Look, Light Speed is fun. Period.

I hadn’t planned on writing about Light Speed but it came up when I was talking about Cheapass Games. And I realized that I’ve been occasionally playing that game for almost twenty years. There’s not a lot of games that I can say that.

Light Speed, originally part of Cheapass Games Hip Pocket line, is one of the only Cheapass games not designed by James Ernest.  (It’s by Tom Jolly) It is said that James Ernest will be sad if you tell him it’s your favorite Cheapass game. It’s pretty damn good, though. (I do like Button Men more, James)

Light Speed is a real time game where everyone gets their own  deck of ten spaceship cards in their own color. Each one has one to four hit points and one to four lasers shooting out and some shields to block lasers.

Gameplay is dead simple. It’s a real time so no turns. You are slapping cards down and that part of the game is over when someone runs out of cards. Then you need to see what the lasers hit. Get out a piece of floss or a retractable ID holders and follow each laser’s path to see if it hits anything.

The cards are numbered and they go in order. The Moth is fragile with one of the weakest lasers but it also shoots first. The Destroyer has lots of hit points and a whopping four lasers but it goes last.

You score points by destroying other folks’ space ships. You can also mine an asteroid for minerals but, I’ll be honest, half the time we don’t play with the asteroid and just focus of blasting away at each other.

When I first played Light Speed, all those many years ago, it confused me. Was a game allowed to be this simple? Did it count? When I first tried it, I was primarily a RPG player and I was used to needing several books to play a game.

Since then, I’ve played hundreds of games, including very simple RPGs. The whole complexity equals value is a false paradigm as far as I’m concerned. I mean, since then, I’ve learned how to play Go and that can be broken down to less than ten rules. And one of those rules is you use a board to play! 

(Then, we start arguing about depth versus complexity. Go is not complex, folks. It _is_ deeper than the Mariana Trench.)

Yes, Light Speed is very, very simple. Yes. Scoring with a retractable ID badge you stole out of your WH40K box takes longer than actual game play. But it is also very clever and unbelievably intuitive and a lot of fun. You can explain it to anyone with half the explanation just showing them the cards. And they will love it.

Light Speed gives you a chance to set aside being a game snob and just have a good time. And I spend plenty of time being a game snob.  

Cheapass Games as games, not artifacts

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been purging my game as part of a big move. This is far from the first time I’ve had big purges but this will end up being a big one. 

And, originally unrelated to game purging, I was cleaning out a closet and I found a box of Cheapass games. A big chunk of their catalog from the days when the games were in envelopes.

And I had to ask myself: do I need these? Not only had I clearly not played them in over a decade, virtually all of them are available as PDFs. Seriously, not only can I make my own copies, thanks to the laminator, I can copies with better component quality. 

They don’t exist for me as games. They exist as artifacts. And I don’t need to keep them since I have almost all of them as PnP projects if I want them as games.

I did keep the absolute worst of them, Las Vegas, since Cheapass never posted that one (and I think the master copies have been lost. Probably intentionally and with a match and lighter fluid) If I ever want to play it again, I actually need to keep it.

Incidentally, none of the Hip Pocket line were in that box. Because those were the Cheapass games I played the most lol. And if I am purging with an eye for storage space, they get more forgiveness.

Random, possibly insane, ramblings about Cheap Ass Games

I’ve been looking back at my past blogs about Cheap Ass games. And I am fascinated by how much my opinion of the work of James Ernst has shifted.

Cheap Ass Games was one of the first game companies I discovered when I transitioned from a RPG-only guy to a board gamer too. In fact, I first came across Cheap Ass Games in a rural comic boom shop I only went to once.  (They were sitting in a wicker basket. I didn’t get any for a few more years but I remember them)

However, during my game snob phase, my opinion seriously dropped. Then, after I became a parent and didn’t have hours to devote to gaming, I found myself impressed at how accessible and fun a lot of the Cheapass Games are. Now, I think they are nifty.

That said, even when my opinion of Cheapasss Games was at its lowest ebb, the Very Clever Pipe Game, Light Speed, Button Men and Lamarckian Poker were still in regular rotation.

I have king held that James Ernest is one of the most authentically punk game designers. The man wants you to use the man’s components? James Ernest says you can dump out the contents of your closet and , bang, there’s your game system!

One of the reasons Cheapass Games has been on my mind is that a family member recently came back from working for years in a third world country. They aren’t a gamer but I found myself thinking of how Cheapass Games would be a way to have accessible designer games when shipping or even printing wouldn’t be viable.

Obviously, not every game in their catalog is going fit those parameters. Not being able to easily make cards would make Kill Doctor Lucky for instance. 

