Desire often trumps logic. Sometimes we want something so badly that we overlook flaws inherent in people, jobs, movies, or games. In my case, Last Night on Earth. The game seemed perfect: a co-operative, competitive table top game that pits human heroes against my favorite undead. The game comes with five different scenarios, eight different playable heroes, and a mostly-randomized set of map tiles that mean each game is just a little bit different from the last. LNoE comes a TON of awesome collateral such as an old truck, gasoline, and townsfolk tokens, and most importantly, a bunch of plastic zombies. The production value on this game is outstanding. With scenario titles like “Die, Zombie, Die!” how could we go wrong?
Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a class of games I like to call “starters,” games that are light-hearted, take an hour or less to finish, and are warm-ups for longer, more “serious” games. They are also easy to explain, so if there’s a newbie or two in the crowd they can jump right in without too much explanation.

Such a game is the infamous Ticket to Ride, which is one of Board Game Geek’s Top 50 games. Like any good starter game, the premise and rules are simple: win by earning points for completing railroad routes across the United States. Earn bonus points for completing “ticket” routes to and from certain cities. You claim routes by playing collections of same-colored railcar cards. Most routes only allow for one train, but some routes allow for two in the event of a game with more than three players.
Read the rest of this entry »

While Tanga has been letting me down a lot lately with their once-a-day deals, every once in awhile a game will come up at a sufficiently low price that I can only shrug and say, “Why not?” Such was the case with “Pecking Order,” which I knew literally nothing about except that it was made by the same dude who started Magic: The Gathering. Even that much I learned in the Tanga write-up. However, the price was right and it was a strictly two-player game. Most of the games in the house are multi-player, or play best with three or more players. Pecking Order was inexpensive and met my criteria for number of players, so there you have it. The purchase was made less than sixty seconds later.

But is it any fun?
Read the rest of this entry »

Hoopla, made by the same folks who brought you Cranium, is a co-operative game that can be played by two or more players. Similar to Cranium, each color-coded category makes you do a specific whacky challenge. The object of the game is for the entire group to complete eight + n challenges, where n is the number of players times four cards. Everyone works together, and you have fifteen minutes to finish (timer included!).

Gameplay is simple. You roll a multicolored die, and you have to do a specific challenge depending on the result. You may select any one of your challenge cards, which allows you to (hopefully) select cards that are more appropriate for whatever challenge type was rolled. The timer is started shortly after rolling.

There are four types of challenges. Blue, “Cloodle,” is just like in Cranium — you draw the challenge, without the use of letters, numbers or symbols. Red is “Tweener,” sort of like “bigger than a breadbox.” For example, if the challenge was “sphinx,” you might say, “bigger than a grain of sand, but smaller than Egypt.” Yellow is “Tongue Tied,” wherein you can only use words of the same starting letter. If the challenge card was “Tony Hawk,” you might say, “slim skateboarding superstar spokesperson.” You are not allowed to say anything that is printed on the card. The last type is the green “Soundstage” challenge. This is like charades but with sound effects. If I chose to act out “Indiana Jones,” I may whistle the theme song to Raiders of the Lost Ark while cracking an imaginary bullwhip or doing the swordsman vs. Indy routine.
Read the rest of this entry »

I recently acquired Hoity Toity, a game by Klaus Teuber, creator of Settlers of Catan. If you’ve been a longtime Gibberish reader, you know how much we love Settlers around here. I received Hoity Toity as part of my $10 “Tanga Trash” item sold during a recent Tangathon at Tanga.com.

