Board Game Review - Runewars

Making games is a tricky business. I like to think of it like baking - take your bread out before it's done, and it's all gross and sticky in the middle. Put too many ingredients into your bread, and you can't even taste the good parts because you're too busy picking the orange rind and flax seeds out of the crust. Leave it in the oven too long, and you wind up with this blackened chunk of inedible charcoal.

So if making games is like baking, then Runewars is like a flamboyant fruitcake. I sort of like fruitcake, but sometimes it seems like the people who make fruitcake get completely insane with the ingredients.

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Board Game Review - Grind

If I were to start thinking of cool stories for board games, I would probably start obvious, with some elves and orcs and big men with heavy swords. Then, since that particular idea has been beaten so far into the ground that it has popped up in China, I would move on to my personal favorite - animal people, ninja-turtle-style. And as a grown man with a little too much testosterone, I might also come up with a game where you look at a lot of naked women and then shoot people.

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Event Review - Memorial Day

I don't try to hide the fact that I'm not all that fond of the people who tend to get elected to lead our country. Our presidents seem to be less and less interested in disguising their corruption, and the wars in which we continue to find ourselves entangled seem less and less just. You can spout on about our global war on terror, but from where I'm sitting, Iraq had jack squat to do with terrorism and everything to do with oil and a vainglorious quest for a legacy.

But no matter how much I find myself disillusioned with the nation's so-called leaders, I find myself filled with pride and gratitude for the men and women who are willing to fight, die and kill to protect us. I may disagree with the Boss Hogg assholes who send them off to die, but I am a devout supporter of our military. I'm downright passionate about it.

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Board Game Review - Mr. Jack in New York

It seems a little odd to me that a game about history's most famous serial killing psychopath is a cute deduction game that's perfect for playing with the kids. Well, one kid - it's only a two-player game. But my daughter loves it (though she loves it a lot more when she's beating me) and doesn't mind at all that the goal of one player is to capture the world's most notorious murderer, and the other player's goal is to allow the bloodiest back-alley killer of all time to get away.

Mr. Jack in New York is the stand-alone sequel to Mr. Jack. The premise is that Gentleman Jack (an odd moniker for a man with a penchant for butchering hookers) has escaped to New York City, and now the police have to catch him. But Jack is a master of disguise, and so in order for the police to capture him, they have to identify which of the eight characters is actually the psycho in disguise.

If you've played Mr. Jack, you already know pretty much exactly how this game works. One player is Jack, the other is the police. The players take turns moving two characters at a time to try to expose The Ripper or keep him hidden. The game comes down mostly to a trial of elimination with a heavy dose of tactical maneuvers. At the end of a turn, if Jack is next to another character, or standing under a street lamp, Jack is visible. And if he's visible, the police character knows that all the characters that are not visible are not Jack. If he's in the dark, then the characters who are in the light are not Jack. And if he's completely invisible, then it might mean you're playing an HG Wells game or a cheesy Kevin Bacon movie.

To complicate things, every character has a special ability. Cloud Rider, for instance, can move through buildings, and Lewis Howard Latimer installs gaslights. Monk Eastman is a mafia boss who can make other people move instead of himself, presumably by making them offers they can't refuse. Captain Callahan moves the crime scene tape, which is only a special ability in this game, because in real life, that job requires less than a fourth-grade education.

With characters moving around, building parks and metro stations, throwing up yellow tape and moving steam ships, it becomes just as important to plan your move as it does to figure out what your opponent will do. Move a metro station to relocate one of your characters, and you might just let Jack have a clear run at the exit. You might move the snobby woman away from the ship captain just to wind up with the Texas Ranger next to her, probably making inappropriate suggestions and asking if she wants to touch his pistol.

As if all that wasn't enough to track, the addition of the sneaky informant can throw the entire thing into disarray. If the cop can get someone to the same space as the snitch, he can grab an alibi card, which will conclusively prove that one of the either people is not the bad guy. In a thematic twist, the mafia boss is not allowed to put concrete shoes on the snitch and drop him into the harbor, which would probably be far too violent for this game. Hell, Mr. Jack in New York doesn't even have bloody noses, let alone outright murder. That would be just tasteless in a game where you're hunting a guy who chops up prostitutes like he was carving steaks. After all, this is a family game.

Mr. Jack in New York has quite a bit more happening than its predecessor, and if you're not sure if you can handle the brain-freeze brought on by attempting to calculate eight different moves at once, you may want to start with the original. But if you're up to the task, and you like a little mental aerobics, the new version is pretty damned fun. It's not one that I pull out very often, but that's mostly because it's just a bit too cerebral for a late-night relaxation game. If it's an hour until bedtime and you're looking to unwind, this is not the game you're looking for. Try Dominion - I can play that when I'm so tired that I'm propping my eyes open with toothpicks.

