pornokitsch

Rattle & Boom: Formula One

Another charity shop find, Waddington's Formula One Car Racing Game (1962) seemed awfully intimidating at first. A fairly lengthy (8 page) rulebook, a lot of bits and pieces and, most of all, we don't know a thing about racing. Car goes zoom. First one past the ribbon wins the need for speed. Never trust Cary Elwes.

Fortunately, our friends John and Bhavna know their Schumachers from their Earnhardts, so we made an evening of it.

The board is one enormous track, neatly divided into tiny boxes of roughly-equal size. Each race consists of laps around the track (like, John assures us, the stuff on TV). The tricky part to conceptualise is that the boxes on the board don't stand for distance, they stand for speed. Each box is a 20 mph segment. So if you're travelling 60 mph, you move 3 boxes. 120 mph, 6 boxes. (Despite the instructions' best assurance, this isn't actually measuring speed, but velocity. I think. Someone that knows something about physics should come by and tell me how this game works.)

Rattle & Boom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

It isn't often that you find an unopened, 12 year old board game in a charity shop (for £3.99, at that). And, honestly, that probably should have been a warning. Or an omen. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer The Board Game (2000) is like entering the Hellmouth. 

The physical elements of the game are deceptively simple. There's a board with a rectangular track on it, with 8 locations (High School, The Abandoned Warehouse, The Library...) spread evenly around the board. There are also three sets of cards: colour cards (8), character cards (8) and "Fate" cards (some amount). Finally, there are 8 crappy little plastic coloured doohickies that look like they fell out of Sorry. 

The game pits the vampires versus the humans. There are 3 of the former and 5 of the latter, each represented by one of the character cards. The objective of the game is to eradicate the enemy, and the winning side is the last one standing. The trick is that the game is conducted in a state of existential chaos: nobody knows who is playing who. Or even what game piece they are.

Rattle & Boom: Zombie Dice

The phrase "beer and pretzels game" is meant to indicate any sort of tabletop pastime that's low-concentration (thus the beer) and an easy mechanic (thus the pretzels). Basically, anything you can do for half hour while eating the bar snacks and waiting for the party cleric to arrive (he's always late).

These games have turned into a complex industry of their own. Munchkin, for example, is the "classic" of this genre - a card game pastiche of role-playing packed with in-jokes and easily playable in fifteen minutes. Except, of course, being geeks, we demanded expansion after expansion, special dice, engraved counters and an infinite number of holiday-related bonus packs that all make things more complicated. Why have an easy game when we could have a hard one?

We'll get to Munchkin in a later review. This is really about Zombie Dice - a true beer and pretzels game from the publisher of Munchkin, Steve Jackson Games.

Rattle & Boom: Runebound

Runebound (2005) is a semi-cooperative fantasy adventure game for 2-6 people from Fantasy Flight Games. The core story is that the Dragon Lord Margath has his beady eyes on the land. The first player to successfully defeat Margath - either by thumping him or by collecting dragon runes (possessed by his nearly-as-difficult upper-echelon minions) will be a hero of the land. Everyone else will presumably be forgotten and disgraced.

The action takes place across landscape divided into hexagons of neatly delineated terrain - rivers, roads, mountains, whatnot. A few cities are also scattered across the board. The board is also littered with challenge markers - ranging from green (cakewalk), yellow, purple and red (eek!). Each marker leads to a random draw from the appropriately-coloured deck and invariably a combat of some sort.

Rattle & Boom: Gloom

Gloom is a straightforward, delightfully morbid card game. Published by Atlas Games in 2004, it picked up an Origins Award in 2005 for "Best Traditional Card Game".

And, despite the stylistic trappings, Gloom is a very traditional game - and that's part of its appeal. It has an easily-mastered mechanic that makes it quick to learn. When this is coupled with the entertaining, shamelessly Gorey-styled artwork, Gloom is the sort of game that you can bring on vacation to play with your geekery-averse older sister.

Rattle & Boom: Mad Zeppelin

Mad Zeppelin is a 2009 release from Dust and Alderac Entertainment.

The game is set in a steampunk-styled 1890. The "Great Empire" is using a zeppelin to ferry raw materials from the colonies. Although security is tight, there are a number of spies and saboteurs on board. The players each take on the role of a nameless foreign power, using the agents at hand to destroy the Empire's resources.

Or, more simply put: You take turns chucking things off a zeppelin. Everything is worth a certain amount of points (Wood = 1, Diamonds = 7) - the first person to chuck 20 or 30 points-worth off the zeppelin wins. We had a lot of fun imagining the humble sheep farmer underneath the zeppelin, steadily losing his flock to falling crates of iron ore.

The game is based around a deck of 14 Traitors, each with their own special power or trait. In each turn, players get two Traitors - one randomly dealt, one secretly selected. Players go around in a circle activating one of their Traitors, then then go around again activating the second one. Each Traitor earns a bit of gold, draws some cards and (possibly) chucks stuff over the side. They do this by bribing the invisible, omnipresent guards and playing a cargo card. At the end of both rounds, the turn is over, and all the Traitors go back into the deck. Repeat until someone wins.

Rattle & Boom: James Bond 007, Role Playing in Her Majesty's Secret Service

James Bond 007, Role Playing In Her Majesty's Secret Service was produced by Victory Games (an offshoot of Avalon Hill) in 1983. Espionage and mystery-based games are always a complicated mileu - demanding of both the GM and the players. They're more open-ended and improvisional for the players and insist that the GM is always one step ahead, something that can be quite difficult to do on the fly. When it comes to enjoying a game, the only thing worse than an impossible mystery is an obvious one.

Much to my surprise, this vintage game made it work -  stylistically, mechanically and, most importantly, philosophically.

The latter point is perhaps the most significant. In the opening pages, James Bond flags up its important distinction: "This game is designed in the favor of the players. After all, what good is being James Bond if the game says you will fail rather than succeed".