novels
Tricky enough that you're going to find a limited Smelly Halfwit factor among players

Cons:
So much happening that it can be tough to keep up
The rules are easy enough to follow, but there can be a painful learning curve

We had a heck of a time finding our copy of A Game of Thrones, but now, as if to mock us, Noble Knight Games has it - and at a much better price than what we paid:
YOU WIN OR YOU DIE

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I don't play a whole lot of bluffing games. They're not usually my bag. I tend to have more fun playing games where I move plastic around a board and then people die. I'm not exclusive, or anything - I can enjoy party games and clever German games, too. But bluffing games have never really been my go-to genre.

Skull & Roses is a bluffing game. In fact, that's about all there is to the game. You basically try to sucker everyone else into grabbing up your skull, and scare them out of swiping your roses. Usually, this kind of game is a little obvious, and a lot boring. But Skull & Roses is actually pretty damned fun. In fact, at points, it's downright Machiavellian.

The actual gameplay is so simple that it's hard to see where there would be a game here. Each player has four cards, and you put down a card or challenge for the right to grab some. If you challenge, everyone else gets to try to outbid you. The highest bidder picks up a bunch of cards, and if he can get enough cards that don't have skulls on them, he wins the challenge. If you can do that twice, you win the whole game. That's pretty much all there is to it.

Now, until I understood completely what I was doing, I really didn't dig Skull & Roses. But then I figured out what I was missing - you have to take your own cards first. So if you put down a skull, it might be stupid to challenge, because you know damned well you'll be grabbing it, and that will suck. And if you're all eager to grab your own cards, everyone knows your cards are safe, and they'll outbid you because they already know what they have. But if you mix that up a little - put down the skull and then bid eagerly, for instance - people might outbid you just because you seemed so excited. And then they'll think your cards are safe, and then they'll grab your skull, and then it will be awesome for you and it will suck to be them.

There isn't a whole lot of game here. Skull & Roses is all about selling your opponents a line of bull manure, and trying to figure out when they're trying to sell you their own brand of fertilizer. If you got all your friends together for a night of mental calisthenics and tactical domination, and then pulled out Skull & Roses, your friends are going to take their bean dip and leave. But if you want to sit around a table and mess with other peoples' heads, this is a real good time.

The art on the cards helps make this game a good time. Each player picks a bad-ass biker gang and gets all that gang's cards. You've got the Werewolves, the Panthers, the Serpents, and other names created by the same kinds of math nerds who form fraternities because they think the girls won't be able to tell that all the guys in the house are geeks if they throw out their pocket protectors. The art follows suit - it looks like it could be a tattoo, if your tax accountant decided to get some ink on his butt cheek. It sounds silly, but it looks cool. The cards are thick and round, with a great linen finish that makes them fun to hold and easy to play.

I had a great time playing Skull & Roses. It's a hoot to snicker when you sucker another player into picking up your skull card. It's also fun to let out a little 'Hell yes!' when you flip the last card out of six and discover that you guessed right. Because the game is all about bluffing and lying and deception, all the fun comes in trying to buffalo your buddies and then gloating about it when you succeed. It's one thing to roll some dice and say, 'That's it, I just took Berlin,' but it's another thing entirely to see the 'I hate you' glare you get when you show your friend a skull and say, 'Hah! Got you again!'

Summary

3-6 players

Pros:
Very attractive art with just enough nerd to keep it tongue-in-cheek
Cool bluffing game that's all about spinning and spotting lies
Excellent quality cards

Cons:
Not much depth outside the bluffing

Skull & Roses is fun, if you like to play games where you mess with your friends' heads. Noble Knight Games has it, and it's pretty darn cheap, for the amount of fun you'll get out of the box:
LET'S LIE ABOUT IT

Not me, you greedy assholes! I already gave most of my games away, just to clean my office.

No, BoardGameinfo is giving away free games. Right now they're giving away Those Pesky Humans, which is fun, and totally worth the one post it will cost you to enter. They're going to be doing more, too.

I don't run a news site, or anything, so don't count on me to do this a lot. It's more like a special favor.

Anyway, go check it out:
http://www.boardgameinfo.com/

I don't have an iPad. I want one real bad, and I'm saving up for it. I even took a second job so I could afford it. And I want an iPad because all the cool games are on there. Yes, I'm a little shallow.

