The Hellfrost Players Guide is a welcome addition to the growing list of Savage Worlds supplements. Authored by fan favorite Paul “Wiggy” Wade, the guide offers an excellent take on epic Norse style fantasy. A cool new setting takes front and center as the lands of Rassilon are introduced. A glory system offers new ways for characters to grow into legends in their own right as their tales are told. Perfect use of new edges brings the world to life along with some new takes on magic. One of the Savage Worlds mantras, “Fast, Furious, Fun” is taken into account masterfully in this book. This is a good place for Savage Worlds players to find the fantasy world they’ve been looking for.

Before we start examining Hellfrost you need to know that this, like the title says, is a player’s guide. It contains everything you need to play in the world of Hellfrost from a player’s perspective. Further volumes will be aimed at game masters, with a bestiary and gazetteer slated for future release. There are already many adventures published and ready for purchase to get your game started though.

Character options abound in the character generation section of the book starting with new races for players to take. Races available to players include standard fantasy staples like Elves, Dwarves, and Humans, but each offers a new take on the classic race. Humans offer four different cultures, each detailed and different from the last. Two different Elf races are presented including the Hearth Elf and Taiga Elves, and the Frost Dwarf presents a cold take on the dour race.

Two new races are also introduced, bringing some new dimensions for characters. The first are the Engro, a diminutive nomadic race from the far north. They have a reputation as thieves and vagabonds and aren’t liked by many races. This doesn’t put a damper on their optimistic personalities or a taste for colorful dress. The Frostborn are the second new race and are relatively new to the world, appearing only in the last century. Identified by their white hair and skin that’s cold to the touch, they can be sired by any race. Frostborn gain some innate cold-based powers but get lethargic with heat.

The new hindrances and edges presented for Hellfrost really provide a real feel for the world. An example of these is God Cursed: you have offended one of the gods and beneficial spells automatically fail on you, but spells that can harm you do extra damage. New edges are available as well, including Disciple and Leadership edges, and many other types. The Disciple of Dargar is an example of one unique to the setting – if a character with this edge strikes an extra opponent down in one blow, adjacent enemies must make a spirit check or be shaken.

The glory system is one of those features I’ve always wanted to see. It is a way for characters to advance their reputations and status as a hero. Heroes earn Glory Points at the end of an adventure when they recount their exploits to a Skald. Rolling a persuasion check, modified by how heroic you were, gives you 1d6 glory points or 2d6 with a raise. Heroic deeds include being outnumbered, beating enemies that outclass you, making a some heroic feat like taking out the evil prince with a called shot that makes a candelabra fall on him, and so on. These are the tales that make you a hero of legend.

You can spend your earned Glory Points on benefits. For every 20 Glory Points you can pick a benefit from the list. Some grant you combat benefits like Combat Prowess; others, like Death & Honor, allow replacement characters to start with more experience than normal (allowing for the times when doing something heroic ends in tragic death that is sung in ballads). Heroic Status, another glory benefit, allows you to have a bonus on reaction rolls with non player characters and taking it four times lets you take Immortalized in Song, guaranteeing your place in history with people flocking to your banner.

New equipment is laid out in detail with new materials for weapons and armor. You can lay your foes low with a black ice great sword or don your suit of star metal plate armor before laying siege to an enemy keep. One of the fun things in this chapter is the inclusion of fortifications for those epic sieges against an enemy castle. Statistics for Fortifications include the toughness, which measures how much damage the walls can take, the siege bonus, and how many people it houses.

Rassilon is a rich Nordic world only touched upon in this book. Some 500 years ago huge amounts of frost giants, hellfrost dragons and other abominations from the north swept down upon the land and wiped out much of the northern and eastern portions of the continent. Some non-human races survived by hiding themselves in their mountain fortresses or behind magical barriers. When the invaders were finally pushed back a wall of ice formed and the Hellfrost was born.

The religions of Rassilon are given a detailed examination with numerous pages dedicated to them and in their own way tell some of the land’s history. Each god is given an entry that includes many details about worship, holy days, sins, duties and aspects. A write up gives a little background for game masters and players to use to add to their characters or NPCs.

Magic is prevalent in the world and there are different forms present. Hedge magic is nature based, with many Hedge magicians being alchemists mixing their potions from collected ingredients. Other magic forms represented are druidism, elementalism, heahwisardry (staff-based wizardry for the noble class), hrimwisardry (cold-based spells), dwarven rune magic, and song magic. Wizard characters have many different options as well as new spells that are sure to make them happy.

The magic rules do away with power points used in other Savage Worlds settings in favor of siphoning a deadly backlash to using magic too freely. If you’re willing to risk the siphoning you can cast spells as long as you wish. To top that off, you also face the weakened effects of fire magic. The colder it gets, the harder the Hellfrost makes casting fire-based spells.

Finally the setting is given more depth with a chapter on life in Rassilon. The day to day routine of its inhabitants, including the calendar, diet, marriage rituals, and other mundane things are given a good write up to flesh out what a player character that was born here might know. Strewn throughout the book are small footnotes about other aspects of the world that add depth and character to the setting. The Hellfrost Gazetteer will soon be released to give a more detailed examination of the world, as will a bestiary with creatures native to the Hellfrost.

The only downside to this book is also a benefit. It is a player’s guide. You can safely give this to your players and not worry about them having too much information, unlike other savage settings that include a game master chapter and a plot point campaign. This is not the only book you will need besides the Savage Worlds Explorers Edition, but on the plus side, it will be an incredibly detailed fantasy world to set your adventures in.

For those that want to start adventuring today, Triple Ace Games offers a variety of adventures for sale to get you started as well as a bunch of free downloads on their website to add to your game. I highly recommend grabbing The Hellfrost Players Guide if you’re looking at running a fantasy game using the Savage Worlds rules or you love the Norse style of play it offers. I look forward to future releases from Triple Ace games for this setting.

Saint Petersburg is a middleweight euro, roughly analogous to Ra or San Juan, so all of this is heavily abstracted. The core system is clean and compelling, and the artistic presentation is distinctive and stylish as well. In fact, it is compelling enough, and plays fast enough, that it has been a favorite of my gaming group ever since I introduced it almost six years ago. It has even overcome some significant balance issues and, perhaps, a certain sameness from game to game. The recent (2009) expansion – designed by Karl-Heinz Schmiel and Race for the Galaxy’s Tom Lehmann – addresses the worst of these balance issues and adds a couple novel twists, but it can cause other problems if used uncritically. I nevertheless strongly recommend Saint Petersburg to eurogame fans. It is a minor classic that offers just enough interesting choices to overcome its flaws and remain charming.

A card drafting system drives this economic engine game. At the start of each phase of play, the players fill a tableau with cards from one of four draw decks and then take turns choosing a single card, paying a price in rubles indicated on the card and either putting it into play or into their hand to play later. If nothing in the tableau appeals, players can pay to put cards from their hand into play or they can pass. Once every player has passed in sequence, players take monetary (ruble) and victory point (VP) income from any cards they have in play that are the same color as the current phase. The phase then ends and the tableau is restocked from the next deck.

