Dead Games - Pt. 2: Star Trek

[By Jeremiah]

So, this is kind of an odd game for me to be playing. I'm really not that big of a Star Trek fan, in fact, I'm a borderline hater. But a few of my gaming buddies wanted to get into the game, so I said, "Yeah, I'll go along with that." And when I say my friends wanted to get into the game, I mean, like a year ago nearly 15 years after the first series was printed, and several years after the last expansion of the Second Edition went to press. In my honest opinion, the best time to get into a CCG is well after the corpse is cold. 99% of dead games will have the bottom drop out on their value and you can buy boxes of starters and boosters for pennies on the dollar!

Stick with the First Edition - We play the first edition base set, along with the first expansion, mostly because it's super cheap to get into, (Alternate Universe - Booster boxes are like $10, If you look around on the internet.) but let me tell you, this game has problems. Decipher seems to have rushed it to market really fast. The biggest glaring problem to me is that there is no cost to play your cards. If you have a hand filled with heavy hitting crew members, ships, and equipment, you can lay 'em all down in one turn! Yep, just slap 'em down and start running missions! The gameplay is decent, but I have to be honest, I think we've done a fair job of butchering the rules.

Gameplay - So the game play looks something like this - During setup players take turns placing missions into the "space line" or "star line" basically in a big line across the table (you'll need a decent-sized table), then players take turns loading up these missions with "Dilemma" cards or "Artifact" cards. Dilemmas are just that, a dilemma your away team must face and resolve before completing the mission (mostly just by sitting around and talking about it - ok, that's not entirely true, just my dig on Star Trek); if you combo these up well, you can really throw a wrench in your opponents' works. Artifacts are items you find when you complete a mission, and they usually are helpful trinkets to add to your inventory.

It's Your Turn - On a turn players can play every stinking card in their hand if they want to, put them on a ship and then move the ship a certain distance along the space line thingy. Each mission card on the line has a distance value which determines your movement. If you choose to do a mission you must face and resolve all of the dilemmas, and then complete the mission - the mission usually consists of having a certain amount of abilities in your away team. (Each character card has a list of skills/abilities/attributes possessed by that particular character.) If your away team meets that criteria, you complete the mission and score the points for it. Yay. If not you have to wait until your next turn, wondering why you attempted the mission in the first place.

What Do I Think of it? - It's not the best CCG I've played, but it's not the worst either, as the expansions continued to hit the market Decipher made attempts to ratify the gaping holes in the game by adding card types and rules to the system. I don't think they ever got it to where they felt the game should be, so they released the Second Edition which revamped the game entirely.

If you're a big Star Trek the Next Generation fan, first I apologize for the smart remarks, and second it's worth spending $20-$30 and getting 2-3 boxes, keeping it around and seeing what kind of cool/funny/off the wall decks you can build with it. And if you get a "Future Enterprise" in an Alternate Universe box, you can still fetch about $30 on eBay for it and make your money back!

Amazon Has Star Trek CCG Right HERE!

Hoplite To It! [A Review of Battle Line]

[Review by Firestone] If there’s a king of board game design, it would have to be Reiner Knizia. This German genius has designed hundreds of games—including many that are at the top of the Boardgamegeek.com list of highest-rated games. (He’s definitely designed some stinkers, mind you, but his highs make up for his lows.)

What makes him so interesting is that his games are so diverse. His games go from 2-6 players. Some have auctions. Some don’t. Some have tile-laying. Some don’t. Some use cards. Others dice. Others wooden bits. Some are ridiculously simple to play. Some will make your brain hurt. He’s a wonder.

According to Boardgamegeek, I own 45 of his games—and I’ve probably played at least 50 more of his that I don’t even own. One of my favorites is a gem called Battle Line—a 2-player card game that I can’t recommend highly enough.

In it you have 9 small pawns, that you place in a left-to-right line between you and your opponent; these represent battlefields. The goal is to “win” either three fields that are next to each other, or any 5 fields. Here’s how you play the game: you play a card, and you draw a card. That’s it. Super simple, right? But as with so many Knizia games, the simple play reveals hidden depth.

Thematically, you’re a Greek general, and you’re playing down troop cards to win battles. There are 60 cards, numbered one through 10 in six different colors. On your turn you have to play a card down to your side of one of the battlefields. Only three cards can be on each side.

