50 Games in 50 Weeks: Horrific, Terror in the Cards
While browsing a local game store’s dusty bargain bin, my hands pulled out a couple decks of cards. Each was adorned with a tiny yellow price tag proclaiming, “$1.” The decks were part of a card game, Horrific: Terror in the Cards. According to the back of each deck, each player in the game plays a villain in a small town, trying to corrupt townspeople into minions, while turning the rest of the town’s inhabitants against the other […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Paranoia
RPG players are conditioned to view PC conflict as an absolute bad. So how can I describe the fun of an RPG that assumes players will attempt to kill each other at every session? Paranoia is set in a 1980’s dystopia where Friend Computer directs humanity with a scented iron fist. It’s 1984 crossed with Discworld. The player-characters are all troubleshooters (“tasked to find trouble and shoot it”), given a job […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Space Hulk: Death Angel
You are a space marine, a heavily armored and incredibly powerful warrior searching an abandoned ship for deadly, xenophobic aliens. Unfortunately, they will find you. This is represented in a card game. And that’s the yin and yang of Space Hulk: Death Angel. The basic idea–marines assaulted by aliens as they traverse a space ship–captures the imagination, but it’s complex and awkward to represent with cards. The players each control a couple of marines, all of which […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Fudged Mouse Guard
My game group played Fudged Mouse Guard a few weeks ago. It takes the excellent Mouse Guard RPG–a game of intelligent mice with medieval-level technology–and converts the system to Fudge (every stat is a score from -4 to +4, and you roll dice that modify your score up or down for a final result, which is compared to a target difficulty). The original Mouse Guard system is a simplified and heavily modified version of the odd Burning Wheel system. The conversion to Fudge […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Catego
Catego is an abstract dice game in which several players (about 2 to 5) each roll dice, and slowly fill in a scorecard, jockeying for position. The scorecard looks like this: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Player 1 Player 2 Player 3 Player 4 Every turn, each player rolls two six-sided dice, adds them, and places that result […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Risus
I had the good fortune to play a game using the free Risus “everything RPG system” as part of DC Gameday this year. Risus is very generic, which is its key strength. The system can be explained in two short paragraphs, which I will now attempt to do. Each character is made up of clichés, each of which gets 1 to 4 dice. Each character has a total of 10 dice […]