The four phases come in the same order each round, and each is associated with the deck used to refill the tableau at its start. The green worker deck emphasizes rubles over VPs, while the blue building deck, which comes next, reverses this. Orange aristocrats focus again on ruble income, but they provide more VP income than workers, and players also score VPs at the end of the game based on how many types of aristocrat they have in play. Finally, the upgrade deck features cards of all three colors (the card backs are multi-colored) that require an additional cost of sacrificing a card of the same color that is already in play. You then pay the difference in rubles between the cost of the card sacrificed and the upgrade card replacing it, with a minimum cost of 1 ruble. Upgrade cards tend to offer more special powers than the basic cards do, and often balance ruble and VP income better than the basic cards do.

Turn order is handled in a distinctive fashion. One or two phases are randomly assigned to each player at the start of the game, and he has the first action in the phase(s) he is assigned in the first round. At the end of the round, the start player tokens pass one place to the left, so each player starts different phases each round.

The game finishes at the end of the round if any of the four decks have been exhausted. Players then score bonus VPs for left over rubles (at a rather anemic rate) and types of aristocrats in play. Each unplayed card a player has left in his hand at the end of the game applies a stiff penalty. As you might expect, the player that has the most VPs after this wins the game.

The interesting decisions in Saint Petersburg do not come from the obvious location, and this can lead some gamers to form an overly negative first impression. Figuring out the best card available is often trivial, since pricier cards offer better bang for your buck than cheaper alternatives. The only major complicating factors are some discounts that are available under certain circumstances and cards that offer special powers. The real puzzles in Saint Petersburg lie in money management and controlling the number of cards drawn at the start of the following phase so that it works well for your financial situation and not so well for your opponents.

Often, grabbing the best card available to you right now means having to pass up opportunities that present themselves a phase – or even a round – later. Making judgment calls about how much you can spend now, maximizing money and points in the short run, without costing yourself stronger plays later can be tough. The third path, taking strong cards into your hand to play later, comes with its own issues. This element of the game gets better, as you might expect, once all of the players are familiar with the cards and their distribution.

There is also a lot of maneuvering for “position.” The number of new cards revealed at the beginning of a phase is determined by the number of empty spaces in the tableau, so players often end up buying (or taking) cards (or not) in order to manipulate the following phase. A player that has plenty of money and will play early in the phase will want more cards revealed, while a player with little money will try to minimize the risk of turning up a gold mine for his opponents.

As an engine-building game, there is also a stage where you have to make the shift from focusing on earning rubles to focusing on earning VPs. That transition can be sudden and bumpy if you’re not careful, and it is possible that a player who does so poorly will get left in the dust. If rich-get-richer games annoy you, Saint Petersburg may be a good game to avoid.

The one clear advantage that easy-to-rank cards offers is that you typically have an occasional pause to assess your financial situation followed by a burst of fast play as you execute. This gives Saint Petersburg a good pace, but also some texture. As long as you do not have anyone especially prone to analysis paralysis, Saint Petersburg should play in under an hour, probably averaging around 45 minutes. Experienced players can even knock out a two-player game in about half an hour.

Unfortunately, there are a few flies in the ointment, and most of them are balance-related. While there is nothing I consider fatal, they’re significant enough that I’ve been mulling my own Saint Petersburg hack for at least five years now (without actually acting on it).

The first, and worst, involves an aristocrat called the Mistress of Ceremonies. If you manage to buy one in the first round, losing requires effort; inspired play by your opponents; really bad luck or some combination of the above. Another aristocrat, the Judge, isn’t broken if you buy it in the first round, but it is very strong. The expansion provides a replacement Mistress that has been nerfed, probably making it slightly worse in the first round than the Judge (which was not changed).

Acquiring variety in aristocrats tends to dominate other forms of scoring. The reward for aristocrats is based on the series of triangular numbers {1, 3, 6, 10, 15…}, maxing out at 55 points for 10 varieties. That means that aristocrats past your fifth variety become very valuable, since they also provide regular ruble – and possibly VP – income as well. While this does not render other cards moot, ignoring the aristocrat race is not practical. Fixing aristocrat scoring requires tinkering with the scoring progression, flattening it out somewhat, or nerfing all of the aristocrats. Neither of these options is appealing out of the box.

Aristocrat scoring also makes another card, the Observatory, very strong in three- and four-player games where it helps you to acquire more aristocrats without having to manipulate the tableau. It is worth noting that the expansion also includes a more expensive version of the Observatory. This keeps it strong, but can make it painful to buy early in the game, at least.

The expansion also includes materials and rules to add a fifth player, buffs for a couple of underpowered cards and several entirely new cards. These include one-time use only cards that allow you to pull off some sneaky tricks. While I am not a big fan of the latter, the fixes are very nice to have, and most of the new permanents are also interesting.

Unfortunately, playing with all of the new cards drags the game out a fair bit. While longer games stretch out the transition from income to VPs, which makes it more strategically interesting, adding all of the cards also causes Saint Petersburg to overstay its welcome. Thinning out some of the less interesting cards should help, though, and groups should be able to find their sweet spot with some experimentation. One obvious place to begin, though, are the additional copies of cards from the original set which are mostly intended for use in the five-player game.

As anyone that knows games by Hans im Glück and Rio Grande, such as Carcassonne and Amun-Re, will expect, the production quality is excellent. While the art on the cards features a quirky, deliberately crude style, cards are readily identifiable from across the table. The icons for the cards’ powers and income are also nice and chunky. While it will not blow anyone away, the graphic design is distinctive, functional and moderately attractive, while the components are all durable and high quality.

One minor note on the expansion, though: I own a copy of the base game from the original printing, which uses gold metallic ink to highlight features on the cards, including the edges and icons on the backs of the cards, while newer printings and the expansion do not have this, using a light brown instead. As a result, I can identify which cards are from the expansion and which are from the base game even when they are face down.

Saint Petersburg is not quite on the same level as truly classic euro-like card games such as Bohnanza, Race for the Galaxy or Battle Line/Schotten-Totten. It has some significant design flaws which, to be blunt, should not have gotten past developers as good as Brunhoffer and Jay Tummelson, and a little more strategic variety would have been nice. The core systems sing, though, and even an occasional bad game has not soured me on Saint Petersburg, even after a lot of play. It’s certainly worth any eurogamer’s time to try it out, and many of you will find it a place in your regular gaming rotation.

The actual gameplay of iDuel Online is incredibly simple, which is both a knock against it and a point in its favor. The simplicity allows for extremely quick, pick-up-and-play action, and the duels can be a lot of fun when you have an opponent who’s actually paying attention and trying to outthink you. However, that same simplicity, combined with the relative lack of players, can leave you wishing there was more here to sink your teeth into.

Character creation is fairly straightforward in iDuel Online. Pick your hair. Pick your skin color. Pick your face. The character designs are reminiscent of various 2D avatar builders online, but it works in this context. The equipment you buy rounds out your character’s looks and stats. While later levels have matched sets and semi-consistent themes, your early character is likely going to be an eclectic mélange of random stat-boosting equipment.

This is a game about gladiatorial combat though, not dress-up. (Well, maybe it’s a little bit about dress-up.) There are ranked and unranked matches, though I have no idea what the difference is. The in-game leaderboards seem entirely based on how many Match Points you’ve earned, either lifetime or weekly, so I don’t know why there’s a distinction made.