The Mr. Jack games have proven immensely popular with the hobby gaming crowd, so it's not as though I need to make a steep case for them. If you like the first one, you'll like this one. If you like deduction games with lots of tricky maneuvering, this is a good pick. But if you like to shoot zombies, battle robots or hack your way through hordes of goblins, you'll probably be annoyed, because the theme is just an excuse. Me, I can play nearly anything - but I have to be feeling pretty smart if I want to take on Mr. Jack in New York.

Summary

Pros:
Very smart game - smarter than the original
A great exercise for the brain
Neat pieces and fun art

Cons:
Practically abstract
Tough on the ol' think muscle

Dogstar Games has a very good price on Mr. Jack in New York, so if you're feeling clever, run over and give it a spin:
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/ASM700300

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Board Game Review - Terakh

The reviews I write tend to come in one of three basic flavors. Your first flavor is the bland vanilla, and it goes something like this:

This game was OK if you like this kind of thing. Here's a joke about boobs or the mentally handicapped.

My second basic flavor is the beatdown review. It reads a little like this:

This game is horrible, and the designer should be embarrassed. Now here's a dick joke.

The third flavor, and my favorite to write, is the Big Winna review. It's kind of like this:

This game is totally kick-ass, and you should buy it if you can. Boobdicktard.

Tonight's review is the third kind of review, the Big Winna review. Because tonight, I'm going to tell you about one hell of a fun game, one called Terakh, and then hopefully you'll all run out and buy a copy, assuming you can find it, which you probably cannot because it does not have US distribution and is currently only available in Canada.

Terakh is an abstracted wargame, sort of. It's played on triangle boards, and has people who kill each other. It has color and glyph coding for movement and effects, and you roll tons of dice. It's the kind of game that would translate famously to a video game I could play on my phone (that is a blatant hint to any Blackberry App developers out there - make more good games, and fewer tower defense games, because those SUCK). It's not terribly complicated, but there's still a lot happening all the time. Success requires attention to details, long-term strategy, and smart tactical maneuvers. A little luck won't hurt, either. OK, a lot of luck.

Each player gets six of the grooviest little prong-sided hockey pucks that ever got put in a game. One side of the disc dude has a stick-art man ready to hurt people, and the other side has the same stick-art guy hiding behind his shield (or it could be a different stick art guy - they all look the same to me). You position your wacky warrior pieces around your little triangle board, which has more triangles in a bunch of different colors. So far, this is extremely abstract. But when you add in the fact that the entire goal of the game is to kill your opponents and destroy their elders (which are four-sided dice), it becomes an abstract with a body count.

Each player also gets an idol token, which is a tiddly-wink that fits inside the prong on your disc dudes. When your warriors cap other warriors, you can put rubber bands on the prongs of the hockey puck sporting the tiddly-wink (those are technical terms, which I am using to make myself feel smarter). Those rubber bands make your idol tougher, which is especially cool because idols have all kinds of special powers, like ranged attacks and teleporting and stuff. So now you have a teleporting hero who hits harder than anyone else and can take a punch.

The reason those idols don't unbalance the game is because combat is a basic roll-off on an eight-sided die, and even if you're adding a bunch to your roll, if you get a 2 and your attacker gets a 6, your ass is dead. You only get one hit point on most guys, so this capricious luck factor (which I usually hate) actually ends up making the whole thing a little more balanced. Sure, you've got your Ultimate Fighting Champion, but he can still get smoked by a nerd with a pocket protector if the dice don't go his way.

There's a ton of different things to do in Terakh, but you only get five actions a turn, and some stuff costs multiple actions (like attacking) and some stuff is limited to elders or idols. You can spin the board where you elder is sitting, and you can teleport from the central purple triangles on each board. You may want to park some guys on blue spots, to use a particular spell, or you may want to crowd around the purple spot to keep a foe from bringing in his fallen troops. Then you've got cards with spells you can cast to totally manipulate the game, and while these cards mostly require you to have a guy on the right color, they're incredibly good at changing the outcome of the battles. In fact, the whole game can twist on a few cards and some really smart plays that nobody saw coming.

I think the main reason Terakh is a simply awesome game is the fact that it never gets to the point where you go, 'that guy is going to win,' because the other guy might be totally sandbagging and setting up a superior position at the expense of sacrificing a few of his hard-earned ass-kickers. You can take out nearly everyone on the other teams, be sitting with all of yours, and then lose because the other guys pulls a last-minute Hail Mary and ganks you without any warning. It's not luck, either - if you don't see those killer plays and the other guy does, he's going to make you pay.

On the topic of luck, Terakh is chock-full of it. People who hate leaving the outcome to a die roll are going to detest this game, because you could have your entire turn pissed right down the toilet because the dice hate you. And then your buddy could have a streak of luck so insane that you'll go from winning to sucking wind before you even realize what's happening. Me, I'm a big fan of dice, but if you're not interested in seeing some twists of fate that send the top dog to the bottom of the heap, you should probably pass.

