Thank you all for your understanding during this time of transition.

Happy Gaming,

Victoria (The_Null_Entry)
-Co-Owner of Game Paradise

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Party games. What makes them enjoyable? What makes them flops? This is a style of game that seems to be more art and less science, as the formula for success is a wibbly wobbly kind of thing. However, one ingredient that seems to always be present with such a success is laughter. “Who’s Got Game” certainly had rounds of laughter, but not every one was a gut buster. This intermittent view of the game, is one that permeated most aspects of our opinions.

“Who’s Got Game” was created by Neil Strauss. With a lot of gamers, that name might not ring a bell, but he is the author of several popular books about dating. I asked my players, before we got going, if they were familiar with the designer and all of them gave me vacant stares.  It wasn’t until I started listing his books that there was a hint of recognition. However, even then, it was only a hint. This gives me the impression that with most hobby gamers, Mr. Strauss might be fighting an up hill battle.

Given that this game was created by a man who writes books on how to pick up women, you can probably extrapulate the nature of the game… or can you? We expected a dating game full of provacative questions and tantalizing answers. What we got instead was a “Get to know your neighbor” sort of game.

In this game you pick a partner. Each player is playing for their own points, but many of the games mechanics refer to your partner. This is really equivalent of saying “the player on your left”, but I guess they decided partner was an easier way to phrase it. Although, while easier, this also caused a small amount of confusion as the players had the misconception that if their partner did well that they would always do well too. This is not the case in this game. Your partner is often there to simply fulfill small tasks, such as read questions.

Once your partner is chosen, it’s time to start playing. On your turn you draw a card out of the box. This deck of cards is actually several different kinds of cards all mixed together in one box. These cards have players doing a variety of tasks: handwriting analysis, answer matching, answer recognition, acting, etc. Now that you have your card in hand, read the instructions to the group and follow what it says.

While not all of these tasks were funny, we did have some funny moments. For example one the cards told the players that the “Leader” (person who’s turn it is) had to guess who wrote down each answer to the following question:

If you were to meet God, and could ask him only one question, what would that question be?

… The group of us playing that night were all pretty well read geeks, and proud of it to boot. So when we all passed in our answers, there was a lot of giggling. None of us knew what the others were writing, but it didn’t matter, because great minds think a like.

So the leader was stuck trying to guess who would ask God…
1.) What is the f-ing question!?
2.) What is the question to the answer is 42?
3.) If the answer is 42, what is the question?

… and now, if you have read the Hitchhiker’s Guid to the Galaxy, you are likely snorting with laughter right now too. It was so unexpected and so absurd, you simply could not help but laugh.

Another moment of laughter came with a challenge card that required your partner to put makeup somewhere on your face. If you left it there the whole game you received ten points at the end of the game. This left one of the boys to put makeup on his female partner, and since the card only said “on their face” and did not specify exactly where and how, some lewd things were drawn on her face using some teal eye shadow. It was special, to say the least, and we all got a good giggle.

So at this point you might be wondering, how do you win? Each time you play a card their are points associated with a given action, such as correctly answering a card or getting someone to guess an answer. The game goes for 12 rounds, each round being the length of one card. At the end of those rounds, points are tallied and the person with the most points win. We found that the game has really good pacing. It was long enough that we felt satisfied in our experience, but not so long as to want to revolt. I think the designer did a good job at picking what originally sounded like a very arbitrary number.

A group enjoying an evening of "Who's Got Game"

But given this bit of brilliance in design, there were some other choices that were made that were less than impressive, specifically, in regards to components. Firstly, this game comes in a rather large box. When packing the game away, all of the components fit in less than half of the box, and that leaves things to roll around, and the game takes up a lot of room on the shelf. Secondly, the game comes with wooden pencils and paper pads. In one game we went through half of the paper pads that came with the game, which was a fair amount of paper. Dry erase boards, or some other variety of reusable boards, would have made for a much better option. Also the score pad was made of a slick paper, and the pencil really was nearly impossible to use on it. However, even with those negatives there are good things to say here too: the cards are full color and of a good quality stock, and the box is very heavy duty.

