Reviews written by HiveGod

A mechanical kick in the pants. Draft cards to build an efficiency engine to hit the magical 8+ coins per hand and then start buying the big victory points... the rub being that once you start buying VPs they will clog up your machine and make it run all choppy.

Other than committing to a strategy the game really comes down to timing the switch from deck building to buying VPs. Come in too soon and you bloat the machine with crap. Come in too late and you're behind the curve and will lose, maddeningly, by something as stupid as a single card-buy.

It's fascinating to watch the different solutions grind away at the problem and to see who had the most efficient engine—and best timing—at the end.

The only knock is for the flaccid theme, which is, perhaps, thankfully thin, given how mechanical the game is and how fast it plays with experienced players. (It's not unusual for your turn to come back around before you're done shuffling from the last one.) A narrative layer would probably just slow everything down.

That said, I like to think of it as scratch-building a Ferrari and then seeing how much cocaine I can hide in the gas tank while still getting it across the border. And then maybe something about fire-breathing pimps.

A feather-light gateway game that neatly unhorses Catan as the premier intro to hobby boardgaming.* Surprisingly tense for such a simple setup. You get to play tactically in the now, maneuver for mid-range goals as well as nurture an overall strategy. Can be taught and grokked in moments; bright colors and beautiful art design make it a sensual pleasure to play. Rating is probably slightly higher for newbies and dramatically lower for hardcore gamers. Still, an excellent way for veterans of the psychic wars to disengage, drop the intellect into neutral and just coast pleasantly along as a warm-up, a night-ender or as a relaxing activity when otherwise impaired.

*I realize that today this notion is hideously out of date: "Settlers of huh-what?" But at the time it was all the rage, along with terror alerts and Nickelback.

UPDATE: Okay, it's just Rummy with scoring sets on a board, and secret scoring goals on the Ticket cards. And like Rummy it's a mild social game. An "eat, drink & be merry with good friends" game. Played seriously or in silence it's stupid. It's for chillin' while counting cards.

UP-UPDATE: The only way I can play this game and maintain my sanity anymore is to pretend the board is the yarn map at FBI headquarters where they're tracking all those random railway murders. Why did I have to get to Little Rock so damn bad?

HOBO STABBIN'

A righteous hoot. Essentially a version of "lifeboat" with added bells and whistles, it feels precisely like a B zombie movie, complete with all the requisite screaming, idiocy, gun-waving, and unfortunate uncoiling of mortal coils.

... shell casings dance in hazy gore-spray ... send more cops ...

This rates 2.5 stars played with the rules as written out of the box. With the proper amount of house-rule spackle this can climb as high as 3.5 or even 4 stars with the right music, mood and people.

How much spackle? All of it. You'll want to come up with new rules for movement, combat, endgame and victory conditions, using any combination of your own tasty brains, the Quick(er) Play Rules, and Mark Chaplin's suggestions:

1. Throw out the rulebook.
2. Pick and choose from variant rules on the 'net—remember to keep it SIMPLE!
3. Do not lay down tiles after finding the helipad.
4. Forget counting "dead" zombies for the winner—this is a kill-the-zombies-to-escape game. Let the most bloodthirsty player place the helipad.
5. When a player dies, have him/her/them control the zombies, etc.
6. Trim the card deck to a custom-picked 50-60 cards. NO more, no less. Keep it 50/50 to screwage/benefit cards.
7. Use a timer—this keeps a panicky atmosphere ticking over.
8. Mount the town tiles on 2mm-thick card.
9. Use the subway expansion.

Also take a look at the smorgasbord of rules salad on the Twilight Creations website.

I have to admit that I was very put off by this at first—if I wanted to make my own game I would have made my own game, not spent money on an unfinished product. With time, however, I've very much warmed to the idea of Zombies!!! as a sandbox/toolkit experience game, a gaming hot rod that can be fiddled with and tuned until you get the custom ride that perfectly suits you & your game group.

If you dig the theme, have the time and are so inclined to tinker, this is pretty darn good.

Your inner 12-year-old will LOVE this. It's just plain fun in a Vikings-killing-robots kind of way...

UPDATE: I've raised my score on this one due to the number of whoopin' 'n hollerin' knock-down drag-out wars we've had. The combat system is fast and simple, you don't have to paint the minis, and the terrain is fab. No two games have ever been alike and the last one we played (a 500 points/side three-way slug-fest) ended with a single character with a single hit point left on the field. Can't recommend this one enough!

GOLDEN KID-QUOTE: "Why are we fighting each other? Why aren't we all fighting the guy who brought us here?"

Man, what a letdown. This looked great, and I feel as if I should love it, but it really felt flat to me. I'm not sure what it's missing—it just came out as a mechanical exercise instead of the nail-biting, fate-hanging-on-the-turn-of-a-card experience it promised.

Perhaps I just need to relax and get into it more, but the cartoony art provides a speedbump I just can't clear. Maybe... maybe if we had a more intuitive grasp of the rules so the game flows instead of clumps. Nice idea, but that would require more plays, and this one's slipped far, far down the list.