Hiwever, assuming you can get a hold of playing cards and dice (which I know might not be a safe assumption), games like Devil Bunny Needs A Ham or Spree or the Chief Herman collections seem within reach. You can make a Pairs Deck with three decks of cards that have the same backs.

Okay, I am probably romanticizing the potential for Cheapass Games. Seriously, if you have access to a deck of cards, you have a vast library of games that doesn’t need any help from James Ernest.

Post Script: and I just learned that James Ernest has spent the last few years publishing game files, including works in progress, at a site called Crab Fragments. I thought he retired and here he goes and gives me a whole new catalog to look at! L

Is Spree Ameritrash?

Looking at James Ernst’s Spree (a game I have owned forever but never played), I found myself asking where Cheapass Games fall in the world of Ameritrash as a genre. Well, at least this Chrapass game.

I mean, Spree is thematic. It’s about burgling a mall. It’s got conflict. You are shooting at each other for crying out loud. There is take-that. You’re grabbing each other’s stuff. And it’s random.

That sure sounds like Ameritrash to me!

But if Fantasy Flight has taught me anything, it’s that chrome matters. And, even by the standards of Cheapass Games, Spree comes with less chrome than a garden rock.

(Of course, you could bling it out like no one’s business. So it’s no one’s fault but yours if there isn’t any chrome so stop blaming James Ernst!)

But I think that arguing production values define a game, rather than define its price, seems like a bad argument. The Grand Guignal experience may be a part of many Ameritrash games but I’m going to argue it’s not a requirement. Theme and interaction are more important. And Spree clearly has that going on.

I’m certainly not arguing that all Cheap Ass games are Ameritrash. James Ernst’s games fall into a lot of different categories. I suspect his design goals were fun and sales. However, some, like Spree do fit.

From what I’ve read, if you actually play Spree and can see past the production values, it’s a solid beer and pretzels game. And I’m pretty sure that the board is free to download so actually making a copy would be easy.

I still think I’d need some bling to get people to play.

James Ernest writes a fun memoir

I finally read Cheapass Games in Black and White by James Ernest. It’s a retrospective on the history of Cheapass Games by the founder and guy who designed almost all the games. It’s about one third commentary and two thirds reprints of ads, rules, packaging and components.

Man, I am both the target audience and the worst audience for this book. On the one hand, I really like Cheapass Games and I have a large collection of their games (that, wonderfully, doesn’t take up much space) On the other hand, that means I have the originals for almost all the images so two thirds of the book is unnecessary for me :P

(Incidentally, you can’t try and make an PnP project out of the book. You do get complete rules but you don’t get complete scans of the components. Which is fine because a hefty chunk of those components are available for download on the Cheapass website.)

Seriously. There are literally about three games discussed in the book that I don’t own. And one of them was reprinted in Chief Herman (I didn’t even know Tishai had been independently printed.) Swag was a convention only game that was turned into Captain Treasure Boots, which I do own. And I just never bought Veritas.

The memoir section are a lot of fun. James Ernest has a very conversational style, which makes him enjoyable to read. He invites us on a journey, talking about his work and life and his philosophy of about game design. Which could be dryer than a desert but he makes it sparkle.

It has been said (I’ve said it but I am far from the first) that James Ernest most legitimately punk of game designers. He isn’t defiant or out to hate parents (his or otherwise) He is simply out to do his own thing, regardless of what anyone else thinks. He is an iconoclast not for the sake of being an iconoclast but because that’s how he can get what he wants done.

Getting some insight into that  and a lot of anecdotes about that is fun. The book isn’t a how to guide to game design or game publishing but you will still learn a lot, possibly while not even noticing.

Cheapass Games in Black and White is a good read. If you have the slightest interest in Cheapass Games or game design or game, you will do yourself a favor reading it.

A couple of handy PnP sites for folks under lockdown

I have already written about a few games that, particularly if you are new to Print and Play, are worth making of you are under lockdown and can’t get out to game. Next, I want to write about a couple of web sites where you can find some nice print and play files.

Just like before, these are not the only place where you can find files but I really like these ones. 

PnP Arcade is the big one for me. Like the name implies, it’s a one-stop shopping grind for a lot of different kinds of PnP games. (Not war games, though. I’m not really into war games but I know there are sites like Wargame Vault out there) Jason Tagmire of Buttonshy Games helped create the site and I’ve been making PnP Buttonshy games for years.

In addition to games from Buttonshy, PnP Arcade has stuff from other publishers who do a lot of PnP. Jellybean, Good Little Games, Grey Gnome and Heavy Metal Snail are all companies I used to check regularly and I can now find out users they are up to through PnP Arcade.

