The Inside Scoop on Gaming

I don't write reviews on RPGNet all that often; partly because I'm very busy doing my magazine (Places to Go, People to Be - Issue 11 out now….sorry, reflex action) and partly because it's a lot of hard work for very little reward. Sure, the people who put it in the hard yards and do scores of detailed, in-depth reviews eventually get freebies from Sandy, but the rest of us shmoes get nothing but philanthropic satisfaction. And philanthropic satisfaction just doesn't go as far as it used to these days.

Imagine my surprise then, when, after submitting a casual piece on Lunch Money, minor RPG celebrity Ken Whitman emails me about sending me a review copy of his game. The message is clear: write for RPGNet, kids! Fame and fortune (cookies) can be yours! The world is your burrito, ya just gotta reach out and add as much salsa as you can handle!

Anyway.

The game is the Three Stooges Card Game. Each box contains 55 game cards and five cards which contain the rules (printed on both sides). According to the box, it retails for around $8.95 in the US. On Australian shelves, however, it would more likely cost around $20 (US$15). Strangely enough, the envelope I received them in bore a customs information sticker which declared the entire value of the contents (two boxes) to be $2. Either Ken was screwing the post office, or we just go a nice insight into how much mark-up the gaming industry thinks it can get away with. But I digress.

The cards themselves are of a high quality; stiff enough not to break but bendy enough to slap around. This is important.

One deck is enough to play with three people, which is also the minimum required. Two decks will be needed for any more than that, and also works for a nice longer game in a three player event. This is good, because once I mixed my decks together, I had no way of separating them back out again, since no card proportions are provided. With two packs, you can play with up to eight people probably. However, we found that anything above around five becomes pointless.

I should point out I've never been a big fan of the Stooges myself. Sure, I like to see people getting hit on the head with heavy objects as much as the next man, but they seemed to get boring and stupid real fast when I was kid. So I was surprised to find myself chuckling quite loudly as I looked through the cards.

The cards are nicely done; simple yet very effective. Each has a title and some text, surrounding a black and white still of the Stooges in action. And when I say "in action", I mean it. The shots are chosen brilliantly to capture the thwacks, bonks and recoils at the perfect moment so that the actions really come to life. When these are accompanied by suitably appropriate and rather humorous card titles such as "Bonk on the Head", "Why I Oughta…" and "Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk", the cards evoke the show incredibly well. This makes it very easy for players to get into the spirit of things and start adding their own sound effects and dialogue, which makes for a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, like the Stooges, this silliness is only fun for a while. And, also like the Stooges, when it runs out, there is no depth to fall back on.

The basic rules are very simple, even beyond what would be necessary for a game like this. Everyone is dealt five cards, at the end of each turn you replenish back to that, and you continue until the draw deck is depleted. The winner is the person who has taken the least amount of damage, which is scored upwards from zero. There are just two types of cards in the game: attack and defence cards. Attack cards carry a number indicating the damage they do, defence cards do not. Very, very simple. Except it isn't.

The starting player starts the turn by attacking another player around the table. They may respond with defence cards or take the damage. If they take the damage, the attacker must keep attacking until he runs out of attack cards. Then turn passes not to the next player around the table, but the person who last took damage, or who last played a defence card. As you might expect, this causes mini-battles to bounce back and forth between two people, and we had games where some people played only a handful of cards.

Now it gets more complex. When an attack is played, any player with a card that contains a matching word to the one played - for example, "Slap" and "Big Slap" - or with the same type of card can join the attack. He simply plays his card down and it adds to the damage. Similarly, if you are hit with a successful attack, and have a "matching" card, you can immediately retaliate with that attack, out of turn.

However, since it was most likely about to be your turn anyway, there is little benefit in matching a defence like this. In fact, since cards are defended against more often than not, there is almost no benefit in matching an attack either. It's just throwing away good cards.

Things are made more complex by the addition of cards with special abilities, both for attack and defence. For example, a "Poke in the Eye", if successful, gains you a free attack on that Stooge which he cannot defend against, whereas the "Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk" card is a defence that only works against a Poke in the Eye (that's where Curly puts his hand along the bridge of his nose). Of course, the NNN can't block the Two Handed Poke in the Eye…which begs the question, what if one is matched with the other?