Leave it to an author to write good rules as well. This game came with a full rules sheet as well as a quick start guide. The quick start was all we needed for the vast majority of the game, and the cards described the rest. The one thing that I must dock the quick start rules for is that it never mentions to read the back side of the card prior to flipping it over, which does make an effect in the game and was easily overlooked. A simple mention to that would have saved us some grief on our first game.

So, overall, how did we feel about this game? Meh. It was ok. The game had some funny moments that we appreciated, but we weren’t rolling with laughter like we are with some of our other favorite party games. The mixture of actions in the game was nice, but we saw a few very similar cards and that sucks away some of the fun of it, especially when they were back to back. The overall theme of the game was ok, but it didn’t make a strong impression either way, and it certainly didn’t fit the preconcieved notions that the cover art and the author’s reputation conveyed. However, it wasn’t a bad game, and it was an amusing way to pass the time and get to know some of my players a little better.

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The first step was to find a suitable game.  I went to my library and started scanning the shelves.  However, with the exception of a few games that I have to review, their just really wasn’t a whole lot of games I hadn’t played or at least didn’t know how to play.  Sure, there were some “roll and move” style games I hadn’t bothered to try, but given they were mostly clones it’s not like I didn’t know how they were played.  That seemed against the spirit of the rules.  So what to do?

And then I was reminded that I have some foreign games that I’ve never been able to translate!  You see, a while back we bought a few lots of games off of E-bay.  While we knew that some of the games were not in English, we were assured that they all had English instructions and were non-language dependent.  In short, the seller fibbed and we were left with about a dozen games out of the lot that were unusable (and yes, this was after searching the Internet for translated rules).

Ok, so a foreign game, but which one?  I had about half a dozen to choose from.  I started opening the boxes and looking at the components.  One of them only had numbered cards, that looked a lot like an Uno deck, certainly not much to extrapolate from.  One game had cards that were covered in German text, and no symbols.  Another one simply had a bag of Jenga like blocks and a rules sheet.  And then I hit upon one that would do:  Gebrauchtwagen Handler.  This game has colorful cards with symbols and dollar amounts and paper money.  These were components that we could work with!

So we sat down together to extrapolate the rules.  One gal in my group could read a very small amount of German, and given that German is a romance language we could pick out prefixes here and there.  But we only used this insight on the cards themselves, the rules stayed firmly tucked away.

We went round and round with possible mechanic ideas.  What we ultimately decided on was a bidding game where you are trying to build the most expensive fleet of cars.  Each round you started the bidding on a face down car, not knowing how much it is worth.  You could pay 100 Euro to take it to the mechanic and see (aka, peak at the card) what the vehicle was worth.  Otherwise you were bidding blind and hope you made a sound investment.

In addition to bidding on the fleet you also had a hand full of cards that were either improvements to your vehicle or damage to someone else’s.  For instance you could buy your car new tires, which might add a 500 Euro to it’s worth, or you could play a flat tire card on someone else that might lower that car’s worth by 500 Euro.

So how did our mechanics work out?  Meh, I’ve certainly played better, but I’ve played worse as well.  Our end game goal (when all the cars were purchased) was far too long, and we went through the other improvement/damage cards way too fast.  Our rules were vaguely interesting, but would need a lot of polish to be a real game.  However, that being said, it was a very interesting experience and it was neat to see what we came up with.

The next weeks challenge might be difficult for some: Play an old Avalon Hill game.   This company made a bunch of games that are commonly referred to as “bookshelf games”, and a search on E-bay for that term will yield you a bunch of options.  We have several, it’s just a matter of deciding which one is right for us this week.

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As geek culture emerged as more and more of a cultural phenomenon, the influences began to seep into the music.  This is a song from a few years ago (2009) that was released by the cast of “The Guild”, a web-isode about online gaming such as World of Warcraft.  This song discusses, in a humorous and catchy way, the idea that online avatars (digital representations of a person) are often more attractive than their flesh and blood counterpart.

