Meme Monday - Monopoly Jokes

Jason is not a fan of Monopoly.  I have a feeling he would agree with this graph to an extent.  Though I don't think he would ever reach "WOOO LET'S DO THIS"

Surprising Stories about Popular Board Games

While clicking around mindlessly on the internet, I stumbled upon this very interesting board game related article:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18995_5-classic-board-games-with-disturbing-origin-stories.html

Apparently, many of the popular games that children enjoy weren't so innocent when they were first created.  Some of the items I'd heard bits and pieces about before, such as Monopoly being based off of another game and Clue originating during the era of the Nazis.  I think I was most shocked to learn that the game of Life originally had a square for "suicide"!

What did you think about this article?  Did you know any of it already?  What was most surprising or interesting to you?

Where do you get your games?

Let's face it.  Most of the board games we play aren't items that you see on the shelves of most stores.  Sure, you might go into Toys 'R Us or any number of stores and find Monopoly, Yahtzee, Life, and Candyland.  But what if you want to acquire more games like Bang! or Pandemic?  Where do you go for those?  This is a question that was posed to me recently, and I thought it would be something good to discuss on the blog.

The simple answer to this question is: Amazon.com.  Almost all of the games that we've played or bought are available on Amazon.  Sometimes it's directly through them (which means free prime shipping!), and sometimes they're listed on Amazon through other sellers.  Amazon usually seems to have the best prices as well.

If, however, you're looking for another place to get games, there are other options out there.  Barnes and Noble has a games section, and usually has one area of "strategy" games where you'll find Settlers of Catan, Risk, and others.  Last time we were there we saw Escape from Atlantis, a game that I didn't buy because I thought I could get it cheaper on Amazon (turns out it's not there - for some reason it is not really available many places right now!).  I posted earlier that Target started carrying a small selection of strategy games.  Another great place to look is independent shops.  We've discovered a few that are dedicated almost solely to games.  Although they are usually retail price (no discounts), it is nice to be helping out small businesses, especially since some of them also host gaming events and other activities.  There are also plenty of websites out there besides Amazon that sell games.

I don't know where all of our games come from since we tend to get a lot of them as gifts.  It seems that if someone doesn't know what to get us for a birthday or Christmas they usually go with a board game - and that's just fine with us!

What about you?  Do you buy most of your games from Amazon like we do?  Or are there other places you know of to get board games?

Bang! Gold Rush

For the original Bang! rules and review, go here.  Gold Rush is the most recent in a line of many expansions for Bang!.  There are two major differences in the game: the gold nuggets and equipment deck, and the shadow variant.  First, the equipment deck.  This is a new deck of cards that you can purchase while you play.  Some of the cards you use immediately when you buy them, others are cards that are put in front of you.  They can cost anywhere between 1 and 5 gold nuggets.  Three cards are face up and available for purchase at a time.  The way you earn gold nuggets is by attacking other players.  Every time you cause someone else to lose a life point, whether it’s from a bang! card, Indians, duel, or whatever, you gain a gold nugget.  You can also trade in beer cards to gain gold nuggets.If you want to destroy a permanent equipment card in front of another player, you can’t use any regular cards like cat balou – you must pay gold nuggets equal to the item plus one.  There are several new characters added to the game that have powers that have to go with gold nuggets and equipment cards.

The other major change is the shadow variant.  This effectively allows players to continue playing, even when they’ve been eliminated.  If you’ve been killed, at the start of your turn you draw two cards that you can attempt to use.  You don’t get any life points back and you also don’t get to live.  You use what cards you can and discard the rest.  You can, however, hold on to your gold nuggets that you’ve earned, which allows you to buy immediate use equipment cards.  Once your turn is over you go back to being dead.  If the renegade is killed, he joins the team of whoever has the most people dead (outlaws or team sheriff).  You can choose to play Gold Rush with both new elements of the game, just the equipment cards, or just the shadow variant.

4-7 players.  An expansion to Bang!  Easy learning curve if you’re familiar with the original game.

Becky says:
First, the equipment cards and gold nuggets.  They are a lot of fun and add an interesting element to the game.  Everyone we’ve played with seems to really like this addition.  Most of the cards are fairly straight forward – use as an extra bang or an extra cat balou, or put it in front of you and you can now hold up to 8 cards in your hand.  These are neat.  There are also ones that seem a little too good and pretty much give you the power of another character.  For instance, there is a card that makes it so that cards with a diamond do not affect you – that’s Apache Kid’s power, and a 3 life point one at that.  However, the “really good” ones are not too many of them, and there are many of the other cards, so you may not even see these at all every time you play.  One thing I noticed about the gold nuggets – people get greedy for them, and they speed up the game considerably.  You see something that you like out on the equipment deck, so you shoot whoever’s next to you to get nuggets, not really caring who they are.  This can mess with the strategy a little bit and makes the game a bit more… blood-thirsty.

