Unmatched: Now that's an epic duel

“A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.” -- Bruce Lee

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one tabletop game that lets you determine the winner in a fight between Bruce Lee and a tyrannosaurus rex. That game is Unmatched, and it deserves your respect.

Unmatched began its life as a Star Wars game called Epic Duels, published in 2002 by Milton Bradley and sold primarily in the toy store market. As a grid-based tactical combat game, Epic Duels was quite a bit more interesting than the usual toy store fare of the time, with players invited to imagine match-ups between characters from across the Star Wars timeline (as it existed in 2002, anyway), and realize those battles with a unique game system using miniatures, dice and cards. It was an interesting little game, especially by the standards of the time, but its nature as a piece of mass market movie tie-in merchandise meant that it didn't stay in print for long.

Robin Hood fights off a pack of hungry velociraptors

Fast forward to 2019. The core structure of Epic Duels has been revised, refined, and freed from the chains of the Star Wars license. Each player takes control of a character drawn from a wide range of mythology, literature, and popular culture, featuring everything from the aforementioned Bruce Lee to King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, and even a selection from the more obscure side of the Marvel comics universe such as Moon Knight and Ghost Rider. The game then uses miniature movement and card play to imagine a duel between whatever unlikely combination of characters have been chosen.

Most games of this type such as Heroclix or Firefly Adventures use a reasonably large board or map printed with a grid to determine movement and distance. Unmatched instead employs a small board illustrated with a series of connected, color-coded circles to establish each character's position. Miniatures can move along the connections between circles, and the circle's color indicates areas where ranged attacks can be made, eliminating the pesky line-of-sight arguments that are the bane of most miniatures games' existence.

Character actions are determined by a deck of cards, unique to each character. Cards represent attacks, defenses and special abilities that can be employed throughout the game. When combat ensues, the attacker plays an attack card with a numerical value face down on the table, then the defender plays a defense card, also face down. Both cards are revealed simultaneously, and the defender takes damage equal to the difference between attack and defense. Most of the cards have an effect that takes place either before or after the attack, which spices up the game and gives players a lot of tactical options to consider, both when attacking and defending. Damage is tracked using a simple dial. It's a wonderfully elegant system that handles attack and damage in one play, and eliminates the egregious "luck factor" of dice rolling.

Apart from the simple yet elegant game play, each Unmatched set is a class act from start to finish. The game is sold in stand-alone sets of 2, 3 or 4 characters, which allows players to try out the game with minimal investment, and also to stick to only the characters that they find interesting. Are you a Marvel fan with no interest in Little Red Riding Hood or Bigfoot? No problem, Unmatched has you covered. The boxes all come with a high quality plastic tray for all the components (a rarity these days), and while the cards are plenty durable, the trays will even accomodate sleeved cards. The miniatures don't come pre-painted, but they do come with a wash applied that brings out the details of the figure, and also a colored ring for the base that makes it easy to tell each player's characters apart.

The artwork on the cards is all original (even for the characters from licensed properties) and consistently excellent, and the graphic design is slick, contemporary and (most importantly) easy to read. The rulebook is well organized (also a rarity these days), but honestly, once you have the basics down you will rarely need to look at the rules -- the game design really is that good.

Ghost Rider artwork from the "Marvel: Redemption Row" set.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Not just a great dueling game, but a great card game and a great miniatures game all rolled into one.

• Unmatched official website
• Unmatched on BoardGameGeek

Dracula is FURIOUS in Fury of Dracula Third Edition

Like its title character, Fury of Dracula is a game prone to death and resurrection. It's been released in three different editions over 28 years, with each edition offering substantial changes to the game's structure and rules as well as its graphic design. We played the second edition once or twice, but most of our experience is with the third edition (released in 2015), so we'll look at it on its own merits, rather than comparing it to the earlier versions of the game.

It's a "one against many" game like Mansions of Madness or Middle-Earth Quest, but rather than one player commanding the forces of darkness against a group of hero players, here the Dracula player is on the defensive, attempting to hide his location for as long as possible while he matures nests of vampires throughout Europe. The hero players, taking the roles of characters from the original Dracula novel, need to balance their efforts between finding Dracula himself, and rooting out his hidden lairs.

Since there are four heroes (regardless of the number of players), it would seem that they have the advantage, but that definitely isn't the case. They will still need to apply a good deal of thought and strategy to finding Dracula in the time available. The game's clock is ticking in the form of Dracula's influence track, which increases when vampire nests aren't found and destroyed. Game rounds are represented by days on a calendar, and if Dracula isn't found after three weeks, the influence track starts advancing much faster until the world is plunged into darkness.