The opponent list displays a user’s avatar, level, class, stats, and whether or not they’re online. One big improvement Namazu Studios have made to the game since launch is allowing players to fight computer-controlled opponents, called Sleepwalkers, alleviating the frustration of finding no one online.

Fights follow a rock-paper-scissors approach (Reckless Attack, Attack, Defend), with some special moves thrown in for spice. Reckless Attack does a lot of damage, but it’s reversed against the attacker by Defend. Defend reduces the damage from Attack, but if the players are of similar level, plenty of damage still gets through. The special moves work along a similar line, generally building upon one of those three bases. It’s an interesting balance, and playing against a similarly leveled opponent can be a tense affair as you try to outthink their next move.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of reason to seek out or wait for an opponent who matches your level. Just a few levels difference to either side can lead to a one-sided fight, and in the later levels especially, the rewards for massacring a level-one Sleepwalker are far better than those gained by fighting anyone else. There’s a penalty for fighting a Sleepwalker that removes half the Match Points earned, but that penalty is assessed no matter the player’s level. Is that a deal breaker? Not really, but it’s worth noting.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer a brief word about the Potions of Specialness. For 99 cents you get 50 potions, with every dollar more you spend adding 75 to that total, up to 350 for $4.99. A potion is used every match, turning it into a “Special Match.” At the end of a Special Match, a win nets you three Spectral Credits, while a loss nets you two. I mention this because there are items in the game that can only be purchased with Spectral Credits. Those items can be quite powerful – in some cases, exceedingly so. Whether they’re worth spending your money on is up to you, though.

Overall, I enjoy iDuel Online. It’s not perfect, by any means, and it’s missing some features, like a chat room or friends list, that might improve the experience. However, it’s much more entertaining than, say, another Mafia Wars clone or War: the Card Game. It’s easy to start up, poke around for a bit, pick a fight and be done in just a few minutes, and when you get a really good match going, it can be intense. The folks at Namazu Studios are listening to their audience and making the improvements and changes that the community wants, which makes iDuel Online’s future look even better. I can see this staying on my iPhone for a long time to come.

Storytelling games pique my interest because there is no game in the world I like more than Once Upon A Time – and party-type games in general are right in my wheelhouse. But this also raises the stakes, because if you’re going to step into a horse race with Once Upon A Time, you’d better be bringing your A-game, and you’d better be bringing something new to the table. Shenanigans fails at both tasks. Shenanigans is the worst kind of party game, confusing simplicity with poor design and believing a spirit of freewheeling fun is excuse for a lack of playtesting. It not only doesn’t deserve to be in the race with Once Upon A Time, it probably shouldn’t even be on the market.

Lest you think I’m picking on the small and plain-looking, let me be clear. I think art and presentation are important – they’re at the core of an enjoyable gaming experience. However, I can certainly tell a hawk from a handsaw no matter the colors it is wearing. The Shenanigans cards are of a decent quality, with a nice logo on the back and clear information on the front. The few images it does use are all rough bitmapped polygons, but that can even work in the game’s favor, since it is designed to not just feel silly but also to revel in its extreme frivolity. I can even forgive the bad booty joke and the inexplicable giant glass dildo labelled “plague” because low-tech is obviously the shtick they were going for.

For the same reason, it’s mostly okay that this isn’t a card game, and that it has no win condition. The rules label it half card game, half roleplaying game, and according to the rules, the winner is the person who had the most fun. Like a game of Mad Libs or Who’s Line Is It Anyway, the point is to tell entertaining stories based on random inspirational elements and with other people butting in. Like Once Upon A Time, Shenanigans gives you noun cards you need to use in your story (Cabin Boy, Pistol, Poop) and story-framing elements that tell you the purpose of the tale (“Tell us of the time you were attacked by a ghost ship”). Like Baron Munchausen, other players can throw in a curve ball by playing cards with new elements to add to the story. Again, like Once Upon A Time, you can’t be too silly or too outside the scripted framework or you get penalised, and much like Munchausen, this takes the form of chip wagering votes for and against. The things new to Shenanigans are ways to combine the noun cards with adjectives (a flying cabin boy, a futuristic pistol) or linking them with “Of” cards (a flying pistol of poop).

Unfortunately, that’s the only innovation the game brings to the table. It does have some surrounding framework of being in a pirate setting, with players actually taking on pirate names (and putting them on name cards) and being forced to talk like pirates, but they aren’t really part of the game proper. Which wouldn’t be a big problem because the pirate theme is there in the noun cards, except they keep undercutting it with inappropriate items for cheap gags (bowling balls, fluffy dogs, taxes) – and then they turn around and undercut that silliness by demanding that your pirate name not be silly at all. When my players discovered that “Astronaut Johnny” was an illegal name, they all named themselves Astronaut Johnny because they were cranky at the tone the rules were taking. It seemed very churlish to include cards asking a fearsome pirate to talk about the time he used his bowling ball of poop to get through the line at the DMV and then tell you that you can’t be called Astronaut Johnny.

None of this would be a problem if the game mechanics themselves really helped pull you in or made you laugh, but they don’t. Telling a story with three or four random objects is not particularly exciting or funny (or difficult). Like too many bad party games, unless the players are themselves geniuses and funny, the game won’t be funny, because the mechanics themselves don’t help this along. Often they are frustratingly vague, because there is no way to win, no points to get and no real guidelines on what makes a good story or how much you have to use the object cards (unlike Once Upon A Time or Munchausen, where there’s plenty of guidelines and heaps of examples). Then, although the game basically admitted it has no mechanics whatsoever, it has the most complicated start-up mechanics of any game I’ve ever seen. You have to do this extended rigmarole of dealing out cards until everyone has a story card and then the person with the highest rated one goes first, except – oh wait we’re back to vague town again – the very common ties are broken by “the most fierce!” The most fierce what? Pirate? Story? Player? Day of the week?

But the worst crime of all is not the rules just being vague but being unplayably incoherent. Each round begins with one player handing out cards to people. Those who get story cards have to tell a story. Stories are rated from 1 to 4, which is the number of objects that must be included in the story. Having an adjective on an object makes it count as two, as does Of-linking two objects, but both combinations only count as one card in front of a player, which is good because they can only have a maximum of four cards in that space. You want to keep some spare, because even though you’re getting new cards each turn, you need to have as many items as the story requires. What’s more, at any time players can raise the number of items required by playing other cards. And if at any time you can’t meet the requirement…

…then God knows what happens. The designers might know, but they didn’t put any hint in the rules. Does the story get discarded? Given to someone else? Does the player lose one of his non-existent points that he doesn’t need for his non-existent win condition? Our group read the rules five times and concluded that there was no answer. The inability to meet the item requirement isn’t a rare thing, either – items are rare enough that players may go several turns without having more than one, making them ineligible for 75% of stories at their base level.