PnP Arcade is chock full of free games so you can test the waters without having to pay anything. Although, if you’re like me, you will eventually spend some money there.

https://www.pnparcade.com/

The other site I want to mention is Cheapass Games. For years, they have had free games on their site, including some really good games like Button Men, Agora, Lightspeed and Kill Doctor Lucky. However, when they were promoting the retrospective ‘Cheapass Games in Black and White’, they added a proverbial ton of their older games.

(And, at least for a little bit, Greater Than Games is offering the digital version of that book for free)

What is great about the Cheapass Collection, from a lockdown/limited resource standpoint, is that most of them are black and white, as well as ink light. And some of them just involve making a board. The old Cheapass mantra of using dice and cards and pawns from other games has a whole new life under these circumstances.

Cheapass, particularly in their early days, made some pretty kooky games and not all of them hold up. But they can be a lot of fun and there are enough gems to make the site worth exploring.

https://cheapass.com/free-games/

As I’ve already written, there are actually a _lot_ of places to look for PnP tiles, free and otherwise. Boardgame Geek is probably the biggest single site, in actuality. And PnP Arcade and Cheapass Games do lean on the casual game side of things. But I still think they are great resources. And, if you are only just now exploring PnP as a gaming option, I think they are even better.

My September PnP

September was a busy, busy month. If I hadn’t worked ahead early in the year, printing and cutting, I wouldn’t have gotten in Print and Play work done in September at all.

But I had so I did. I only made one project but that was Pairs, the free fruit version, from Cheapass Games. As a deck of 55-cards, Pairs counts as a ‘big’ project for me. (To be fair, I consider anything more than two pages of components big but Pairs definitely doesn’t count as a micro game)

Now, I got to play Pairs and some of the other games you can play with the deck a couple years ago at a convention. Which was a bit of a revelation since Pairs is the epitome of a casual gaming tool. It isn’t designed for game nights. It’s designed for pubs. I wouldn’t have brought a deck for the folks I played Agricola with but I would have brought it for the folks I played pub quiz with,

The fact that I laminated my cards just makes it even more perfect for pub games :D

If a PnP file is only one or two pages, I’m a lot more inclined to try it regardless of potential quality. ‘Big’ projects require being more likely to be good and be played. Pairs meets that requirement.

I’ll be honest. October looks like it will be even more busy than September. It may be a PnP-free month. But I’m glad I did make something in September.

A mediocre game can be a fun PnP project

As comes as no surprise since I am interested in Print and Play and a fan of Cheapass Games, I’ve acquired a lot of files from them over the years. With the Black and White Kickstarter going on, I’ve been looking through some of my older files.

Which is how I found myself looking at Gold Digger again. The one designed by James Ernest and illustrated by Phil Phoglio, not the one designed by Reiner Knizia and illustrated by John Kovalic. 

Honestly, I’m not sure why I impulsively printed it, cut it, laminated it and trimmed it. I mean, apart from the fact that it was really easy to do, even though it’s a ‘larger’ project by my standards.

It’s a forty-card deck. Ten one nuggets, ten two nuggets, ten three nuggets and ten booms. It’s a push-your-luck game. Shuffle the deck. Flip a card. If it’s a nugget, you set it aside. Then you can choose to bank it and end your turn or draw another card. Draw a boom and you bust, losing any nuggets you drew on that turn. Go through the deck and whoever has the most points in nuggets wins.

Let’s be honest. It’s easy to see why Gold Diggers never got published. It’s a really simple game. Not the simplest push-your-luck game I’ve ever seen (I’ve played Pass the Pigs) but the luck in Gold Diggers is flattened. Some simple card counting to track the ten booms might be enough to break the game. The odds are very simple to figure out and whoever has the turn after the last boom card has a big advantage.

Randomly discarding five or so cards might be a way of solving that problem. But even then, there’s not much there. And there’s enough light games out there, even in the world of print and play, that Gold Diggers has serious competition.

(I do want to note that while Gold Diggers is a weak game, it’s not the worst game Phil Phoglio has illustrated. In my experience, that was SPANC from Steve Jackson Games which was a horrible game that they wanted me to pay money for)

However, crafting the game was definitely fun for me. I printed it out on impulse and then kept on going until I was done. Small cards with wide margins meant that it was quick work with the paper cutter. While, for a lazy crafter like me, forty cards is a large project, this still ended up being in easy one and probably took me an hour from printing to finishing trimming.

Now that I actually made Gold Digger, maybe it will get played. If I were into drinking, it’d be a good game to play while drunk.

Like a boomerang, Devil Bunny comes back

It will come as no surprise to anyone evenly vaguely aware of my strange and possibly unhealthy obsession with Cheapass Games that I’ve been following their promotional release of PnP versions of some of their old games with a fevered eye. (It’s part of their kickstarter campaign for a history book)

I’d been wondering if they’d include Devil Bunny Needs A Ham since it’s probably right after Doctor Lucky as one of their most iconic games. In part because it’s is a decent little game and one of the cheapest things they ever sold but mostly due to the deranged name.