It's a neat game that really captures the tension, for both the Dracula and hero players, with Dracula often narrowly eluding discovery, and the heroes desperately scrambling to find him in time.

The third edition, published in 2015 by Fantasy Flight Games, boasts updated graphic design and illustration as well as streamlined rules. The design is very well done, keeping with FFG's house style but adapting it to the gothic horror theme. The rules are fairly smooth and elegant, with a straightforward turn structure that makes for quick turns, adding to the game's sense of tension and urgency.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A complex but elegant game that gives players a lot of strategic decisions to make, and evokes the gothic horror theme very well.

• Fury of Dracula (third edition) official website
• Fury of Dracula (third edition) on BoardGameGeek

Shadows of Brimstone: a western horror dungeon crawl

It may come as a bit of a surprise that when I first heard about Shadows of Brimstone, I wasn't terribly interested. Sure, I love an adventure game, I love a horror game, and I really love a western game, and this promised to be all three, plus it was coming from Flying Frog Productions, the publisher behind two of my favorite board games (Fortune and Glory and A Touch of Evil). But the setting looked like a rather appalling rip off of Shane Hensley's Deadlands, and at the time I was suffering from Kickstarter exhaustion, and not really interested in backing another expensive game.

I was resigned to ignoring this game, but then a very generous friend gave me a copy for my birthday, freely admitting that his motivations were somewhat selfish: he wanted to play the game, but didn't want to assemble and paint the miniatures (more on that in a moment). It looked like I would be taking a closer look at Shadows of Brimstone after all.

It's definitely a game in the midst of an identity crisis. The mash-up of wild west and unspeakable horror isn't entirely new (see the aforementioned Deadlands and its accompanying card game, Doomtown), but it adds elements of the classic dungeon crawl to the mix, setting the game in an abandoned mine represented by a board of interlocking room and corridor pieces.

More than that, Shadows of Brimstone can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a role playing game, a board game, or a tactical miniatures game, so it tries to be all three, and not entirely successfully.

At its heart, I think Shadows of Brimstone wants to be a "role playing game in a box" like Hero Quest, Descent, or Mansions of Madness. Players take on the roles of archetypical western characters, and go adventuring in the dungeon-like mine which may or may not contain a portal to a Lovecraftian other world, depending on the scenario being played. Unlike Mansions of Madness or Descent, the game avoids the need for a game master to control the villains, instead combining a basic scenario outline with a deck of randomized cards to determine the shape of the board and what monsters are encountered.

An initial, major turn off for me was the "assembly required" nature of the game's miniatures, which come in several pieces on plastic sprues and require several hours of assembly before the game can even be played. I don't mind painting miniatures or even a minor bit of assembly, but this was above and beyond, requiring a professional level of model making that is normally reserved for players of high-end tactical games such as Warhammer.

Perhaps because of the lack of a game master, encounters tend to be very combat-heavy and light on story, and this is where the game is most successful. The simple rules for determining the monsters' actions work well, and the combat system is pretty straightforward, although without a player controlling the monsters, their tactics tend to be of the "move into position and then keep hitting you until you or the monster goes down" variety.

The game's attempts to mix board game and role playing elements are less successful. It has a lot of the things you would expect from an adventure board game, such as cards and counters representing your character's possessions and abilities, but these are strangely incomplete, with no in-game way to track a character's money or experience points other than writing them down, which seems awfully low-tech. The game designers insist that this isn't a problem, but it's very telling that the fan community very quickly stepped in to fill this gap in the game's components, creating a variety of unofficial print-and-play money and experience tokens.

In a similar vein, the game has an abstracted feature that allows players to visit town between dungeon (sorry, "mine") encounters, with the result of their last encounter sometimes even having an effect on the town visit. While in town players can spend their money and experience to buy better equipment and improve their abilities, but there are no cards or tokens to represent these improvements. Players are expected to just write them down on a character sheet.

The problem I have with the game's reliance on a written character sheet is that there are actually very few character creation options available. Players starting a new campaign must choose from one of four different archetypes, and from there they choose one of three option cards, but that's really it. The addition of a character sheet really seems like a cheap way to make up for some conspicuously missing components.