So when I say Shenanigans is unplayable, I mean unplayable. Every time we tried to play this game we could not complete one single hand because the rules did not exist. My players were already cranky that we were playing a low-rent version of Once Upon A Time, so when we hit this problem there were mass walkouts and harsh language. This isn’t a game; a game is something that’s designed, preferably after reviewing the rest of the field and after rigorous examination of its purpose. This is just somebody having a fun evening telling stories and writing down some crazy card ideas and then going straight to print without all the steps in between. It doesn’t need a review, it needs a playtester – or a dozen. Proliferation and plenitude are a sign of a strong, prospering game industry, yes, but this kind of rushing to print such a loosely designed product just makes the whole industry look bad.

Of course, even if Shenanigans had been playtested, it still probably wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as Once Upon A Time, the Rolls Royce of storytelling games. Which isn’t to say no other games should enter the field or try to bring their own ideas into the arena – but if they do, they should at least try harder. At the very least, they should try harder than Shenanigans did. It feels like the designers barely tried at all. The game feels like it was thrown together in five minutes flat, and that’s just not good enough for my money – nor, I assume, for yours.

Half a star.

Mutant City Blues features one of my new favorite role playing systems, GUMSHOE. GUMSHOE is a system designed to allow the GM and players to have exciting investigative games without worrying about a failed spot check ruining the game. It also spotlights two popular genres, merging them into a cool blend that gives a new twist on superheroes. Written by fan favorite author of The Esoterrorists, HeroQuest, and Feng Shui, Robin D. Laws is known as an innovator in the industry, always bringing something new to the table.

The GUMSHOE System, originally designed for The Esoterrorists, is Robin Laws’ answer to running a successful investigative game. It makes the assumption that the characters are good at their jobs and will find the clues they are looking for automatically, as long as they have the right skills. What the players do with this information after they have it is up to them. This mirrors the cop shows you watch on TV like CSI. You never see Grissom not finding the clues they need, the excitement comes from putting the clues together and finding the murderer.

Combat is downplayed in GUMSHOE but you can still get your hands dirty mixing it up with super powered bad guys. The resolution system is handled with simple D6 rolls added to points spent from skills against a target number chosen by the game master. For example if you have 6 points in shooting and need to hit a fleeing perp you might choose to spend 3 points, roll the D6, and add the two together to compare it against the target number to hit him of 3. Easy!

Skills are divided up into Investigative skills, investigative powers, general powers and standard skills. The main difference is that with investigative skills and powers you don’t roll for them. If the GM determines that you will find a clue, he will give it to you. If there might be some bonus with the clue, he will ask if you want to spend a point or two in the skill to receive it. Usually these just make you look good while performing the task, but can provide a true benefit. General Powers and Standard skills use the tests as detailed above.

The world of Mutant City Blues exists ten years in the future after a strange ‘Ghost Flu’ plagues the planet. People everywhere of all ages succumb to it and then it mysteriously it disappears. Months later some people that had the flu manifest mutant powers. These powers are documented by Doctor Quade on his Quade Diagram and a map of known powers is developed. This Quade Diagram is not only used by scientists but by the police department to solve crimes. You can quickly tell by the diagram what kind of mutant or mutants were involved. It also has game mechanics that help you choose your powers since it’s cheaper to buy powers that are near each other on the diagram.

The world is not your normal superhero world. The characters do not run around in tights. They work for the HCIU – Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit – and investigate crimes that might be beyond the normal cop’s abilities. The book covers many aspects of the HCIU including procedures, organizational structure and assignments. Other chapters go into a more detailed look at forensics, the heightened and the law. It really sets a good stage for those unfamiliar with police procedures to begin their virtual careers.

The powers listed in the book cover a wide variety of comic book powers and abilities. Detailed descriptions are given of the powers, along with their uses, slang terms people refer to them by, where the power’s located on the Quade diagram, which powers are connected to it, and a feature I found interesting, the legal ramifications of their use. For example Mind Reading or Spooking is illegal without consent or a warrant and is punishable by up to 20 years in jail. The powers are separated into investigative and general powers depending on their use in the game.

Not all powers are entirely good. In order to take certain powers, you must follow the path along the Quade diagram which might lead you to a defect you must take before moving on to the next power. Defects, which provide you with role playing opportunities, are rated in terms of stages. Stage one is not so bad, it only affects you slightly, but stage three effectively cripples and retires you from the force. Defects come up if a sub-plot focuses on your defect. You can try to avert the crisis through role playing, or if it becomes necessary, by making a test. Failure indicates you move to the next defect stage and suffer its effects. Stages one and two you can try and recover from with counseling or treatment.

A chapter detailing the current state of the world fills you in on what’s going on in this changed world, including changes to medicine, politics, sports and the arts. The timeline brings you up to date on what has happened in the last ten years. Following this is advice on building your own Mutant city. Customizing the setting to fit your needs makes the game more personal and puts control into the gamemaster’s and players’ hands, something that many games don’t do anymore. Statistics are given for many key individuals that could play a role in your games along with some example organizations.

A Robin Laws book would not be complete without some excellent advice on running and playing the game. Investigation games can be tricky – coming up with plots, evidence and twists doesn’t come naturally to those of us brought up on the traditional dungeon crawls. that the entire process is covered and laid out in an easy to understand way. After reading the GM tips provided, I was confident I could run an investigation. Sample premises are also given if you need some help with a quick idea. Player’s advice goes over sub plots that players come up with to help a GM personalize the game for them, as well as some interviewing techniques players can use when they’re questioning witnesses.

If this game has one flaw, it’s the combat system. For a superhero game you usually look for a robust combat system. I’m not saying you can’t throw down with these rules, but if you do it too much, you’re going to get hurt. Your combat skills use the same mechanic as other skills. If you spend three points on an attack, it’s gone until your next adventure. That being said, the amount of combat system that is here is the right amount for an investigation game.

Wrap all this up with a short intro adventure and you’ve got the makings of a top notch game from Pelgrane Press. Whether you’re a fan of comic books or TV police drama, Mutant City Blues has you covered. Mutant City Blues is well written and fun to read, and I look forward to running adventures using the GUMSHOE rules. If you’re looking for something different or love the idea of mixing Heroes with CSI, you won’t go wrong with Mutant City Blues.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mutant City Blues was one of the games chosen for the 2009 Game Cryer Holiday Gift Guide. You can read more about this great game at All Games Considered.

Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies (S7S for short) is a very interesting game that will feel quite at home for anyone used to modern one-mechanic-to-rule-them-all RPGs. It adds nice twists to that mechanic which encourage entertaining narration and the reincorporation of key elements of the characters, though. Description of the results of die rolls are always by the player that rolled the dice, too. The result is a system that balances pace and action with color and story. The setting hits most of the tropes of its genre, but also features some original flourishes that can inspire GMs and players alike. Add in play advice that is well above average, and S7S is easily in the top tier of action-adventure RPGs.

S7S is built using a variant of the PDQ system called PDQ#. Underkoffler and others have used forms of PDQ in half a dozen other RPGs, so it is well-tested, but S7S is the first game to use PDQ#, which is streamlined and tweaked for action-adventure play.

