Tagline: Wizards of the Coast and the Bourbaki card game design team strike again in this surprisingly fascinating and addictive card game, the first in a line of non-collectible games meant to provide competition with games like Uno and Skip-Bo.

Thirteen years later, Twitch remains one of my favorite card games. My review speaks highly of it, but a game with that kind of staying power deserves special attention. Sadly, it is long out of print and virtually unattainable as I write this. If you get a chance, though, I recommend you grab a copy ASAP.

The premise of the game is simple: Someone plays a card. The cards tells you who goes next. If it’s you, you’ve got to play another card before someone challenges you and you have to take the entire stack of cards. If it’s not you, you’ve got to figure out who it is and challenge them before they can play. Be careful, if you play or challenge wrong you’ll end up taking those cards.

Simple, right? Right.

Until you start playing the game, that is. Then what seems so simple on the surface suddenly seems to be the most complicated thing you’ve ever done.

The basic game centers around eight different cards. The four basic cards are Left, Right, 2 Left and 2 Right. These cards tell you who goes next (the player to your left, your right, two seats to your left, and two seats to your right – respectively). In addition the card Ditto means that the last card’s effect is repeated, the card Back At Ya! sends the turn back to the last player to play a card. The last trick is that all players are given a color card, and a duplicate of this card is place in the play deck. When that color card is played the person to who it belongs must play next. Finally there are the challenge cards – these cards are keyed to the colors of the players. If a player is too slow or if they make a mistake, you can challenge them with the challenge card corresponding to their color.

The name of the game is speed, and once you’re into the heat of the chase you’re going to find that these simple rules are more than challenge enough.

Now let’s take another step, into the Advanced Game. At this point we add three more cards: Pick a Color, Rotate Colors, and Left to Right. These are called “Pause Cards”, when they are played gameplay temporarily stops while their results are gauged. Pick a Color means that the person who just played the card picks the color of another player, and then that player plays a card (resuming play). Rotate colors means that everyone takes their color card (indicating what color they are) and hand them to the player on their left – this causes confusion regarding what color to use to challenge which players and what color you are when the color cards come up during gameplay. Finally, Left to Right means that all cards referring to a particular direction mean exactly the opposite – left means right and right means left. Conveniently there are exactly two of these cards, meaning that once play is reversed, it will eventually turn back the other way.

Twitch is the first in a line of games Wizards of the Coast is producing in order to apparently attempt to compete with traditional family games. On the strength of this product I intend to go out of my way to also purchase Pivot, Alpha Blitz, and GoWild! — the other products in this line-up.

At seven bucks you can’t lose with this game. It won’t be put on the shelf next to your Magic cards or your Doomtown cards, but I think it more than amply deserves a place alongside such classic games as Uno and Skip-Bo.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Richard Garfield, Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, and Dave Pettey
Company/Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $6.95
Page count: n/a
ISBN: 1-57530-581-X
Originally Posted: 1998/05/30

Tagline: “Chess will never be the same!” This innocent looking pack of 80 cards completely alters the game of Chess – from a static strategic puzzle to a dynamic tactical conflict. Moody and evocative art by Rogerio Vilela. Translated from the original French.

I actually have quite vivid memories of writing this review. It was the first time I really became aware of how thoroughly I’d been bitten by the reviewing “bug” because I started thinking about how I would write the review of the game as I was playing the game.

The tagline of Knightmare Chess is, “Move a piece. Play a Card. Chess will never be the same…”

There you have the whole game. In the elegant box in which Knightmare Chess comes you will find 80 cards – each of which subtly alters the rules of Chess in different ways. These cards let you do all the things you always wish you could do in a tight moment during a game of Chess – resurrect a piece which has been captured, move a piece out of the way, take not one piece, but many on a single move. On each of your turns you can play one card.

When first approaching this game I was both anticipatory and doubtful. Anticipatory because it sounded like a fun thing to do once or twice. Doubtful because chess is an ancient game – its grace and its beauty come from the fact that its rules are carefully balanced, all the pieces are known, and the challenge comes from manipulating a known set of variables in a strategic way to overcome your opponent.