This is not an isolated case - the problems with matching of special effects, and of overlapping and contradicting and seemingly pointless special effects in general runs rife through this set up. If an attack hits, but does no damage, does the special effect still work? If you attack two people at once, and one of them reverses the attack, who does it return to? And so on, ad nauseam. To counter this problem, the rules provide a clarification of the rules for almost all the cards (only a handful have no special effects). These help, but need to be studied carefully when the situations come up, and what's the point of that in a game that's supposed to be fast free-wheeling fun?

It also doesn't help that the rules are not particularly clear. The tight space they are written in makes for a succinctness which hampers all the explanations, and gives no room for examples.

As a result of all this, it took a long time for us to figure out how we were supposed to be playing. Even after a dozen or so games, we were still consulting the rulebook and going "hang on, hang on….now what?" every few turns. And then we discovered we had the rule for playing defence cards wrong all along. Not good. (We actually preferred our way though).

The other problem with this game was that, even if you make sense of the rules, the gameplay makes no sense. There is no structure and no strategy. Attacks bounce randomly across the table, and are defended equally as randomly. Since defence cards are so common, attacks are generally unlikely to succeed. What's more attacking exposes you to reversals, and so is highly dangerous. But because the last player hit has the next go, you can have a whole series of turns where one player keeps attacks, gets it rebounded, takes damage, and then does it again. Even if this doesn't happen, someone will at one point inevitably run out of defence, take a whole heap of damage in a row, and thus be out of the game. Almost every game we played ended with most of the players on a score of 0 to 4 and the remaining one or two with scores in the twenties. Plus we found no way to control who got which scores - it seemed to be entirely based on luck.

Presumably to account for this, when the game finishes, the losing player can empty his hand on others in an effort to make himself not lose. In every game we played, this never had any effect on the scores or placings. Nor is it particularly clear why you would bother making yourself not last anyway. Or perhaps it is to make someone not win. Since victory is not important in the game (because you immediately start another game) this also makes no sense. In fact, this whole end phase makes no sense whatsoever. Like too many rules in this game, it boggles the mind why this bit is even there.

In short, while we were playing this game, at no time did we ever have any idea what was going on. It was a collection of confusing criss-crossing card slapping that lacked any structure, logic or reason, with annoying rules verifications to break up the flow. But, well, we still enjoyed it quite a bit.

After reading the above, you'd think I would be on the whole negative towards this game, but in truth, we all found it a lot of fun. Maybe it was the alcohol kicking in, but there is some inspiration in its lunacy. The absolute randomness and chaos actually makes it more fun, and in a bizarre way, the confusing rules also helped this. The fact that the game didn't make any sense at all or follow any sort of order made it feel more like watching the Stooges. Maddening, stupid, incredibly silly…but yeah, fun. Lotsa fun. Speshly at 1 a.m. after too many shots of red cordial.

So yeah, if you are in a party mood, and some people had had a lot to drink, you can have a hell of a lot of fun gathering people around for some major Stooging. On the other hand, if you're in that mood already, anything seems funny. Something like Blindfold Bridge (a game I invented which is Bridge but you can't look at your cards but you can look at everyone else's) would probably also fit the bill, and it isn't going to cost you $20.

And the Stooges isn't much good for any other sort of play. It just lacks any real depth to make it interesting to anyone who wants a serious game. It's a quick meaningless throwaway which makes it a decent filler game, but because it's only suited to certain people, you couldn't just whip it out at a convention, or to fill a roleplay night, and expect it to go down well. Also, because of the confusing special effects, it's not an easy game to teach.

I sound like I'm contradicting myself here, and I suppose I am. My reviewing mind says I didn't this game is well designed, but my playtest heart says "damn we had a lot of fun!". It's sort of the nature of some party games, I guess: by any conventional standard of game design, they fall down, but they just are so much fun when they work!

The Stooges is like Blindfold Bridge (although not quite as silly). Any serious gamer who looked at it would immediately say "that's just stupid". But with the right people, at a good party, the stupidity can either be ignored, or becomes part of the fun, and you can have a huge laugh and a decent game of card slapping for points. If that's what you're looking for, get yourself a pack or two and go crazy. Once you manage to grasp/rewrite the confusing and overly-complex card rules, it is a good game within this field.

On the other hand, if you want a fast-paced and fun beat-em-up card game that also has some strategic depth that keeps it interesting forever, go for Lunch Money.

(Blindfold Bridge is copyright Steve Darlington 2000. It may not be played without inviting the author along and providing red cordial and/or/mixed with beer.)