The basic mechanic of PDQ comes right out of any traditional RPG design. Roll 2d6 and add your appropriate attribute – a Forté – plus a bonus if you narrate in stylistic touches that are appropriate for your characters favored Techniques. Some Techniques are tied to specific Fortés while others can be used at any time you can fit them in. Entertaining the table or letting your character’s Foible hinder you will earn you Style Dice (as will a couple of other, minor methods), which you can spend to roll-three-keep-top-two instead of rolling straight 2d6. That’s a little hippified, but not unheard of in mainstream RPGs. Oh, and the extended conflict system can be applied to any dramatic conflict, not just combats. Again, unconventional, but hardly unheard of.

However, Fortés are not skills. They do not come from a standardized list, and they do not (necessarily) correspond directly to an area of expertise in the way skills typically do. For example, every character has his Nationality as a Forté, representing how culture shapes what a person knows, and what she is likely to know how to do. Each character has Fortés that represent his past life and his motive for pursuing a life of adventure (earn m’lady’s love, free mom and dad from the Dread Pirate, that sort of thing), too. Likewise, Piracy is just as valid a Forté as Brawling. Even the magic and alchemy systems are built from Fortés and Techniques.

Another odd bit is that players narrate the results of their dice rolls, not the GM. This is rather unusual in traditional games when a player succeeds, and pretty much unheard of outside of the story games scene for failed rolls.

The real kickers, though, are damage and Story Hooks. In extended conflicts, which S7S calls Duels, damage is applied by reducing the rating of a character’s Fortés, and the player taking the damage decides which Fortés are damaged. That means that a seduction can inhibit a character’s ability with a sword, and a swordfight can damage a character’s mercantile acumen.

The rulebook points out that this is not intended to be realistic. It simulates a trope from action-adventure stories instead; often, when a protagonist suffers his first reversal, his entire life starts falling apart.

On top of this, damage generates Story Hooks. A Story Hook is a requirement that the GM spawn a plotline, or at least a scene, that revolves around complications in the character’s life related to the damaged Forté. Story Hooks are only generated under certain circumstances, but a generated in almost every Duel, and players can control which Fortés Story Hooks are based on.

The eponymous 7 Skies is the default setting for the game, although I don’t think there are any great barriers to adapting the game to your own swashbuckling world, or 17th century France, for that matter. The “universe” of the setting is an enormous hemispheric dome of air. A strange, viscous substance called The Blue forms its base and an enormous pillar of fire is its hub. The universe is divided radially into six different regions, called skies (the seventh is the pillar of fire).

Each sky has it’s own nature and it’s own climate from which they derive their names. That means that the Sky of Thunder is full of enormous black clouds that constantly spit lightning, and the Sky of Stones is a rocky obstacle course. Orbiting through these skies are several enormous rocks inhabited by human civilizations. These civilizations interact with each other by means of ships made from the wood of floating trees that inhabit one of the skies. As a result, those ships can travel between worldlets on the wind.

With one exception, each worldlet is home to a single nation, and the largest and most important of those nations are described in the book. Underkoffler does not bury you in detail, but he does provide the basics of each world’s culture, a key organization or two, a few figures of note and the major conflicts facing each nation. A high percentage of this material is fodder for campaign, adventure and character concepts.

This concise presentation does make the nations one-dimensional, with a couple of lucky ones finding a second dimension. This is not unusual for RPGs and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. High adventure relies on charismatic heroes and colorful villains with strong drives and fearless natures, not anthropological detail. There is nothing to stop a keen GM from adding a twist or a subculture if he needs it, either. In fact, it’s easier to customize a bare bones setting than a fully fleshed out setting, since there is less canon getting in your way, complicating matters. If you like a lot of detail in setting materials, though, the 7 Skies may disappoint.

Each nation has a distinctive form of government and culture, and none of the nations could be called generic aside from the fact that they draw on tropes more than actual cultures. My only quibble is that, aside from a jungle nation and one that has some vaguely Arab influences, all of them are rooted in European tales and cultures. Considering the amount of non-EuroAmerican source material cited in the bibliography and especially the filmography it’s a little odd that there isn’t a wu xia world, for instance. There is a decent variety of sexual politics among the nations, including a couple varieties of full equality of the sexes, but there are no instances of matriarchy or violent misogyny.

I think this setting does a very nice job of supporting the swashbuckling genre. It cuts away the extraneous material and gets right to the romance, intrigue and conflict you need. The entirely original milieu of the 7 Skies is a pleasantly over-the-top, romantic blend of Age of Colonialism seafaring, space opera interplanetary travel and Space: 1889. True, the ties between the system and the 7 Skies are easy to sever if you want to go elsewhere with this system, but the setting, considering it only fills a little over 100 pages, delivers in spades.

The play advice is quite solid overall, including a nice overview of how to develop an adventure from the characters’ Foibles, Motivations and Story Hooks. The rules sections are heavy on sidebars with tips for getting more out of the system, including how to bend it a bit here and there for effect. While these sidebars contain very good material, I’d have liked it better if it was gathered together and combined with the rest of the play advice material. I find it has more impact if you read it in “advice” mode instead of as a distraction while trying to read the rules. Reasonable people can disagree on this, though.

The book ends with a nice overview of the swashbuckling genre. Underkoffler is rather renowned in certain circles for his genre analyses, and I think S7S lives up to this, though it wasn’t quite the deep dissection I expected beforehand. It presents a good overview of the major elements of the genre, like romance, action and style, and its bibliography and filmography are deep, taking up over a page each.

While the advisory material as a whole isn’t quite up to the level of A Penny for my Thoughts or Spirit of the Century, it is a cut above what you find in most RPG rulebooks. The genre overview holds up to almost any you will find in an RPG, as well.

Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies does what it says on the tin – provide an engine for dashing adventure – with a nice, well-crafted system and setting. While it doesn’t quite get my blood rushing with excitement, it does beckon as a lighter, more color-focused version of the action-adventure genre than most RPGs provide. It fits a niche similar to that of Spirit of the Century, but S7S doesn’t rely on laundry lists of stunts and skills, which suits me nicely, although it may disappoint some gamers. S7S is now my top choice for high-color action-adventure romps.

The Droid Codex, with its myriad combat, technical and utility droids, makes it tremendous resource for game masters, particularly for those running Clone Wars or other droid-heavy campaigns. This is easily the most statblock-heavy book since Threats of the Galaxy, which may make Scavenger’s Guide to Droids less essential for players. Those who enjoy playing droids will find plenty of new options for their characters, and tech specialist types should appreciate how the protocol format allows them to put their creations to work, but even they may be disappointed by how much of the book has been dedicated to the codex.

Scavenger’s Guide to Droids starts off by tearing down the system for creating droids presented in the core rulebook, and presents a new one based on droid chassis. With this approach, the chassis – like astromech, battle, and medical – take on the role normally served by species, providing droid characters with certain advantages and built-in equipment.

The new approach brings droids in line with the standard character creation rules, and makes the entire process a lot easier. A set of manufacturing traits, which provide bonuses or penalties based on manufacturer, back up the new species-like approach to droids. For example, Baktoid Combat Automata (creatures of the infamous B1 battle droids from the Phantom Menace) are easily confused; players can make a Persuasion check to cause the droid to question it’s programming and stand idle for a round) while the Czerka Corporation droids are extremely personable, allowing them to use their Charisma or Wisdom modifiers in place of Charisma when making persuasion checks. It’s all enough to create a droid character that’s every bit as compelling as an organic character with a background from the Rebellion Era Campaign Guide or a Legacy Destiny from the Legacy Era Campaign Guide.

