Sometimes it isn’t as easy as you think to spew out four or five pages worth of highly opinionated prose about a game no matter how much you love or hate it. But then again, some games, for whatever reason, do not necessarily warrant the kind of extensive, in-depth dissection that something titanic and awesome like STARCRAFT or ORIGINS does. So to that end I bring you Cracked LCD’s first ever Review Rodeo, a way for me to shoot my mouth off about some of the lesser lights, sleeper hits, exercises in mediocrity, and embarrassing fiascos of game design that I come across in my far-ranging adventures in the hobby game world. So let’s all hop on the mechanical bull and get trained up to go two minutes with this week’s stable of games.
BLASPHEMY ; (Pinstripe Games, $100)
We’ll get things started off right with an awful game fresh from the Origins gaming convention in Columbus, Ohio. BLASPHEMY is a terrible game, but it has some fairly unique qualities. One, it’s the only game I know of that tries to simulate the life of Christ that seems to combine the irreverence of LIFE OF BRIAN with the brutal, realistic torture of THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. Two, the game is one of the most bizarre productions I’ve ever seen. The game is packaged in a long, narrow box in which you might expect to find a rifle, it has six or seven “rulebooks” styled after religious tracts, wooden tiles, and rubber chits. Yes, rubber chits. They represent faith, which are really kind of like hit points in the game’s context.
Two to four players compete as rival Jesuses (G.I. Joe-sized resin figures, by the way) on a trek that will lead them from wandering around trying to find John the Baptist on through the Holy Land in search of followers and a “frisky donkey” that can transport them to the Crucifixion. Along the way, these Christ figures get to have all kinds of zany adventures; my Jesus was caught by pirates and forced to walk the plank at one point- while resisting Satanic temptation and trying to accumulate enough faith to make it to the old, rugged cross at the end, which is presaged by a bunch of faith-draining events.
The blowout production and amusing premise turns out to be distractions from a really, really crappy game. It’s pretty simple roll and move stuff but not even as compelling as TALISMAN or possibly even SORRY- you roll a gigantic D6 (the “Holy Roller”), land on a space, draw a card, maybe roll for a result- but the humor is rarely funny and strangely enough, not as blasphemous as the game would suggest. In fact, if you took out some of the PG-rated vulgarity and Jesus and “the gang” throwing down in a mosh pit, it could be sold in those “Family bookstores” as a youth recruitment tool for churches.
It’s not to say that there’s not some fun in the game; we had a blast reading out some of the cards and the game ended in an amazing quadruple elimination when the last remaining Jesus rolled a three and was freed instead of Barabbas. But the fun just isn’t worth a hundred bucks, at which is this game mind-bogglingly retails. The game is almost certainly the product of either rich kids who thought they had a good idea for an “awesome” board game or venture capital. Possibly both.
GARIBALDI ; (Fantasy Flight Games/Nexus Editrice, $35)
I’m pretty sure everyone has heard of Jesus, so that makes him a pretty decent candidate for the board game treatment. But who the hell, outside of Italy, has ever heard of Giuseppe Garibaldi? Not me, but according to the box copy of the new Nexus Editrice game GARIBALDI, released stateside by Fantasy Flight, he’s some kind of Italian national hero who ran away from the Austrians sometime in the late 19th century and the game covers this flight, which apparently included a sick wife and lots of walking—bad combination. It isn’t the most interesting subject for a game and the physical production, rendered in all the shades present in a basin of dirty dishwater, sent up alarm signals as soon as it hit the table. I was pretty sure that the game wasn’t going to survive fifteen minutes with the rough-and-tumble bunch of hypercritics that I call my gaming group.
The good news is that despite looking absolutely horrible and boring to the extreme, GARIBALDI is a pretty fun, cooperative tracking/deduction game that definitely squeezes in between the classic SCOTLAND YARD and FURY OF DRACULA. One player plays Garibaldi (whoever he is) who must make it from one end of the board to the other in thirty turns, moving along a network of paths and numbered locales while the other players represent the Austrian patrols trying to catch him. All movement is card driven; each card has feet, a boat, or a horse to indicate which types of paths the player can take and there are also a couple of events with historical text that no one will likely ever read. It’s a single deck, but the cards are split down the middle with different effects for the Austrians and Garibaldi. Garibaldi’s moves are secret, so as in the spiritual ancestors of this game the players must work together to try to determine where Garibaldi is heading, what his next moves could be, and how to tighten the noose and catch him for whatever it is he did wrong.