The premise of Knightmare Chess, while seemingly innocuous, actually radically alters the very basic appeal and structure of the game. The rules are no longer balanced, they are in constant flux. The pieces are not known, they can be altered and rearranged. There is no known set of variables, the variables are unknown and changing.

At first glance, therefore, Knightmare Chess has the potential to completely screw the only appeal chess has – its strategic component.

After playing the game awhile I realized I was wrong. Knightmare Chess transformed Chess into a radically different game, but it did not destroy it. Where Chess is a static strategic puzzle (with its elements known and the possible interactions between pieces completely proscribed), Knightmare Chess is a dynamic tactical conflict. Just because the rules are always changing, doesn’t mean that Knightmare Chess is an inferior game. It does mean, however, that it appeals to an entirely different aesthetic than Chess.

Chess has often been described as a wargame. Indeed, in some ways it is – if you are willing to accept a certain degree of abstraction. Nonetheless, it is an odd one – one in which you have only a certain number of troops, in which both sides are equal, and in which everything is ultimately predictable. If Knightmare Chess is similarly a wargame carried to an extreme degree of abstraction, then it presents a model of modern warfare – where the sides can quickly become unequal, where reinforcement is conceivable, and where combat is anything but predictable.

Knightmare Chess is a fascinating game. If you are a chess player, approach it with an open mind. If you have no taste for chess, then it is entirely conceivable that this game will appeal to you nonetheless.

It should be noted that I am using a copy of the Second Edition for the purposes of this review. The differences between the first and second editions are extremely subtle and largely inconsequential to the overall gameplay and assessment of this game. For a list of differences you can check Steve Jackson Game’s website.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Pierre Clequin and Bruno Faidutti
Company/Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
Cost: $14.95
Page count: n/a
ISBN: 1-55634-319-1
Originally Posted: 1998/05/30

For Christmas I got a copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill. It’s a great little game. I don’t really have much to say about it at the moment, but I bring it up because the game ships with eight 6-sided dice which are marked as 1d3-1 (generating results of 0, 1, or 2 pips). At one point during the holidays we had the game half set-up when everyone got distracted by some other bit of family business, which left a couple of people mucking about with the dice.

In the process, I was struck with the idea for a silly little dice game that proved amusing enough that I present it here:

1. The first player rolls all 8 dice from Betrayal at House on the Hill.
2. The target number is 6. If you fail to roll 6 pips on your dice, you have lost and the other player scores a point.
3. If you have rolled more than 6 pips, you are allowed to remove a number of dice from the pool equal to the number of extra pips you rolled. (Example: If you roll an 8, you can remove 2 dice from the pool.)
4. Hand the remaining dice to the other player to roll. The target number remains 6.
5. When a player scores a point, the other player rolls all 8 dice and play continues.

We either played to 6 points or swapped in new players in a tag-team style.

Not exactly a high-strategy game, but a strangely satisfying combination of Horse with the random rote of War. Plus dice. (Dice are cool.)

I wasn’t planning on doing this, but almost immediately after writing about my first set of rulebook woes with Castle Ravenloft I ended up playing the solo scenario “Adventure: Impossible” and running headlong into two particularly egregious problems.

First, a quick description of the “Adventure: Impossible” scenario: In the scenario you play each of the five Heroes in the game sequentially as they enter Castle Ravenloft’s dungeons in order to defeat 3 of Strahd’s powerful lieutenants. (Which three is randomly determined before the game begins and revealed as you play.) When one hero dies, the next hero arrives.

(Minor problem: The scenario doesn’t specify what happens to the dead Hero’s treasure. It also doesn’t specify what happens to the monsters which were controlled by the dead Hero. I arbitrarily ruled that the dead Hero’s treasure disappeared, but that their monster control cards and traps transferred to the new character.)

The scenario wasn’t going too badly for me until I got an Alarm trap. These traps generate a new monster every single turn until they’re disabled… and I could never get the damn thing disabled. My fighter failed to disable it twice and was then killed. He was replaced by the rogue, who has a +5 bonus to disabling traps (and thus has an 80% chance of success). The rogue failed three times, but was then fortunate enough to get teleported to the far side of the dungeon by an Encounter card. A few turns later, this was my predicament:

The Alarm trap was still spitting out monsters, all of which were pouring across the dungeon towards me. At this point I had killed one of Strahd’s lieutenants and was now engaging Klak. Klak’s appearance was actually quite lucky in some respects because he would cause unexplored tiles to flip over, which gave me room to continue moving away from the monsters pursuing me and, thus, enough time to kill Klak before they reached me.