The way you determine who won is that you compare the “formations” on each side. They’re kinda like poker hands. Three cards in a numerical row of the same color (straight flush ) > three of the same number (three of a kind) > three of the same color (flush) > three in a numerical row of any colors (straight) > any combination of three colors and numbers (high cards).

Sometimes you’ll both play three of a kind down, and the tie is broken by who has the highest numbers on their cards.

At the end of your turn you can “claim” a battlefield if you’ve won it (by both having three cards down and your formation beats your opponent’s). You can also claim it if your opponent has at least two cards down, and you play your third one and there’s no way your opponent could win the battle. For instance, if your opponent has two 4’s on his side, if you play your third of three 5s on your side, there’s no way your opponent can beat you, so you can claim victory there.

There’s a great deal of angst, because sometimes you don’t want to play a card down, because you’re still waiting for juuuust the right card in a few places. But you have to, so you’re forced to ditch a card on a battle you just know you won’t win. But that gives your opponent a chance to get closer to winning. It’s so tense and wonderful!

As I said, the winner is the first person to win three battles next to each other, or any five across all nine battlefields.

But WAIT! There are also some cards called Tactics cards, that let you mess with things. At the end of your turn, when you draw a card, you can draw from the regular Troops deck, or draw a Tactics cards. Those allow you to break the rules in some way. There are only 10 of them, but they can be powerful. One is a wild color; one is a wild number; one lets you steal an opponent’s card from an unresolved battle, and one changes the rules for determining winner in one battle so that it’s only the numbers that count.

Some people think the Tactics cards insert too much luck, so they don’t play with them. I’ve played both ways, and I like both ways. Without Tactics cards makes for a more tense and thinky game, while playing with them makes it a little more thematic and “loose.”

If I had one complaint, it would be about the theme. It’s pretty boring, and publisher GMT Games used boring artwork on the cards. They’re functional, they’re just not fun. I must not be the only person who feels that way, because there are LOTS of rethemes for this game on Boardgamegeek, where people have created entirely new images to use for the game.

But other than that purely subjective gripe, this is one of the best 2-player games I’ve ever played—maybe the best. It’s super cheap, so consider giving this one a whirl!

 Thanks for reading!

Infinite City - The City of the Future!

While it's not the most intricate or ingenious game design, Infinite City is a pleasantly surprising, quick-moving, tile-placement game that has players taking the role of rival corporations jockeying for control of a quickly expanding city in a booming economy.

In the box you will find a whole mess of tiles, and a bunch of colored pegs.

Player turn—Turns are pretty simple: Place a tile and put your colored peg on it. Then resolve the game text on your tile. Draw back up to 5 tiles.

The goal is to have as many of your colored pegs adjacent to one another as possible; you score 1 point for each peg in a group of three or larger. There are also tiles that have a numeric value on them or a "silver lining." If you control a tile with a numeric value on it, you also score that number of points, and the player controlling the most tiles with the silver lining scores a point for each of those as well.

The game text on the tiles is where the game becomes interesting; the tile effects let you swap two placed tiles, remove pegs from a previously tile, force the next played tiles to be placed adjacent to the one you just placed, and so forth.

The game ends when a) a player runs out of pegs, or b) all 5 of the "Power Station" tiles are played. Scores are tallied and the player with the most points wins control of the city and its vast resources, fame, wealth, and power!

The game supports 2-6 players, but I've found that 3-4 players is the sweet spot. With 6 players there are a TON of tiles being placed, shifted, removed, and thrown across the room before you place your next tile. It doesn't totally ruin the game; it just makes it a little more tedious than a game of this type should be.

The abilities of the tiles are pretty well balanced, and even with 6 players in the game, we've found that no one is really ever out of the game at any time. One player even commented that he was about to take on the king maker role after having a few of his tiles moved on him; instead he had a few well played tiles and ended up turning the game around for himself and pulling out the win. I enjoyed that about the game; there's nothing worse than playing a game for an hour when you know full well who is going to pull out the win, and everyone is just along for the ride.

The artwork is great—everything is done in an Art Deco/City Of the Future style and they all look really slick; they remind of those great Superman cartoons from the early 1940's.

This is definitely a game worth picking up and working into your rotation; it's not a reinvention of the wheel, but it's a pretty enjoyable iteration of it.

Infiltration: Take the Money and Run

Donald X. Vaccarino is the creator a little game called Dominion. It’s ridiculously popular—it’s like he invented a way to just legally print money.