One last topic deserves special mention. The pieces in Terakh are unique and really, really nice. I suggest you spin past BGG and look at some of the pictures of this game. Ender's Game, in particular, wrote a great picture review. The warriors are incredibly sturdy plastic, and the triangle board that you have to spin a lot have velvet on the back. Yeah, like an Elvis painting. The colors are bright, the rulebook is full-color, and the art is... stick figures. But whatever, it's worth owning Terakh simply to have a box of the wackiest components you'll see in a game. The only way to make these more unique would be to include a quart of motor oil and some Russian porn.

I seriously recommend this game. It won't be leaving my collection, and I plan to play it at nearly every available opportunity. It's fun, smart and tricky, with the kind of components that make you want to play the game. Do yourself a favor and check out this awesome indy game.

Summary

Pros:
Fantastic component quality
Cool mix of theme and abstract
Triangle boards and dead bodies make it a man's abstract
Lots of strategy, great tactical plays and long-term strategy

Cons:
More luck than many people will find acceptable

You can only get Terakh in Canada, which would suck if they weren't offering free shipping right now. Also, the game is ridiculously underpriced, so it's like you're robbing them. Here's a link. Go rob them.
http://www.terakh.com/order/online.html

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Making Stuff

As many of you are aware, I own VixenTor Games, which makes dice towers and other gaming accessories. We're considering launching a new product line, and we need a little help. I've heard these 'give something away already' grumblings, so I'm killing two birds with one stone here.

Run over to the VixenTor Games website and read the front page news story, then click the link and take the survey. You'll be entered to win fifty bucks store credit (enough for a deluxe dice tower), and you'll be doing me a solid.

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Board Game Review - Feudo

Regular readers may have picked up on the fact that I like games that have what polite women sometimes call 'hoochies'. The harem in Dominion: Intrigue, for instance, is one of my favorites, mostly because it features scantily clad females who have a lot of sex. After reading the rules for Feudo, I decided that I liked at least one element of this game before I even played it, because one of the units each player controls is the seductress. She's actually called 'milady', but since all she does is knock boots or give men diseases, I like to think of her as a trailer-park porn queen.

If the main goal of the game was to get horizontal with cheap floozies, Feudo would actually have a lot going for it. And this 'milady' thing is such a dominant part of the game that it definitely does make it more interesting. It's kind of like chess meets a wargame, but with hidden moves and the plague. But it's also a little bit Puritan, because it's really in your best interest to avoid getting close enough to let the other guy's tramp get her hooks in your leader. Before you know it, she's producing a dress with stains on it, and he's telling lies to Congress.

Each player in Feudo gets the same batch of units. Mostly, they're all soldiers and knights, but you also get a baron (who is a bad-ass on wheels with a weakness for easy women) and milady (the afore-mentioned trollop). At the top of each turn, everyone picks which units they'll move that turn, and whether they feel like paying them to work harder. Then you take turns moving the guys you chose, and you try to take cities and kill people to earn big points. If somebody gets too close to your trampy dame, she'll run right up and bed their leader, and the whole army will sit around with their thumbs up their asses, wondering if he's ever coming out of his tent, and whether he might not have the clap later.

To add a little mayhem, you've also got the plague running around the board. Get too close to an infected city, and all your guys will start calling in sick to work. Let your floozie get too close, and she'll be able to transfer her bad fortune to the enemy. Basically, all his guys will need penicillin shots, and it will burn when they pee.

Since fights are won or lost based entirely on the point values of the troops involved, you're not likely to see someone trying a desperate, against-the-odds maneuver. There's a little luck in where the plague goes, but winning or losing Feudo will be based mostly on using your head and playing smart. Keep your horny baron away from the cheap lay, use your power where it will do the most good, and spend your money when you can really use the edge. You can't do a lot, so you have to make it all count.

So Feudo is a fairly smart game with hookers and a body count. So what I can't figure out is, why don't I like it? It seems to have all the ingredients for awesome, and yet it just kind of falls flat. There seem to be some unbalancing elements, too - the whore will always seduce the baron, if she gets close enough, and then that player essentially misses his entire turn, creating one hell of an advantage for everyone else. The plague can suddenly wind up right in the middle of your concentrated power, and the next thing you know, you're too weak to pick up the TV remote, much less go kill things. And since you only get a few units for the whole game, going toe-to-toe with another player just opens it up to let the other players grab cities and then kick you from behind while all your guys are facing the other way.

I hate to criticize a game with easy women and killing. It seems to go against everything I believe about games. But even when games do include sex and violence, they still need to be fun (especially when there's sex and violence, it should be fun. Why else do we go to the movies?). Feudo seems like a pretty smart game, and while it doesn't completely fail, it never really succeeds, either. So whether or not milady is wearing a T-back thong and stripper boots, I'm still not going to play this game again.

Summary

Pros:
Highly tactical and very strategic
A very small amount of luck means skill is a greater factor
Relatively easy to pick up and learn
Whores and war

Cons:
A few unbalancing factors
Not really all that interesting, which is odd because it's a fairly well-designed game

You may be reading this and thinking, 'well, Drake didn't like it, but I still might.' So here's a link to buy it. Knock yourself out.
http://www.funagain.com/control/product?product_id=016740

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