PLACING MONSTERS

Here, however, we run into our first rulebook woe. The rule for placing Monsters reads:

When you have to “place a Monster” this is shorthand for draw a Monster Card and place the corresponding Monster figure on the bone pile that’s on the Dungeon Tile you just placed. If you already have the same Monster Card in play in front of you, discard that Monster Card and draw again. Note, however, that it’s okay to draw a Monster Card if another player has the same Monster in play.

(Minor problem: You will often be told to “place a Monster” in situations where you haven’t just placed a Dungeon Tile, so the first sentence is actually misleading in addition to being ungrammatical. But that’s just a quibble, really.)

The question becomes: What happens when you already have one copy of every single Monster Card in the game? Should multiple Monsters now be allowed? Or is it now impossible for new Monsters to appear? And if it’s impossible for new Monsters to appear, should I cycle through the entire deck?

I ask that last question, because the game is also unclear on what you should do when you get to the bottom of a deck of cards. Should you reshuffle the discards? Or have you simply depleted the dungeon of Monsters? (I think the answer here is pretty obviously “reshuffle”, but once again we’re seeing the sloppiness of the rulebook.)

In terms of whether or not Monsters should be drawn when you already have one copy of each Monster Control card, I see three possibillities:

(1) You don’t draw any additional monsters. (This is the most literal interpretation of the rules; it is also the most favorable to the players.)

(2) Draw an additional control card to determine what type of monster to place, place it, but then place the extra control card under the existing control card. The new monster will still be activated by the control card already in your hand. If one of these monsters is killed, remove one control card to your XP pile normally while leaving the other in play. (This allows new monsters to continue entering play, but doesn’t result in a single player activating the same monster multiple times on their turn.)

(3) Draw an additional control card, place the monster, and resolve the additional control card normally. (This is the most punitive possibility, since it means that the active player will be activating those monsters twice.)

I decided to go with the first possibility in thie scenario, largely because the alternative was pretty much certain death. In the future, however, I might actually use a house rule in which scenario #2 is always used when a duplicate control card is drawn. It might make the game slightly more difficult, but in a way that I feel would be more enjoyable and universally consistent.

TACTICAL FAIL

In any case, I’d managed to kill Klak, but the monsters were still coming.

oh shit…

I had them strung out pretty well so that I could take them one at a time, but the problem was that as soon as I killed one of them the Alarm trap would immediately respawn them. And I couldn’t keep that up indefinitely because the encounters would slowly whittle me away.

But then I got lucky and pulled a treasure that would let me teleport all the way back to the other side of the board where I could deactivate the Alarm trap.

… instead I missed the die roll three more times.

(If you’re keeping track at home, I have now missed the die roll seven times. One of these had a 55% chance of success and the others all had an 80% chance of success, meaning that there’s only a 0.002% chance that something like this could happen.)

I’m now down to 1 hp and the monsters are closing in, but I have a clever scheme which will allow me to circle around a corridor loop in the randomly generated dungeon, pull the monsters away from the Alarm trap, and give me one more shot at disabling the thing.

… except for the encounter card which teleported a spider right next to me for a guaranteed kill.

At this point, the cleric — my last Hero in the scenario — teleports in and makes a beeline for the Alarm trap. Once there, he proceeds to blow his disarm roll three more times. (I am officially done calculating the probability on this one.)

With more monsters closing in, the cleric fled down the hall, where he promptly discovered the Zombie Dragon (Strahd’s third lieutenant) lurking in a the Rotting Nook:

This does not look good.

And here, as the Zombie Dragon pins me in the corner, we reach our second rulebook woe. When a monster activates, you are supposed to check the Monster Tactics listed on their control card. The rules for this are:

• The Monster’s tactics are presented as a list. Each possible maneuver for the Monster starts with a statement. If that statement is true, the Monster follows the resulting tactics.
• If the statement is not true, go on to the next statement. If that statement is true, the Monster follows the resulting tactics.
• Once a Monster has selected and followed one set of tactics, the Monster’s turn ends. Do not continue to check its remaining tactics that turn.

