From: "Walt O'Hara" <hotspur@ROCKETMAIL.COM> Subject: Mini-Review: GROO: The Game. I found this cute little gem at my favorite hobby/gaming shop (the Game Parlour, Chantilly, VA) over the weekend. GROO:THE GAME is a card game comprising about 70 cards in the basic game, one sheet of rules (folded, not stapled), seven BLANK dice with stickers to apply game symbols onto the dice. In addition, there is an expansion box of 55 cards that expand on the basic game. I bought both. The basic game retails around 15 bucks, the expansion about 8. Hey, it's my birthday... I'm allowed. G:TG is NOT a collectible card game. Every card in the series comes in these two boxes. No word if the publisher, Archangel Entertainment, plan on producing more. The mechanics of GROO are designed for multiplayer interaction and I think the more the merrier. The basic game states that 2-4 players can play. The expansion deck adds room for 2 more. If you are a fan of MAD magazine (knowing the age group of a few of the readers of this list, I suspect there are a few of you out there), you will be familiar with the artwork of Sergio Aragones, the illustrator who drew the cute little cartoons on the edges of the magazine for so many years. He is the illustrator of the cards, stickers and rules-- the game has a cutesy look to it. The game plays easily enough; the essence of the game is to build your army and your city, and avoid GROO (the barbarian main character of the Marvel comic book series by Aragones). Groo is a source of destruction (much like he is in the comics). You don't want him in your town. He destroys buildings, he levels temples, etc., etc. There are five kinds of cards: Wild Cards, Event Cards, Groo Cards, Building Cards, and Troop Cards. There is also a single GROO Card. The Sequence of play runs like this: 1. Discard Phase (where you get rid of unwanted cards or cards you don't have the right resources to use) 2. Draw Phase (draw cards up to 5) 3. Attack Phase (Move troops to attack another city) 4. Construction Phase (Build new buildings or troops) 5. Leftover Phase (Hand leftover resources to the next player) 6. 2nd Draw Phase (draw back up to 5). Resources are handled in a novel fashion: six of the seven dice in the game have stickers on them that depicts a little man (representing LABOR), a gold coin (representing KOPECKS or money), a sack of wheat (representing FOOD), and Groo's face (representing Groo control points). Each card, with the exception of Event cards and Wild cards, has a cost associated with it. The yellow GROO CONTROL CARDS have a "Groo Control Cost" in Groo heads depicted on the card. The orange BUILDING CARDS have a Labor, Kopeck, or Food cost depicted on the card. Likewise, the troop cards have a cost associated with them as well. The seventh dice is the GROO CONTROL DICE. This is the random element that decides if Groo will wander away from your town and go somewhere else. Groo can go either 1 player town to your left, 2 player towns to your left, 1 player town to your right, two player towns to your right, or stay put (twice on the die). If Groo stays put, there's a big chance you are going to lose a town unless you can fish some form of Groo control card out of the deck that makes him go away. On top of the mechanics, which are simple and elegant, there are some Wild Card functions that disrupt the flow of the game. These are the Wild Cards and Event Cards (red and blue). The game plays fast, furious and silly. Groo is easy to teach and easy to learn, with enough variability to make the game extremely "replayable." I don't know what the publisher has in store for it, but I suspect we will see more of them. The game credits read like a virtual "Who's Who" from TSR during the Big Moolah years: Jeff Grubb,Ron Perrin, Larry Elmore and Margaret Weis (of Dragonlance fame, I presume). I suspect this game started out as a joke and developed a life of its own-- like many good games do. I hope to see more out of Archangel Entertainment. === Walt O'Hara --------------------------------------------- NEW Home Page: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1861 Email: Doktor_Rat@Humanoid.Net --------------------------------------------------------- _____________________________________________________________________ Sent by RocketMail. Get your free e-mail at http://www.rocketmail.com