Review - Temple Run: Speed Sprint Card Game

Temple Run: Speed Sprint Card Game
Published by Spin Master
Designed by Brady Lang
For 2 to 4 players, aged 8 to adult

Jump! Left! Right! ARGH!

So, I have this dream...

In the dream, I'm running away from a monster.

Wait, wait. Hold on. This sounds familiar.

Oh, that's right. Recently I reviewed Temple Run: Danger Chase, a surprisingly good little dice game based on the popular smartphone app, in which you frantically roll dice in order to escape a demonic monkey.

Well, Temple Run: Speed Sprint is from one of the same designers as Danger Chase, and tries to recreate that same nightmarish situation with a simple deck of cards and an electronic randomiser.

Should be fun, right?

I saw Speed Sprint  in a discount stores, priced at £1.99. Seemed reasonable for a card game, so I picked it up without having particularly high expectations. The box is really flimsy (one of those horrible folding flap boxes that even most card games avoid these days), and inside is a ridiculously small number of components. Honestly, the box is pretty large, obviously to draw attention to the game on the shelf, but about 90 percent of that box is just air. Here's a picture, so you can see what I mean:

Big air.

Not since The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Game has there been a board game with such a high air-to-game ratio.

The game actually comprises a single deck of 60 cards (including four character cards) and a pretty cool electronic idol, which doubles as a timer and a randomiser.

The cards in the deck are colour-coded, and each one represents a different move or special power: Jump, Right, Left, Slide, and Invisibility.

Left! Right! Jump! Cha Cha Slide!

Players are allocated a character card (so they know what player number they are), and a hand of cards. Then someone whacks the timer, and the game begins.

The idol calls out a player number, and then an action. If the player called has the named card (or an Invisibility card, which is wild), he or she has three seconds to discard the card and press the idol, at which point another player is called. Failure to discard a card in time pauses the game, and forces the player to draw a new card. First player to discard all of his or her cards is the winner.

Done.

Nothing more to see here.

It is just a simple, speed-based game. With the exception of being asked to "pass," which involves selecting one of your cards and giving it to another player, there are no decision points in the game. You just grab the right card, chuck it on the table, slam the idol, and carry on. Pretty mindless, and not particularly great.

It is fun enough for a few minutes, but the biggest problem is that the idol seems to give you just a bit too much time to find the card you need. Even playing with one hand behind your back at all times, it is still incredibly easy to play the right card before the timer runs out. That being the case, the game just doesn't seem to be as frantic as it should be.

Additionally, the cards are low quality, and considering they are being manipulated at speed, I can see them getting creased and scuffed very quickly.

Oh look. It's smiling at us.

Overall, for £1.99, I think it was a worthwhile purchase; but it really is nothing special. It is certainly not a game I would recommend to anyone. For fans of the Temple Run app, the Danger Chase board game is a much better option.

Anyway, while I've got your attention, I want to tell you about this other dream I have.

I'm in class, and I'm wearing a tinfoil hat; and the teacher is asking me how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism...

Review - Unspeakable Words

Unspeakable Words
Published by Playroom Entertainment
Designed by James Ernest and Mike Selinker
For 2-6 players, aged 10 to adult

Being a writer has its downside. Sure, you get to spend all day crafting worlds, inventing characters, and generally doing what you love.

But...

First of all, people have a tendency to buy you pens. Usually pens with your name on them.

I know my name, thanks. And, apart from writing shopping lists, I haven't used a pen since about 2005.

And when it comes to games, people always seem to think a writer is going to like word games. Scrabble, Boggle, Upwords...

No.

No, no, no.

Words are tools. I don't play with tools.

Except my friend, James.

As a writer, I want board games that create stories. Games where I get to rearrange letters into words couldn't interest me less.

So, I tend to have quite a few word games in my collection, but there is only one that I actually bought myself. That one game is Unspeakable Words.

I picked it up years ago, when I saw it going cheap. I knew it was just a word game, but there was a little twist that appealed to me: A Cthulhu theme. Of course, this was back in the days when the Cthulhu theme was not quite so prevalent. Nowadays, Cthulhu is overused almost as much as ellipses in blog posts.

