by: Michael Barnes

You know what we haven’t done here at Cracked LCD in a while? A Review Rodeo. This is where I take a couple of the smaller games that I’ve played recently, maybe some of the lower profile releases I’ve checked out, and whip up a couple of short reviews. It’s good to rustle up some of these smaller games from time to time in between the big, expensive, high profile releases. This time, they’re all pretty good- not a lame mare among ‘em.

INNOVATION

Carl Chudyk is known in hobby gaming circles for his self-published card game GLORY TO ROME, one of the most embarrassingly ugly games I’ve ever seen. It was a pretty decent game, probably a little too close to SAN JUAN for comfort but it had its merits if you closed your eyes and didn’t look at the hideous cartoon artwork. For 2010, he’s back with another homespun card game and this one is even uglier with its almost non-existent graphic design sense that makes minimalism look excessive and a muted, brown palette that in no way signifies that the game is any fun at all.

There is a ring of decks and each contain various cards that represent different technologies. Each has one of six colors and a couple of icons along with one or more special abilities that can be activated if you have the most icons of a particular type. The abilities might let you steal cards from other players, move things around, draw extra cards, or perform other advantageous actions. If you do not have the majority, you can still activate the ability, but other players with more icons can use it as well. The idea is that you want to accumulate cards into a score pile to qualify for one of the ten “achievement” cards that escalate in value and price over the course of the game. Once someone gets five, the game ends and achievement points are tallied up.

On the surface, the game is pretty simple despite some goofy terminology and a three or four turn sense of “what the hell am I doing?” It’s a draw-a-card-play-a-card game at heart, but there are a couple of big-time kickers that give the game several dimensions of depth. Players can only have one “top” card of each of the six colors in their display, and everything below it and all the icons on the cards are inaccessible until later in the game when certain techs allow you to “splay” your stacks to the left or right, letting you use the left- or right- most icons on ALL the cards in your stack or, even better, downward which means you get the bottom three icons on every card in a stack. But older technologies eventually lose their utility, so if you’re in age seven or eight and you’ve got a lot of castle icons in a stack they’re practically useless. So you’ve got to use abilities to get some better cards in there for use at a later date.

INNOVATION is a terrific game despite its low quality and embarrassingly awful look. It’s not at all a “Civ-lite” style game, and its abstraction will certainly put off many. But those who are in the market for an easy to play card game that isn’t completely stupid would do well to have a look at this fine game.

NUNS ON THE RUN

I also almost fled the table before NUNS ON THE RUN, a new game from Mayfair unfortunately titled after a particularly dire Eric Idle/Robbie Coltrane film. But once again I’m glad I gave the silly theme and title the benefit of a doubt because NUNS ON THE RUN turned out to be fun deduction/evasion game with a surprisingly appropriate and silly theme.