One role playing element I do really like about Shadows of Brimstone is the idea of multiple games being linked as a campaign, with characters gaining experience and abilities as they progress across gradually more involved and difficult scenarios. It's a neat idea that gives the game a more epic scope than other, similar games. I just wish it either had more consistent board game components, or more open-ended role playing game options.

Rating: UNDECIDED. I want to like this game, but it has some weird shortcomings. I really feel like we need to play through a few more games before I give it a rating.

• Shadows of Brimstone official website
• Shadows of Brimstone on BoardGameGeek

Cthulhu Wars: world conquest, Lovecraft style

Cthulhu Wars is the brain child of veteran game designer Sandy Petersen (creator of Call of Cthulhu), and it really shows off his lifetime of experience with games in general, and the Cthulhu Mythos in particular. It did over two million dollars on Kickstarter, largely due, I'm sure, to the game's incredible array of miniatures. However, credit is also due to the incredibly smooth and well thought out game design, a fact that was made very clear in the months Petersen spent demoing the game all over the country, in advance of the Kickstarter campaign launch.


One of the biggest problems with area control games like Cthulhu Wars is that once you start losing, it can be difficult to recover. Couple that with the fact that area control games tend to be elimination games that only end when one player knocks everyone else out of the game, and you often have a game where the early leader will run roughshod over the other players, who wind up just wishing the game were over.

Sandy Petersen must have been aware of this problem, because a lot of the game play in Cthulhu Wars addresses it, and for the most part eliminates it. All the players are in the game until the bitter end, and there is a built in time limit to keep the game from going on for too long.

Rather than playing as intrepid investigators on the verge of madness, as with most Lovecraft-inspired games such as Arkham Horror, players of Cthulhu Wars get to be the bad guys. Each player takes command of an ancient, god-like horror such as Hastur, Nyarlathotep, or even Great Cthulhu himself, along with an army of monsters and cultists. Cultists open gates which allow your monsters, and eventually your ancient one, to enter play, and the monsters guard your territory and attack the other players.

Each turn, players earn power based on the number of cultists and gates they have in play, and spend it to move their pieces around the board, summon new monsters and cultists, launch attacks, and eventually bring their ancient ones into play. One nice bit of balance here is that you always earn at least half as much power as the strongest player, so you can't really fall too far behind, even if you get completely wiped off the board.

 Players start the game with a stack of six spell book tokens specific to the ancient one they are playing, each with a unique ability. They have to earn these by accomplishing certain goals, also specific to their ancient one, such as occupying a certain amount of territory, bringing a certain number of creatures into play, or destroying so many enemy units in battle. A player can't win the game unless they've earned all six of their spellbooks. I particularly like this aspect of the game, as it gives each player a plan for what they need to do over the course of the game, and the different requirements and abilities serve to make the player factions even more different from each other.

The game play is deceptively and refreshingly straightforward, and I find that when we play we rarely need to refer to the rule book for anything more that a quick refresher, which is unusual for a game of this scale and complexity. The game round is divided up in such a way that you're never waiting long for it to be your turn to do something, which is also nice and definitely feeds into the idea that every player is there for the entire game, with very little down time.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A very immersive game with a lot of strategic depth, and smooth, intuitive rules. The only real down side is its high cost ($200 retail for the base 4-player game). The miniatures alone are worth it though.

• Cthulhu Wars official website
• Cthulhu Wars on BoardGameGeek

Check out my OnTableTop.com project blog about painting the Sleeper faction miniaures for this game.

All you Zombies

The zombie apocalypse genre has exploded in the past few years. It seems like every hipster from Portland to Brooklyn has a zombie apocalypse survival plan in place, The Walking Dead is a successful show on a mainstream cable network, the novel World War Z was a bestseller, and game store shelves are absolutely choked with zombie board games.

Zombies!!!, first published by Twilight Creations in 2001, has the distinction of being one of the first zombie-themed board games to hit the market, and while it may not be the most complex or nuanced game, it is still one of the more playable.

Game play is refreshingly simple: each player's figure starts in the center of town square, with a handful of life and bullet tokens, and three cards representing special actions. On each turn, a player draws a random tile and places it adjacent to one of the tiles already in play. The nicely illustrated tiles represent the eerily quiet streets of a town in the grip of a zombie apocalypse. Buildings on the tile might contain life tokens, which keep you alive longer, or bullet tokens, which make it easier to shoot zombies. Unfortunately, as each tile is placed, a number of zombie figures are added to it.

Players have to move their figures across the tiles, evading or destroying the hoards of zombies in their path, biding their time until the Helipad tile (randomly shuffled into the bottom half of the tile stack) is placed. The first player to reach the center of the helipad tile is the winner, but they'll have to fight their way through a lot of zombies to get there.