But anyway...

I was intrigued by the comical art, the fun spin on a theme I enjoy, and (of course) the promise of 30 cute Cthulhu pawns.

Frankly, those pawns are worth the price of admission alone.

We could be in trouble.

In fact, the presentation for the entire game is lovely. You get 96 cards depicting letters of the alphabet, the 30 pawns, and a 20-sided dice, which I am sure is a little nod to the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.

What is so nice about the cards is the way the theme is incorporated. For example, on cards depicting "C", you get the legend "C is for Cthulhu" and a nice picture of Cthulhu taking a nap with his teddy bear. If you don't know why that is funny, you clearly aren't a H.P. Lovecraft fan.

Additionally, each card incorporates a piece of art that is more typically associated with the letter in question. Seeing Azathoth eating an apple is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

That penguin looks mighty nervous.

So the presentation is great. What about the game?

Sadly, the game is not really much to write home about (with a personalised pen, no doubt). The concept is that players are researching arcane lore, revealing words that no person was ever meant to spell out. Each player starts the game with five pawns, representing sanity (this is a Cthulhu game, after all), and seven cards.

Taking it in turns, players create words from the cards they have. The cards used to spell the word are placed on the table for everyone to see. The word is then scored based on the number of angles in the letters, which is another nice nod to the weird fiction that inspired the game. For example, the letter "Z" scores two points, while the letter "C" scores none.

At first, this might seem unusual. After all, the commonly used letter "A" scores five points, but the letter "Z" only scores two points. However, this is a surprisingly clever system when you realise that, after scoring your points, you have to roll a sanity check. To do this, you roll the 20-sided dice, and you must get equal to or greater than the total value of the word you just scored. If you don't, you lose a sanity point.

This means people who score high-value words are at greater risk of going insane. Thematically, this makes sense, and it also levels the playing field. Those players who are experts at creating high-scoring words run the risk of going insane, giving those people who have been scoring low-value words a chance to make a comeback.

The winner is the first player to score 100 points, or the last player with any sanity.

Cthulhu's taking a nap. He does that.

So, yeah. it's just a word game. However, it has just enough going on to make it a little more interesting for me. The theme, the comedy elements in the art, the cute pawns, the push-your-luck element associated with creating high-value words, and the fact that people who are not great at word games still have a fighting chance, all adds up to make something that is just a little bit more than the sum of its parts. There are even some optional rules to spice things up a bit more, by giving people a chance to recover sanity, or to make up gibberish words if they are close to going insane.

This game may not be a Deep One, but if I have to play a word game I want to play one where I am not completely bored by the time Mi-Go comes around, and that means the only choice Hastur be Unspeakable Words.

...

...

I'll get my coat.

Review - Go Piggy Go

Go Piggy Go!
Published by Mattel Games
Designed by top secret government agents
For 2-4 players, aged 5 to adult

Surprises are nice.

Okay, not all surprises are nice. Being surprised by an axe-wielding lunatic on your way home from the pub isn't nice.

But lots of surprises are nice.

For example, last year, when I asked my daughter what she wanted for her birthday, she said "Go Piggy Go!"



Aww, look!

I had no idea what she was talking about until I looked it up on the Internet. Turns out it is a family board game that she had seen advertised on the television. I had been playing board games with my daughter for a little while (Parcheesi, Dominoes, Memory Games, Snakes and Ladders), but it still came as quite a surprise that she was asking for games for her birthday, especially games I had not even heard of.

But the biggest surprise of all is that Go Piggy Go! is actually good.

This is not something that is immediately apparent. It isn't like opening the fridge and finding an elephant. It is more like opening the fridge and finding elephant-shaped paw prints in the butter.

You see, when you set up the game, it looks like every other roll and move game ever.

The aim of the game is simple: Each player has three cute plastic pigs that need to be moved from a starting space at one end of the board, to a food trough at the other. So, on a player's turn, he or she rolls the dice, and moves one pig that number of spaces. The path is very linear, and there really is no decision making at this point. Just move as much as possible.

Sounds awful, right?

Right.

