Buried In A Cheap Cardboard Coffin

When we weren't looking, Cheapass Games died.

Admittedly, the current claim is that Cheapass Games is only hibernating. However, it's employees have moved on, James Ernest is designing games for other people, and Toivo is no longer collating.

I'm not sure what lead to this state of events, my three theories are:

1- At it turns out, people would rather pay 300% more for cool plastic widgets. The evidence for this can be found in the catalogue of "James Earnst Games," an imprint of Cheapass games that specialized in full-color card games, including previous hits like Give Me The Brain, and Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond. And while Killing Doctor Lucky was fun in black and white, the Paizo company has determined that it would be even more fun to do so in glorious Technicolor. (Paizo being the company that has licensed certain Cheapass Games assets. Perhaps I'll finally get a nice copy of Spree.)

2- Game Designer James Earnst's obsession with games where you bid for resources. For every The Great Brain Robbery, there seemed to be a Bleeding Sherwood, or a Jacob Marley, Esq.. I own some of those Bidding Games, and I can tell you that the only one I could ever convince people to play a second time was The Big Cheese. And that's because The Big Cheese could be played at a restaurant, while waiting for the pizza to come out. I do not imagine my experience is atypical.

3- My demographic cannot keep a business alive. Perhaps there was something else involved in the company's demise other than low sales, but given that Secret Tijuana Death Match never sold out of it's initial 5,000 copy print run, we can conclude that it was at least a strong factor.

At least the dream of James Ernest lives on. Unspeakable Words is a fun card game by James Earnst, where you try to gain 100 points by spelling out words. Every angle in the letters you use earns you a point, and the more points you make makes the word more likely to drive you insane. (Which potentially leads to a number of skipped turns, unless optional rules are used. Optional rules always make me wonder how fully a game was play-tested.) Sanity is measured by thirty neat little C'thulhu tokens, which could easily have been represented by pennies instead. I don’t know if the game has legs, but the first few play-throughs have been enjoyable enough that I’m tempted to snap up my own copy.

Alternatively, you can play Stonehenge, a board game with five different ways to play. James Ernest suggests you play a game that involves bidding on things.

Friends Not Included

Other online games offered by the people who make Ticket To Ride include:

Gang Of Four Online: A purportedly Chinese game where players try to get rid of their cards by forming better poker-style hands than the last player. The highest ranking hand is called "A Gang Of Four," but the rules forget to state which of those cards represents ex-propaganda minister Yao Wenyuan. I'm betting it's the Green-10.
Availability: There always seems to be 3-10 games of this going on at any particular time.

The Queen's Jewels: You play a jeweler, trying to sell gems to random people on the street. The gameplay described reminds me of a mashup between Renfeild and Bleeding Sherwood. I don't know for sure, because I have yet to play The Queen's Jewels. I also have yet to play Renfield or Bleeding Sherwood, even though Cheapass Games gives both of those away for free.
Availability: 1-3 people sullenly hanging out in the waiting room.

Fist of DragonstOnes: According to Days Of Wonder: "You will like it if you liked... Dungeons & Dragons™, the Lord of the Rings™ or Harry Potter™"
Availability: Give it a try. You'll be the first!

One product of theirs that you can't try out online is Shadows Over Camelot. The basic gameplay revolves around heroic knights working together to accomplish quests by assembling specific cards. Meanwhile, every round something terrible happens to undermine said players. The fun part is that in the beginning of the game, each of the players secretly gets one of 8 cards. Seven of them tell the player that they are loyal knights of Camelot. One of them lets that player know that they are a traitor, who will only win if the other players lose.

If too many black swords are gained for the forces of evil, the knights are overrun and killed by the forces of evil. "Accidentally" failing a quest gets the team black swords. Failing to catch the traitor gains the team black swords. Accusing someone of being a traitor gains the team black swords. Reminding the team that there is a mathematical chance that there is no traitor playing does not gain the team black swords, but seems awfully suspicious. Other suspicious activities include not doing quests to draw more cards, completing the best quests to steal their rewards, and completing the boring quests so that they do the least possible damage to the forces of evil.

