Warning! this post involves academic ranting. If you just want our house rules, you can skip this one. (promise our feelings won't be hurt)

So… Atlas Games' Lunch Money shares its place with Apples to Apples as a "game" I despise and get asked to play way too often.

Why I dislike these titles so much was best said by the Famous Carpenter when he said: "Before I got into professional carpentry, I really liked everything about it. Now, when I walk into a room, all I can see is what wasn't done right and it really gets me."

This really sums up my feelings on John Nephew & Charlie Wiedman's Lunch Money. When I knew nothing about game design, I found it entertaining and down right fun to play with my group of friends. Now, after a little education and experience, I can barely stand the thing.

If you want specifics, here are 5 reasons why you should hate it too:



1. Card design
I know a lot of people out there like the moody, sepia toned card design of this game, but hear me out. For a game that has 4 card types dictated by card color, why are there 5 or 6 different card colors? Is silver supposed to be part of the blue defense card family? I know printing errors happen, but was it really a good idea to make weapon cards violate and special cards a dull occasionally bluish red?

This short coming goes hand in hand with the complete lack of printed information on the cards individually. Want to know how to use a card? Pull out the rules and look it up! Now repeat that process for most of the 50 individual cards in the game, and then repeat again when you forget a specific card's rules during your turn. In short: you must stop playing the game to review the rule sheet on every players turn, every time you play.

we still end up doing this every game. even after playing this game for years, we've found rules we misunderstood or new interpretations of how the game is played! if you need an example: do you remember what cards a Headlock allows you to play?


2. Card balance
Since a Hail Marry that deals 7 points of damage costs no more than a Jab that deals 1 point of damage, it can get pretty frustrating when you aren't the player drawing the higher damage rate cards. Why would you ever want to draw a Spank that deals 2 points of damage (AND requires you to successfully play a Grab on the opponent before it) instead of a Power Play that deals 3 points of damage (and has the same restrictions)?

The Grab card poses a particular challenge. As players draws from a communal deck, it is possible to end up with a hand full of Grabs and nothing to use them with. (grabs deal no damage lone) Likewise it's possible to draw many red special cards, which are useless without a grab, and draw no grabs.

Dodge and Block cards present a similar problem. (In that they do the same thing, can be played in the same way, but the Dodge card is better)

In essence, there are good cards and bad cards and the player's only hope is that he draws more good cards than his opponent. i.e. it boils down to luck



3. Fussy rules
This should be obvious from the examples above, but you will spend a lot of time reviewing the rule booklet while playing this game. The primary reason for this is the red special cards, which make up about 50% of the cards in the game.

What makes these cards fussy, is that by SPECIAL the designers mean each card has a unique rule associated with it. Some special cards must follow a grab, others place status effects on their target, some must be defended against as if they were multiple individual attack cards. Some special cards even reference special interactions with other special cards.


4. King Maker and Petty Politics
Oddly King Maker, classic bane of game design, is not a huge issue in this game. Because Humiliation can be played at any time, there are times where a player can choose which of two battling opponents will be eliminated from the game (by nullifying either a crucial attack or defense card). However this rarely comes up, because the player will have something better to do with that card.

By contrast, petty politics is a much larger issue. Since a player can target any opponent in the game, ganging up on an individual player for meta-game reasons is not uncommon.



5. Fishing, Monking, and Hippie
I'll end my rant with three uniquely bizarre aspects of the game. These are technically not flaws, but rather odd things that tend to happen during play, which seem to go against the intent of the design.

When a player goes Fishing, he spends his turn (or multiple turns) dumping cards into the discard pile, to maximize his chances of drawing better ones. When multiple players go Fishing, they game breaks down and becomes who can acquire the most ideal hand and then launch a super-flurry / one turn kill first. This is a legitimate strategy in the game, and a legitimate design decision in some ways too, but it does point out how some cards are much more valuable than others. (even if a player is simply fishing for a grab card in order to use a particular special)

When a player goes Monking (or chooses to be "the Monk"), that player either Fishes for defense & counter cards OR constantly passes his own turn. This is also a legitimate strategy, as it ensures non-monks will grind away at each other while the monk remains safe OR the other players will be ground down by the monk's defenses at a relatively safe rate. The game can hang if too many players are Monking and its strategic effectiveness points out certain flaws in the game's attack / defense structure.

My last note is about the Hippie special card. Hippies allows all players to attack one target player at the same time, for the duration of one attack round, plus some minor restrictions. In short, there's nothing quite like being able to be eliminated from a game before you start your first turn…


That's my rant. I hope you enjoyed it. Tomorrow or next week I promise to post our House Rules for this game. I hope you enjoy those too, but if not, maybe it will get you a'ranting too ;-)

G - out

Mister Taru awakes with a pounding headache, following a massive kibble bender the night before. As his vision clears, malaise turns to dread as he finds idiots videoing him for youtube.