The base game includes 100 plastic zombie figures, and it's not uncommon to run out over the course of a game. Seeing 100 zombies on the board, even if they're only an inch tall, is a pretty terrifying sight. It is in this way that the game really succeeds at recreating the tone of the George Romero zombie films of the 1970s, with hoards of undead making our heroes' plight seem pretty hopeless.

Expansions add standard zombie film tropes such a military base (with glow-in-the-dark "government enhanced" zombies) and a shopping mall, among others, and players can also buy bags of additional zombie figures for those all too frequent times when 100 zombies aren't nearly enough.

Rating 3 (out of 5) A fine game that is true to the source material and really puts you in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, but a bit simple to be really engaging.

• Zombies!!! official website
• Zombies!!! on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: November 27, 2014

The Ripper strikes!

Jack the Ripper is without a doubt the most famous serial killer of all time, thanks as much as anything to the lack of real information about him. He was never caught, or even identified. What's more, his short murder spree took place in Victorian London, a time and place given mythic status thanks to iconic tales like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and countless others.

I sometimes wonder if a series of brutal murders is an appropriate subject for a game, but the Ripper's legendary status trumps any sordid reality, and as I mentioned earlier, there is precious little reality surrounding the crimes anyway. So why not, especially if games about the Ripper focus on the mystery rather than the carnage.

Mr. Jack is a two player board game in which one player takes the role of the Ripper, and the other player tries to catch him. The board is populated with a cast of eight possible suspects varying wildly from serious Ripper suspect William Gull to the fictional Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, illustrated in a cartoony style that undermines any possible morbidity and keeps the game's tone nice and light.

Players take turns moving the suspects around the board, with the goal of manipulating them so that certain characters are either in light or shadow at the end of the round. After each round, the Ripper player (who knows which suspect is the real Ripper) must declare truthfully whether the Ripper is in light or in shadow. This allows the detective player to use a process of elimination to figure out who the Ripper is.

To keep things interesting, on any turn after the Ripper was in shadow, the Ripper player can attempt to have him escape by moving him off the map. Both players have the ability to manipulate terrain features on the board in order to make it easier or more difficult for the Ripper to escape.

Once the detective player feels certain he knows who the Ripper is he can accuse, but if he's wrong, the real Ripper "escapes in the confusion"' and the Ripper player wins.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Mr. Jack is quite amusing and involves a surprising amount of tactical decision-making for both players.

• Mr. Jack official website
• Mr. Jack on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: May 27, 2014

Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper takes a more serious, scholarly approach to the material. As the title suggests, it is a rummy game, with a standard playing card deck's suits replaced by evidence cards supporting the different popular Ripper suspects: Montague Druitt, Prince Eddy, Dr. Gull, Dr. Pedachenko, George Chapman and Jill the Ripper, representing the idea that the killer could have been a woman.

Players play melds of evidence cards against the different suspects, along with cards representing the five victims and their respective crime scenes. At the end of the game, the suspect with the most evidence in play is revealed as the Ripper, and cards associated with that suspect are worth double. However, there is also an alibi card in the deck for each suspect, and naturally, the suspect can't be the Ripper if he has an alibi in play.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper adds some interesting extra elements to the standard rummy model, and the game's structure fits the theme particularly well.

• Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper on BoardGameGeek.com

Date Played: June 1, 2014

UPDATE July 20, 2015: Another look at Mystery Rummy, Lost Cities, and Camelot Legends

Instant role playing game

I am a big fan of the immersive nature of gaming. I like to lose myself in the world of the game, and to me exploring is more fun than simply winning. It's why I tend to favor adventure games like Fortune and Glory or Runebound over abstract strategy games, and it's why I love collectible card games but don't really like playing them at a competitive tournament level.

Naturally I like role playing games, where the entire point is to let your imagination run wild, and the setting and story are far more important than "winning." What I don't like about role playing games, however, is the sometimes large amount of prep time involved. When it's my turn to be game master of our bi-weekly role playing group I tend to favor pre-written adventures set in recognizable worlds. As a player, I don't particularly enjoy creating characters to play, and most of mine tend to be thinly disguised versions of characters from media, history or literature.

Mansions of Madness is what Wil Wheaton calls a "role playing game in a box." It combines the immersive, story-driven experience of a role playing game with the structure of a board game, using H. P. Lovecraft's 1920s based Cthulhu Mythos for its setting.