Then they surprised and delighted me by bundling it with its sequel Devil Bunny Hates the Earth, a game where you play sentient and suicidal taffy making machines trying to lure squirrels into your works to keep Devil Bunny (TM) from  destroying western civilization by manufacturing a particularly unsatisfying kind of saltwater taffy. There’s a reason I used to call it James Ernest Mixes Up His Medication. Again.

Stripped of their deranged names and themes, the two games are a decent little roll-and-move game (better than a lot of roll-and-move games that are out there) and a quirky mancala variant. And I’d cheerfully play either game again, for what it’s worth.

They are also the easiest games in the promotion to make, at least for far. (They could release the Chief Herman Funpacks, which are just rule sets) All you need to do is print the boards. Then add tokens, pawns and dice.

If you only make one game from Cheapass’s Classic Black and White Collection (TM), you might as well make these since they’re fun and easy. Which sounds wrong but you should still do it. Frankly, I will because I think they will be great for kids.

That said, I am really hoping that James Ernest and the gang release Enemy Chocolatier by the end of this Kickstarter. Never actually got to play it but it looked so brilliant.

P.S. I also have to note that the rules explicitly note that if Devil Bunny finds squirrels in his taffy machines, he releases them back into the wild so they’re clearly aren’t hurt by the experience.

P.P.S. I kind of hope this project inspires James Ernest to make more Devil Bunny games! Let Devil Bunny ride again!

The Hip Pocket Line and the path it paved

Back when I was first starting my tottering steps into board gaming, Cheapass’s Hip Pocket line served as a starting point for me. Cheap and portable and many of them had more game to them than some of Cheapass’s larger games.

They might also mark my fascination and love of micro games. They might be a bit high in the component count for the modern definition of micro game (particularly the several that need extra components) but the idea is still clearly the same. Small, short, portable, affordable.

While micro games have long been with us (Hi, Ogre!), Love Letter really marked the start of the golden age of micro games. And looking back at the Hip Pocket line, I think that doesn’t just mean commercially viable but innovative as well. 

I look at Love Letter or Buttonshy’s Wallet Games or Perplext’s Pack O Game line, there’s a lot of variety and even innovation. In comparison, all but one of the Hip Pocket Line was some kind of tile laying game. To be fair, they really explored that design space but later micro games went so much farther.

I’m not trying to bash the Hip Pocket line. Some of them still hold up very well today. I think they mark a watershed for James Ernst’s game designs with more refined mechanics. I think they an important step in micro game design and development. And, someday I will finally play Time Line, which has to be the deepest game in the line!

And to be even more fair, while I think the best of the new generation of micro games are amazing, Sturgeon’s Law is still very much in effect. There’s a lot of bad ones out there. By that standard, the Hip Pocket line is a statistical wonder :D

When I look at the Hip Pocket line now, I appreciate how much fun they gave me years ago and how they helped pave the way for more games down the line.

James Ernest is totally punk

I’m sorely tempted to back the latest Kickstarter from Cheapass Games: Cheapass Games In Black and White. It’s a retrospective by James Ernest about the company. It looks to be one third stories about how he designed games and two thirds rules and components sheets.

Which means that the ebook version amounts to a PnP workshop :D

Actually I don’t know if it will be formatted in a way to make PnP easy. In fact, I’m sure it’s not. Which isn’t that big a detractor. They’re releasing thirty of their titles as free PnP files and they’ve released a bunch earlier. And some games, like Lamarckian Poker, are just rules anyway.

On top of that, since I’ve been collecting Cheapass Games for over ten years, I’m not sure if there will be much I don’t already have :D

So it’s actually the reminiscing that really, really interests me.

But that’s not what this Kickstarter made me feel like blogging. I mean, anyone who’d be interested in the book already knows about it :P It was a quote from one of the prerelease blurbs. Cory Doctorow (who I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of) describes the company as ‘a punk genius of the gaming world’

The idea of Cheapass Games as a punk concept, possibly accidentally (the book might make me change my mind), is a great way for me to explain Cheapass Games. Not Mohawks and safety pins kind of punk but the ideology of rejecting the mainstream corporate. 

Board gaming, even more so back in the 90s, is a niche culture and a boutique business. But chrome and pretty bits and production are still a big deal. I’ve known folks who will judge a board game on its production level before anything else. Chrome is a such a selling point. Chrome is how the man gets you to buy games.

And, while sometimes I feel like people who demand chrome should go to a museum rather than play games if pretty things are that big a deal, there is real value to chrome. It can make a game easier to play and understand.