There are 40 quirks that droids can start with or acquire when they’re reduced to 0 hit points. These include “curious” in which the droid likes to intrude on areas where it’s not invited or “helpful” in which it attempts to assist with any skills it knows – as well as those it doesn’t.

There are also five new droid-specific talent trees, one for each degree of droid. First-degree droids (medical, scientific, espionage) gain skillful new options such as “Science Analyzer”, which doubles Intelligence modifiers when making skill, while second-degree droids (such as astromech droids) get technical talents like “scomp link slicer” which introduces new hacking options. Third-degree droids (protocol droids) gain new talents to improve their diplomatic and persuasion checks. Fourth-degree (combat droids) gain enhanced targeting tools, the ability to greatly reduce damage from a single attack per encounter, and a new overload option for onboard weapons. Rounding out the new talents are the fifth-degree droid talents that allow construction droids to enhance their durability, temporarily double their Strength bonus to melee attack roles, and turn their cargo loads into projectiles.

Droid prestige classes gain new talents as well – independent droids gain new options for their Specialized Droid, Autonomy, and Elite Droid talent trees, while the droid commander prestige class gets the override talent tree.

Of course, sometimes all of this can be overkill when all you want a droid for is to make the occasional skill check or provide covering fire in a fight. That’s what the new protocol format is for. Borrowing a page from The Clone Wars Campaign Guide’s Follower talents, the protocol format allows players to have a stripped-down droid companion. Rather than running another full-blown NPC, the droid companion gives players two to four offensive, defensive and skillful options. Each of these options takes 1-3 of the player’s swift actions to execute, meaning that a player can still move and perform a standard action (such as shooting, using a talent or feat, or aiding another character) and order the droid to help.

If the encounter demands it, the GM can always step in with the full droid stats, but for the most part the protocol format is about providing characters with additional flexibility without complicating things with another full-blown NPC in play.

I like it; my own character is a lightsaber-wielding, tech specialist Jedi and I can easily see him building a droid assistant. It’s not something I’d considered of before Scavenger’s Guide because I didn’t want the overhead of another character, but a protocol-format droid could work well. The book provides ten examples of popular droids converted to the format – including HKs, 3P0s and B1 battle droids – along with rules for converting existing droids to the format.

There are a number of new feat options, the bulk of which involve combat. Among the new offensive options are gems like Aiming Accuracy, which grants a +5 bonus after aiming, while Pinpoint Accuracy allows a droid to move a damaged foe one step down the condition track. Meanwhile Tool Frenzy allows a droid to gain +2 to attacks with non-weapon appendages in exchange for a -2 penalty to Reflex Defense, and Mechanical Martial Arts causes enemies to take a -5 to attack and damage rolls after being hit by the droid.

There are also several defensive and skillful feats. Turn and Burn lets a droid withdraw through two threatened squares instead of just one, while damage conversion allows a droid to take extra damage instead of moving down the condition track. Logic Upgrade: Skill Swap lets a droid change out a trained skill for an untrained one, and Sensor Link lets a droid share sensor data with another droid. There are 17 new feats in all, serving to round out both offensive and utility droids.

Rounding out the character options is the Droid Equipment chapter, which presents new forms of locomotion, appendages, processors, and accessories. Options include hidden holsters for concealed weapons, high-speed cutting torches, holographic game systems, comm jammers, hidden compartments and blaster recharge interfaces, just to name some of the most interesting … and iconic.

All of this is packed into the first half of the book. The second half is given over to a massive, 92-page Droid Codex. It’s essentially Threats of the Galaxy in droid form, providing statblocks and write-ups for 46 new droids. Actually, it’s two or three times that number, since almost all of the entries provide two or three variations on the theme, as well as a separate protocol-style statblock. Packed in amongst the statblocks are adventure hooks and insights provided by one of four characters: Klikk the Jawa scavenger, Raalo the Toydarian junk dealer, Mavvern the Besalisk arms dealer, and EV-6T6, a supervisor droid.

This is a huge amount of space to dedicate to statblocks and GM-specific material. As a game master, I’m glad to have it; while there have been plenty of new droids scattered among the various campaign guides, it’s nice to have a single sourcebook I can go to for new threats and allies. The plot hooks are great – as I’ve said before, any time I can read through a sourcebook and see a dozen ideas for my campaign in as many pages, I know I’ve got a winner.

For players though, all these droids may be a disappointment. One of my players bought the book, and was chagrined to find it was essentially Threats of the Galaxy lite. He would rather have seen more options for the game, like additional droid prestige classes and tech specialist options. I see his point – I would have loved to see them peel off 20 pages to create Galaxy at War-style battlebase write-ups for droid factories and a skillful droid prestige class – but I enjoyed the book all the same.

Ultimately, Scavenger’s Guide is a worthwhile purchase for game masters who want droids to play a prominent role in their game. Players with droid or tech specialist characters will find the first half of the book adds a bunch of welcome options. Whether or not that’s enough to make up for the half of the book that’s dedicated to droid and encounter material is something individual players will need to decide.

The sourcebook looks to provide players and game masters with background materials to keep their games flying. It succeeds. While diehards may take issue with the introduction of cybernetics to the Firefly universe, Six-Shooters & Spaceships lives up to its title by providing plenty of solid background material for the Serenity RPG. It’s a solid purchase for anyone running the game but fans of other science fiction RPGs will find it equally useful.

I fall into the latter category. I run the occasional Serenity one-shot at conventions, but my weekly game is Star Wars. When I first flipped through the book, it was the 14-odd floor plans that immediately drew my eye. Wizards of the Coast did a decent job in providing starship floor plans in many of its Star Wars source books, but they tend to follow a similar blockish, single-level layout reminiscent of the Millennium Falcon. Keeping with the spirit of Firefly and Serenity, the ships in Six-Shooters & Spaceships are multi-deck affairs with prominent cargo holds, common areas, and cramped crew quarters.

The deck plans are perfect for anyone looking for a tramp freighter for their science fiction game, and make it worth checking out the book just for those, even if you never use a single Serenity game mechanic. The same goes for the NPC write-ups, which have enough quirks to give Mal Reynolds and the Serenity’s crew a run for their money. Need some space pirates, rival traders or local character for your game? Just flip to chapter two.

While I picked up Six-Shooters & Spaceships fully intending to loot it for my Knights of the Old Republic game, it is first and foremost a Serenity source book. Unlike Big Damn Heroes, which upgrades the Serenity RPG to the current state-of-the-Cortex-art, this book is purely supplemental. As such, it introduces a lot of mundane material not included in the Serenity core rulebook. Some might question the need for forensics kits, game boxes, smart paper and party dresses, but if anything, Firefly was about sweating the small stuff. In a universe where strawberries are a delicacy, write-ups on multi-tools, paint sets and sewing kits make sense.