One player takes the role of the Keeper, and is responsible for setting up the game and controlling the Lovecraftian cultists and monsters that serve as the game's antagonists. The Keeper's role is similar to the game master in a traditional role playing game except that in Mansions of Madness the Keeper has his own set of strict rules to follow, and he can play to win.

The Keeper chooses a scenario and the board is set up, using tiles that represent the different rooms and surrounding grounds of a rickety old 1920s building. Each scenario has multiple story options for the keeper to choose from, so they can be played multiple times without the players knowing what's going to happen. These story determine the contents of different stacks of encounter cards that are placed in the various rooms on the board. Encounter cards can be useful items, obstructions that must be passed, or vital clues to the plot of the scenario being played.

The rest of the players take on the roles of investigators, choosing from a roster of suitably Lovecraftian characters such as tweedy professors, society debutantes and hapless scientists. Over the course of the game, the players explore the board searching for clues to the resolution of the scenario. Meanwhile, the Keeper has a specific set of action cards that he uses to place and move monsters on the board, with the intention of fulfilling the nefarious purpose of the scenario's villain.

The game is weighted in favor of the Keeper: he knows what's going on long before the players do, and the monsters and cultists he controls tend to be more powerful than the investigators. But, like other Lovecraft-based games such as Arkham Horror, the sense of doom-laden near-futility is appropriate to the setting and source material.

With its 1920s Lovecraftian setting, well-made components, and emphasis on story over competition, Mansions of Madness hits so many of my touchstones that I can't really give it an objective review, but it's a near perfect game for me.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) It really is role playing without all the extra work, which is exactly my cup of tea.

• Mansions of Madness official website
• Mansions of Madness on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: May 3, 2014

Late to the table: Betrayal at the House on the Hill

Generally speaking, the point of this exercise is to play through all the games in our collection with an eye towards assessing their playability and in many cases answering the question "why do we never play this game?" One would hope that would be less of a question with new games that we pick up, but I like that these reviews also serve as documentation of our game collection, so we're going to add new games to the list as we get them.

For the sake of continuity, it would be nice if we could only buy new games that start with letters of the alphabet that we haven't got to yet, but that's not always going to be practical, so we will occasionally be backtracking. All of which brings us to Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

A friend of ours who isn't really a gamer visits us to play games every weekend. We've tried out many of our games on him, and he likes most of them, although he tends to favor less complex games like Blue Moon City or Tokaido. He also really likes haunted houses. He bought a copy of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, and, reasoning that he probably wouldn't play it with anyone else, he gave it to us to keep in our collection, with the understanding that it will always be available for him to play with us.

Each player takes on the role of an iconic horror movie character such as the dumb jock, the twitchy professor, or the precocious kid, exploring a haunted mansion by laying down tiles that represent different rooms and hallways. Each new room entered requires the player to draw a card, either an Event that has a one-time effect, a useful Object such as a weapon, or an Omen that moves the game's plot along. After each Omen is drawn, the player who drew it rolls the dice, and if they roll less than the number of Omens that have been drawn so far, the Haunt begins.

This is where the game gets interesting. When the Haunt is triggered, the players refer to a scenario book, cross-referencing the specific Omen that triggered the Haunt with the room it was found in to determine which of 50 different storylines will now be played out, and which player has been revealed as the Traitor.

The Traitor player is now working against the other players to fulfill whatever goal the Haunt requires. Sometimes the player's character turns into a giant two-headed snake whose goal is to destroy the house, sometimes their character stays in the game to assist whatever monster has been revealed. Meanwhile, the other players are given a specific goal they need to reach to defeat the Traitor, such as killing the monster or finding a particular object and taking it to a particular room.

As of this writing I've played Betrayal at the House on the Hill three times, and I've been the Traitor every single time.

There is a lot of suspense in the build-up to the Haunt, with all the players knowing that one of them could be revealed as the traitor at any moment. Much like many horror films, once the monster is revealed, it becomes an action-packed race to either destroy the monster, escape the house, or fulfill whatever goal has been assigned to the players.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A fun romp that has some of the feel of Arkham Horror or Mansions of Madness combined with the paranoia of Battlestar Galactica, but without all the complexity.