His latest design is Infiltration—a fast filler for 2-6 players that has you in the position of breaking into a corporation to steal as much as you can before the guards catch you.

You lay out the cards for the “first level” in a stairstep up to the right, and then a “second level” to the building back up the left. On each turn, players choose a card from their hands, and then simultaneously reveal them. It might allow a player to move to the next room. Or take some of the loot in a room. And some rooms have locks or scientists in them, and you can play cards to interact with them. There are also some special cards that give you something extra and cool and unique to do.

Here we run into the first problem: turn order can be hard to overcome. Turn order changes every turn, but if you’re at the end of the pack, you’ll find yourself scrambling to get to good rooms and get some of the loot.

In the game I played, one player played a card that let her move into a room and interact with it—normally you can only do one or the other. Unfortunately, interacting with the room forced her to end her run, so she was out of the game.

There’s a built-in timer to the game. A threat number increases as the game goes on, and when it reaches a certain level, the guards catch anyone still in the building. So you have to figure out how much loot to grab before you high-tail it out. The weird thing is, there’s no trap door on the second-level set of cards. So while there’s cool stuff the further in you go, it’s almost impossible to get that stuff and still get out.

This also led to another problem with the game. One player was in the kingmaker role: he ends it early and hands Player X a victory, or lets it go one more round and it's between Player X and me. He can't do ANYTHING to better his position. He ended it—still not sure why

So only two people in our game escaped—one who used a special card to escape, and the other was the woman from way earlier in the game. If the player who used the special card hadn’t been able to get out, the woman would have won…with zero points. That’s ridiculous to me.

The theme of the game is stealing. I think the game justifies it because you’re stealing from a corporation, and CORPORATIONS ARE ALWAYS EVIL, AND ENJOY BOILING PUPPIES ALIVE IN THE TEARS OF KITTENS. I’m no apologist for corporations, but come on… So be aware you’re stealing. I’m not against playing the game because you’re stealing; I’m against playing it because it’s a bad game.

I think ultimately this game suffers from Stephen King Syndrome: Donald X has had enough wild success that people aren’t willing to push back against some of the bad ideas here. If you don’t mind some swinginess, you might enjoy this. And the theme is pretty cool. And it’s certainly a fast game.

Me, I think I’ll wait for the upcoming Netrunner game to release my inner hacker.

Fluxx—No Capacitors Needed!

Review by Jeremiah In 1997, Andrew J. Looney better known as Andy Looney released Fluxx, through his upstart gaming company "Looney Labs." Since then the game has taken off, generating four different editions of "Original Fluxx" and spawning seven different versions of the game, each with its own unique theme and flavor. Not to mention the available expansions for most versions.

We'll be posting reviews of the versions at a later date, but today we'll just cover the original version, known for being the "ever changing card game".

Yes, the game Fluxx, is in a constant state of Fluxx; if you're like some of my gaming friends, honestly this may not be the game for you. The randomness and unpredictability of this game has claimed many a casualty over the years. At the start of the game there is literally NO WAY for anyone to win. The rules are simple: Draw one card, play one card. Through the course of the game, the cards that are played determine the rules, game-play, and goal of the game.

There are several types of cards that can be played -

New Rules: These add different rules to the game; they can be as simple as how many cards you draw/play. Or in some versions they may dictate the type of accent you must speak with in order to gain the ability to draw more cards or gain some sort of advantage.

Actions: Play these cards and do what the card says. They often let you swap a currently desirable card with another player, or snatch that "Rules Reset" card from the discard pile so you can get rid of the large pile of new rules that takes an engineering degree to keep track of.

Keepers: Simply a card is played in front of you that remains in play until something happens to rip it from your clutches. These are often the cards that Goals cards will refer to as an objective for winning the game. By having the right pair of Keepers at the right time you can claim victory, or not. Keepers are typically a card that represents an object: Money, the Sun, Brain, Cookies, Time, Rocket, etc.

Goals: Finally, we know how to win the game! Goals generally require players to have a certain pair of Keepers in front of them in order to win.

Yes, you can win this game by having Milk and Cookies.

Creepers: Creepers are a newer concept to the Fluxx franchise; these are literally cards that creep right out of the draw deck and into your play area. They keep you from winning the game (unless, of course, the current goal, or a New Rule states otherwise), and are a general nuisance. There are only a total of  four of them in Original Fluxx: War, Death, Taxes, and the ever present and dangerous Radioactive Potato!