In October of 2010 a new song emerged on YouTube: Roll the Dice by The Sinister Six. This song not only held strong board game and role playing themes, but also threw down the gauntlet, declaring that board game players were superior gamers to those who relied on consoles and computers to “get their game on”.

By 2011 the emergence of table top themed music was no longer in its infancy. This song was released on YouTube in May of 2011 and features the cast of the movie “Gamers: Dorkness Rising”. This song explores some generic “Dungeons and Dragons” gaming themes, as well as lively fun pokes at gamer habits.

Popular music was also not safe from the gamer geek invasion. The popular song “Like a G6″ by the Far East Movement was quickly adopted and twisted into a parody of itself and was reborn as “Roll a D6″.

Another song released in August of 2011 is a little bit more personal. Rather than being a song about table top gaming in general, this song is immortalizes a single evening of gaming by regaling us with a hillarious tale of repeatedly killing a player.

And now we are seeing a new evolution in geeky gamer music: LARPing. LARP is a acronym for “Live Action Role Playing” and is generally treated like the red headed step child of the gaming community. This song however, embraces the hobby proudly.

These are only a handful of the gamer songs available. There are dozens, if not hundreds of others that we could have chosen from. Is there a particular song that we missed that you would like to share with the rest of the gamer world? Please post it in our comments, so that the gamer geek music can keep flowing!

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Ever since I was a little girl, it was very common to see the National Enquirer running stories about spotting the Loch Ness monster, a giant sea creature living in a loch in the Scottish Highlands.  It’s a popular myth, much like Big Foot, and there are hundreds of blurry images of what are supposedly the beast released every year.  This game, monopolizes on this popular myth to create a great game of luck and deduction that has you chasing the beast around the lake in an effort to get the beast picture of it when it emerges.

Each round of the game is comprised of three phases.  The first phase players choose how far they will personally make Nessie move.  The second phase players choose what special ability they would like that turn.  And the final phase players move their cameras to different locations on the island and find out who took pictures that round.

In the background is Nessie. In the foreground is the representation of your reporter, choosing their special ability.

Choosing how far Nessie moves is a task that is split among three players.  This way, no one player knows how far Nessie will move, but can make some educated guesses based upon how far they have made the creature move.  Each player has a hand of cards number 1 through 5 .  These numbers dictate the number of spaces Nessie will rotate.  Each player secretly chooses one of these cards on their turn and places it face down in front of themselves, thus locking in their movement.

Once all the cards are placed face down, the players take turns deciding what special ability they would like.  Each player can take one ability, but no ability may be shared by two players.  The abilities range from getting to peak at one persons card, to being able to move Nessie one spot further on the track, and even using photoshop to doctor up your photos that turn.  We seemed to favor certain abilities over others in each of our’s unique play style, but each seemed to have it’s purpose.

Next, players move their cameras.  Each player is given three cameras, and must move at least one of them each round.  We often found ourselves moving two, or even all three if our abilities allowed us, in order to get the best placement for where we thought the creature would pop up.  Moving cameras are done in order, and spaces are limited.  So you might be bumped slightly to the left or right of the position you want, if you are slow to pick that spot.

A look at a game in progress.

Lastly, players turn over their cards and move Nessie.  All those who are on the same small island around the lake, receives points.  Everyone directly in front of where Nessie emerged gets an even niftier prize:  Points, and a picture of Nessie.  This picture might include his head, tail, or torso.  By making sets of complete pictures you rack up big bonus points at the end of the game.

We played this game a few times, the traditional way, as well as with variants that changed the game a little bit and made deciding where Nessie might be a whole lot tricker.  Each time we found ourselves pleasantly surprised by the games complexities and the ability to be rather tricky and deceitful.  We were also impressed with the relatively short play time which allowed us to have multiple games back to back without it requiring a weekend commitment.

Overall we had a really good time with this game, and if you like games with luck, deductive reasoning, and bluffing, I think you will too.  This game has a whimsical theme, interesting mechanics, a reasonable playtime, and an attractive looking board and pieces.  Overall this game gets a nice big thumbs up.