The premise of the game is simple. Between three to six players take on the roles of antique dealers and attempt to win by building the biggest and best collections … or by stealing them. You may either go to the auction house to acquire more pieces, or go to a gallery to display (or steal) your collection. If you go to the auction house, you may either buy one of two possible items with cash or you can try to steal an item, as long as you are the only thief present. There are three possible actions at the gallery. You may display your collection. The best and second-best collections get to move forward on the game board. You may play a thief and try to steal an item from any display. You may also play a detective, which will send all thieves to jail. All players make their “moves” at once, but the events unfold in cascading order. If I display my winning collection at the gallery, I get to move forward. If a thief is played, they get to steal a part of my collection after I move. If a detective is then played by a third player, then the thief goes to jail after stealing an item from my collection. The game has a kind of rock-paper-scissors feel. You win the game by moving forward with a successful exhibit, you can add to your own collection by stealing, or you can counter thieves with detectives. Unfortunately, this methodology falls a little flat in smaller games.
Read the rest of this entry »

We received the boardgame ImagiNiff from Lady Jaye’s folks as an early Christmas present. There are eight blank spaces around the oval-shaped game board. Players write their names on the dry-erasable surface (marker included), filling in any remaining spaces with names of people everyone knows. We had six people in our game, and put in “Batman” and “George W. Bush” as our two non-player characters. The object of the game is to be the first to cross the finish line by answering questions about yourself and other players.

Read the rest of this entry »

Settlers of Catan is one of my favorite games. I play it online almost every day and I play the tabletop version with friends whenever I can. One of the problems with the game is that it doesn’t travel very well. There are lots of pieces and Settlers requires a large playing surface. I purchased the travel edition before my last trip out to California on business.

When is a travel game not a travel game? When the playing surface is a square, single block of plastic. While the board is much smaller than the surface area necessary for the original game, it isn’t easy to pack. When taken out of its normal cardboard box and put into freezer bags, the original game packs almost as lightly as the travel version. The board should have folded in half, with the playing pieces hiding inside. It’s such a standard setup for travel games I was shocked by Settler’s solid board design. I wound up taking the original game with me to California and left the travel edition at home.

One of the biggest differences between the travel edition and other versions is that the hex numbers are fixed. The desert is always in the middle of the board. There are too many holes in the board, which allows tired/new players to put settlements and cities in illegal positions. As you can tell by the photo, the board allows players to illegally place settlements on the straight sides of each hex, instead of at the legal corners of each hex.

The Settlers of Catan travel edition is good for playing on uneven surfaces, or where space is at an absolute premium. A camping trip is a good example. The cards and pieces are very small, and in most cases you are better off shoving the original in freezer bags and playing with the full-sized set.

The travel edition can be purchased for $19.99 + shipping from the fine folks at FunAgain Games or local game stores.

Short story: too many design flaws to make this a worthwhile purchase.

Two and a half out of five STFU mugs

Lady Jaye and I held a birthday bash in my honor back in August. I was lucky enough to have most of my friends present, and to make things even better I got some games! They all fit my personality: the Captain and his family bought me a martial arts movie-style card game, gave me SPANC, which stands for Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls, also a card-based game. More on those games at a later date.

hooked me up with Sucking Vacuum. The object of the game is to escape a doomed space station via the one escape pod. The catch is that you must assemble a space suit, fuel the escape pod, and either leave with another player or find the autopilot and leave by yourself. This last point is what makes the game really fun. If you don’t have the autopilot you have to ally with another player. But as soon as you do so, the other players will be out to get you! You can also jack players for their equipment, so the game has a paranoid vibe going on.

Sucking Vacuum is a tile-based board game, with setup similar to Zombies!!!. The play area is made up of square tiles that are randomly assembled at the beginning of each game, so each game will be different from the last. There are three types of tiles: the shuttle, rooms, and hallways. The shuttle and room tiles each have three pieces of random equipment in them, represented by tokens that are placed face down. If you occupy the shuttle bay or any room, you can “search” the room and retrieve a piece of equipment of your choice.

Images downloaded from Funagaingames.com

The space station is leaking air — rapidly — and while everyone starts in a room full of air, each tile in the game is quickly depleted of oxygen. If you’re on a tile without any air, you expend oxygen for everything: moving, searching, attacking another player, defending yourself, even standing still. You have 10 “breaths” and can only replenish your air supply at pre-determined air tanks throughout the station or via an air bottle special item token.

