No one appreciates a good card game
anymore. Board games are great. RPG campaigns are fabulous and a
great way to gather friends. But card games are just as energetic and
crazy. They can make you laugh just as hard and result in just as many
friends made- and lost- as any good tabletop in the world today…and the geekdom
is full of em’. Allow me to review some of the best hidden gems out
there. Poker is for ESPN. These card games? Well, as Hardison
says in the TV show Leverage, it’s the “Age of the geek, baby.”
The cult TV show Firefly has cornered the market on board games, and I think my family is making it our life’s mission to collect them all. Out To the Black, however, isn’t so much a standard tabletop as a smaller is, scaled down card game that plays like a stat building game. You can play as any member of the crew, including our beloved Captain. Each crew member’s playing card has specific stats for; Flyin’, Fightin’, Thinkin’. They have specific levels for each ability; Jayne for example has a high Fightin’ stat, but his Thinkin’ is monumentally low. Gee…wonder why that is…
You have a stack of cards that you
draw from; a five card hand. The player with the most recent birthday
will draw a card from the Job pile, picking out what job the crew will
run. They are divided between one man
jobs, two man, three, etc., so sometimes you work as a team and sometimes you
fly solo. The cards in your hand have numeric
values that you can add to any of the stats for your crew member; you have to
accomplish a certain total stat number to complete the job. Some stat numbers on the cards you draw are
wild and can be put anywhere, some are specific to one stat only. You lay down a certain amount of cards and
can even redraw and use the special abilities of your crewman if you have
to. All crew working the job total the
amounts from their hands together as they drop the cards to help complete the
job. You make the total, you make the
job and you get the money. You fail, the
job goes south and the Alliance tags you…complete with an Alliance penalty
card. Sucks to be you.
The absolute best game on the planet
is a game that can end in one round and in under five seconds, or can last for
hours if you know how to manipulate the cards. You will laugh so hard that
you cry every time you play it. It is the most hilarious game ever with
only one rule; there are absolutely no real rules. It is called “We
Didn’t Play Test This At All.” One huge stack of cards on the
table. You draw 7, and the player that goes first drops a card, and round
robin style from there. The mission is
to simply be the last one standing and make the others lose. Sounds like
an easy win, but it is how you win that makes you have to pee your pants due to
laughing. Here are some examples of cards that you play every round:
1:
“AHH Zombies!”- When this card is
dropped every player has to scream this before drawing their own card. They don’t, they lose.
2:
YOU: Anyone that says “You,”
“Your” or “Yours” during the course of the game loses.
3:
Kitten Ambush: Cancels any card
that was just played.
4:
You Win: You win if you are the
A: only girl in the game. B:
Shortest in the game. C: If there are three bombs on the table…
There are blank cards in which you
can make up your own rules. You can throw down a blank card and say
“Anyone married to me has to lose immediately!” Boom! Your spouse
is out of luck. You want a Kitten Ambush card, but don’t have one?
Declare your blank card reads, “Kitten Ambush!” There are also “Star Cards,” which are specialty
cards that you play permanently. Their effects last throughout the game
and have to be repeated by every player. Whoever does not perform the
Star Card’s action each time they take a turn…you’re outta there, baby. An
example of a Star Card is “Everyone must name a food and say “MMM…. (Insert
food here) tastes good” each time they draw a card. They don’t, they lose.”
Tell me that isn’t fun.
“Playtest” is a family
favorite. We pee our pants with laughter
every time we play it because it just never gets old. And yes…they have
an expansions out the wazoo, all from Asmadi Games.
The next game…well, be sure that you
are comfortable with yourself and that your soul is well adjusted before
playing this game. I can safely say that only adults should play it,
because not only is there language, but this game will make you question
whether or not you were ever as moral as you thought you were. I am
talking about Cards Against Humanity.
One black deck, and one white
deck. The black deck is for the Judge, who picks one card and reads it
out loud, laying it on the table. All others draw ten cards from the
white pile, and have to choose a card that they feel answers the statement from
the black card. They give their answers to the Judge, who picks the best
one. A grown up Apples To Apples or Balderdash, as it were. Seems
easy enough, until you read some of the answers and realize the Judge will
probably be praying for your soul.
Here is an example of a round.
The Judge draws this card from the Black deck:
“The official cause of Jar Jar
Binks’ untimely death was ruled as ____”
The answers that each of four
players chose and dropped that the Judge has to read/decide from are as
follows:
1:
Draining Carl Sagan’s corpse of its mystical energies
2:
Wil Wheaton’s chest hair.
3:
Rainbow colored unicorn meat.
4:
Monkeys beating sticks against an obelisk
And these were the PG rated ones I
could use for the review, people. You
will laugh, you will gasp, and by the end of the game you will begin to think
that, like Malcolm Reynolds, you are going to the “Special Hell.” And you
didn’t even talk at the theatre…
This next game I am new to, but have
fallen in love with. It’s called Smash-Up, and is quickly rivaling
Munchkin as the legalized crack of the card game world. Like Munchkin,
Magic: The Gathering, etc., expansions come out regularly for this game.
It’s the various deck expansions that drive you crazy and make this game even
more crazy and fun. The game format is similar to the games that I just
referenced, with similar stats on the various cards in your decks. You
get to pick two different face down decks to play, shuffle them together, and
draw a hand. These two “smashed” decks are your army with which you crush
the others and infiltrate the “bases” that are laid out on the table.
Last man standing wins. What makes this game crazy are the deck
combinations you can come up with. Examples of decks to play:
Vampires
Ninjas
Robots
Robots
Kittens
Insects
Insects
Cthulhu
Fairies
You find when playing Magic: The
Gathering how different colors work together. Red and White work well
together for direct damage and “holding back the enemy.” Blue and green
work well for deck discarding and Mana ramping. Smash-Up works similarly
as you find that different types of decks work well with each other. I
found in my first run that Kittens and Insects were a horrible draw.
Sadly you pick them at random while face-down, so you’re stuck with what you
get. That is half the fun, but also half
the crappy luck. Like a bad Mana draw in Magic, sometimes you have a bad
Vampire/Insect draw, or a bad Cthulhu/Kitten
draw. But tell me the very concept of this doesn’t just make you dance in
your seat and giggle as you rummage through the comic books and empty red bull
cans on your desk, then tell your Guild mates they have to raid without you as
you fly at top speed to your nearest gaming store for a copy of this game? Plus an expansion or two?
I knew it would. Now go spend
that rent money on these games! Your landlord might be unhappy, but your
Game Night buddies will love you for it!
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