What these rules fail to address is a situation in which a tactics statement is true, but the resulting tactics cannot be executed. For example, in the picture above my cleric is boxed into the corner by a skeleton and the Zombie Dragon. As a result, there are no adjacent spaces open next to the cleric. You can see just beyond the Zombie Dragon that there is a wolf and a spider waiting to pounce me. The wolf’s tactics read:

• If the Wolf is adjacent to a Hero, it attacks that Hero with a bite.
• If the Wolf is within 2 tiles of a Hero, it moves adjacent to the closest Hero and attacks that Hero with a pounce.
• Otherwise, the Wolf moves 2 tiles toward the closest Hero.

The first line doesn’t apply since the Wolf isn’t adjacent. The second line does apply (the Wolf is within 2 tiles of the cleric), but it can’t move adjacent. Does that mean it doesn’t attack at all? And, if so, should I instead execute the third line of the Wolf’s tactics? What if this wasn’t a solo scenario and the closest Hero was boxed in but there was another Hero within range who wasn’t? Should the Wolf attack the available target or freeze-up on the unavailable target?

Then consider that the spider’s tactics unambiguously trigger a web attack. (“If the Spider is within 1 tile of a Hero, it attacks the closest Hero with an acidic web.”) But the spider’s web attack is a +11 attack with the effect, “1 [damage] and Slowed. Place the Spider adjacent to the Hero.” Should the spider deal damage and then not move? Or is the entire effect canceled since part of it can’t apply?

What would probably be useful is a general rule for handling occupied spaces. Maybe something like, “If a Monster must move to or appear in a particular space and all possible spaces are occupied, the monster instead moves to an adjacent space.” This doesn’t necessarily clear up the question of whether or not the Wolf would be allowed to attack even though they didn’t get adjacent to their target, but it would help.

It would also clear up another issue with the “place a Monster” rules: What happens if the bone pile is already occupied by another monster? (Since many monsters won’t move when they appear and several encounters spawn multiple monsters, this situation actually crops up quite frequently.) We’ve been playing with the “place them in an adjacent space” rule since it obviously makes the most sense.

A couple days ago I posted my first thoughts on the Castle Ravenloft boardgame. One of the things I mentioned was the horrific quality of the rulebook. Today I want to expound upon that a little bit.

But first, let me mention how the session we played last night went: We had a couple of newbies at the table, so we started with Adventure 2: Find the Icon of Ravenloft. This is essentially the plain, vanilla version of the game. It’s a good way to get introduced to the basic gameplay, and then wraps up with a climactic fight in the Chapel. We were able to conserve our big AoE attacks until reaching the Chapel, but then two bad Encounter draws ended up teleporting two of our Heroes to opposite ends of the dungeon while spawning even more monsters. With a good deal of scrambling, however, we were able to strand a gargoyle, reconcentrate the enemies, and then blast our way out of the castle.

Good times.

We then moved to Adventure 9: Gauntlet of Terror. In this scenario the layout of the dungeon is largely predetermined at the beginning of play and groups of monsters are moving towards the dungeon’s entrance, seeking to escape and ransack the village. This adventure completely inverts the strategy of the game in almost every way.

The first time we played it, we screwed up the respawning rules for the monsters. Then a couple of players left and a new player showed up and we played through it a second time using all of the rules correctly. Both plays were great fun, with quite a few really tense moments. (Including one memorable turn where we ended up semi-intentionally spawning 7 monsters at the same time.)

I’ve now played the game a total of 18 times. It continues to deliver a consistently fun experience.

THE RULEBOOK

With that being said, I now want to discuss the inadequacies of the rulebook in a bit more detail. To quickly sum up the problem: Castle Ravenloft pretty much can’t be played without house-ruling nearly every facet of the game.

EXAMPLE 1: IMMOBILIZATION

The complete rules for the Immobilized condition read: “If your Hero is Immobilized, your Speed is reduced to 0 — you can’t move!”