• Betrayal at the House on the Hill official website
• Betrayal at the House on the Hill on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: April 27, 2014

Monster squads

When Horrorclix was released in 2006, the collectible miniature/click dial treatment had been given to several games: the original Mage Knight, Marvel and DC Comics Heroclix, Crimson Skies, which was two games in one (air combat and brawling pilots), and Mechwarrior with its giant robots. Strangely, the games' designers made no effort to make any of these games compatible with each other, and in most cases seemed to go out of their way to make them as different as possible.

Freddy Krueger takes on the Aliens

As the name suggests, Horrorclix features all the old standbys of the horror genre, including vampires, werewolves, zombies, Lovecraftian shoggoths and deep ones, and even ghost hunters and vampire slayers. Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street film series and Jason Vorhees from Friday the 13th both make an appearance via a special boxed set, as do the Aliens and Predators from the recent Alien vs. Predator film. They even did a large Alien Queen figure, and an even larger Cthulhu, which stood about 18 inches tall.

The game itself was sold as a more story-driven game than Heroclix, which tended to get right down to the fighting with little preamble. Horrorclix uses the same basic movement and combat system, but the character abilities have been greatly simplified, and the game adds plot twist cards and victim tokens in its attempt to add more narrative to the action.

Hellboy vs the Alien Queen

The plot twists and victims do add an interesting wrinkle to the game, especially the first few turns as each player's monsters scramble to consume (or rescue) the victim tokens in order to enhance their abilities. But in the end it still comes down to a fight between each player's squad of figures.

Rasputin, the Mad Monk

That said, the figures are pretty great. Aliens and Predators aside, the game wasn't beholden to a specific license, so the designers were able to be more imaginative with the characters populating the game. In addition to the standard werewolves, zombies and vampires, the game features some unusual figures such as a ghost-addled Rasputin and a whole set of sinister carnival freaks.

Fun as it is on its own, it's unfortunate that the game wasn't made to be more compatible with Heroclix, but the games are just different enough to make crossovers a bit awkward, and they are best played separately. They did release a Hellboy boxed set that was supposed to work in both games, but in practice the figures are a bit overpowered in Horrorclix and underpowered in Heroclix.

Wizkids Games has been releasing all of their new figures to be fully Heroclix-compatible, so hopefully they'll get around to re-releasing a few figures from Horrorclix. After all, who wouldn't want to pit a hunting party of Predators against the Justice League, or see if Doctor Strange can stop the zombie apocalypse?

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great game that offers a similar experience to Heroclix, but is a bit easier to play.

• Horrorclix on BoardGameGeek.com

Dates played: February 8 and 16, 2014

Thousands of horror films couldn't possibly be wrong

Low budget horror movies are a pretty incredible genre when you think about it. Nowhere else is the cheapness and silliness of the product not only forgiven, but a major selling point. There are thousands of horror films out there, but the fan base seems to have an insatiable appetite for more, regardless of the films' relative sameness and heavy reliance on a hadful of overused clichés. In fact, identifying and reveling in those very clichés seems to be a large part of the genre's charm.

Which brings us to Grave Robbers From Outer Space, the first in Z-Man's now out of print line of B-movie card games. We've already reviewed two other games in the series, Bushwhakin' Varmints and Cannibal Pygmies, but to summarize: players use cards representing common horror movie characters, locations and props to construct a movie, and attack their opponent's movies using creature cards, with the hope of knocking out their opponent's characters. Whoever has the strongest movie when someone plays one of the two "Roll the Credits" cards is the winner.

But I don't think the game play actually matters very much.

What matters is that it is a reasonably entertaining game that lets players interact with the beloved clichés of low budget horror films. It doesn't necessarily poke fun at them so much as it celebrates them, since it is the familiarity of those creepy med students, dumb jocks, vampire hunters and shuffling zombies that make low budget horror such a surprisingly safe refuge from our mundane existence.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The game itself is mediocre, but the world it describes is fun to visit.

• Grave Robbers From Outer Space on BoardGameGeek.com
• Grave Robbers II: Skippy's Revenge on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: February 1, 2014

Dream a little dream

Wizkids Games pioneered the collectible miniatures game in 2000 with Mage Knight, brilliantly applying the blind booster pack and card rarity concepts from Magic: the Gathering to pre-painted plastic figures and adding the insanely clever clix base, which gave players an easy way to track the figure's game statistics such as strength, defense, remaining health, and so on.

It was only a matter of time before Wizards of the Coast (publishers of Magic) jumped into the collectible miniatures market with Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures in 2003, followed by Star Wars Miniatures in 2004. Both games took advantage of some massive brand recognition, and avoided the problem of coming up with an alternative to Wizkids' patented clix dial by simply printing each figure's game information on accompanying cards. This made it easier for the figures to be used with the D&D and Star Wars role playing games, and also provided Star Wars fans with yet another wave of plastic figurines to collect.