But there is a cool little twist. In the middle of the board there is a plastic wolf riding a tractor. When you press the wolf, plastic hay bales shoot out of the front of the tractor. If a player rolls the side of the dice that has a number and a wolf symbol, he or she gets to choose what to do: move a pig, or fire the tractor.

Of course, children always want to fire the tractor.



Aww, look!

The purpose of firing the tractor is to hit the pigs. Any pig hit is sent back to the start (or one of two pre-set checkpoints).

This is not a major element of the game. Sometimes the wolf only gets fired once or twice, and often there is not much point in doing so; but it does add a nice little dexterity sub-game, and usually raises a few laughs when "Daddy's pig" gets sent back to the start. Again. And again.

And again.

Yeah. Big laughs.

However, what really raises this game above some of its peers, and makes it something that is actually a bit interesting to play, is the way in which the pigs interact.

When a pig moves, it can enter a space with another pig. It can do this to "jump" the pig and then carry on; however, it is also possible to enter the space with another pig and then stop there. When this happens, you stand your pig on top of the pig that was already there. From that point on, if the pig on the bottom moves, the big on the top moves with it.

Genius.

You can hop your pigs onto other pigs, and then get a free ride from one end of the board to the other. And of course, if the pig on the top ever wants to move, he can do so without moving the big on the bottom.

And the final wrinkle in the rules is that no more than two pigs can occupy a space. That means it is possible to block routes across the board.



Aww, look!

In practice, you see a lot of pigs hopping on other pigs, creating roadblocks the other players cannot circumvent. Of course, those road blocks then become the prime target for the hay-firing wolf.

It all becomes surprisingly tactical.

Okay, it's not Chess, but there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye. More than enough for adults to actually enjoy the game rather than merely tolerating it for the sake of the children.

I also rather enjoyed the little in-jokes and puns: The pigs take piggyback rides on each other, each player controls three little pigs, and rather than blowing down houses made of straw, the wolf uses hay bales to knock down pigs.

So, surprisingly, I would recommend this game to anyone with young children. It is fun, fast, colourful, and just tactical enough to keep older players interested. It won't win any awards, but it is better than it really has any right to be.

And the pigs are cute.

Review - Christopher Robin's Pooh Goes Home to Bed Game

Christopher Robin's Pooh Goes Home to Bed Game
Published by the Traditional Games Co. Ltd.
Designed by... dunno... Christopher Robin?
For 2-4 players, aged 5 to adult

This is the box

Recently, I have been reviewing a lot of relatively new stuff, so it is time to redress the balance and get back to what this blog is really supposed to be about: bizarre, obscure, out-of-production games that no-one really cares about.

So, what better way is there to get back into the swing of reviewing shit games than reviewing a game about Pooh?

Ha. See what I did there?

Anyway, to be fair, this isn't really my game. I bought it for my daughter for her third birthday, and she absolutely loves it. I guess that is pretty much all this review needs to say; but being as you were so kind as to stop by, I'll ramble a bit. Pull up a chair...

Christopher Robin's Pooh Goes Home to Bed Game, which from now on will be referred to as Home to Bed to prevent the onset of RSI, is not so much a game as it is an activity. It is designed for very young children, and has a very simple goal in mind: It wants children to learn the directions of "up," "down," "left," and "right." It also wants to provide situations where children have to consider several options and pick the best one.

As you can see, this is not a game for adults. This is a game for adults with children.

Very, very patient adults with children.

The age on the box says 5+, but my daughter had absolutely no trouble learning how to play, because really there isn't that much "playing" involved.



Look - the rules have a little story in them!

The game (activity, passtime, thing, whatever) takes place on a beautifully illustrated board depicting all the locations from the Winnie the Pooh stories, linked together by paths. On your turn, you roll a pretty cool custom dice. Four faces on the dice give you a direction to move in, and if you roll one of those directions, you must move in that direction if possible (otherwise you do not move at all). The other two faces on the dice say "decision," and when you roll one of those, you can choose which way to move.

When you move, you move along the path until you reach an obstacle or a crossroads, which immediately ends your turn. Hitting an obstacle slows you down, as it requires you to roll a "decision" or one of two specific directions to get past on your next turn.

After your move, play passes to the left. This continues until one of the players reaches the "home" area on the board.