So when my friend called me a few weeks back and mentioned this great game he was playing on his iPhone, I got all grumbly. But then he told me that you can also play it online, and so I checked it out, and was almost immediately hooked.

The game is called Shadow Era. It's a free collectible card game that you play online (or on your iPad, if you have one and aren't still trying to get caught up on some bills so you can drop six hundred dollars without feeling incredibly guilty). If you've ever played the World of Warcraft card game, it will be dreadfully familiar. In fact, I'm not entirely sure how they're avoiding a cease-and-desist, because you do nearly the exact same thing.

There are two factions, human and shadow. Then there are categories within those factions, like hunters and warriors and wulven and elementals. You'll get a hero who combines a faction and a job description (human mage or shadow green-grocer, for instance), and then you'll build a deck and summon allies and throw spells to try to kill the other hero. The game keeps track of your life points, and your allies can get hurt while you play, too. You can attack with your hero if you have a weapon, and you can put special items into play that help you out, like war banners and power crystals and clean socks.

You get a free deck when you sign up, and there are two ways to get more cards. One is the free way. With the free way, you get 20 gold every time you win a fight, and when you've got 100 or so, you can buy one card. The other way costs actual green money, which I actually appreciate because it means that the game is not just a throwaway. For five bucks, you can get enough cards to be competitive with two or three different decks, and for ten, you can play just about anything you want. The money you'll spend is negligible, really, unless you're a rabid collector. Why you would become a rabid collector in an online card game, I can't say, because it's not like you can sell your cards six months later when you get tired of the game and decide to get rid of everything at once.

Shadow Era is a relatively deep game, especially considering it's cheap and online. It doesn't have the complex brilliance of Magic, but it does have several clever moves and tough deck-building decisions. You can build your deck one card at a time and play just the kind of game you like, and as with many far more expensive games, you can still lose with a great deck just because you play it poorly. I've had many tense games where I beat players who should have won, simply because they played the wrong cards at the wrong time. I've also lost many games just because I screwed up.

Shadow Era is a lot of fun, and I'm really enjoying it, but it's not without flaws. Possibly the biggest strike against it now is that there just aren't enough cards. If you're playing a direct-damage mage, your deck is probably very similar to every other direct-damage mage, and if you're playing a warrior, the only difference will come in the incredibly expensive cards that the other guy bought and you can't afford. More cards will make Shadow Era a far better game, and so I'm looking forward to future releases.

There are also bugs, and from time to time, balance issues. Very few people play the wolfmen, because their main talent is losing. For a long time, everybody who wanted to win a lot played elementals, because they were crazy overpowered and had cards that were not only exclusive to them, but against which there were no counters. Not to mention the number of times allies get stronger at random, or die at bizarrely inappropriate moments, or the variety of other bugs that have plagued the game since it began. The computer-controlled enemies are prone to making idiotic mistakes, like playing a card that permanently renders one of your allies useless, and then firebombing them when they could have hit someone else.

However, the developers of Shadow Era are very involved with the game. Updates are regularly released that address those irritating bugs, and just recently, a badly overdue update to elementals fixed it so that they were not as blindingly overpowering as they had been. A very active forum allows players to discuss strategy and interact directly with the guys in charge of the game, and so many bugs are fixed as soon as they are discovered.

Shadow Era isn't perfect, and it's still in its fledgling stages, but I am very excited to see what will happen with the game over the long haul. More cards would be great, and maybe more hero types, but those will probably appear as time goes by. You don't have to be a genius to win (though it helps), and because the cards are so incredibly affordable, it takes almost no investment to have a very competitive deck. It's fun, it's damned pretty, and you can play it wherever you go.

Well, you can play wherever you go, if you have an iPad. For the rest of us broke assholes, you can use a web browser.

Summary

Play against the AI or other real people

Pros:
Great art
Very affordable
Fun and easy to learn
Plenty of meat without being overwhelming

Cons:
Not enough cards
Minor bugs and balance issues

If you can read this review, you can play this game. It's available for iPhones, iPads, Android phones and regular old web browsers. You can try it out for free, and theoretically, never pay a dime for a game you could play for weeks. If you want to give it a spin, it's right here:
http://www.shadowera.com/