Both games were very successful, and in 2006 Wizards of the Coast added a third game to their lineup: Dreamblade, a much more abstract game with some very unusual characters and concepts.

The battles depicted in Dreamblade take place in "the shared unconsciousness of humanity." Since the game isn't locked into a particular genre or licensed property, there is a distinct sense that anything goes, a sensibility born out by characters such as Slaughter Boots (a giant pair of spiked boots) Decapitrix (a lovely lady with giant lobster claws) and of course, the mighty Octorilla (a giant gorilla with an octopus for a head).

The game's uniqueness doesn't end with the bizarre characters, either. Rather than literal, tactical movement using a grid or a tape measure, the playing surface is simple and abstract: five rows of five squares each. The object of the game is to score points by controlling the squares closest to the center of the board. So even combat between the figures is secondary to placing your figures in the right squares. The player who scores the most points each turn wins that turn, and the first player to win six turns wins the game.

Combat occurs when each player has figures in the same space, and is resolved using proprietary six-sided dice numbered one through three; two of the other three sides of each die are blank, and the final side depicts the Dreamblade of the game's title. When a Dreamblade is rolled, it activates many of the characters' special abilities.

This game reminds me a lot of the holographic chess game that R2-D2 and Chewbacca are seen playing in the original Star Wars, so much so that it surprises me a little that Wizards of the Coast didn't make it an official Star Wars game, since they held a license to produce Star Wars games at the time.

Dreamblade's simple area-based movement system and emphasis on holding ground rather than merely defeating all your opponent's figures is what sets it apart from most other miniatures games, but it also proves to be the game's major limitation. There is little in the way of immersive story or major variations in strategy, the two things that would keep players coming back for more. Even with all the weird, interesting creatures, the game can get a bit repetitive after a while.

A major barrier to getting into this game, and probably one of the reasons for its demise, was that it was phenomenally expensive, with starter sets and booster packs costing half again as much as other collectible miniatures games on the market at the time. It's too bad, because Dreamblade was really something unique.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) With its imaginative characters and unique game design, Dreamblade is fun to get out and play every once in a while, but the lack of strategic depth keeps us from playing it more often.

• Dreamblade on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: January 4, 2014

Cowboys and monsters

The combination of the wild west and supernatural horror seems obvious now, but it was a fairly unique idea in 1996 when the Deadlands role playing game was first unleashed on an unsuspecting gaming public. Its setting, which populates the lawless American west of the 1870s with spell-slinging sorcerers and slavering monsters, was unique and very well developed, and was a natural to get the collectible card game treatment during the CCG boom at the end of the 1990s.

Deadlands: Doomtown revolves around the power struggle over a fictional California mining town that just happens to be sitting on the world's largest deposit of Ghost Rock, the mineral that powers magic in the Deadlands world. Players construct decks around the different factions vying for control of the town, from the greedy Sweetrock Mining Company to the sinister Whateley family to the Law Dogs, who had the unfortunate and probably hopeless job of maintaining law and order.

One of the things that made Deadlands: Doomtown unique was its strong story line, which progressed over the course of the game's expansions and revealed itself through text on the cards and changes to the characters in the game. The game's publishers even used the results of national tournaments to steer the story, with factions that didn't perform well being weakened or even eliminated from the game.

The most unique thing about the game, though, is its poker-based combat system. Each card in the game is printed with a poker suit and value, so when two players get into a shootout, they draw cards based on the strength of their respective posses, and the winner is the one who can make the best five-card poker hand using standard poker rules (with the exception that the legendary Dead Man's Hand of two black aces, two black eights and a Jack of Diamonds will beat even a royal flush).

Unlike most CCGs, Deadlands: Doomtown works best as a multiplayer game. Over the course of the game, players play location cards ("deeds") that provide either income or control (sometimes both). Income is used to pay for locations, weapons and characters ("dudes"), who provide influence. A player wins if he has more control points than any other single player has influence, so the game's balance relies on the players identifying who is in the lead and keeping that player in check. A two player game can end abruptly over a lucky (or unlucky) card draw.

In order to experience the game's superior multiplayer environment, we invited some of our friends over to play. We had a nice range of factions represented in our game:

• The Collegium, a group of mad scientists who need ghost rock to power their bizarre steampunk gadgets;
• The Whateleys, an inbred family of sorcerers straight out of H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror;
• The Black Jacks, a gang of outlaws;
• The Agency, government spooks from back east who are trying to keep a lid on things.