Taking the only logical course of action, Mister Taru gets up and has breakfast…

first show | last time

Branding! Branding! Branding! Setting up consistent rules for how our logos, marks, and tag lines are used is something I completely finished when I set up Robot Martini two years ago.

The above images are few black & white drafts I'm working on right now. When I have a collection I think works, I'm load them all into a style guide and go back to advertising again.


Just a little peek at what I'm working. Tomorrow I may start my pre-game rants about Atlus Games' Lunch Money. The rant will be a two parter (it's a long rant) and I'll follow it up with our House Rules as part of Friday's game day report / wrap up.

I spent the weekend in Philadelphia with Astrobrot artist "J D" David Lovejoy, Mister Dash, and fashion designer "Danny" Calico . Despite bringing a bag full of games, only three Philadelphia staples were to be had: Cat chases / bites stuff , kickball, and Box Eats Cat. Fortunately, we also wandered around downtown, hit the art museum, and generally had a great deal to eat.


Of course there is something rather wrong with Phili. This is a photo of the first placard Julez and I saw while touring the art museum. It felt appropriate, as half a dozen inner city children were gathered around and kicking the painting beside it.


2 examples of art at the museum. On the left is a solid gold cup, which features two spiraling serpents. On the right, a piece of furniture which reminds me of an angry monster!

I have to say, having grown up a shootings distance from the Washington DC art museums, and having 2 not-so-shabby art houses here in Baltimore I was both impressed and amused by the collection Phili had on tap. Impressed largely because the actual building is HUGE, and packed full of so many different things and amused, because the collection itself felt small despite the building's great size…


Regardless of my feelings about the museums, Phili's public Conveyor system is quite nice. It made me small-town-envious with its elevated trains, and multiple-path connection to the downtown area set up. (read: wtf is wrong with MDOT and why is Sheila Dixon not fixing it)

I liked the system so much, I grabbed a framed poster of it and will hang it on my office wall.

If you are interested in more photos & videos, check out my profile at facebook.com

Here is a recent treatment of the RMG shirt design. I'm playing up the robot in the background by making it more dimensional. It's certainly more active / exciting, but not there yet.

comments and criticism are very welcome
-G

It's a busy week here. Looking to finish these shirts and get them print-ready before I set up our Moli.com merch store. Also looks like the Web Guy is pretty close to ready with our update's beta testing.

Take a look below, and let me know what you think in the comments' section.



RMG-brand shirt #1: 'Porkchop' was removed to avoid branding confusion with floppies shirts. Over all, my concern is that the art is too disparate from the 8bit style currently featured on this website. original here.


RMG-brand shirt #2: 'GeeGee' was removed from this shirt to avoid confusion with the floppies brand. As with the above, I'm not sure if this is too off-character for the art on the website OR if that matters. If the shirt is cool, does it matter? (at the very least, I want to continue developing this style for use in future products) Original here


RMG-brand shirt #3: Simple redraft of the previous version. Changed the moon into our M "robot eyes" logo mark. Original here


Floppies-brand shirt #1: Also a simple clean up job of the previous image. Mostly removing line work from the dumpster in the background, and adding the RMG logo. Original here


Floppies-brand shirt #2: Added 'GeeGee' & 'Patrick' characters. Also changed the scale to put 'Pablo' more in the foreground. This image would likely be smaller (over the heart) instead of a full shirt's width. Original here

more to come later, but crit is welcome
-Gee

I'm working on RMG shirts, to coincide with the launch of RMG's website update AND the opening of our Moli.com store. Here are 5 that made it past the sketching phase.

You be the judge of whether we should use them or not. Please let me know what you think in the comments field below :-)


Tee #1:Porkchop jumps happily off of our gas oven / pipe robot.


Tee #2:Dan and Ku play tic-tac-toe in the alley, with Dan's matt knife.


Tee #3:Pablo runs from lightning, which a nasty cloud hurls at him from afar.


Tee #4:Gee walks by the light of his martini. A hidden danger approaches him from behind


Tee #5:Home sweet home, an exterior of the robot martini night club from the road.

above: Break (pink), Attack (orange), and Guard (blue) cards in my next free to download game "Donkey Punch". Images were drawn entirely in photoshop, using a d-pen & tablet.

Donkey Punch is a simple game for 2 or more players. (Since it is downloadable,there is no real limit to that number) Donkey Punch uses what was ultimately functional from Project Bladed, but didn't end up being what I wanted.

For anyone who has seen Project Bladed during its 5 or so years of development, the Specific mechanic that I am bringing over is simultaneous blind play. Otherwise, the game is largely original. (in so far as it was a direction I could have taken Project Bladed, but chose not to)

Provided I can get all the artwork hammered out, we may play this during this Thursday's game session.

feedback is quite welcome

G