If there’s one thing I like, it’s a game based on a goofy premise. Lucky for me, there are games like The Great Brain Robbery from Cheapass Games out there. In a nutshell, this game is about zombies in the old west, robbing a passenger train full of government cheese in search of sweet, sweet brains. If it sounds like a pretty silly game . . . well, that’s because it is. This is not a terribly deep or complex game, but it is a fun game when you’ve got a group of like-minded friends around.

In The Great Brain Robbery, each player controls a zombie on the train. You start with a single card, which represents either a brain or a type of government cheese (both of which can be put into your head). Each turn, you wander around and land on brain tokens; when you do so, you keep the token and you draw another card. Each brain card has a Cost, Hit and Run stats, and an IQ. Cost indicates how many brain tokens (or experience points, or whatever) you have to pay to install the brain into your head. Hit and Run act as modifiers when you attack or move, respectively, and IQ helps you win the game. Now, you can only hold two brains at once, and if you don’t have anything in your head, you get serious fighting and moving penalties for holding cards in your hand. This is where cheese comes in handy: it can be installed for free, and while it doesn’t give you much in the way of bonuses and has no IQ (you can’t win with cheese in your head), it does eliminate the aforementioned penalties. Now, as you wander from car to car on this train, cars further back have a chance of falling off, leaving some zombies running to catch the train (dropping any cards in their hand along the way). In addition, you can fight other zombies in order to take the brains right out of their head. Once you get to the engine car and put on the breaks, the game effectively ends, and the zombie with the highest IQ wins. There’s a little more to the game than that, but not that much.

The Great Brain Robbery is a lot of fun to play, period. There is some strategy involved, though there’s also a lot of luck. In the beginning of the game, players tend to shop around for a good brain (or a good starter brain) and collect tokens. Sooner or later, though, someone’s going to amass a pile of tokens and take off for the engine car, probably with a pretty smart brain in hand (and a starter brain or cheese in head). Once this happens, players tend to race after the leader, ganging up and tying to beat his lead so they can be the one who decides when the game ends. A typical game lasts 30-45 minutes, though I have played games that lasted only 15, due to the engine car being drawn early.

What I Liked: The Great Brain Robbery is fun; there, I’ve said it a third time. It’s got a goofy premise that appeals to me, it has simple mechanics that work fairly well, and it tends to generate some laughs around the table. While this is definitely a Cheapass game, the artwork is very good and suits the game well, and the cards and board do the job they intend to. The Great Brain Robbery, like all Cheapass games, is also very good value for money. I paid $7.50 for it at Funagain, and I feel like I’ve easily gotten my money’s worth out of it.

What I Didn’t Like: Not a whole lot. Luck can be a deciding factor in the game; I’ve seen a player lose simply because he got a run of bad luck in the beginning and never really caught up. I’ve also seen someone win simply because she happened to pull the engine car at the right time. Some people may not like that much, but it doesn’t bother me a lot in a game this light. Also, as a Cheapass game, it doesn’t come with everything you need to play. The game includes rules, the board, and the cards. You need to supply your own dice, pawns, and brain counters. This may turn people off; however, I find it to be an advantage. It keeps the cost of the game way down, and the pieces not included are easy to find. Six-sided dice are virtually ubiquitous in board games, you can use just about anything as a pawn, and pennies make a good, cost-effective brain counter.

The Bottome Line: The Great Brain Robbery is a fun, light game with a low, low cost. Unless something about it really turns you off, you don’t have many excuses not to buy it.

I’m back from the beach, and it was a good little vacation. I got burnt in a few spots, got kind of an uneven tan, but otherwise had a good time. Got to play Apples to Apples with my wife and my parents; always a plus in my book, because this game is simply a lot of fun to play. Still haven’t gotten a chance to play my new games, though I keep re-reading the PDF rules for Battleground: Fantasy Warfare. I’ve even come up with a fairly minor house rule: if one of your ranged units shoots at an enemy unit that is already engaged with one of your own units, every 6 that you get on your ranged unit’s attack roll is considered a hit against your own (engaged) unit. Roll damage as usual. If you have more than one unit engaged with your target, you may divide errant hits however you want to. The reason I’d want to implement such a rule is that it seems to me that there should be an element of risk when you’re firing into a melee involving your own soldiers.

I’m off to the beach for a few days, since I don’t have to work until Tuesday. Thus, I probably won’t be posting for a couple of days; I’ll have my laptop with me, but I don’t know what the Internet situation is going to be.