And that's all there is to it.

Roll the dice. Move in the required direction. Pass control to the next player.



This is the board. Not kidding!

Now, astute readers will have noticed that there is a deep flaw in this game. Here, let me illustrate:

"Daddy. It's your turn."
[Always Board Rolls "up"]
"I get to go to the next crossroads. Your go."
[Little Never Boring rolls "up"]
"I get to go up too. Your go."
[Always Board Rolls "down"]
"Oh. I have to go back to the last crossroads. Now it's your turn."
[Little Never Boring rolls "up"]
"Yay! I get to go up. Your go, Daddy."
[Always Board Rolls "up"]
"Hurrah! I get to go up again. Your go."
[Little Never Boring rolls "decision"]
"I rolled "decision." I will go up again. Your go."
[Always Board Rolls "down"]
"F*CK."

Yeah. As a way to teach children their left from their right, Home to Bed is incredibly effective, but as games go, it's worse than Snakes and Ladders. You have almost no control over your fate, and what should be a five to ten minute learning exercise can stretch out for an agonisingly long time.

However, where Home to Bed really scores some Brownie points is with the presentation. Seriously, this is a beautiful game. There is such attention to detail in absolutely every aspect of it, and it feels as much like a cherished keepsake as it does anything else.

The board is an immaculate and childlike illustration of the area around Christopher Robin's house, and you can spend quite some time wandering those paths, picking out the famous landmarks from the stories.

The dice is huge (just right for little hands), and each face has the direction the player should move in, and a unique illustration of one of the main Winnie the Pooh characters. But more than that, the illustrations on the dice work as an educational aid. On the "down" face, Pooh Bear is falling out of a tree. On the "left" face, Eeyore is looking to his left. On one "decision" face, Piglet is looking confused, and on the other "decision" face, Pooh Bear is scratching his head. It just works. It's lovely.



Look, look - they're looking up!

And you don't have to roll the dice by hand. Oh no. The game includes a massive ceramic "hunny" jar for a dice roller. Pointless. But brilliant.

Honestly. Brilliant.

And the playing pieces... Oh my. Gorgeous, heavy pieces that are good enough to display on a shelf.



The gang. Ain't they lovely?

 It's lovely.

The rules book could have been a single piece of paper. Instead, it is a full-colour pamphlet, illustrated throughout, and containing a full Winnie the Pooh story to read with your children after the game is over.

Even the box is amazing. There are pictures on the side panels of the lid that continue on the side panels of the bottom part, creating stunning large-scale pieces of art.



The two halves of the box make cool pictures.

And did I mention that this is all based on the artwork from the books, not the Disney stuff?

No?

Well, it is. And it's lovely.



I eat my peas with hunny...

Okay, this isn't really a game. But it is a labour of love. It is a celebration of Winnie the Pooh: The stories and the artwork. It is a throwback to those times when games were simple, and having fun didn't require a lot of rules. It is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. And it is something that my daughter wants to play with me every single day.

Every day.

One day, she is going to think I am an evil tyrant who won't let her get a tattoo, and who scares off all the boys, and she probably won't want to speak to me from one day to the next.

But right now, every day, she will pull at my jumper with her copy of Home to Bed tucked under her arm, and she will ask to spend time with me.

So of course I say, "Yes."

Review - Dark Darker Darkest

Dark Darker Darkest
Published by Queen Games
Designed by David Ausloos
For 2-5 players, aged 12 to adult


Okay, before I start this review, I'm going to lay my cards on the table. I backed Dark Darker Darkest on Kickstarter. It was not the first game I backed, but it was the first (and currently only) game that actually arrived at my house. Additionally, I was one of the people who had some involvement in the second edition of the rules book (on a voluntary basis). So, yeah, this game is a little bit special to me. If you feel that either of those things in any way devalues or negates my opinion, better jog on, because there is a big, fat dollop of opinion heading your way... right... now...

Er...

Now...

Anyone who frequents this blog knows I am a sucker for a game that tells a story (yeah, I'm talking about stories again). There is something joyous about sitting at a table with a group of friends, and creating a unique adventure in another world. What that means is Dark Darker Darkest was a very easy sell for me. You see, Dark Darker...