You’ll need a complete space suit to escape: helmet, jacket, and pants, but the other equipment items come in handy. My favorite (obviously) are the weapons. You use makeshift weapons, such as a toilet brush, to jack your opponents and steal their equipment. All recovered equipment is played face up except for special items, so all of the other players can see what you have. This makes for some interesting bargaining. In the game we played together, I threatened that if she didn’t team up with me I’d beat her up and take her stuff. She said “NO YUO” and I advanced on her with my trusty fire extinguisher Unfortunately she was better armed than I was — a hunk o’ space station — and I got pounded me hard. Special items include the autopilot, an air tank, a rocket sled, and a jet pack.

The game has an awesome premise, and I like the idea of rapidly shifting alliances. But Sucking Vacuum has a few major flaws that need to be addressed. First off, the rules that come with the game are in dire need of a rewrite. There’s a revised ruleset available online for download, and while it fixed some of the glaring mistakes the rules were ambiguous enough to give us fits. The game is bundled with an expansion, and it took us about fifteen minutes to figure out how to split the tiles and tokens up and configure the board. In reality, it was a simple process, but a border-less chart in the rules led to confusion about how many types of tokens there were, and if they needed to be in the standard game or not. It was a silly bit of confusion, and one that could have been easily remedied by some thoughtful editing. What’s particularly sad about the rules was that the boxed set gave me was the second edition. According to Funagain Games, my version is now out of print; hopefully the next version will have an even more refined set of instructions. I may go over the rules one more time and write a quick summary of them later.

The tiles are nicely illustrated and give shout-outs to various Sci-Fi books and movies. For example, one of the rooms has a facehugger from Alien in it. Unfortunately, the tiles are a bit too small and flimsy. This is a double whammy when you have multiple players on the tile with 3 equipment tokens face down. The tiles get crowded quickly, and it’s hard to pick up the equipment tiles without disturbing the board or any tokens. I guess I’m a little obsessive when it comes to having the board properly aligned or markers knocked over, but if you’re not bothered by a disheveled playing area this probably isn’t a big deal.

As pointed out at the end of the game, things would have gone a lot more smoothly if we played with someone who had played the game before. The annoyances of the instructions would have been smoothed over, and we could have spent more time playing than wondering if we were following the rules. It turns out we ignored the one part of the rules we did understand: that you could only carry one piece of equipment at a time. Discovering halfway through the game that we’d made a mistake led to some more frustrations that probably would have been avoided if we had an experienced player there to check up on us.

Did I like the game? Yes. Would I recommend it to anyone else? I’m not sure. I don’t know if my displeasure with the game is based on mechanics or the problems with the rules. I’d like to play a few more games, but I’d rather play with our original crew again, as to not repeat the first-timer instructions debacle too soon.

Pigs. In. SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

• Great premise. The twist of trying to keep other players away while keeping one person close enough to help you pilot the shuttle is genius.
• Great graphics and ingenious weaponry. I really got a kick out of the teddy bear weapon.
• Randomly-generated playing areas are great. I really enjoy them in other games like Settlers of Catan and the aforementioned Zombies!!!

I can’t let you do that, Dave

• Awfully written rules. More editing and less discussion about choosing accents for each player, please.
• The tiles could be made out of a thicker cardstock.
• I’d like to see the tiles a bit larger, or the tokens a bit smaller.
• Not enough tiles; the space station felt very small and the game may go by too quickly once we understand the rules better.

Sucking Vacuum, I launch you into space aboard:

Three and a half out of five STFU mugs!

I found the 10th anniversary edition of Settlers of Catan on funagaingames.com after directing Panda to buy the regular edition there. The game has an estimated MSRP of FOUR HUNDRED DOLLAH but does appear to have nifty contents. The 3D terrain seems neat, even though the screen shots on FunAgain aren’t super clear. I’d like to see the whole board assembled, and not just the individual hexes. I wonder how one properly randomizes the hexes now that they can’t be easily shuffled.