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 3 (Average)

The Three Stooges Card Game
Author: Ken Whitman Category: Non Collectible Card Game Company/Publisher: Archangel Entertainment Line: None Cost: $8.95/$20 Page count: n/a SKU: AAE-3100 Playtest Review by Steve Darlington on 02/17/00. Genre tags: Historical Comedy	I don't write reviews on RPGNet all that often; partly because I'm very busy doing my magazine (Places to Go, People to Be - Issue 11 out now….sorry, reflex action) and partly because it's a lot of hard work for very little reward. Sure, the people who put it in the hard yards and do scores of detailed, in-depth reviews eventually get freebies from Sandy, but the rest of us shmoes get nothing but philanthropic satisfaction. And philanthropic satisfaction just doesn't go as far as it used to these days. Imagine my surprise then, when, after submitting a casual piece on Lunch Money, minor RPG celebrity Ken Whitman emails me about sending me a review copy of his game. The message is clear: write for RPGNet, kids! Fame and fortune (cookies) can be yours! The world is your burrito, ya just gotta reach out and add as much salsa as you can handle! Anyway. The game is the Three Stooges Card Game. Each box contains 55 game cards and five cards which contain the rules (printed on both sides). According to the box, it retails for around $8.95 in the US. On Australian shelves, however, it would more likely cost around $20 (US$15). Strangely enough, the envelope I received them in bore a customs information sticker which declared the entire value of the contents (two boxes) to be $2. Either Ken was screwing the post office, or we just go a nice insight into how much mark-up the gaming industry thinks it can get away with. But I digress. The cards themselves are of a high quality; stiff enough not to break but bendy enough to slap around. This is important. One deck is enough to play with three people, which is also the minimum required. Two decks will be needed for any more than that, and also works for a nice longer game in a three player event. This is good, because once I mixed my decks together, I had no way of separating them back out again, since no card proportions are provided. With two packs, you can play with up to eight people probably. However, we found that anything above around five becomes pointless. I should point out I've never been a big fan of the Stooges myself. Sure, I like to see people getting hit on the head with heavy objects as much as the next man, but they seemed to get boring and stupid real fast when I was kid. So I was surprised to find myself chuckling quite loudly as I looked through the cards. The cards are nicely done; simple yet very effective. Each has a title and some text, surrounding a black and white still of the Stooges in action. And when I say "in action", I mean it. The shots are chosen brilliantly to capture the thwacks, bonks and recoils at the perfect moment so that the actions really come to life. When these are accompanied by suitably appropriate and rather humorous card titles such as "Bonk on the Head", "Why I Oughta…" and "Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk", the cards evoke the show incredibly well. This makes it very easy for players to get into the spirit of things and start adding their own sound effects and dialogue, which makes for a lot of fun. Unfortunately, like the Stooges, this silliness is only fun for a while. And, also like the Stooges, when it runs out, there is no depth to fall back on. The basic rules are very simple, even beyond what would be necessary for a game like this. Everyone is dealt five cards, at the end of each turn you replenish back to that, and you continue until the draw deck is depleted. The winner is the person who has taken the least amount of damage, which is scored upwards from zero. There are just two types of cards in the game: attack and defence cards. Attack cards carry a number indicating the damage they do, defence cards do not. Very, very simple. Except it isn't. The starting player starts the turn by attacking another player around the table. They may respond with defence cards or take the damage. If they take the damage, the attacker must keep attacking until he runs out of attack cards. Then turn passes not to the next player around the table, but the person who last took damage, or who last played a defence card. As you might expect, this causes mini-battles to bounce back and forth between two people, and we had games where some people played only a handful of cards. Now it gets more complex. When an attack is played, any player with a card that contains a matching word to the one played - for example, "Slap" and "Big Slap" - or with the same type of card can join the attack. He simply plays his card down and it adds to the damage. Similarly, if you are hit with a successful attack, and have a "matching" card, you can immediately retaliate with that attack, out of turn. However, since it was most likely about to be your turn anyway, there is little benefit in matching a defence like this. In fact, since cards are defended against more often than not, there is almost no benefit in matching an attack either. It's just throwing away good cards. Things are made more complex by the addition of cards with special abilities, both for attack and defence. For example, a "Poke in the Eye", if successful, gains you a free attack on that Stooge which he cannot defend against, whereas the "Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk" card is a defence that only works against a Poke in the Eye (that's where Curly puts his hand along the bridge of his nose). Of course, the NNN can't block the Two Handed Poke in the Eye…which begs the question, what if one is matched with the other? This is not