The second thing that I wanted to mention was that I got my Funagain order yesterday. The Great Brain Robbery is, indeed, a Cheapass game. The card stock is about the quality that you can buy from any office supply store, and it requires two dice, a pawn for each player, and about fifty tokens (none of which come with the game). That said, for $7.50 it’s a great value. The game itself seems like it’s going to be a hoot to play, and (as Cheapass admits proudly), all of the required pieces are pieces that are easy to scrounge from other games that you no doubt already own. Heck, pennies make good counters, right?

Battleground: Fantasy Warfare also looks pretty darned good. I’m impressed with the unit abilities and the command cards, and I can’t wait to get a game going. Sadly, I’ll probably have to wait until after my mini-break to give a full review of either game. They’re coming, though.

Anyway, see you all later.

Quick post, all.  You perceptive types out there have probably already noticed that you can see the most recent five comments on the sidebar to the right now.  You’re not imagining things; that’s new.  Have fun.

This is a mechanic that borrows heavily from Serenity: The Roleplaying Game, by Jaimie Chambers and Margaret Weis. I re-tooled it for the d20 System, specifically for a varient that I’m working on right now. I’ve edited the below entry to make it more generic and less specific to my varient. Disclaimer: this mechanic will afford the PCs more power than the core d20 System does. You may have to adjust your encounters accordingly.
Story Tokens
Story tokens are a mechanic to allow players greater control over the game world, and their characters’ destiny. Each character starts the game with 3 story tokens, and gains additional tokens during play. Story tokens may be spent in a variety of ways. Note that only player characters have access to story tokens.
Gaining Story Tokens
The GM may award a player story tokens for the completion of a goal, for role-playing particularly well, or for performing a dramatic and important action. There are no specific guidelines restricting story token awards; however, a player may never have more tokens than 10 + her character level.
Spending Story Tokens
Story tokens may be spent at any time, for a variety of purposes. Spending story tokens is never an action, but often accompanies an action. A player may spend story tokens on behalf of another player, but may not give story tokens to another player. Story tokens may be spent in the following ways:
Fudge the Dice: A single story token may be spent in order to gain a +3 bonus to a single die roll. You may spend up to 4 story tokens at a time in this manner, for a maximum bonus of +12. You may also spend 8 story tokens in order to automatically and instantaneously take 20 on a single roll, regardless of whether or not you would normally be able to take 20 on that roll. Taking 20 in this manner does not use any extra time.
Cheat Death: You may spend 2 story tokens in order to automatically stabilize when your hit points have been brought down to negative numbers. You may also spend 6 story tokens any time you would take enough damage or suffer an effect that would cause your death; doing so negates the damage or effect completely.
Swap Tokens: You may, at any time, trade in story tokens for tokens of any other type, on a one-for-one basis. (This particular use of story tokens is designed for games that use other types of tokens, such as Monte Cook’s Iron Heroes.)
Call in a Favor: Story tokens may be spent in order to call in favors from NPCs in the world. Note that you must be able to justify this expenditure; that is, you must be able to explain why that NPC owes you a favor of that magnitude.

• 4 tokens buy you a minor favor, such as the loan of a small amount of money, a free piece of relatively inexpensive equipment, or a bit of useful information.
• 6 tokens buy you a moderate favor, such as a guard looking the other way when you’re caught in the act, the loan of a large sum of money, or a small sum of money, no strings attached.
• 8 tokens buy you a major favor, such as a pardon from the local magistrate, a free horse, or the loan of a huge sum of money.
• If you are calling in a favor from an NPC with moderate power or influence, such as a local governor or lord, a moderately powerful fence or crime boss, or a minor warlord, add 2 tokens to the cost of the favor.
• If you are calling in a favor from an NPC with a high degree of power or influence, such as the king of a nation, the high priest of a major religion, or the commander of a very large army, add 4 tokens to the cost of the favor.