But Cheapass Games definitely proved that low production, (sometimes) hi concept could really work. It rejected the idea of needing a pile of plastic for a game to be good. And, in a world where having miniatures sometimes seems like a requirement for a Kickstarter to be funded, that is an important idea.

Sometimes, I feel like the main reason a game needs colorful art and plastic figures is to convince other people to play the game.

So pitching Cheapass Games as a way to reject being a corporate sell-out and sticking it to the man might be the way to get people into their games. Slightly more seriously, Cheapass Games did show a different way to approach both publishing and playing games. 

Instead of saying this is a game about bartering over chopped up body parts, let’s say this was part of a revolution.

The Very Clever Pipe Game still holds up

While it’s been years since I’ve gotten it out, The Very Clever Pipe Game was a very big deal for me when I first started down my road to becoming a dedicated gamer. Basically because it was a game I could take anywhere and teach really easily.

Hey, these are the things that can make all the difference :D

Let me give the elevator pitch. VCPG is a connection game made up of a deck of cards where players are trying to make closed groups in order to score points. There are two colors of pipes and two colors of floors. Depending on how you want to play, you are either a color of pipe or floor.

One touch I really like is the pillar rule. Each card is two squares to you can make an empty square with cards on all sides. That’s a pillar and it counts as a cap for any pipes or floors next to it.

VCPG is a very simple game. However, it’s also a very tight game. The rule set and the deck of cards are very streamlined without any fiddliness. It probably helps that I was playing the second edition, which was heavily revised. For one thing, it has less than half the number of cards. That extra revision and play testing probably helped a lot.

VCPG is also one of the few Cheapass Games from that era that doesn’t need any extra parts. These days, I have multiple tool boxes of game bits but, back then, not needing any extra bits made a big difference. All I needed was a baggy of cards and I was good to go.

All of that meant that VCPG is a very portable, very accessible game. More than that, luck of the draw creates enough variation that it’s a game that you can keep on playing over and over. For someone who wasn’t just getting his toe into board games but also learning how to learn games, that was all a big deal.

My original copy of VCPG looks like it was dropped off a building and then run over by a car. It’s has clearly seen a lot of love. These days, its niche has been taken over HUE. Mostly because I like the scoring system and it handles multi-players more simply and elegantly.

But VCPG still holds up. It has a simple job but it does it well. I’d cheerfully play it again and I know there’s stuff in it that I haven’t explored yet. I really only played it using the pipes, not the floors. That alone is a whole zone of the game I don’t know about.

The Very Clever Pipe Game was a nice thing to discover and helped lead to a much bigger world.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/279/very-clever-pipe-game

How my opinion of Mapple has changed

My, what a difference seven years makes.

Seven years ago, I first discovered and wrote about Mapple. And, at the time, I was fairly disparaging. My opinion of it now is a fair bit better, thanks to having a lot more PnP experience under my belt.

Mapple is a free game, really a free family of games, from Cheapass Games. And it is a really easy build. You just have to print off one of the four boards, add coins for pieces and you’re done. The rules are even on the margins.

Every board was made for a convention and each map is actually of the city where the convention was held. Well, most of them are. Each map is broken down into areas.

Both players get a quarter, two dimes, three nickels and four pennies. One player is heads and the other one is tails. You take turns placing coins in spaces, with only one coin per space. The clever is bit is that if your opponent has a coin of lower value next to where you placed your coin, you get to flip it and make it your own. Game ends when you run out of coins and you get a point for every space you’re in. Most points wins. A full game is doing that twice so everyone gets to go first.

Okay, Mapple is a perfect information abstract. If you don’t like those at all, it won’t change your mind. If you only kind of like them, it’s a real quick one so it’s not a bad choice. In fact, I like how every game is ten turns so you know how long it’ll take from the start.

Every board has more than twenty spaces and there are four boards so Mapple has enough variety that it shouldn’t get formulaic or predictable too fast. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s solvable but you get four boards to solve.

Okay, why has my opinion of Mapple changed? I still think it’s an okay game but not a life changing game. However, in the last seven years, I have looked at and, more importantly, played a lot more PnP games.  I am now comparing it to its own pool of games. And it’s does pretty well by that standard.

When you’re actually buying a game, you want some serious replay value. You want a good return for your investment. Here’s a dirty little secret about PnP games. It’s more okay to not get a ton of play out of them, particularly ones where you just print off one page. 

And I’ve honestly gotten more play out of Mapple than I have games that I paid for. I like stones on the board abstracts. I find Mapple a relaxing little exercise. It isn’t a life-style game that I’ll play forever. But I will play it enough to make to worth my while.