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We loved the game Nile Deluxor, and to this day it still gets pulled out and played on a pretty regular basis!  It’s a fast paced game where players must manage their crops, and their hands, in an effort to harvest the best distribution of goods.  And thanks to Minion Games, we have one free copy of this game to give away!  Here is how to enter:

1.) Find our post on Facebook and like it to receive (1) entry, or comment on it to receive (2) entries, or do both to receive a total of (3) entries!
2.) Tweet about why you want to win this game!  Make sure you include @GameParadise  in your tweet.  For each tweet you send during our contest you’ll receive (1) entry (maximum of one tweet per day).

Winners will be drawn on May 12th, 2012.

Winners will be contacted for shipping information, failure to respond within 24 hours will result in a new name being drawn.

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Wasabi is a tile laying, resource management, game where you attempt to complete sushi recipes with “style”.  Players get points for completing rolls and the player with the most points when no more sushi pieces can be added to the mat is the winner.  There are also specialty cards that let you move sushi pieces around that have already been placed.

My friends seemed slightly surprised by my choice, but after explaining the logic of my choice, they all agreed to play.  So we settled in for a full four person game.  A couple of my friends hadn’t played before and I had to explain the instructions, but the game is pretty easy, so the rules went quickly and we were off.

I have a pretty clearly defined strategy for this game, start with the little two ingredient recipes so that I can get some action cards early on.  However, this strategy has also bit me in the butt before because I can almost never complete my one big five ingredient recipe.  So this game I mixed it up slightly.  I started with two 2-ingredient recipes and my 5-ingredient recipe.  This seemed to be the best of both worlds, and I was able to complete my big recipe really early on.  Huzzah!  In the end, it looked pretty clearly like I was going to win.  However, one of my friends sneaked up and beat me by one point in the end.  He had six bonus points which I hadn’t considered and which gave me a false sense of victory.  Darn it!

Even though I didn’t win, I still had a lot of fun playing.  It wouldn’t be my favorite game if I only had a good time with it when I won, now would it?

Next weeks challenge is a tough one:  Play a game without reading or knowing the rules.  I’m not sure how I am going to go about this one yet.  Do you have any ideas?  We would love to hear your suggestions.

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“You have to hear the story of this game.  It’s made by a guy who is in the army, over seas, right now.  He made this game while he was over there, and he is launching it on kickstarter!”, those were the words that came from my business partners mouth, and I must admit, my stomach churned.  You see, I grant honest reviews.  Some times they are not favorable, although sometimes they are.  However, everyone loves and supports the troops, and now if I didn’t like this guys game, I felt like I would be branded as an un-American trader.

So with a heavy heart I opened this guys game a week or two later and read through the rules.  My stomach stuck in my throat and I started grasping at straws for things that could be great about this game.  Hidden gems that might be revealed in the game play.  But regardless of what I did, I could not deny that ultimately what I took to the table for my players was a pirate themed version of “Munchkin”.

In this game you play as a pirate who is reaching retirement age.  However he wants to have enough gold doubloons to carry him comfortably into old age, ten gold doubloons to be exact.  To do this you hire on a cast of scallywags to help you on your way and you plunder boats and ports.  If you are successful, you receive gold doubloons.  If you fail, bad stuff happens, which could be the death of crew members or damage to your ship.  To hire crew and face opponents are all done by flipping over the top card of a common deck on your turn.  If this is an opponent (such as a ship) you must face them.  If this is a crew member or goody (such as rum that could help you later) you put it into your hand.

Now if you like Munchkin, maybe this is the game for you.  That is a very popular series by Steve Jackson, and they continue to make new versions of that game for a reason.  However, commonly the thing I hear that people love about Munchkin is that it is funny.  It’s satire.  This game however, is not full of the verbal punchlines that it’s predecessor has.  This game tries to play it straight, much to my chagrin.

Sitting down at the table, my players however were immediately impressed by one thing:  the coins.  This game comes with a slew of “gold doubloons” that you collect during the game.  Instead of trying to get to level 10, you are trying to collect 10 gold doubloons.  These coins are very neat and give the game a very cool feel.  Regardless of everything else I say about the game, the designer can feel really good about these components, because those coins are pretty neat.