Now, the shadow variant.  What I love about this is that it means you’re never completely out of the game.  You still get to keep playing, which was a bit of a flaw before.  We would have people die in the beginning or middle of the game and still have it go on for 45 minutes, while they had to sit there and do nothing (or more likely, text someone or play Words with Friends).  I know some people feel it makes the game longer but I don’t think it does very much, because the shadow turns are so brief.  And when you combine it with the gold nugget stuff it evens out.  We have noticed a trend when we play with the Shadow variant though, and that is that it seems to help the sheriff’s side way more than the outlaws.  I haven’t quite put my finger on why that is, but most times the sheriff wins when we play shadow variant – it seems like a bit of an issue for a balanced game.

Finally, the new characters.  For the most part I think they are very good.  Most of them deal with the new gold nuggets and equipment cards, such as Raddie Snake, whose power is that he can choose to exchange a gold nugget (up to 2 times per turn) to draw an extra card.  However, there is at least one character that seems pretty unbalanced and too powerful.  That’s Don Bell – his power is that at the end of his turn, he “draws!” and if it’s a heart or a diamond, he takes another turn.  Effectively it means that every turn he has a 50% chance of getting another turn right away.  And he starts the game with 4 life points.  If he had 3 I could maybe be okay with his awesome power, but 4 is too much.  Too powerful characters either dominate the game or get killed right away.  Our Don Bell got killed right away because his power was too good and no one wanted to see it used.  They all ganged up on him just to get him out of the game, which is really no fun either.  Also, other older characters might not be as good in Gold Rush – we discovered that “Big Spencer” became a “Big Target” when people wanted gold nuggets because he almost always has to take the hit.  Poor Big Spencer got killed right away, and people gained a lot of gold nuggets.

Overall I really like the gold nuggets and the equipment deck.  They speed up the game, which has always been an issue with us.  I also do like the shadow variant because I hate being killed and not getting to play anymore, but I can understand why some people don’t like it.  I give this expansion an 8.5 out of 10.

Jason says:

Dodge City pushes the game further along the asymptote toward perfection, High Noon/Fistful breathes further life into it, and Wild West Show sorta-kinda goes overboard a bit.  Gold Rush puts in a good effort, but for me, not good enough.

I commend Gold Rush for trying to fix the dead-players-out issue.  Unfortunately, the fix is a problem in itself.  In theory, gold nuggets are a good addition that fit into the genre; I like the fact that it is an extra incentive for shooting people.  I do not like the fact that it adds a whole separate class of cards that don’t really mesh with the rest of the game and that are supremely powerful.  When a card like the Calumet or the Boots comes up, there is no reason not to go for them.  Worse yet, those cards are duplicates of powers already assigned to characters, making those characters less unique.  There is something sacred to me about powers.  They are things that make a player feel like they have a personal edge… but not anymore.  I will no longer pick Apache Kid if I know I can just grab a Calumet.

Next are the extra rules to fit the expansion in with the rest of the deck.  First, you can discard beers without regaining life to instead take a gold nugget; bad, it doesn’t make sense.  Second, black-border cards cannot be discarded by Cat Balou; bad, too powerful.  Third, you can force other players to discard black cards by paying the price of that card + 1.  Why would a living player ever do that!?  Just buy your own black-bordered cards if you have enough money!  Only a ghost would force discards, since they could never hang on to black-border cards themselves.  What a boring way for a ghost to spend its hard-earned nuggets.

That brings me to the Shadow Variant, inherently flawed because it requires the gold nugget part to play well.  I think it is a bit too powerful, since it’s almost the Ghost Town card from High Noon, permanently (making that card a moot point also).  As an added minus, it ruins more cards, like characters Pedro Ramirez and Kit Carlson who can manipulate the draws of the next player, but not if a ghost throws off all of that planning.  Silliest yet, the Renegade is no longer a Renegade when he dies, and is instead a swing-vote for the losing team.  It’s all very unsatisfying to me.

My last thought is the characters, which are, to varying degrees, over-powered.  In particular, Don Bell, who gets to play an extra turn on aDraw! of hearts or diamonds.  Arguably better than Black Jack in every way.  This is just another example of a card that I think directly suffers because of this expansion.

So you might be thinking, “Wow, you just panned that game like a prospector in a gold rush!  Can you do better?” to which I would say, “Good pun!  And yes, yes I can.” The market part is a completely separate deck of cards that don’t really fit into the rest of the game.  Instead, why not make a market out of cards from the deck, all costing four nuggets?  As for the Shadow variant, instead of interrupting the flow of the living players’ cards, maybe allow dead players to take one of just a few indirect actions, or maybe have a separate deck for them to play off of (I know there is a website called the Bang! blog which has an unofficial expansion that does this).

So what does it come down to?  I will give Gold Rush a 5.75/10, which mathematically comes out to a 5.75/10.  For all of the panning I did, I would have given it a much lower rating, but I do respect that Gold Rush speeds up the game and allows dead players to play.  I wouldn’t personally include Gold Rush in a game of Bang!, but our house rules say that the designated Sheriff gets to determine the expansions we play with, and if that sheriff says Gold Rush, I won’t say no.

Meme Monday - lolCats