[I do feel like I need to compare Mapple to Coin-Age since they are both tiny games that use coins as the central pieces. Here’s my comparison. They’re not really alike. Coin-Age uses the coin flip, creating a random element and a much more dynamic game. It plays out differently. I like the idea of Coin-Age more but, at least these days, I’m more drawn to playing Mapple because it’s more restful]

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/120655/mapple

Vague but happy memories of the Big Cheese

When I spend time ruminating on the start of me becoming a dedicated board gamer, two companies tend to feature heavily in my memories: Looney Labs and Cheapass Games.

And they are companies I continue to like. However, I got to say that the earlier games from Cheapass Games are a lot more uneven. 

The Big Cheese was one of my earliest acquisitions, mostly because it was so very cheap, even by Cheapass standards. It was also very small, a tiny deck of cards and my game collection at the time consisted of a tiny deck of cards, not counting dice that didn’t come with the game, bidding tokens and a way to keep score.

In fact, I don’t even really remember what it was like to play the game. My strongest memory of the game is playing it in a coffee shop across from the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. I can’t even remember the name of the coffee shop and I’m pretty sure it’s gone. It’s kind of a fun memory.

The game itself, while the edition I own has some fun artwork of rats doing business work (the rat race :D), is really an auction game. Here are the twists. Your bid serves as a timer for any card you win. You’ll place your bid tokens on a project card and take one off at the start of each turn. Definitely makes resource management interesting. And you roll dice to determine how many points a project is worth so there’s some definite swinginess. Although you could argue that makes it a more realistic business model :P

I should really revisit The Big Cheese sometime. I have a feeling I would like it more now. For one thing, I’ve played a lot more auction games since then and have a better appreciation and understanding of them. I also think I would appreciate tokens being tied up in a project and used as timers better.

Of course, now it’s available as a print and play so even if I didn’t still have my old copy, I could make a new one.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/506/big-cheese

Bitin’ Off Hedz - not a good game but maybe a good learning curve

Bitin’ Off Hedz is definitely in the running  for the worst Cheapass Game I’ve experienced. 

It came out in 1996 and I think that James Earnst was still  finding his bearings. We had already gotten Kill Doctor Lucky, so there was the  promise of things to come.

The theme of the game is that you are all dinosaurs who are all so bored that you’ve decided to race to the volcano to throw yourself in. By Cheapass standards, that’s pretty normal.

Anyway, at the end of the day, it’s a roll and move game where you can sometimes throw rocks at other pawns that makes them go back to start and optional powers depending on what kind of plastic dinosaur you’re using for your pawn. When one of the main twists in the rules is getting forced back to start, that isn’t a good rule in my book.

The selling point (?) of the game is that the board is huge. It’s made of sixteen sections that you have to hold together (post it notes on the underside are recommended) and is close to three feet long. The completed board shows a winding path that forms the shape of a dinosaur skull.

Back in 1996, Bitin’ Off Hedz was an ambitious physical design, particularly for a self-publisher. Time has not been kind. Sixteen black and white pages of illustration on poor quality paper falls short of even PnP standards, particularly paired with a subpar rules.

However, these days, I am more forgiving of Bitin’ Off Hedz. Not in and of itself but for its place in the history of Cheapass Games. I knew it was an early game but I hadn’t realized how early it was when I first tried it.

From that standpoint, I view the game as an experiment, James Ernst still figuring out what would work with the Cheapass format. I find it telling that the next time he made a roll-and-move game, Devil Bunny Needs A Ham, it was smaller, quirkier and a much tighter design. Multiple pawns and a claustrophobic board, that game offers more choices on top of a really silly theme.

Bitin’ Off Hedz isn’t a good game. But it may have been a necessary step to figuring out what makes Cheapass work.

Change, a game system whose games work just as well with regular cards

I probably still have two or three copies of Change, since it was so cheap and it is so small. One copy lived in my bag for a while, in large part because it is the size of a box of matches.

And the idea of Change was one that appealed to me and still appeals to me. Instead of one game, it's three different rule sets for a tiny, special deck of cards. You know, a game system.

Really, given the whole found art nature of James Ernst design aesthetic, you could say that game systems are his speciality. In many ways, that has so far culminated with the Pairs deck.

But Change was a very early approach to a game system in the world of Cheapass Games. And, I really hate to say it, it shows.

It's a deck of fifty cards. There are no suits. Instead, there are ten 1's, 3's, 5's, 7's, and 10's. They are decorated with cute pictures of the Fridey's zombies and done up to look like paper money. It's card stock, which might have the word card in it but doesn't make for good cards but this is Cheapass we're taking about.

The games comes with three rules sets: Make Your Own Change Night, Boneyard (which I admit I never played) and Diminishing Returns.

Here's the big problem. Make Your Own Change Night is a retread of Hey Bartender from Chief Herman's Holiday Fun Pack and Diminishing Returns is a retread of Pennywise from the same collection. In other words, they were games I was already familiar with, just tweaked for the special deck.