So my players were enamored with the components, and I start explaining the rules.  You could see the faces around the table drop as I explain the mechanics.  Everyone can see that this game is Munchkin, to the point that we are using common phrases like “kicking down the door”.  However, this games rules does not have some of the intricacies built into it that we are accustomed to in Munchkin, such as you can’t barter for treasure and help someone around the table.  Because of this inability to gang up, our first few rounds are spent being crushed.  It’s not till nearly twenty minutes into the game that someone begins to get their feet underneath them and climb up through the ranks.

A look at a game in progress. You can see the gold doubloons in the picture, as well as some red tokens that are used as "damage" for your crew members. The center deck in the photo is the common draw pile used for "kicking down the door".

Over an hour passes and we are still playing.  I hadn’t thought the game would take this long, and now my players are getting antsy.  There are a lot of turns in a row where people are pretty stuck and can’t do much, which adds to the frustration.  People start calling for the game to be over.  The mob is forming and they are searching for their pitchforks.   I try to tell them about the creator, maybe they will be moved to some sort of patriotic guilt, much like I was.  But alas, they have already set their minds against the game.

One of the foes you can face. The toughness of the ship is denoted in the top right hand corner of the card. In this case, the attacker must have an attack power of 10 + whatever is rolled on an eight sided die in order to get the plunder.

Eventually the end of the game arrives and we all go our separate ways.  I sit the game aside desperate to try it again, surely there are some gems in it that I can tell other people!  Surely they are not going to send me back to my blog to talk badly about a soldier’s creation!   So it sits, on my shelf, till I can get another game going.  After a few weeks have passed, I attempt to bring up the suggestion of the game again.  One player from last time is in this new group, “Didn’t we already play that?  Don’t you have enough to review it?  It was soooooo long, and it was just like Munchkin”, come the wail of my player.  The group immediately heeds the warning of the repeat player and suggest we play something else.  They are of no help, and I am being tossed back to the wolves.

I feel terrible.  I desperately wanted to like this game.  I really didn’t want to tear down a young solider who is doing his time for our country.  But I’m also an honest reviewer… and I can’t lie… I can’t sugar coat it.  So bring on the hate mail.  Tell me I’m unpatriotic, and “how dare I”.  I’m ready for it.  And for the designer/soldier who made this game, keep it up.  Clearly you have a love for gaming and I think you could do pretty good in the industry when you get home, but copy catting a popular games mechanics is not a great way to break in.   However, the artwork and great components show a real since of spunk.

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Neanderthals, cavemen, early humans.  Regardless of what you want to call them, I was immediately impressed with this designers ability to think outside of the typical theme box.   Power Grid: The First Sparks, is a brand new Friedemann Friese title.  For those who might be a little bit newer to the Euro-game market place, Friedeman Friese is a rock star among board game designers.  He has designed such games as “Mega Star”, “Black Friday”, “Power Grid: Factory Manager”, and of course “Power Grid”.  His games are always thought provoking resources management games that are delicately balanced to keep the games close and cut throat.  He is a favorite in my house.

However, I have begun to see an annoying trend: “Power Grid”, “Power Grid: Factory Manager”, and now “Power Grid: The First Sparks”.  All three games have the “Power Grid” title slapped onto it, but only one of them is truly “Power Grid”.  The other two seemed to be piggy-backing on the first ones good name.  I find this kind of marketing to be irritating to say the least.  I found that at least “The First Sparks” had a decent excuse for doing so.

The German name of the game “Power Grid” is “Funkenschlag” , which apparently translates into “First Sparks” (or at least that is what the forward by the Mr. Friese says.  According to Bable Fish, the word Funkenschlag translates into “Spark Impact”).  This got him thinking about cavemen creating the first sparks with flint stones, and this caveman themed game was born.  Friedemann made the mechanics of this game closely mirror the mechanics in Power Grid, but a little more stream lined for a shorter play time, and released this new game to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the release of it’s predecessor.