Okay, that means that you can’t use a Move action to move (since your Speed has been reduced to 0). But can you still use At-Will, Utility, or Daily powers that allow you to move? What if another character uses a power that would move you… is that allowed? What if an encounter card is triggered with a trap-like effect that would ordinarily force you to move — does the Immobilized condition prevent that movement, too? What if the effect in question doesn’t use the word “move” to describe the positional change, should that be allowed?

For example, here’s the text from the Overwhelming Terror encounter card: “Place each Hero 2 tiles closer to the Start tile. If a Hero is on the same tile as a Monster after being placed, that Hero is slowed.”

Should Overwhelming Terror move an Immobilized Hero to a new tile? Does the flavor text (“A cacophony of shrieks and howls rises up around you, and you flee in terror.“) change your opinion?

If they aren’t moved, do you still check to see if they are slowed? And if you do, do you use the tile they’re currently on or the tile they would have been placed on if they were moved?

Okay, let’s consider Strahd’s Minions: “Place the active Hero and the two Monsters that are closest to that Hero on the tile farthest from the active Hero. If there are less than two Monsters in play, place a new Monster adjacent to the active Hero after he or she is placed.”

If an Immobilized Hero isn’t placed on a new tile, should you still move the monsters? And if not, should you draw a new monster if there are less than two in play? (After all, there is no “after he or she is placed” if the Hero was never placed.)

Should an immobilized rogue be allowed to move as part of their Deft Strike ability? (“Before the attack, you can move 2 squares. Attack one adjacent Monster.”) If not, should the immobilized rogue be allowed to move when the cleric uses Hallowed Advance? (“Hit or miss, each other Hero can move one tile.”) If not, can the fighter use Bodyguard when the immobilized rogue is attacked? (“The attack misses instead, and you swap positions with the Hero that was attacked.”) Can the fighter use Bodyguard if the fighter is the one who’s been immobilized?

In order to have a nice, consistent ruling for being immobilized, our table has been playing “Immobilized” to mean:

(1) The immobilized Hero cannot change their own location through the use of any action or power. Any other power, ability, or effect which would change the immobilized Hero’s location takes effect normally — including other Heroes using their powers, attacks from Villains and Monsters, and Encounter cards.

But other reasonable interpretations could include:

(2) “Immobilized” simply reduces the Hero’s speed to 0. Any effect (including their own powers) which allows a Hero to move without taking a Move action can be performed normally.

(3) An immobilized Hero “cannot move”. Nothing will cause them to leave they’re currently standing in.

(4) 4th Edition’s definition of Immobilized: “You can’t move from your space, although you can teleport and can be forced to move by a pull, a push, or a slide.”

Since forced movement isn’t defined as part of the Castle Ravenloft rules (and “pull, “push”, and “slide” are terms of art which are not used), this would still leave gray areas. But you could try to formalize something close to it by saying:

(5) An immobilized Hero has a speed of 0 and cannot move using a Move action. A Hero cannot use any of their own abilities to move. (Exception: The eladrin’s Fey Step ability can be used normally.) Any ability or effect which says that a Hero “may” or “can” change their position cannot be used by the Hero. Abilities or effects which do not give the Hero a choice in whether or not to move affect an immobilized Hero normally.

Of course, each of these variant interpretations result in significantly different gameplay. And many of them don’t provide clear guidance in resolving the tack-on issues of effects like Strahd’s Minions. (One of the reasons we use the interpretation we do is because it doesn’t have any gray areas in resolving abilities or powers found in the game. It may occasionally give “illogical” results based on the flavor text, but it can be applied with absolute consistency.)

EXAMPLE 2: GAUNTLET OF TERROR

Adventure 9: Gauntlet of Terror, like most of the adventures in the game, introduces several scenario-specific rules. For example:

When an active Hero moves within 1 tile of a tile with a face-down Monster token on it, or onto a tile with a face-down Monster token on it, flip that token over.

Seems simple enough. But does that mean that a Hero can avoid flipping Monster tokens by simply not moving on their turn? And if that’s the case, then we’ve also re-opened the whole “what counts as a move?” can of worms. Are we only talking about Move actions? What if you take a Move action (which may or may not be mandated by the game) but move 0 spaces? Or use your Move action to do something other than move? What if you’re immobilized?