Our two friends hadn't played Deadlands: Doomtown before, but they are both experienced gamers and picked it up pretty quickly. We had a good time exploring the game's unique mechanics and setting, but the game did take several hours to play and we identified two major flaws in an otherwise well-designed game.

The rules governing how characters move from place to place are confusing and counter-intuitive (even to those of us who have been playing the game for years).

More critically, conflict in the game doesn't always come naturally. It's too easy for players to just have their characters hide out at their high-control locations, and it often takes a player just wanting to stir things up to get some action going.

However, the great things about Deadlands: Doomtown such as the unique poker-based combat system, the intriguing setting, and the colorful cast of characters, far outweigh the flaws in the game's design. It's a game I really wish we had the opportunity to play more often, and I would love to see an enterprising publisher pick it up and do something with it.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Deadlands: Doomtown is an incredibly immersive game, even by collectible card game standards. Unfortunately its nature as a collectible game makes it difficult to find players willing to get into it, and it really needs at least 3 or 4 players for a satisfying game.

• Deadlands: Doomtown on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: December 27, 2013

UPDATE: Alderac Entertainment Group recently announced that they will be bringing Doomtown back, using the Living Card Game format made popular by Fantasy Flight Games with Call of Cthulhu, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Netrunner, and others. More information on Doomtown Reloaded can be found here.

The mother of all cooperative games

I've been a fan of H. P. Lovecraft since high school, and Katherine and I have played Call of Cthulhu: the Card Game since it was originally released as a collectible card game. But for some reason, it was a long time before we made the jump into Arkham Horror. We eventually tried it out at a convention several years ago, and bought the game the next day. Since then we've obsessively bought all the game's expansions, and we play it whenever time allows.

Arkham Horror is an incredibly immersive cooperative game, where all the players work together to save the sleepy New England town of Arkham from the ravages of an Ancient One, a horror from beyond time chosen at the start of the game from among several possibilities. The Ancient One chosen has an effect on game play, some subtle, some very overt, which is one way in which every game of Arkham Horror is different.

Players choose from among the many heroic characters who are drawn to the danger and mystery of Arkham. Characters run the gamut from rough and tumble adventurers to tweedy librarians, and each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages in the game, and trying out all the different characters is another reason it is so easy to play this game over and over again.

The object of the game is to work cooperatively to close all the gates to other worlds that are opening throughout Arkham. Players move their characters around the board, seeking clues and encounters at different locations, occasionally travelling through a gate to another world where they try desperately to hold on to their sanity. New gates open every round, so it's a race against time to close them all before the Ancient One awakens.

On the surface Arkham Horror seems really complex. The board is huge and there are a ton of counters, cards, and dice. But once you get into the rhythm of the game, it isn't that difficult, and it's easy to get caught up in the adventure and tension as more and more gates open, spilling bizarre monsters into the streets of Arkham.

Four our game we randomly chose Yibb-Tstll, from the Kingsport Horror expansion, as the Ancient One. It's a horrid looking  creature with dozens of eyes, and so during the game, our ability to evade monsters is made more difficult.

When it's just the two of us, we usually play two characters each, as we've found that the game is virtually impossible with only two heroes. We usually deal out a few random characters for each of us to choose from. Katherine ended up with Patrice Hathaway (the violinist) and Wendy Adams (the street urchin), and I got George Barnaby (the lawyer) and William Yorick (the gravedigger).

Our game had its highs and lows, as they usually do. Poor Patrice Hathaway was devoured while in another dimension, to be replaced by Daisy Walker, the librarian. When a character is removed from the game (a constant danger), its player gets to choose a new character and carry on until either the gates are all closed and the game is won, or the Ancient One awakens, in which case the players must fight a near hopeless battle to try to destroy it.

A good cooperative game needs to be difficult to win, to justify the players being able to work together and also to give them a sense of accomplishment if they win. Players will quickly lose interest if the game is too easy, but if it's hard to win, they'll keep playing as long as the game also engages their imagination, which Arkham Horror certainly does.

We managed to win our game by closing all the gates, but only barely...

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Incredibly immersive, with a vast amount of replay value. It takes 3-4 hours to play, and we have occasionally played two games in a row, not ready for the experience to end after one game.

• Arkham Horror official website
• Arkham Horror on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: November 29, 2013