Most gamers love and/or hate the fact that you constantly have to rethink and adjust your strategy during the game. You could literally be holding the card that would guarantee your victory, and by the time your turn comes around the goal has changed 3 times and someone has stolen that card from you anyway. It is also quite possible that the rules will dictate that you play a card that instantly claims victory...for another player! It happens—deal with it!

This is a great family/youth/group game that supports up to 6 players, and is generally a quick play (I've played games that last as little as 3 minutes or have gone up to 35 minutes). It sells for under $20, and because of the random aspect it has a pretty high ceiling in terms of re-playability.

In case you haven't picked up on this, Fluxx isn't a game for everyone. If you feel the need to plot your strategy out 3-4 turns ahead, you will probably get a little flustered with the game, but for some quick-moving, light-hearted, think-on-your-feet, silly fun, it can't be beat.

Step Right UP! - A Carnival Review

It's the fun of shoddy carnival rides without the danger of death or dismemberment! Carnival is a card game that is controlled by dice—which seems odd given this is published by Dice Hate Me Games... It pits players against each other as Carnies trying to build their carnivals before the other players finish theirs. Each player has 5 different attractions placed in front of them, which require 4 different elements to complete construction: Banners, Lights, Seats, and Materials. By completing 4 of the 5 attractions (Bumper Cars, Ferris Wheel, Roller Coaster, Carousel, and Flying Swings) you win!

Turn Sequence - At the beginning of your turn you roll 3d6 (that's gamer speak for three six-sided dice) and choose to use two of them; these dice are placed on a tableau and they give you a corresponding action that you can use at any time during your turn (steal a card from another player's midway, swap a card with another player, swap a midway card, etc.). Players can play any number of cards from their hand into their midway and complete their dice actions, and that is pretty much the turn.

There is a handy little twist though: Each player is given three Admit One tickets at the beginning of the game; they can play these tickets at any time and cancel a dice action that has just been declared. So you can tell your friend to get his grubby little paws off of your Ferris wheel lights! This also results in your opponent losing that action.

The cards, with the exception of wild cards, are all one of the elements needed to build your attractions. That is to say, there are no special ability cards in the game—that's what the dice are for. It works well. It keeps your hand balanced and not full of special cards that do you no good if you have nothing built—or even started—in your midway.

The Bottom Line - The game has a bit of an identity crisis in that it doesn't feel like it should be more than a filler game, but it took us a little too long to play than a filler (I'm guessing subsequent plays will speed things up, though). It's designed for 2-4 players and there are a few variants, such as playing with 4 players in a team-on-team scenario, instead of every man (or woman) for himself. I found it highly competitive as a 4-player game, and things got pretty cutthroat pretty quickly! (Yes, I'm saying that as a positive!) The game includes an expansion pack called "The Sideshow," which we haven't yet busted out, but when we do I'll post a quick review on it!

Free Stuff - Dice Hate Me Games included another little freebie in the game: a single card with the rules for a game they call "Lucky Dice." It's a completely random, up-to-the-roll-of-the-dice type game. Once you've "solved" it, you will go crazy because you never roll what you need to score the most possible points. They did, however, create a free iOS version that you can download right here! Give it a test drive and let us know what ya think!

All in all, you're not going to invest a ton of cash into the game, and if you're playing with the right folks it can get pretty competitive, so it's definitely worth a spin!

Have you played with the Sideshow expansion? What did you think?

Thanks for reading!

Panic! At the Castle

“Don’t panic.” It’s a phrase made famous by British science fiction writer Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Fellow writer Arthur C. Clarke said that advice is perhaps the best that could be given to humanity.

Apparently Douglas Adams never had a Troll ready to take out the last piece of his castle, because that’s a perfect time to panic!

Castle Panic is a cooperative game for 1-6 players. Your castle is being attacked from all sides by hordes of evil monsters. If they destroy all of the pieces of your castle, you lose; if you defeat all the monsters, you win.