There’s plenty of gear with crunchy rules as well, such as burn gel (essential when you’re cutting your way into a derelict ship), camouflage paint (perfect for getting the drop on a contact who’s about to betray you) and armored dusters (also useful when you’re about to be betrayed). There are an assortment of hand-to-hand weapons, from broken bottles to stunners to extensible swords, as well as a variety of pistols, rifles and firearm accessories like night vision and thermal scopes.

Perhaps most controversial will be the section on cybernetics, which adds a high tech feel to Firefly’s largely low-tech universe. The new rules allow players to gain a Cyber-Enhancement, which provides a +2 step bump to a single attribute. They can also take it as a major upgrade, which includes a step bump plus two new traits (one a benefit, one a complication). Specific cybernetic implants include chemical regulators (granting the Steady Calm asset), Chronometer (effectively Walking Timepiece asset) and Cybernetic Uplink (equal to the Mechanical Empathy asset).

Functionally, it allows players to acquire new benefits and drawbacks with a cybernetic justification. While I haven’t tried it in game, I expect it will work just fine. The bigger question is: does it fit your campaign? That’s one that every game master is going to have to answer for themselves, but I have to say that as a fan of the long ago Star Frontiers sourcebook Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space I was happy to see the rules in there. The technological contrast between Browncoat fringes and the civilized Alliance core tends toward the extreme; cybernetics could be a good way of reinforcing that.

There are plenty of little knickknacks and specialized tools in this book that could be helpful to have in a regular campaign, especially if you’re trying to recapture everyday life on the fringe and in the black. The real value of the book, both as a system resource and as one you’re stealing content from for other games, are the starships and NPCs.

Like Malcolm Reynold’s Serenity, all of the named ships in this book have personalities of their own, and crews that are every bit as quirky. There’s the Cantankerous, a surplus Alliance tank transport that’s been converted for freight duty by her captain, Ming-Mei Kowalski. She inherited the barely-functional heap from her recently deceased uncle. White Lightning is a freighter that doubles as a traveling salon and sneaks in a little smuggling on the side to help pay the bills. Elsewhere there’s the Rascal Puff, a freelance rescue ship that might save your bacon should your ship become disabled out in the black. And if you just need a place to kick back, relax and place a few bets, the OddEasy is for you – the former space liner was converted into a traveling prize-fight arena by streetfighter-turned-entrepreneur Jamison Merryweather

As a game master, Six-Shooters & Spaceships was well worth picking up. Players will get a little less bang for their buck; the equipment chapter is handy, but unless they’re the kind who loves to pour over floor plans for their future dream ship, this book won’t be as useful.

War for Edadh is a solid design which will succeed or fail as a game depending on how you feel about the simultaneous action selection (rock-paper-scissors) mechanic that lies at its heart. There are enough bells and whistles hanging from this core mechanic to give play sense and structure, but not enough to change the fact that War for Edadh’s heart is rock-paper-scissors. It also suffers from a too-clever-for-its-own-good introductory rulebook and some serious usability issues. While you should not avoid War for Edadh because of these problems if it otherwise sounds like something you’d enjoy, fence-sitters who are not eagle-eyed should stay away.

After players choose their armies, they organize each unit’s cards into three columns. Only the card currently in front engages with the enemy’s units and the state of the battle changes with time, so order is quite important. Leadership cards, on the other hand, sit in reserve, waiting for the right moment to influence the battle.

Combat occurs in three-round “durations”. At the beginning of each round, the players secretly choose a Combat Value for the round, and the winner is determined rock-paper-scissors style, with low values beating the highest values (but not middling values) through a small rules kludge. High values also let a player deal more damage, but are hard on a critical resource. The winning player then chooses one of his front-line units for the current clash, and then the loser does the same. The winner’s attack value is compared to loser’s defense value, with a high defense resulting in less damage, but not getting off scot free. There are plenty of wrinkles in this routine (such as when you use your leaders for bonuses) but you repeat for three rounds, then do some bookkeeping, then do it for three more rounds and so on, until one side succumbs.

The devil is in the details that I have glossed over, but if you cannot get past the rock-paper-scissors element, this game is a non-starter for you. The details add structure and make the choices more interesting, but it is feasible – possibly advantageous – to choose your CV completely at random and have an advantage over an opponent that is trying to marshal every edge he can.

A fancy version of rock-paper-scissors can certainly be fun. Games like Take 6! and Hoity-Toity are thematically very different, but mechanically related. What the successful ones have in common is that they do not outstay their welcome. War for Edadh also passes this test for me, since a skirmish shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes once you are familiar with the rules. Larger battles like a best-of-three fight take longer, but the rules for these larger fights add extra dimensions as well.

Unfortunately, War for Edadh has a couple of problems as a product that are independent of how good a game it is. The base set comes with two rulebooks, one an introductory text that just teaches the basic skirmish rules while the other is a comprehensive rulebook that provides a reference version of the skirmish rules, plus solitaire rules, and a few ways of playing out larger battles. Breaking the core rules out into an instructional rulebook is a good idea, but the presentation doesn’t work. While the introductory rulebook uses ample examples, but it is split into two parts. The first details the basics of troop combat, while the leadership, terrain and basic movement elements are left for the second part. This gives the impression that War for Edadh is a complex game that needs to be taught in stages. Actually, it is straightforward and easy to grasp when properly explained. I doubt that the skirmish rules are any heavier than such strategic eurogames as Puerto Rico or Goa, and they are probably noticeably simpler. It also peppers the rulebook with a lot of cross-references, especially in the “extended” rules, making them more confusing. It would have been much better to present the skirmish rules in their entirety from the beginning, a point made especially clear when you read the recap in the comprehensive rulebook, which is crystal clear. I ended up rereading the introductory rules three times and still had to refer to them – with some difficulty – the first couple times I played.

The instructional scenarios in the introductory rulebook are oddly over-simplistic, as well. In both, players begin with two-deep columns, with one type of unit on the front line and another in their back line. The added complexity of mixed units is minimal – troop cards do not have unique rules associated with them – but mixed lines would do a lot to show off the tactics the game offers.

The other usability problem is more persistent than the way the rules are organized: the troop and leadership cards are very hard to read. This is a product of several choices: the font; the decision to use italics for most of the information on the cards; the use of a smaller font-size in order to make more room for the artwork; the use of light text on a dark background with very low contrast colors – a very light orange on a dark green for one faction, instead of, say, white on black. As a result, it is impossible to read cards from across the table, and a fellow like me who is coming up on middle age even has to squint at close range sometimes. The Guard Value and Guard Defense stats, which are shown inside a sword and shield icon, are especially difficult to pick out.

The pity of it is that the cards are absolutely gorgeous; the art by Ash Pyne is better than any card game art I have seen. It is reminiscent of Brian Froud’s work: moody and distinctive and it makes Edadh stand out from other early-gunpowder fantasy settings. It’s a shame that the art direction means this fine art distracts from the game’s playability.

The base set of War for Edadh includes 120 of these beautiful cards, enough to build armies for the two core factions – the Huaos-Dzaa and the Angueth – plus the landscapes you battle on (terrain has an effect on combat). It also has the aforementioned two rulebooks, 10 scoresheets (each unit uses one) and 20 small plastic markers that you use on the scoresheets. I also received as part of my review package two expansion decks (with fixed contents, not randomized) which each contain 46 cards (6 of which are new terrain cards) plus a rulesheet for some new types of cards. I don’t think this new element will be necessary for a while, but the units are a welcome addition. There are several more expansions, including full campaign rules and new factions, in the works as well.