Now, I have had fun with Make Your Own Change Night so it's not like Change is a total waste. But a deck of cards can do the same trick and I can play a whole bunch of other games with that.

(It's telling that Boneyard has since been released as a rule set for regular cards, although you do need two decks of cards to get the right card count.. I also have to admit the rules to Boneyard confused me when I first read them years ago but they seem perfectly simple now, although I still think calling the auction sets buckets is bad jargon)

What a game system needs, more than anything else, is a great game. A killer app. For instance, if the only game you had rules to play with the Looney Pyramids was Zendo or Volcano, I'd still be happy with those games. Change it only doesn't have that killer game, its games work just has well with regular cards.

I have seen a lot of different kinds of decks over the years. Five or six suits, pyramid decks, multi-suited cards, straight up numbered decks. I haven't seen another deck like Change and maybe there's a reason for that. It would be really interesting to see what a killer game with a deck like this and I still don't know what it would be.

My mental block with Spree

It's fun reminiscing about older Cheapass Games. While a lot of them weren't particularly good, they were always interesting. Combining James Ernst's philosophy of throwing everything against the wall to see what stuck and the whole minimalist design philosophy meant you'd come up with something you'd remember if nothing else.

(I do wonder if my early exposure to Cheapass Games is part of why chrome isn't a big selling point for me, although I do appreciate it. I could argue that years of D&D where I had to use my imagination as another reason :D)

Spree was one of those earlier games that I never could get into. Looking back, I honestly wonder if the minimalism/found components element may have been too much for me for once.

In Spree, you and your friends have broken into a mall that's on its last legs to steal stuff and shoot at each other with stun guns. With the rise of decaying and abandoned malls, the theme is even funnier these days.

And, in all honestly, there was nothing appalling with the mechanics of the game. You use a die for moving and shooting and a hand of cards from a regular deck of cards to loot. It's really random but, seeing as how this screams beer and pretzel game, I don't think that's terrible.

No, for whatever reason, using a regular deck of cards just did not work for me. Normally, it wouldn't be a problem for me but I just couldn't handle the disconnect between all of my associations with conventional cards and shooting and looting in a mall. I play a lot of abstracts and use a lot of game systems so you'd think this wouldn't be an issue for me. A specialized deck for Spree would have helped me a lot.

Of course, that would have also probably tripled the cost of the game at the very least, defeating one of its major selling points. And it still wouldn't be a good game. 

A couple years after I found Spree, some folks insisted on pulling out Frag and I found it really underwhelming. Looking back, Spree gave me a similar experience for a fraction of the cost. I'm sure Frag fans would be appalled by that thought.

I have a feeling that Spree has the potential to be a fun, sloppy game, a cross between a first person shooter and a party game. Maybe with some house rules. However, what I remember about it how using a regular deck of cards threw me off so much.

Okay, I will rank the Hip Pocket line

I had been planning on making this just a response to someone asking me about ranking the individual games in Cheapass's Hip Pocket Game line. But my response ended up getting so long that I decided to just make it a separate blog entry.

So, here's a ranking and commentary on the Hip Pocket Game Line.

1. Light Speed - it's a real time game of slapping down cards that represent space ships with shields and lasers that you trace to see if they hit anything. It's not the first or only game of its kind but it's the best I've found so far. In large part because it is so stripped down and simple while still feeling like a space battle. When I first played it, it felt like cheating to be so easy but so thematic.

I didn't realize there was a revised version called Stellar Conflict, which adds faction powers, until someone commented on it in my last blog post. I'd be willing to try it but part of the appeal of Light Speed is it's raw simplicity. Adding complexity and time to the scoring part of the game might be a game breaker for me.

2. The Very Clever Pipe Game - a tile laying game of connecting pipes and collecting the cards that make closed pipelines. This is easily the game I played the most, because it is so solid and requires nothing but the cards. It works well because it tosses out everything but the fundamentals. It misses being number one because it's in a more crowded field of tile laying, connection games. These days, HUE takes its place in my bag. Still, I'd never turn down a game.

3. Agora/Camden - creating a Roman market place with special events to spice things up until someone wins by earning enough money. This has some really weird placement rules that restrict how cards can connect to form larger stands but there isn't restrictions on how you place stands. I've never seen another game quite like it and it does a good job being different and and unique.

4. Nexus - you place cards in a basket weave pattern and claim intersections to control paths. When I first played Nexus, I really liked it. It was one of my first area of control games. But time hasn't been as kind to it as some the games earlier on the ranking. Not a bad game but not sparkly any more.