Components

• 1 Gameboard—The board consists of a big circle that has a castle in the center and a forest all around, divided into six pie-shaped sections. One-third of the sections are blue, one-third green, and one-third red. And the whole “pie” is divided again into concentric circles with names such as Archer, Knight, and Swordsman. We’ll get into what that means later.
• 1 Rulebook—It’s full-color and well organized. It helps that at its core the game is fairly simple.
• 49 Castle Cards—The cards aren’t the best quality; you might want to sleeve them to prolong their life.
• 49 Monster Tokens—Simple, sturdy, and functional.
• 6 Walls
• 6 Towers
• 1 Tar Token
• 2 Fortify Tokens
• 6 Order of Play Cards
• 12 Plastic Stands—Unlike some games, these stands are pretty tight; we’ve had no problems with them not holding the pieces.
• 1 6-Sided Die

 Gameplay

The board starts with a six monsters—one in the Archer ring of each of the six sections. Depending on the monster, they have 1-3 hit points (HPs). They always start at full strength, and if a monster takes a hit, you simply rotate it so the next lowest HP is facing toward the center. If it’s on its last HP, it’s dead! Yay! In the center of the board you build your castle—which means you put one Castle piece in each of the six pie sections. Just outside of that you place a Wall piece in front of each castle piece.

A turn consists of:

1. Drawing up to your hand limit (this limit varies depending on the number of players).
2. Discarding one card and drawing another to replace it (optional).
3. Trading one card with one other player (also optional).
4. Playing cards to kick some monster butt (hopefully).
5. Moving all monsters on the board. (Each monster moves one concentric circle closer to the castle.)
6. Drawing two more monster tokens. (This is where you draw a monster. Cry. Roll the die, and put the monster in the Forest circle of the numbered section that matches what you rolled. Cry again. Repeat.)

The card deck includes cards such as Green Knight, or Blue Swordsman. So if you play that card, you can hit one monster for one point if it’s in the Swordsman circle of the board. This is where trading becomes important, because your Red Archer card might not be useful to you on this turn, but when the monsters move at the end of your turn it’ll be really useful to the player on your left during her turn. So you can trade a card she’ll need next turn for a card you need this turn. You always have to look ahead in this game.

Most of the tiles in the Monster Pool are actual monsters, but there are a few other tiles, such as one where all monsters in a certain-colored section move forward one space (and since they’ve just done that already, this can really mess things up). Or one that reads, “All Monsters Move Clockwise,” which will totally screw up your best-laid plans, since that might cause a monster to be in a different-colored section now. Aaargh! Or one that tells you to draw three or four MORE monsters! Or a boulder that will roll through a section, helpfully killing monsters in its path—and unhelpfully destroying Walls and Castles, too.

There are other types of cards to help you in the fight. For instance, Hero cards in each of the colors that let you hit a monster at any level in that particular color. Or one that lets you put a Tar token on a monster to keep it from moving forward for one turn. Or one that lets you look through the discard pile and find the card you really need right now.

So what happens if a monster is on the innermost circle and it’s time to move him? More crying, that’s what! If there’s a wall there, the monster destroys the wall, stops moving, and takes one point of damage. (Yes, that might kill it.) If there’s no Wall there, it instead destroys a Castle section, stops moving, and takes one point of damage. If a monster is already in the very center section—where the castle is…er, was—and it’s time to move, it moves clockwise and destroys the next castle section, stops, and takes damage. This is bad because, while you can play one Brick and one Mortar card together to rebuild a Wall, you can never rebuild Castle pieces.

And there you have it. Each player runs through the above Turn Order until either all of the pieces of your Castle are destroyed, or all of the monsters on the board and in the Monster Pool are dead. The game suggests keeping track of which monsters each player defeats, and then declaring the person who clobbered the most monsters the Master Slayer and ultimate winner—assuming you win, of course. We always ignore that rule, though, and just all win or all lose.

Verdict

As cooperative games go, this one’s on the lighter end, strategically—the choices are a little more obvious than other co-op games. As such, I’ve never broken this out with my game group, but I do play it ALL THE TIME with my wife and kids. My oldest is 7 and he does just fine with it (even though the game suggests it’s for 10 and older). The 4-year-old is the designated monster draw-er and dice roller. I think this would work well with a youth group, too; co-op games are a great way to build camaraderie as you work toward a single goal…

It’s a game about monsters, and killing monsters. The killing is, of course, abstracted (you just remove the tile from the board), but if you’re sensitive to that, you’ll want to pass. There is an expansion out now (expect a review soon!), that features a Wizard’s Tower. So the use of magic is something to consider, too.