an isolated case - the problems with matching of special effects, and of overlapping and contradicting and seemingly pointless special effects in general runs rife through this set up. If an attack hits, but does no damage, does the special effect still work? If you attack two people at once, and one of them reverses the attack, who does it return to? And so on, ad nauseam. To counter this problem, the rules provide a clarification of the rules for almost all the cards (only a handful have no special effects). These help, but need to be studied carefully when the situations come up, and what's the point of that in a game that's supposed to be fast free-wheeling fun? It also doesn't help that the rules are not particularly clear. The tight space they are written in makes for a succinctness which hampers all the explanations, and gives no room for examples. As a result of all this, it took a long time for us to figure out how we were supposed to be playing. Even after a dozen or so games, we were still consulting the rulebook and going "hang on, hang on….now what?" every few turns. And then we discovered we had the rule for playing defence cards wrong all along. Not good. (We actually preferred our way though). The other problem with this game was that, even if you make sense of the rules, the gameplay makes no sense. There is no structure and no strategy. Attacks bounce randomly across the table, and are defended equally as randomly. Since defence cards are so common, attacks are generally unlikely to succeed. What's more attacking exposes you to reversals, and so is highly dangerous. But because the last player hit has the next go, you can have a whole series of turns where one player keeps attacks, gets it rebounded, takes damage, and then does it again. Even if this doesn't happen, someone will at one point inevitably run out of defence, take a whole heap of damage in a row, and thus be out of the game. Almost every game we played ended with most of the players on a score of 0 to 4 and the remaining one or two with scores in the twenties. Plus we found no way to control who got which scores - it seemed to be entirely based on luck. Presumably to account for this, when the game finishes, the losing player can empty his hand on others in an effort to make himself not lose. In every game we played, this never had any effect on the scores or placings. Nor is it particularly clear why you would bother making yourself not last anyway. Or perhaps it is to make someone not win. Since victory is not important in the game (because you immediately start another game) this also makes no sense. In fact, this whole end phase makes no sense whatsoever. Like too many rules in this game, it boggles the mind why this bit is even there. In short, while we were playing this game, at no time did we ever have any idea what was going on. It was a collection of confusing criss-crossing card slapping that lacked any structure, logic or reason, with annoying rules verifications to break up the flow. But, well, we still enjoyed it quite a bit. After reading the above, you'd think I would be on the whole negative towards this game, but in truth, we all found it a lot of fun. Maybe it was the alcohol kicking in, but there is some inspiration in its lunacy. The absolute randomness and chaos actually makes it more fun, and in a bizarre way, the confusing rules also helped this. The fact that the game didn't make any sense at all or follow any sort of order made it feel more like watching the Stooges. Maddening, stupid, incredibly silly…but yeah, fun. Lotsa fun. Speshly at 1 a.m. after too many shots of red cordial. So yeah, if you are in a party mood, and some people had had a lot to drink, you can have a hell of a lot of fun gathering people around for some major Stooging. On the other hand, if you're in that mood already, anything seems funny. Something like Blindfold Bridge (a game I invented which is Bridge but you can't look at your cards but you can look at everyone else's) would probably also fit the bill, and it isn't going to cost you $20. And the Stooges isn't much good for any other sort of play. It just lacks any real depth to make it interesting to anyone who wants a serious game. It's a quick meaningless throwaway which makes it a decent filler game, but because it's only suited to certain people, you couldn't just whip it out at a convention, or to fill a roleplay night, and expect it to go down well. Also, because of the confusing special effects, it's not an easy game to teach. I sound like I'm contradicting myself here, and I suppose I am. My reviewing mind says I didn't this game is well designed, but my playtest heart says "damn we had a lot of fun!". It's sort of the nature of some party games, I guess: by any conventional standard of game design, they fall down, but they just are so much fun when they work! The Stooges is like Blindfold Bridge (although not quite as silly). Any serious gamer who looked at it would immediately say "that's just stupid". But with the right people, at a good party, the stupidity can either be ignored, or becomes part of the fun, and you can have a huge laugh and a decent game of card slapping for points. If that's what you're looking for, get yourself a pack or two and go crazy. Once you manage to grasp/rewrite the confusing and overly-complex card rules, it is a good game within this field. On the other hand, if you want a fast-paced and fun beat-em-up card game that also has some strategic depth that keeps it interesting forever, go for Lunch Money. (Blindfold Bridge is copyright Steve Darlington 2000. It may not be played without inviting the author along and providing red cordial and/or/mixed with beer.) Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 3 (Average)

The Three Stooges Card Game