Wait. You know what? I've got to say this first. Dark Darker Darkest is a bloody awful name for a game. It doesn't really mean anything. And if you say it quickly you sound like that guy from Team America: World Police, flailing his arms around in the jeep.

Right. Got that out of the way. I feel better now.

Where was I?

Right. Dark Darker Darkest turned up on the Kickstarter website at a time when I was beginning to despair. I had recently received Zombicide, and had found it a little dull and a little clunky. I was thinking it had reached the point where there was never going to be a good zombie game, despite the industry churning out new games about necrotic fiends on a bi-weekly basis.



"Hey, look! Another game about zombies!"

But then there was Dark Darker Darkest: A game that involved a group of everyday people sneaking into a fortified manor house to hunt down a mad scientist and then steal the antidote for the virus that is ravaging the population.

Yeah. It's Resident Evil, the board game.

Ker-ching!



And these are supposed to be the good guys?

More than just a zombie game, this was a game that promised the thrill of being hunted through cramped hallways by reanimated dogs, undead birds, infected gorillas, and giant snakes. It's like the worst day trip to the zoo ever.

(Please note, I do not believe there is a gorilla or snake in the retail game, they were extras that Kickstarter backers got, and which other gamers might get at some point in an expansion. Sorry, folks!)

So I backed the game. I only backed at the basic pledge level which got me the game and the stretch goals, as I didn't feel the need to buy anything else; and I was incredibly excited when two gigantic boxes arrived at my house. I mean BIG boxes. It's a game about zombies, and I thought there might actually be a real corpse in there.

(Please note, my excitement was slightly dampened by the absence of a whole bunch of stuff that Queen still haven't sent to me, and are unlikely to send to me for some while yet. Never mind, the game's the thing...)

If you were to explain Dark Darker Darkest to someone, the first thing you would do is tell them to ignore the stupid name. Then you would tell them that the game involves a small group of people moving around a mansion which you create from a big stack of nicely illustrated tiles. Some tiles have cameras which you need to try to avoid, and some tiles are locked. Avoid or kill the zombies, unlock the doors, find the antidote, and escape. You'll be back home in time for Scooby Snacks.



Sorry. If I'd known you were coming, I would have cleaned up.

But describing what this game is really doesn't do justice to what this game is.

You see, The Big Ds is a co-operative game. Everyone works together to win against the game system. And it is one of those beautiful co-operative games that genuinely feels co-operative. It achieves this with a fabulous team mechanism. At the start of each turn, you look at where people are in the house. Any people on the same tile form a group. You then create an order in which the groups will activate. Every character within each group gets a set number of actions (moving, searching, attacking), but those characters do not have to take those actions in a strict order. One person could move and shoot, then pass control to someone else in the group who searches, who then passes control back to the first person, and so on. Only once all the characters have exhausted all of their actions does control move to the next group, who then get to take their actions.



The team tracker.

Do you see what I'm saying?

Do you see?

If all of your characters start the turn together, then you just get one big turn for everyone to act in, and there is no strict order for characters to move in, and you can hop back and forth between characters as much as you want. But if you spread your characters out, then they all act independently.

And did I mention that every time a group finishes activating, zombies and creatures in the house might respond to the sound the group has made, and lurch into abnormal life, hunting down survivors to gnaw on their entrails?

I didn't?

They do. And the fire might spread too.

I didn't mention fire?

Man, I suck at reviews. Which is really worrying considering what this blog is all about.

But anyway, do you see? Do you see why Triple D is so cool?

The game encourages you to forge a unit, to stick together and work as a team. It actively encourages you to act like you would bloody well act in a zombie apocalypse.

If you are one of those people who watches horror movies and says, "Why are they splitting up?" Well, this is the game for you.

Or, maybe it isn't.

Because there is another mechanism in this game that is either going to make or break it for you. You see, for all the plastic zombie miniatures, and the brooding artwork, and the fire - oh God, the fire - this whole game revolves around a mechanism which is its most magnificent triumph and its biggest failure.

Unlocking doors.

The whole game is about unlocking doors.