My kids adore this game, and it’s made for some super-exciting finishes—once we were down to a single Castle piece left on the board when we were able to pull out a win. If you’re looking for some non-competitive gaming fun, I highly recommend you start panicking as soon as possible. But don’t forget your towel…

Gloom - The Addam's Family of Card Games

Review by Jeremiah.

Gloom, is probably too cheery a name for a game that takes place in a world where "the sky is gray, and the tea is  cold, and a new tragedy lies around every corner." I picked up this game because the gimmicky design hooked me, so I had to give it a try.

Overview - The context of the game is this: Players choose a family to take control of, and the belief of these families is that the more one suffers in this life, the greater the reward is in the sweet by and by. So players take turns playing cards on their characters that will cause them to suffer, thus giving them negative Pathos Points, and then ultimately play a card triggering their untimely death. Meanwhile opponents attempt to play modifying cards on each other that will cheer them up!

End Game - The game is over when a player has successfully made all 5 of their family members as miserable as possible, and then killed them off. The player whose family has the lowest total self worth, wins. I guess. It's kind of like miniature golf in that regard, everyone is miserable and the lowest score wins.

You Said Something About a Gimmick? - Yes, yes I did. The game is printed on plastic, see-through cards. So instead of stacking up modifiers underneath or next to a character, you actually place modifying cards on top of the character card. These modifying cards have 3 different locations in which they can add or subtract from your Pathos Points; playing certain cards may cover up points or add to them depending on the location. It's very cool looking. However we found it very hard to read the cards on a darker table top, so we used blank sheets of printer paper as a play mat for each player, and the cards popped right off the table! There are also "Story Icons" on some cards, which add some card synergy to the game; having matching icons will again add or subtract Pathos Points and again these can be covered by other icons or just blanked out completely.

Well... Did You Like It? - Yes. And, no. The game designer, Keith Baker, really put out a solid effort on this one. The game plays pretty well, the mechanics don't feel gimmicky even though they could easily let the clear cards be the selling point. It's strategic and competitive, but beyond that the flavor text included in the rules goes great distances to ensure that the game is more than just laying small rectangular pieces of see-through plastic on the table. There is a somewhat lengthy description of the "world of Gloom," as well as the families players can take control of. And further still players are encouraged to story-tell during game play. So instead of simply playing a card and saying, "Okay, so that's minus 15," you're encouraged to play your card and explain that your character "Was out late one night and made a poor decision to order the Pu-Pu platter at the Chinese Restaurant and therefore was - Distressed by Dysentery - giving him negative 15 points!" This is great. And can be fun and entertaining with the right players in the game! The aspect of this that doesn't ring true with me is that there are cards that become a little too gloomy for my taste: Chastised by the Church, Pestered by Poltergeists, Hunted by Horrors, etc. The game is intended to be cartoony and humorous in a dark way, but in some ways, for me, it gets a little too dark at times. Of course, I don't know what else one would expect when a game's goal is to maim and kill your own characters.

The End -  Since its release Atlas has added 3 expansions, each of which adds a family, and therefore the ability to add players to the game. The game plays well, but raises many flags for me on the content side of things; tread carefully with this one, or check it out at your local game shop before picking it up!

Am I way off on this? I'd love to hear your opinions and experiences with Gloom, leave them in the comments below! And as always, thanks for reading!

Gloom is on Amazon if you dare!

Uuurrrnnggg... Dead Games, the fad of the 90's

1993 changed gaming as we know it, at least for a decade or so. Wizards of the Coast released the first "Alpha" series of Magic the Gathering, the first collectible card game. Heretofore card games on the market pretty much consisted of games played with a pinochle, or poker deck, or if you were really progressive you were playing Milles Bornes and Uno.

Magic the Gathering (MTG) introduced an entirely new gaming experience, and subsequently an whole new wooorrlld, of games that followed suit. The concept was quite ingenious, instead of having an out of the box game playing experience players could now customize their own deck of cards, and pit them against other players, and in the meantime chase down highly sought after cards that would make your opponent tremble in fear when it was thrown on the table. It caught on, and BIG, MTG is still thriving and new sets are being released regularly, with just about every gaming store in existence holding monthly if not weekly tournaments.

Because of the wild success of MTG, the entire gaming universe jumped on the collectible card game (CCG) band wagon, new gaming publishers sprouted up, and nearly EVERYTHING was turned into some form of a CCG.

