Dave Reviews: The Original Purdy Pictures

Dixit

The game that spawned Mysterium. Or the idea for Mysterium. Basically, Mysterium exists because of this game.

To the point!

Dixit is a family-friendly game that is ostensibly for up to six people. In reality, if you come up with more pieces for scoring and voting, and you have enough cards (there are numerous expansions), you can expand it as much as you want. So, in theory, it can be a real party game. It's definitely better when you're drunk.

The game's premise is simple: everyone has a hand of six cards. The active player chooses a card and creates a clue around it. Then every other player chooses the card they think will best match that clue, and all the cards go in a pile. They're shuffled, laid out, and everyone secretly votes on which card belonged to the active player.

Unlike a game like Codenames, the clue you give isn't particularly restricted; you can use one or more words, sounds that aren't words, references to familiar things, etc. Pretty much anything goes. The reason is that you don't actually want everyone to guess your card. However, you want somebody to guess your card—you only score if some, but not all, of the opponents figure out which card is yours.

So how the bloody fuck does that work? Pretty easily, once you've gone through a few rounds.

One of three things can happen: Everyone guesses correctly, some people guess correctly, or no one guesses correctly.

• Everyone's right: Everyone except the active player gets two points. The active player gets zero.
• Nobody's right: Everyone except the active player gets two points. The active player gets zero. In addition, each player gets a bonus point for each person who guessed their card.
• Some people are right: Everyone who guessed right gets three points. The active player gets three points. Everyone also earns a point for each person who guessed their card.

It's not a complex scoring system, but it's awkward relative to how most game scoring works (do thing -> get points), so mistakes can happen. Reading the directions again for purposes of this review, I realize we may have never done the scoring exactly right. Professionalism!

In terms of fun, I must reiterate a previous point: Bring alcohol.

Wait, are you twenty-one? If you're not twenty-one, disregard that last paragraph.

If you are twenty-one, bring alcohol. Drunk people make the best clues. BUTTERFLIIIIIIIES

Is this a good game? It is.. a... simple game. It's very easy to play (keep one person semi-sober for scoring). That's good for some people! It's quite good for people who don't play many board games, the ones who would see the cards, pieces, and scoring track come out and wonder what kind of over-complicated insanity they've gotten themselves into, so you can show them it's really simple and fun.

But just for a normal sober game night? Eh. It's strange in that the game is totally in control of the players—everyone picks their cards, the active player makes the clue, there is almost no randomness involved, and skill will win out most often—and yet it frequently feels as though you're not really in control of your outcome. You have a game where every time it's your turn, nobody can play anything even close and everyone guesses your card, so you're getting zeroes while everyone else is getting threes, and you just can't win enough guesses for your cards on other people's turns to catch up. Or all the guesses seem to work your way points-wise, even though you don't feel like you've done a great job and maybe even think someone else had really done a better job playing.

Really, just drink. Or smoke. Maybe don't do acid, not with the pictures on these cards.

Score: Six empty beer bottles, or eight full ones, out of ten.

Dave Reviews: Previously Looted Mayan Temples

Lost Cities

I don't know why I always assume games with the 'South American explorer' vibe revolve around Mayans. The Incas were pretty legit.

Fuck the Aztecs, though. Goddamned Eagle Warriors.

Wait, which game are we playing?

Lost Cities is a Reiner Knizia game, which is good! Reiner makes good games! So Lost Cities is... it must be...

Ok, look. This is a 2008 reprint of a 1999 game. Less was expected of the industry back then. It's useful to go back and look at games like this so we see where our hobby came from while also looking towards where it's going.

So.

In Lost Cities, you have five explorers and five tracks for them to go down. Each track has a randomized set of bonuses on certain spaces, and are worth a certain number of points at the end of the round depending on how far your explorer moves. There's also a huge deck of cards, with cards numbered zero through ten and corresponding to the color of one of the tracks. If you want to put an explorer on a track, you play a card of that color. Easy.

However, if you want to move the explorer further along, you have to play a card of the same value or higher. Therefore, in order to move the explorer a decent distance (hopefully all the way to the end), you need to start with low value cards and work your way up as slowly as you can. You can discard a card and draw a new one rather than play a shit card; however, you can't take too long, because as soon as a certain number of total explorers reach the break line on their tracks, the round ends, and explorers who haven't moved very far are actually worth negative points.