Throughout the mansion there are locked door tokens. When you get close to them, you flip them over to reveal two or three coloured symbols. Every item you start with, and every item you find in the mansion, has a coloured symbol on it. If a bunch of people have items with icons that match all the icons on the door token, you can unlock the door. You then keep the token, and you can cash it in later on a "security panel" to break the code that is sealing the entrance to the mad scientist's laboratory.



The security panel.

(Please note (really? Again?), in the original rules for the game, one person had to have all the items required to unlock a door. This was changed in the revised rules, which you can find over on the BoardGameGeek website.)

This is the game's greatest triumph, because it creates agonising decisions for the players, and gives the game a heavy dose of resource management which is often lacking from other games of this sort. For example, you are out of ammo, and there are zombies closing in; but you really need the icon that appears on your spare ammo clip. If you reload, you lose that icon, and you cannot unlock the door. If you cannot unlock the door, you cannot win. If you don't reload, the zombies eat your brains, and you cannot win.

(Not winning is a really big aspect of this game, by the way.)

But this mechanism for unlocking doors is also the game's biggest failure, because it is so absolutely, totally, unapologetically unthematic.

You know what? I don't care. It is a concession the designer chose to make for the sake of making the game gruelling, tense, and entertaining. And it works. Managing your equipment is like a mini-game. You have to finely balance the useful weapons you want for fighting zombies, with the tat you need for unlocking doors.

And when you do finally unlock the laboratory, the game flips on its head. The group activation mechanism I talked about earlier transforms into this crazy Euro-style worker-placement type thing where the group can "place" six actions at a time, after which the bad guys react. Used actions are then locked out for several turns before being returned to the players, so there is a chance certain characters may have to miss a turn and you never have quite enough actions for what you want to do. And of course, the whole time, the crazy scientist (or one of his relatives) is attempting to set fire to the mansion with you still in it.

It's bat-shit crazy.

And absolutely joyous.

And you might hate it.



Wooden cubes? In a thematic game? Heresy!

You might hate it because, while I think the artwork is incredible and sets the game apart from anything else in my collection, you might think it looks ugly and drab. You might hate it because the miniatures aren't great (a friend of mine said they were like "cheap army men"). You might hate it because the price in the UK makes you want to be a bit sick in your mouth. You might hate it because the iconography on the cards is often difficult to understand, and you will need to reference player aids during every game unless you are really familiar with everything. You might hate it because it is so bloody difficult to win.

And you might hate it because it chucks about a dozen mechanisms into the pot and stirs them together into a stew that some people are going to think is awesome and some people will think is stew.

I guess that's as fair as I can be about the game. I love it. It is the zombie game I wanted all previous zombie games to be. It does that thing where it takes great game mechanisms and dunks them in a vat of theme, and while some of the theme might drip off on your shirt, there is still lots of tasty theme left to enjoy. No, wait. I'm thinking about fondue, aren't I?

But the theme is strong in this one. Even with those idiosyncratic rules that don't quite gel.

Need an example?

Here's an example of something that happened in one of my games:

Towards the end stages of the game, a fire was running rampant through the house, and it looked like the whole place was going to burn down. While Lucy Chang ran to get into the laboratory, Leo and Bunny accessed the sprinkler system, dousing the flames. It was a losing battle, but Leo was keeping the fire at bay just long enough to stop the game ending through the destruction of too many mansion tiles.



Character board.

Lucy opened the laboratory, and the crazy scientist lurched at her through the billowing smoke. She set to him with a baseball bat, and for the next two turns they wrestled with each other as the scientist approached the sprinkler room.

Eventually outpacing Lucy, the scientist entered the sprinkler system room. He thrust Bunny into the adjacent room and attacked Leo. As the scientist tore bloody chunks from Leo, he glanced at Bunny, and nodded. She knew what he meant.

With trembling hands, she pulled the pin from the grenade she had found earlier, and lobbed it into the room, bringing the whole place crashing down on the two combatants.



This icon does not mean throw grenades at the one you love.

You can chalk that up to a win for the good guys, and a climax that rivals any number of horror films.

And that is why I love the D-Meister.

I can't say you will love this game too, but I can say you should definitely try it if you get the chance.

If nothing else, you will have some stories to tell.