Stroke of Luck: This is perhaps the most potent, and potentially useful, application of story tokens. Players may spend tokens in order to alter the game world in some ways; however, any alterations must be approved by the GM, and must be justified by the player. For example, a PC could spend tokens in order to say that a friend of his lives nearby when the party is in need of a place to rest and recuperate, but saying that his friend is actually the king of the land would be a bit of a stretch. This use of story tokens also requires a fair amount of GM adjucation; the cost of this ability can range from a single story token when the thief suddenly realizes that, yes, she does have an extra set of lock picks in her backpack to replace the ones that just broke, all the way up to 30+ tokens for extremely significant changes to the game world, such as a PC realizing that he is, in fact, the legitimate heir to the throne of the recently deceased king.
Break the Rules: If a PC wants to do something that isn’t normally allowed by the rules—such as running up a wall or opening a locked chest with a swift kick, she may spend story tokens in order to effectively make the action legal, just this once. Depending on just how outrageous the action is this could cost anywhere from 1 story token to 30+. The GM, however, has the final word.

Or something less dramatic, maybe. In case you hadn’t noticed the big red logo on the right-hand side of this page, I am now a Funagain associate. What does that mean? To you, the reading public, it won’t be that big a change. Any time, from here on in, when I review or otherwise link to a game, I’ll include a link to Funagain’s product page for that game. This will give you two things. First: it will give you additional reviews, left by people who have (presumably) played the game. Second: it will give you a way to buy the game, both quickly and cheaply. Funagain tends to offer pretty good discounts on the games they sell (around 20%, usually), they have a large product catalog, and they even have a nifty rewards program, whereby you accrue points by buying things. These points can, predictably, be traded in for discounts on future purchases. All around it seems like a pretty good deal.

Why Funagain? I recently made a purchase from them, and have been quite pleased thus far. I went ahead and bought a couple of Battleground: Fantasy Warfare decks (Elves and Orcs), as well as The Great Brain Robbery. I’ll post reviews when I’ve gotten a chance to play them.

I played two games last Saturday night, with a couple of friend of mine. First, we played a couple of games of Munchkin, which was immensely enjoyable. Second, we played Arkham Horror, which was also enjoyable, but in a very different way.

*Munchkin:* This one’s great for any fan of D&D, period. The basic premise, for those who don’t know, is that you’re in control of a fantasy RPG character, and you take that character dungeon delving until you are the first one to reach level 10. It’s fantastic fun twinking out your character like crazy, and you get to come up with some pretty crazy builds. For example, I had a gnomish wizard with a vorpal sword in one hand, a flaming sword in the other, a mace attached to my leg, and a catapult being wheeled by my elven follower. Plus, the cards are funny.

*Arkham Horror:* This is a whole different kettle of mi-gos. _Arkham Horror_ is based off of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos”, and draws a lot of inspiration from the _Call of Cthulhu_ RPG, in all its incarnations. You and your friends play investigators in the fictitious New England town of Arkham, and your goal is to cooperate in order to prevent a Great Old One from entering our dimension. Our game started out with myself as a scientist, and my two friends a psychiatrist and a salesman; our goal was to prevent Azathoth from eating the world. In _Arkham Horror_, you get various items, skills, and spells to aid you in your quest, and you can even get allies to tag along. Despite this, it is a very difficult game. There’s a constant feeling of dread lurking over the game board, a feeling that you’re simply staving off the inevitable apocalypse. In the end, it turns out that that was exactly what we were doing; Azathoth did, indeed, eat the world after three hours of play. It was not, however, a dissappointment; in fact, I’m very much looking forward to playing the game again.

In other news, I’m tackling the Herculean task of reading my Gamecrafters’ email after a long period of inactivity. If you sent me email some time in the past that has not been answered, be patient. I’ll get to it eventually; it’s just that I’m going to have to sift it out from the plethora of spam.

Brennan Taylor, the guy behind Galileo Games, just contacted me to let me know that the psionics supplement that I wrote for Bulldogs! is, in fact, in the pipe even as we speak. Needless to say, this got me excited. In other, related news, Brennan Taylor is currently launching another role-playing game, Mortal Coil, which sounds pretty cool. I know this because I subscribe to Mr. Taylor’s blog, Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?, which is a very good read. At any rate, I firmly believe that Galileo Games is a publisher that deserves more attention that it gets, and I’m not the only one.

I just looked through my Manage functions for WordPress (which powers this blog), and noticed that I had not one, not two, but ninety-three comments pending moderation. Good grief. Anyway, I’ve gone through them all (most of them were spam), and approved the ones that were legitimate comments. Er, one. Anyway, to Chad Underkoffler of Atomic Sock Monkey, I apologize that your comment has only now been displayed on my website, especially given that the post that it was associated with is four or five pages back now. Mea culpa.