On the whole, I like War for Edadh, even if it is unlikely to end up in my pantheon of must-play board and card games. I am no great fan of simultaneous action selection, though, so a game that manages to win my favor in spite of that has something going for it. It’s a shame that production problems cause major problems for the game, though. Complex cards for games are difficult to design well, especially when the publisher tries to make them extra pretty as well. War for Edadh’s publisher, WarriorElite, is far from the only publisher to fall into this trap, however, and I do not want to make them a poster child for this kind of problem. If you feel confident that you can get past these hurdles, I do recommend War for Edadh. It’s not too complicated, offers some nice choices, plays quickly, and has several variants that can give it extra length and complexity if you want.

For his part, Sauron advances his Stories by nurturing several plots, and he commands many minions and monsters to intercept and attack the good guys. The heroes are assigned quests (hence the title), gain counsel from canonical Middle-Earth personalities, sabotage the enemy’s plots, and advance themselves through encounters as they travel. Once the markers reach the end of the Story Track, the “dominant” faction wins if it completed its mission; otherwise the winner is determined by one last combat of champions. The game is epic in both scale and size (the map is huge), and no part of it is done in a small way. There’s a lot of strategy to plumb and plenty of clever game mechanics, but it’s prohibitively long.

The object of the game is to have your team’s mission accomplished when the Story markers reach the end of the Story Track. One player portrays Sauron, massing his forces to take over the world, and one to three additional players are the heroes, holding the line while Gandalf gathers his army. Turns alternate between the two sides as they consolidate their positions, hopscotching their Story markers over each other down the track.

Sauron’s three types of actions gain him Influence, cards, and servants. He can double up on these actions, but they lose effectiveness this way. Influence markers are how he affects the game. He places these in adjoining cities, creating a web of his power that makes travel perilous for heroes, or he puts them in a pool. The bigger his Influence Pool is, the more potent are the Plots and cards available to him. His monsters and minions can guard locations, move to surround someone, or attack Sauron’s enemies. Minions are the notable underlings of the books like the Ringwraiths, while monsters are cheaper critters like the warg riders pulled randomly from a token pool. Some tokens are empty bluffs but most are painfully real. Finally, the Dark Lord can draw Plot and Shadow cards to empower himself. Plots are strictly regulated – he can only have three of them going at once, so their management is critical for his strategy. Like Plots, Shadow cards require a minimum Influence Pool, but their use is far easier and can affect combat, corrupt the heroes, and more.

When the heroes step up to bat they have a lot of ground to cover, figuratively and literally. There are five available characters, all original to this game and each with his own stats, abilities, and Hero Cards. These cards are used to execute most actions. Movement between locations demands a card with a matching terrain symbol, so for example, a swamp card could bridge two areas in a marsh. Movement is still possible without the right terrain but only by expending multiple cards to muscle through, and cards are also a character’s life in this game.

Adventuring tires and wounds a character, so cards are discarded separately according to why they were lost, and retrieving them is no trivial thing. A character rests to get his Rest Pool back, but if he does so Sauron’s Story tokens move forward. Healing returns his Damage Pool to him as well, but to do that he must be in a Haven, one of the citadels where heroes are protected from the effects of Sauron’s machinations. If a hero’s cards are all in discarded pools he has been defeated; he moves to a Haven and heals but now he loses equipment or favor as well, and favor is a hero’s best friend.

Favor, like Influence for Sauron, is the coin of the realm by which heroes accomplish their great deeds. Spending it eliminates Sauron’s plots and removes the effects of Corruption cards on a character.

Combat utilizes subtle strategy. At the outset of every fight, a hero’s agility score either adds cards to his hand or extends his endurance for the fight (see below). The antagonists secretly choose a card from their hand and reveal it. (Monsters and minions fall into one of three “levels” of villain, and draw cards from the matching deck when a fight starts.) Some cards are straightforward – they list attack and defense values, usually inversely (a heavy offense means lowering one’s defense). The fighters compare these values to find how much damage each inflicts and suffers. To mix things up, cards have special rules that affect the outcome. A savage attack may be so focused as to leave the aggressor defenseless, forcing him to take extra damage, or an aimed shot might do increased wounds on a subsequent round. Everyone (and everything) in the game is rated for his relative melee and ranged combat skills, giving opponents critical information about their card mix. Cards and fighters both have strength scores, and when someone plays cards in excess of this number he’s too tired to go on. The enemy may end up pummeling him senseless (though often he ends up exhausted as well).

The Story markers continue down the track, with the peril increasing at each stage. On Stage III, if one side completed its mission and can claim dominance (proximity to the end of the track), they win. If these criteria don’t determine a winner, a final, decisive battle occurs between Sauron’s Ringwraiths and the heroes’ champion, chosen from among their numbers.

Most of the components are up to the high standards Fantasy Flight Games has set for itself, including a vast map that offers a library of necessary information printed along the edges. If there’s a weak link in the chain it’s the ambitious miniatures: They’re something else, with a few that are absolute standouts, but some bend or even break under their own awesomeness. The game also uses region reference jewels, little colored dots that tell what cards apply to certain areas of the board. There are enough of these that the colors blend together, and determining which is which renders everyone squinty-eyed.

play on the whole is a lot like the figurines – it breaks its own arm batting for the fences. Middle-Earth Quest encompasses a big story, and even though the heroes are not “the” story, it’s a big game with a learning curve forged in the flames of Mordor. At the same time, one’s participation in it can seem like such a small thing. Combat is interesting, especially intellectually, but it’s not really thrilling. There’s all this space on the map, so much to see and do, but you’ll never get to most of it. Your small quests leave you feeling like a small player on an epic stage – that’s well within the idiom, but as a player you want more. There are plenty of options, though, so not only does it speak well to FFG’s attention to game balance, it means there’s always one more unexplored, unexploited advantage for a character in peril to pursue. (Corruption cards are one good example – as Mr. Frodo well knows, taking on one of these cards for some extra benefit would make just this one thing so easy . . .) Subtle things can swing the game, and laggers can make rapid advances. Then again, the missions can be dull: There are five for Sauron, and three of those are “Advance Story marker A/B/C to Stage III,” which is what you’re trying to do anyway. If, as it is too easy to do, the Story Track doesn’t determine the winner, having a mano-a-mano combat with only one chosen hero at the end seems anticlimactic – you’ve been doing that all game, too.

One thing about Corey Koneiczka and Christian T. Petersen’s design certainly makes this feel epic, and it may be the straw for someone on the fence about whether to buy: It’s a long game. The publishers suggest three hours and up and that’s accurate, in the same way that a geological epoch is three hours and up. In the time it takes to play your first game you can watch the entire special-edition movie trilogy. Getting better at it requires playing through it a few times, if everyone wasn’t alienated by it the first go-round. Middle-Earth Quest enjoys multifaceted strategy and an interesting give-and-take both in execution and in its combat system, but the time requirement and learning curve limit its value to all but the most patient and advanced players.