The points get kind of stratospheric, which is neat—many games don't go above fifty, and most don't go above one hundred. If you're not getting triple digits in a single Lost Cities round, that wasn't a very good round.

But there's not much strategy here. As the round draws nearer to a close, you may need to decide whether it's worth the risk to start an explorer down a new trail when they could be worth negative points. It can be a consequential choice, but it's about the only intellectual decision you'll need to make. If you can go down a track and you have a low card, you play the card and go down the track. If you can hit bonuses that give you extra moves, you link them together as best you can. Maybe you play a 2 on one track rather than a 0 on another because you like the bonuses on that first track more, but you still have the 0 and you'll still play it pretty soon.

I imagine that people looking for games that weren't Twilight Imperium-sized but more friendly than Monopoly and less mindless than Chutes & Ladders were probably happy with this in 1999. Today, it's quite possibly a good tool for teaching game basics to kids. Beyond that, it's just a casual game that can kill an hour. Don't avoid it like the plague, but it's not much more than a thrift store purchase.

Score: Three Macklemores out of five.

Dave Reviews: Fun With Fascists

Secret Hitler

This one's been out for a little while, with all the fanfare that anything which says "Hitler" is going to obtain. I just got a chance to play it, though. So let's write the 379th review on the Internet about:

How Fun Is Hitler?

Secret Hitler is, as the name very strongly indicates, a hidden role game. To my surprise, it doesn't just resemble other hidden role games; it's damn near a re-skin of The Resistance. If you're going to basically copy a game, of course, The Resistance is a fine one to use as a basis. Then again, you're setting the bar awfully damned high for anyone who recognizes the core mechanics.

Let's go over those mechanics, vis a vis The Resistance.

• Two teams: check. 
• Plucky blue-colored good guys versus the terrible red power: check.
• Rotating leadership position: check.
• Voting for teams: pseudo-check. Where The Resistance had a vote for a proposed team, Secret Hitler has a single Chancellor to vote on.
• Target number of 'wins' for victory: check. Secret Hitler requires more—six for Fascists, five for Liberals, versus three for either side in The Resistance—but the rounds are shorter.

There are differences, but they're really adjustments to the same core gameplay. The biggest change is the alternate victory conditions that become possible once there are three Fascist policies on the board. From then on, voting Hitler in as Chancellor makes him Chancellor for Life, and the Fascists win. However, every time a new Fascist policy is enacted, the President has to assassinate a player. If the President assassinates Hitler, the Liberals automatically win.

Policies are enacted by the President and Chancellor. The President picks up the top three policy tiles from the stack, discards one face down, and hands the other two to the Chancellor. The Chancellor then discards another one face down, and plays the last one face up. The stack contains eleven Fascist and six Liberal policies; as the game goes on, especially if the Liberals get a lead, it can become very easy to draw three Fascist policies and be forced to use one even if you're a Liberal President and Chancellor.

There's one rule that I haven't figured out the logic behind: during the policy-making stage, the President and Chancellor can't talk. However, once the policy is played, they can lie about what tiles were available. So what's the point of not letting them talk or otherwise telegraph what's in their hands during the policy phase? If they're allowed to say it afterwards, there's no material difference if they're allowed to speak during the phase as well. Their messages will be the same, and players will have the same data to base their judgments on.

I wanted to like Secret Hitler, and I kind of do. However, I can't shake the feeling that Secret Hitler is fun because including Hitler in silly games is fun. The difference between this and the Resistance is that in Secret Hitler, the decisions are much simpler—do I trust this Chancellor or no? And, especially if there aren't many Fascist policies left, do I trust this President not to throw a Liberal one out if they see it? After that, it's mainly a numbers game. If the Liberal President/Chancellor combo (which is what you usually get) see a Liberal policy, they're going to pass it, so you're just hoping the good guys see what they need. Or don't, if you're a horrible Fascist.

On the other hand, The Resistance requires you to solve the entire proposed team while not nixing so many teams that the government automatically wins. There are more strings to pull when you know the odds are, especially later on, that someone on the team is a government spy unless your team has figured out everyone's identity, and even then there's usually a bit of everyone holding their breath until the mission votes are cast. Everything revolves around your capacity to solve the puzzle of your fellow players.

Some people will like the relative simplicity of Secret Hitler, and that's fine. It's not bad. Just know that's what you're getting.

Score: A filibuster-proof 77 Fascists out of 100 U.S. Senators.