5. The Big Cheese - the token auction game in the line, themed around corporate rats completing projects. The biggest twist in the game is that the value of the completed project is determined by a die roll. While GEM is my choice of quick auction games, the Big Cheese would be interesting to revisit. I've played a lot of auction games since the Big Cheese and it would be interesting to revisit.

6. Steam Tunnels - you lay down tiles to create a maze of tunnels with players claiming tunnels whose value will be determined by their end caps. Okay, it's been so long since I've played it and it left so little an impression, I can't remember what I thought. Which is not a recommendation.

7. Cube Farm - a tile laying game where you build a map of an office floor where you try to get the good stuff like the copier and the exit close to you and the bad stuff like the Vice President far away. I did not have a great impression of it but, you know, I remember it. And I've been in a lot more cubicles since then. I'd revisit it to see what I think now.

Games that got left out:

I swear the Big Idea had a Hip Pocket edition but I can't seem to find any proof of that. Right group, decent party game.

And, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I haven't played Safari Jack or Timeline. And, revisiting the Hip Pocket Game line, I really need to play Timeline. A time travel game where the maze of time lines constantly shifts sounds like a lot of fun.

I personally own all these games but a good chunk of them of them are available as free print and plays on Cheapass's website and I'm sure can be printed on demand at sites like Drive By Cards.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/73/hip-pocket-games

http://cheapass.com/free-games/

My stepping stone of Hip Pocket games

Wandering down memory lane has brought me to the Hip Pocket line of games, a line of games that Cheapass produced that were smaller than their usual games but better than a lot of them.

I played them quite a bit in between getting back into board games with Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico and Fluxx and getting serious about building a library of games. They were a big part me testing the water with my toe before diving headfirst into the deep end.

Every single game is a little deck of cards in a plastic baggy and most of them are tile laying games. At the time, they cost between four to six dollars so it was easy to get a little library going. The games in the Hip Pocket line were simpler and more solid than most of the other games in the Cheapass catalog at the time.

Over the last few years, as I've become less of a game snob, I've come to appreciate Cheapass's designs more and more. Some of the games that have come out in the last few years have been good and well aimed at the 'causual' audience. But I really believe the Hip Pocket line are some of the best games they made.

The best of the Hip Pocket line, which I'm saying are The Very Clever Pipe Game and Light Speed, I have played more times than I can count, particularly since I wasn't keeping track of my plays back then. I'd honestly play any of the ones I've played again without a problem, even Cube Farm, which I thought was just okay.

Confession time: I have not yet played either Safari Jack or Timeline. I may never play Safari Jack but I do want to eventually play Timeline. It is probably the heaviest game in the lot, which was heavy when Fluxx was one of primary games, but it's probably light to me now. Plus, it looks like pretty good.

Small and short but punchy and well designed. The Hip Pocket line was a good way for me to edge into collecting games. And, while I have other games I now carry everywhere, they still hold up really well.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/73/hip-pocket-games

Pairs proves to be a more interesting game system than I thought

Since I subscribe to the Cheapass Games newsletter, I have been aware of Pairs pretty much since it was ever mentioned. However, it didn't really interest me very much.

However, I did sign up for what amounted to a Pairs seminar with James Ernst at this year's Rincon. He ran through four different games that you can play with the Pairs deck as well as some variants. And by the time he was done, I had a much better opinion of the Pairs deck as a game system.

The Pairs deck is a triangular deck. It doesn't have suits, only ranks one to ten. And each rank has as many cards in it as its rank. So there is only one one card but ten ten cards.

All the Pairs games I played were light, quick games. Pub games that would be good for figuring out who pays for the next round. The games I learned included elements push-your-luck and bluffing. And I know you can use the deck to play climbing and trick taking games since Cheapass has all but admitted that they started with a Great Dalmutti deck to create the Pairs deck.

The actual Pairs game was one of the ones I learned, which is a very simple push-your-luck game. In fact, I'd say it was the weakest game I learned. So instead of being a deck of cards that you can theoretically play other games with, I would buy the deck specifically to play the other games. It really is a legit game system.

The Pairs deck isn't the first triangular deck I've played with. I'm pretty sure that was the Great Dalmutti, which goes up to twelve. I didn't realize how much losing those twenty three cards (11+12) tightened up the odds in the Pairs deck until I had a chance to play with it.

The games I got to play were on the serious casual side. They were lighter than what we play when the toddler is in bed and we are exhausted. But they'd be great at restaurants or parties or bars. And great with folks who'd never play something like Love Letter. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are deeper games that I just don't know yet.

Nothing is going to beat the standard deck of cards as a game system. It has had literally centuries of development and refinement and playtesting. And the best alternative I've found is the brilliant Decktet with its multi-suited cards. The Pairs deck is still pretty flexible and fun, though. And, since all three take up less space than some paperbacks, there's no reason not to own all three.

http://cheapass.com/pairs/