What I'm about to say might be the most shocking thing you've ever heard. I have never played Magic the Gathering. I know, I should hand in my Geek Card. But I never got past the eerie and hostile nature of the majority of the cards (particularly the Black and Red cards).

I did however play my fair share of CCGs that showed up on the scene, all of which are now commonly referred to as "Dead Games." There are many I still dust off and enjoy playing from time to time, and others that, while I don't play them anymore, still hold a special place in my heart. Over the next several weeks, Firestone and I will be revisiting these games. Join us as we take this trip down memory lane and look at the games that time forgot, we'll look at the good, the bad, and those that shall not be named.

What's it to Ya?

No really... "What's it to ya?" Today we're looking at "What's it to Ya?" a nifty little party game about "What matters most." Shortly after the blog went live we were contacted by Mike Petty, who designed the game not only to entertain but to get families, students, and folks in ministry talking about priorities and, well...what matters most. He sent a few copies our way, and so today we're taking a look at the two distinct sides of this coin.

The Game - The game-play is simple; it truly is a party game. But because of the

simplicity, Petty was able to include 3 different variants of the rules, Individual play, Partnership play, and "What's it to..." Any way you play it, the idea is the same. Players will be ranking 5 item cards from highest to lowest in importance to them.

The Items - Think of these like Apples to Apples green cards. Only not so much in the specific or proper nouns that they deal with, but more generalized concepts. Anything from anti-drug laws, to prayer, to clothes, to leadership or numbers.

Ranking Cards - each player (or partnership depending on your preferred method of play) will be given a set of 5 ranking cards. These simply have a rank of A-E on them. One set will be used on the table.

Game-Play - We'll start with the partnership game, this is the version that seems to get off the ground quicker and creates some fun and insightful and "I can't believe you think that!" moments at the table.

So here's how it works, you'll set up by handing out ranking cards to the teams, and then put one set of ranking cards in the middle of the table. Then you deal 5 items from the deck, placing each of  them next to 1 of the 5 ranking cards.

While writing this I just drew 5 random cards, so the table would look like this:

A - Realistic Expectation B - Family C - Electricity D - Pleasure E - News

Now, the teams decide who will guess and who will be "The Boss" first. (And yes, you will probably hear "like a boss..." more than once because of this) the boss takes the ranking cards and places them in order of importance SECRETLY,  in their own personal ranking from left to right. You then take turns having the team's "guesser" try to guess the order, starting with most important. The team with the most matches scores a point for that round. If there's a tie, each team gets a point. And if you go 5 for 5 you score 2. Players switch roles and you do another round. You can play as many or as few rounds as you want, they suggest a game to 7 points though.

By nature of elimination you'll find that to score 5 of 5 is really only to score 4 of 5, because once you've scored the 4th there is only one answer left. It's still a difficult feat, but it's not a true 5 for 5...

The Individual Game - This variant operates the same way, but the scoring is different, instead of players guessing to match their partner, they instead individually rank the items, and score by having the most popular answer.  In my above example that means if there are 5 players and 3 say Electricity is the most important then they score that card for the round - and a healthy amount of quizzical looks from around the table - again having the most matching popular answers scores you a point for the round, and a 5 for 5 scores 2.

The What's it to...? Game - This version is more of a just-for-fun version with no real scoring. In this version you put someone in the "hot seat" as it were, and they are given a set of ranking cards. Each other player is trying to guess the order of the items as ranked by the person in the hot seat. Players take turns being in the hot seat and are asked to be honest about their ranking, not just to try and throw everyone off!

The Teachable Moments - As I said above, there's more to this than just the game-play, and that's the heart of what this game is about. Is it fun? YES! The group of students I played this with had a blast, and asked to borrow it from me! We had many laughs, and a few cringing moments when someone guessed wrong. But the conversations that can come out of the game are numerous; after a few rounds I had the students make their guess for their partner and also tell why they were picking that item in that rank." I could also easily see using the game with pre-determined items, and revolving a series of Sunday school lessons around those items and the priorities we place on them.

The Bottom Line - For a party game "What's it to Ya?" is exactly what I look for in party games: super light in terms of game play and mechanisms. With little to no housekeeping. It supplies good entertainment and lots of laughs, whether you want to laugh or take the conversation deeper it sets the table for both! If you're a parent, a small group leader, or a person in ministry I recommend grabbing a copy and starting some conversations with the people you love.

You can pick up a copy of "What's it to Ya?" Super cheap RIGHT HERE!