And so forth.

(We interpreted this rule as, “If the active Hero is within 1 tile of a face-down Monster token or on the same tile as a Monster token at any point during their Hero phase, flip that token over.”

This seems to match the intention of the rule as written, but may be a distortion if “move” should be interpreted to include movement from Encounter cards (which are drawn after the active player’s Hero phase is completed). On the other hand, if we changed the rule to read “if the active Hero is within 1 tile of a face-down Monster token (…) at any point during their turn” we end up with a different kind of distortion because the Monster tokens can also be moved within range during their turn but after the Hero has moved. The rules as written clearly don’t suggest those tokens should be flipped over… but maybe they should? I don’t know.)

Complicating this, here’s another example from the same scenario:

Discard the token [you flipped over]. Then place a new Monster token from the box top face down on any tile (except for the Start tile) that doesn’t have a Monster token on it.

Does that mean we can place a Monster token on the same tile as the Monster token we just flipped over? And, if so, should we immediately flip it over again?

Another point of confusion: The rule as written reads, “When an active Hero moves within 1 tile (…) or onto a tile.” That’s a strange way of writing it because “within 1 tile” is interpreted consistently elsewhere in the game to include the tile you’re on. It’s probably just needless redundancy, but should it be interpreted to mean that “within 1 tile” doesn’t include “the tile the Monster token is on” in this particular case? If so, does that mean if you start your turn on a tile with a Monster token on it that you can actually move around on that tile without flipping the token over (since you wouldn’t be moving onto the tile)? Or even move diagonally off the tile (which would result in you being two tiles away and never “within 1 tile” due to the tile-counting rules)?

Final example:

Shuffle the Dungeon Tile stack and take out 15 tiles. One at a time, each player takes a turn placing one of those tiles adjacent to the unexplored edge that it closest to the Start tile until all 15 tiles have been placed.

This rule is problematic because it doesn’t tell you how to orient the tiles you’re placing. Since the monsters and monster tokens in the scenario follow the arrows on the tiles, the vagueness of the rule technically allows the players to construct a board in which all of the monsters move away from the Start tile (making the scenario ridicuously easy).

THE NEED FOR A REVISED RULEBOOK

Needless to say, these radically different interpretations and/or patchings of the rulebook are not trivial matters in terms of gameplay.

For example, if Monster tokens can be placed on the same tile you just removed a Monster token from and they can be triggered as you place them, you can actually end up in scenarios where all the remaining monsters in the game spontaneously generate.

On the other hand, consider the difference between (1) “characters moving as a result of encounter cards flip a monster token” and (2) “characters only flip monster tokens while using a Move action” when dealing with an encounter card like Strahd’s Minions (“Place the active Hero and the two Monsters that are closest to that Hero on the tile farthest from the active Hero. If there are less than two Monsters in play, place a new Monster adjacent to the active Hero after he or she is placed.”).

In the first scenario, you end up with a situation where a Hero can be teleported to the far side of the board and immediately spawn multiple monster tokens which will (probably) all attack them simultaneously on the same turn.

In the second scenario, however, the Hero is stranded in a far corner of the dungeon surrounded by prowling monsters, allowing the other players to move the monster tokens away from their location and prevent the mass-spawning which would otherwise occur on their next turn.

Off-hand, I can’t tell you which one makes for the more interesting game; nor can I tell you which one makes for a more balanced game; nor can I tell you which one the designers (Mike Mearls and Peter Lee) intended me to play.

And these are not isolated problems. Both the Rulebook and the Adventure Book are filled to the brim with this kind of vagueness and inaccuracy. I can’t really classify this as bad game design (I’m pretty certain the underlying design is actually quite robust and thoroughly playtested). It’s atrocious rules-writing, not bad rules-design.

But given this woeful shortcoming in the game, it’s surprising that Wizard’s response to the problem has been an overwhelming and deafening silence: No errata. No FAQ. No official clarification or support of any kind.

So, to conclude: Fun game. Very much worth grabbing a copy of. But be prepared to put in a little sweat equity to make the game function properly.

Go to Castle Ravenloft: More Rulebook Woes