Dave Reviews: Death and Luck (and Death)

Bloodborne: The Card Game

From Software is known for basically one thing: the Dark Souls phenomenon. In addition to the three Dark Souls games, this includes Bloodborne, a faster-paced affair still predicated on knowledge of enemy patterns, a high degree of skill, and grinding out some levels and items if your skill isn't quite there.

The Dark Souls board game, for better or worse, stayed fairly true to these ideas, especially grinding through the same level to get stronger if you ran into a roadblock. Does Bloodborne in card form manage the same feat?

The Bloodborne card game looks like a psuedo-coop affair, where players work together to defeat monsters but try to end up with more blood echoes than their fellow hunters by the end of the game. 'Pseudo-coop', however, is overstating the cooperative nature. In reality, the monsters are something of a filter through which you fight each other. Non-boss monsters are either killed in one round or run away; boss monsters, including the final boss, stay and accumulate wounds until they die. If you damage a monster during the round in which it dies, you earn blood echoes and trophies in accordance with what's printed on the card. Trophies lead to bonus blood echoes at the end of the game. If you can work it so you help kill a monster and someone else doesn't, you gain an advantage over them.

Bloodborne is a hand-building game—you don't have a deck you draw from, you just hold all your cards in your hand and discard them after use. One of those cards is the Hunter's Dream; when you play it, you take half damage for the round, stash all your blood echoes, collect your discards, and choose an item from the three on display. Usually you go to the dream when you're concerned about dying, because death makes you lose all your unstashed blood echoes, but it can also be beneficial to go when a strong item is available, especially if your absence will make it difficult or impossible for the other hunters to kill the current enemy.

Battling the monsters is pretty straightforward. Every card has an amount of damage that it does, an ability, or both. If the damage done amongst all hunters is enough to kill the monster, it dies. Of course, some items screw with other hunters if they use a certain type of weapon (ranged or melee), does damage to all other hunters or all hunters including yourself, or otherwise goofs with the math everyone is doing to figure out if they'll survive the fight. After all, the monster swings first, and you only have eight health at most; you need to not just survive, but survive with enough health to make it back to the Dream on a following turn, unless you have a way to not lose your blood echoes if you die.

And this is where the game starts to collapse. Bloodborne is predicated on walking the line between life and death and being good enough not to cross over, or at least not too often. Damage is done via dice rolls, which is the polar opposite of this.

Now, a bit of unpredictability is ok. Calculating the odds may not be exactly how the video game works, but it's a skill. How safely can I play this without letting my opponents back into the game? How poor are my odds if I make this risky play? Do I have to take that risk anyway because I can't win if I don't?

Bloodborne, however, amplifies this by putting faces on the dice with plus symbols. If you roll one of these faces, it does that much damage and you roll again. If a die has two faces with plus symbols, you have a one in three chance on any roll that you'll roll again. One in nine times, you'll roll three damage dice. That's potentially once per game, depending on the dice of the monsters in the deck.

In addition, each die has a zero. So if you roll a red die for a monster, you have a one in six chance of it doing no damage, and a one in nine chance of it doing almost certainly half your life in damage. Yellows are slightly less bad in terms of top end damage, but you can still take a major hit, or no hit at all. But you have no way to plan for the damage any given monster will do. That's part of what Bloodborne is about, knowing your margin for error and using it to the greatest possible extent. This game gives you none. It's very unlikely you'll take eight damage in a round, but that doesn't really matter; if you get knocked down to two from full or high health, the next round you could easily die while trying to get into the dream. And taking four to six damage is liable to happen at some point, so you either play ultra safe or get lucky, neither of which are satisfying methods of play.

There's an expansion out called The Hunter's Nightmare. It adds many more monsters and end bosses, which are fine. You get two special abilities at the start of the game and choose one to keep; these are pretty fun. And it adds death tokens, so when you die your maximum number of each trophy type gets capped lower and lower depending on what killed you. I'm sure there are maniacs who think the game is too easy, but it's neither too easy nor too hard—you might play better than your opponents, but how much you die is highly luck dependent, so being punished for death is the worst idea possible. You can leave it out, but holy hell, what was this guy thinking?

Maybe with a more lighthearted, screw-your-neighbor theme, this game would have come off better. As Bloodborne... it doesn't give the sense of being Bloodborne at all.

Score: Two out of four umbilical cords.