Card

The Dungeon of D is a "print-and-play" (PnP) game, meaning it's not available for sale, but instead you can download PDFs of the components and print them out to make your own copy. In other words, it's an amateur rather than a professional production, but it's worth remembering that "amateur" has its roots in the Latin "amare" (to love); that is, an amateur does what he does for love, not for money. While its rare for any amateur product to reach or exceed professionally-produced products, it can and does happen -- as it has with this game.

Pit is a wonderful game, probably the best game released in 1904. I imagine that Wheedle came about by Knizia taking a look and saying to himself "that's interesting... but I think I can do better." And so he did.

Like Pit, Wheedle is a lightly-themed stock game, played in real time, where players are frantically trading cards with each other to try to collect sets of cards. Each card represents stock in one of several satirically-named companies (like "N Securities" and "Hard Cell Phones"), and players are trying to get at a majority share of as many companies as they can.

Unlike Pit, all trades are made with full disclosure. You say not only how many cards you are trading with other players, but also which cards. Trades can be uneven; you can trade one card for two, or you can even give away or accept cards in exchange for nothing.

Additionally, there is one face-up card in the center of the table (the deck has 61 cards, so there will always be one left over, whether you play with three, four, five, or six players). Anyone can trade one-for-one with the table at any time -- first come, first served. This does occasionally lead to disputes of whose cards are whose when several players put a card on the table to exchange at the same time; as players get more experienced at playing, this tends to happen less.

At any time, any player can end the round of trading. The game rules do not suggest a mechanism for this (and I have witnessed games where some players are concentrating so much on their hand that they do not notice that the round has ended), so you would be encouraged to supply your own bell, air horn, or some other sufficiently attention-grabbing device.

Scoring is as follows: for every company in which a player has a majority share, they earn one point per card; a player gets two points per card if they own all cards of a particular company. There is one modifier to this: whatever single card is face-up at the end of the round is the company that went bankrupt, and all matching cards are worth negative points (even if part of a majority). As such, there is often some frantic trading with the center once players perceive that the round is close to ending.

The player that ends the round gets a five-point bonus if their hand consists only of majority or totality shares. They pay a five-point penalty otherwise. This mechanism generally prevents players from just ending the round on a whim, unless they are far enough ahead that they can afford it (in which case, it offers a way for a game to end faster if the winner is essentially determined anyway).

You play a number of rounds equal to the number of players, with highest combined score being declared winner. Overall, it is a fast-moving game that serves well when there is not much time for an extended game, or if you are looking for lighter fare after playing something particularly involved. Be aware that the game often involves lots of frantically-raised voices, so do not play in an area where you would be disturbing anyone else's quiet time.

Oh, and I make absolutely no excuses for the box art. Getting people to look past the eyesore red-and-yellow logo is probably the hardest barrier to entry for this game, and I can offer no suggestions there.

Mystic is a card game released in 2000. Like James Ernest's Brawl, it came in several standalone sets (there were four in all, two under the label "Domination" and two more under the expansion set "Companion"). Each set came with two playable decks of cards, so you could play a two-player game right away, and more cards allows more players (up to 5 at a time). While the decks of cards are pre-constructed, players are able (and encouraged) to construct their own custom decks according to certain restrictions; it is therefore a customizable card game, but not collectible.

Quite often, the people who have the most startling impact on games are one-hit wonders -- Gygax and Arneson, for example. Pace both men, but neither produced a game worth the powder to blow it to hell after D&D.

Garfield, by contrast, has certainly never designed another game with the commercial impact of Magic, but his other games, of which this one, are all worth playing.

Puls is a game of mental arithmetic and timing. Each player is dealt 10 cards from the deck; cards are printed with numbers (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, and 15) in six different colors, with numbers and colors mixed. Also on each card is an arrow symbol. The objective: get rid of cards more quickly than your opponents.

A finalist for the Spiel des Jahres award in 1999, Uwe Rosenberg's Mamma Mia! is not as well known, or arguably as deep, as his game Bohnanza, but it's a good game for a party setting, accessible enough for kids and yet with just enough strategy to hold the interest of sterner gamers.

From a game design perspective, it's interesting because there are essentially three layers to the game.

Reels & Deals was included in the Games 100 in October 08, Games Magazine's annual round-up of the best 100 games in print (yes, we tabletop geeks take this seriously), and when I learned that the developers live scant blocks from my house, I decided I had to take a look at it.

Here's an interesting thing about game design: if you take an absolutely trivial decision and add time pressure, it's no longer trivial. Rock! is a two-player game that proves the point quite nicely... by doing almost nothing else.

The deck consists of 60 cards, with each card depicting a rock, paper, or scissors. Each player takes half the deck (out of habit we usually shuffle the deck first, not that it really matters). On the count of three, each player flips the top card of their deck onto the table. It doesn't matter which card is "yours"... rather, the winner is the one to physically slap the card that would win if the two were thrown in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. If you slap the correct card first, you capture both cards; if you slap the wrong card (or if you slap any card when there is a tie) then your opponent captures the cards. In the event of a tie when no one slaps down, flip two more cards, winner take all. When you've played through all cards, whoever captured the most cards wins. Simple as that.

I was there at Carnegie Mellon's gaming club in 1994, ground zero for the explosion that was Magic: the Gathering. I witnessed people taking their paychecks down to the local game store and exchanging them for boxes of cards. I saw these same people begging others to take their boxes of old Commons that were useless. I saw people trying desperately to find ways to organize their collections so they could build a deck in some reasonable amount of time.

It turned out that collecting was fun, trading was fun, building decks was fun, playing was fun... but organizing thousands of cards into some coherent system was tedious and boring. Somewhere along the line I stopped bothering with it; it took too much time that was better spent playing games. If I play these days, it's with preconstructed decks... just so I don't have to think like a librarian.

Dominion solves this problem in a unique way. It's a standalone game where the players build their decks during play as part of the game.

James Ernest games (like, say, Lord of the Fries) tend to be fast, funny, and fun, but often too luck dependent for serious tabletop gamers. Falling is instead fast, funny, fun, and with surprising strategic depth.

The set-up is simple: most of the cards are shuffled, except for the "Ground" cards, which are placed at the bottom of the deck. One person acts as dealer, Blackjack-like, but there's no betting and he's an impartial referee as well. The object of the game is to be the last person who hits the ground. (As the rules say, "It's not much of a goal, but it's all you could think of on the way down.")