The rampant suspicion that flows through this game is one main reason that this will never be offered online: The required paranoia necessary to play Shadows Over Camelot simply cannot be achieved through instant messages. Also, the game prohibits table talk, and you're going to have a hard enough time stopping that when you're all in the same room, let alone a virtual space where people could cheat like crazy through AIM.

Like a lot of games for three or more players, you do not want to bother with only three players. Also, the game is about this is exactly the kind of game Cheapass Games is talking smack about in their company philosophy. Fifty bucks gets you a clever design idea, and a plethora of soft rubber pawns that stride atop a full color abstract gameboard. It's nice, but I'd rather pay twelve bucks for it and have a tiny scavenger hunt in my apartment instead.
"Okay guys, we still need four pawns representing invading Saxons, a pawn representing the holy grail, and something to track the inevitable corruption of a utopian dream."

Played: Kill Dr. Lucky

Kill Dr. Lucky is the story of 2 to 7 players who gather at a Clue-like mansion, each with the intent of killing the eponymous Doctor. Players take turns sneaking about the premises, laying in wait for Dr. Lucky, making attempts on his life, and foiling the assassination attempts of the other players. (The game takes place in a time before Internet message boards and instant messaging, so none of the players realize that everyone else in the mansion wants Dr. Lucky dead, too.) The bare bones Director's Cut is available through Cheapass Games, and Titanic Games produces a deluxe edition. One version or the other should be available through your Un/Friendly Local Game Store.


In addition to providing pawns, a very pretty board, and cards of high quality stock (the philosophy of Cheapass Games is that you already have game pieces, dice, etc., so why not pay 5 to 10 bucks for a game instead of 30 to 50?) the Titanic version gives you spite tokens. In previous incarnations of Dr. Lucky, the only way to fail a murder attempt or increase the value of an attack on the Doctor was to play the right cards. Spite tokens offer an extra wrinkle. Every time a player attacks Dr. Lucky and fails, they gain a spite token. These add one point to all future attacks on Dr. Lucky, and, yes, I quadruple-checked, they are not spent in this manner. They are only spent to contribute to a failure, at which point they are given to the player who failed.


Allow me to explain how a board game night involving Kill Dr. Lucky usually runs. During first game, which takes 30 minutes to an hour, everyone learns or slowly remembers the rules. The second game lasts half that time. A third game is suggested, now that everyone knows what the hell they're doing and can plan against what went wrong on their second try. The third game doesn't end until the player who is the second most and second least stubborn throws the game.

On a typical board game night, I am the least stubborn person, allowing games to go on far too long after I realize that we've either screwed up the rules or we broke it. Meanwhile, the most stubborn player won't give up because, damn it, we kept at it this long, and they still have a good chance of winning.

The problem with spite tokens is that unless you're playing with people who openly adhere to the Jander School of Failure Cards, the game will never end. In the original Dr. Lucky, failure cards are kept unseen in a player's hand. Spite tokens, however, are on the table. So it's easy for the other players to conclude, "I'm not going to waste failure cards on this attempt, because I know the last guy has enough tokens to take care of it."

Which gives the attacking player more tokens. After all failure cards are spent, the game becomes a tedious exercise in keeping the player with 14 spite tokens away from Dr. Lucky while slowly siphoning those same tokens to other players until their combined efforts can't stop an attack. Or alternatively, the session ends when the second most/least stubborn player says, "Fuck it, I don't want the guy to my left to win."

Which is what spite tokens are all about. The player with the least spite is most likely to harbor the most.

This is not to say that I don't endorse spite. I highly recommend the deluxe version. Spite tokens embrace the gameplay attitude that Jander always understood: "I have two spite tokens here. But if you leave it up to me to save your ass, I'm not spending them. That's why they're called spite tokens."