50 Games in 50 Weeks: The Play’s The Thing
If you can imagine a Shakespearean role-playing game that’s riotously fun even for those not steeped in Shakespeare, you’d be imagining The Play’s The Thing. The players take on the roles of small-time Shakespearean actors in a play that changes underneath their feet. That, indeed, is the fun: not only can the director interrupt and tell you to do the rest of the scene in Japanese accents, but all the other players can bid to have […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Munchkin
The Munchkin card game models dungeon crawlers who are only interested in killing things and taking their stuff. The game has two decks; the Door Deck contains monsters to fight, while the Treasure Deck contains stuff: a race (elf, dwarf, etc.), a class (cleric, fighter, wizard, etc.), a weapon, or an event. You start the game with a few Treasure cards. On your turn, you draw a Door card. If you […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: A Game of Thrones: The Card Game
This is a tough review, because I simply didn’t like the Game of Thrones card game. It’s not my kind of game. However, I’d like to play it again at least once, because it has interesting strategy implications. And that is both the positive and negative of the Game of Thrones card game. Imagine Magic: The Gathering with 50% more rules. It’s deep and complex. This can be good or bad, depending […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Ticket to Ride
Ticket to Ride is one of the classic Eurogames. This intimidated me; Eurogames are known for their relative complexity. I’ve only played Ticket to Ride once, and I learned it quickly and had fun. The game is played on a board showing major American cities (there are other versions for other countries, naturally), and colored potential train lines running between them. At any given time, four colored train cards […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Dominion
Dominion came out of nowhere a few years ago to become a hugely popular game. Folks just adore this game. I decided to just straight out buy it, based on all the praise I’d heard for it. When I opened the game box, I was taken aback. The base game includes hundreds of cards, and they all seem different. In play, the game makes sense. There are only a few main card types: […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is a new tabletop role-playing game that’s garnered a lot of interest lately, partly due to its impressive roster of designers and developers: Cam Banks (Smallville and Leverage RPGs), Rob Donoghue (Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files RPG), Matt Forbeck (Lord of the Rings RPG, Deadlands RPG), Will Hindmarch, and Philippe-Antoine Menard (The Chatty DM). MHR takes an interesting mechanical approach: to perform an action, build a set of dice (a “dice pool”) from elements […]
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 […]