UPDATE: So we're playing and I'm bumping along the bottom and we make it to stage III and then I get a work call that forces me to step away from the table for a bit... Upon returning I find out I won.

Huh.

UP-UPDATE: 3 stars --> 3.5 stars. Jeez, I don't know what my problem was. This game's a riot with the right people!

UP-UP-UPDATE: Couple things.

1. Don't let the engineer in your group endlessly noodle with the iPad app—he will build perfect ships no matter what tactics are employed against him, like "bogart all cannons" or the classic "sand timer cartwheel". And then he'll double all your scores. Forever.

2. It takes a certain kind of emotional fortitude to not weep openly when you finally finagle things to punch it to the front of the pack and run down the four-dollar pirate, putting salvo after salvo of beam weapons through his papier-mâché flying saucer, and then you're not even buzzed from your first celebratory Zgwortz when you warp around a neutron star and straight into the teeth of Voidbeard the Pirate with his nonstop fusillades that peel your battery nacelles, fountain crew into the silent black, and pick your guns and engines off one after the other and so on until you're just screaming for it all to stop stop STOP! And then the iPad-practiced engineer comes in and mops him up for the 12-dollar bounty. There are words to describe that sensation, but they carry far more meaning when screamed inside an isolating helmet rather than read off a dumb screen.

NOTE 1: Normally I hate it when people use the generic term "dollar" for all intermediary economic exchange units in games when there are already perfectly appropriate game-specific designators like "ducats" or "galacticreds" or "orphan femurs", but it turns out that "four-dollar pirate" is funnier than the thematic alternative.

NOTE 2: Voidbeard the Pirate, so-called due to his hideous predilection for weaving curdled space-time into his beard to strike terror into the hearts of his victims. And man, does it ever.

tl;dr — Light & fast = FUN; serious & slow = OH GOD KILL ME NOW

After 1 play: (2p) Works well as a chill activity with a glass of wine & some downtempo ambient. It's pretty, has neat little puzzles to solve, and everything you do nets you some kind of return, so there's a feeling of constant forward progress (as opposed to irritating impotence). I like the dark undertones of Rasputin-like manipulation of entire peoples, murder, and slave sacrifice in order to treat with demons. But that's just me.

I think it would be absolute hell with hardcore gamers, especially at max player count. Each turn can be laboriously optimized for maximum payoff with minimum setup for the next player; but this process, at least in the early game, involves brute-forcing all possible moves to climb the various branches of the game tree, a fractally-fuzzed boredom bush. This might be okay if you're playing against quantum computers (spoiler alert: you will lose), but it would be excruciating with savannah-born meat-brains (chuck a spear, check; grind n-ply game states in a timely fashion, not so much). A chess clock would be a must... or you could just hold everyone to casual play and save the thinky for heavier games where such deep contemplation is part of the intended experience.

Probably most enjoyable with your honey, family play, or two couples as a social activity.

Thoughts on the 2p rules:

It's a bummer that the process of turn-order bidding for two is merely implied in the rules—maybe more obviously for some, but still. It would have been nice to have a small, concrete example of what must otherwise be intuited.

No one wrote:

The two players will bid for four turn order slots; it is therefore possible, through clever and/or aggressive bidding, to get two (or more!) turns in a row.*

*If you go 3,4 in one turn and then 1,2 in the next that's four turns in row!

After 4 plays: (3x 4p) It's a solid 7. Works as intended—a pleasant little puzzler with lots to do, Nerf®-edged back-and-forth, and gorgeous to boot.

Stuff we got wrong:

• Resource cards are hidden.
Good luck finding that in the rulebook...

• Djinn & the market only refresh between rounds.
What you see during turn order bidding is all you'll get until next time...

• Viziers score 1 VP each, then +10 per person with fewer than you.
So if the final vizier count is 5, 4, 3, 1 the scores will be 35, 24, 13, and 1. This will crazy-change the game...

Shaitan take these infidel rules!

I prefer more structure in my storytelling—concrete points to push off of and hit my head on. This was far too loose—flaccid, really—with no real sense of risk or danger. More of an improv activity than a *game* game. Shooting the shit instead of shooting the It, if you will.

I respect where it's coming from and what it's trying to do but it just doesn't work for us.

A light romp that plays fast with 7p as long as they...

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...play fast. I can see how this could bog down hideously if folks got too thinky with it. Keep it quick and it's great fun!

9 plays later: Yeah, hurry up with your goddamn turn—we're running from a monster, not amortizing fees in a derivative financial instrument. If you're pokey I swear to God I'll sacrifice Sparky the dog just to lure the monster into the middle of your molasses-pants pack.

A wonderfully themed game of cat and mouse... where the mice are stalking the cat! It comes in on the long side, but this can be mitigated if players take their turns in a snappy manner, especially Dracula. Highly recommended for patient players who are into the milieu. Others may find it too ponderous.