That being said, I’m very glad that I am very familiar with how to play Power Grid before I sat down to the rules for First Sparks.  The instructions really were not very good, leaving me to reread sections a couple times before comprehending what the author was trying to get across.  Ultimately, if I hadn’t known how to play Power Grid, and thus couldn’t draw upon parallels, I think I would have been up a creek.  Furthermore, the editor of the rules needs a slap on the wrist because we found multiple typos in the instructions.  Typos happen, but in a published game I expect a little more polish.

Each of the turn phases in First Sparks closely relates to similar phase in Power Grid.  At the start of the turn, players take turns offering up and purchasing tools and knowledge from a present and future market.  This is almost an exact copy of what Friese did in Power Grid with the power plants.  The main difference is that bidding has been eliminated.  Previously a player would offer up a power grid with an opening bid and then bidding would go around the table until a clear winner was determined.  That winner would pay the price and gain the plant.  However, now players offer up a tool or knowledge and beginning with the player in last place and progressing up the ladder, each player is given the opportunity to buy that tool or knowledge for a set price.  No back and forth bidding.  This made this phase go much much faster, and also forced players into a slightly different mindset.

A game in progress. Each tile represents a hunting area for a different type of good.

The second phase in Power Grid was to buy resources.  Tools and Knowledge don’t require resource, and instead this step was swapped out for hunting and gathering.  If you have people next to appropriate hunting areas, and you have a tool that can be used in that area, than you gather a certain number of goods from that area based upon how many items are there.  For example if you have a person next to an area of Bears, and you have a bow that lets you hunt bears, you see how many bears are in the pool of bears and receive a given number of bears accordingly.

The third phase in Power Grid is to expand to new cities, similarly in this spin off you expand your tribe into new hunting territories.  Just like the end game condition of having a given number of cities, the new end game condition is to have 13 tribe members.   While Power Grid deals with fuel and money, everything in First Spark is done with food.  Food is the ultimate currency that pays for expansion, feeding members, and buying new tools and knowledge.

The last phase is the same in both games:  Bureaucracy.  Refill the food just like you would refill the resources, burn off the high card and place it under the Step 3/Shuffle card.  The only thing you don’t do is get money, because all currency is food and you get food when you hunt.   Otherwise this step is an exact duplicate of what you do in Power Grid.

A look at the different types of food and how much each one is worth.

Besides the poorly written instructions the only other downfall I really see is the price, and really that is relative.  The game’s MSRP is $44.95, which in this economy seems high for most families looking for a new game.  Over our Christmas stint at the Washington Square Mall, most families promptly set back on the shelf anything running over $30.  However, you do get a good amount of bang for your buck.  The game is made of quality components: lots of custom cut wooden pieces, nicely illustrated cards, and custom board pieces that are made of a thick cardboard and don’t seem prone to warping.  So really, this downfall is a two edged sword:  you get what you pay for.

So what did I think?  Overall we really liked it.  The game played very similar to Power Grid but played in almost half of the time.  The games took an hour or less, and thus was much more manageable.  While the game was shorter on time, it wasn’t shorter on quality mechanics.  Each game was remarkably close, required slews of strategy, and was very enjoyable.  I also think that the customization of the board and the randomness of the technologies and knowledge give this game enough replay-ability to be enjoyable for many more games to come.  Overall, this is a good buy in my book.

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Since last Sunday night, my small family has had the plague.  Ok, not the plague, but certainly a plague.  The doctor’s note officially called it “Acute Pharyngitis”, but that’s too much of a mouthful.  Basically, we had really bad sore throats, coughs, fatigue, body aches, and general fuzzi-headed-ness.  Aka, plague.  It also seemed to be a highly contagious as not only did I have it, but my husband, and my friend and editor, Shawna, had it too.  Popping in on Facebook earlier this week, it seemed many others in our social groups had it as well.

So long story short, no one wants to get together and game with you when you are sick.  I certainly can’t blame them.  But that means that I have failed my challenge this week.  *sigh*  Did you manage to avoid the plague?  We certainly hope you did!

Next  weeks challenge is pretty simple:  Play your favorite game.  We have over 1000 to choose from in my house, so I’m going to have to mull over this one…

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