The Inside Scoop on Gaming

INTRODUCTION

Those darned Grays are at it again. You, along with a handful of other hapless Earthlings, have been taken aboard an alien spacecraft, there to be subjected to heartless experiments. Surely you and your fellow Abductees will set aside any personal differences in order to unite against this common threat and escape.

Ah, screw that! It's every man (and woman, and little girl, and cow) for himself!

Abduction is a humorous non-collectible card game for two to four players. The goal is to escape from your alien captors at all costs... including the freedom of your fellow captives.

CONTENT

Abduction provides you with everything you need to play on the 72 included cards except a single six-sided die. This includes the rules (7 cards), eight game pieces (to cut out and fold from 2 cards), and three types of cards used in actual play (66 cards):

The twenty Location cards are placed to form the layout of the alien spacecraft. Some of these locations, such as the Teleport Chamber, include Powers that the players can choose to use. Others, like the Breeding Chamber, feature positive or negative Effects that occur automatically.

Each Location also has a Search Number. Players can place an Item card (see below) from their hand face down under a given Location card and attempt to beat the Search Number on a d6. If they succeed, the Item is theirs to use. If they fail, it stays at that location until it is found.

The ten Item cards represent the goodies fleeing Abductees can find to aid in their escape. All of them have either usable Powers (such as the Alien Rail Gun and the Carbon Displacer), beneficial automatic Effects (such as the Quantum Phaser and the X-23 Distorter), or, in one case, both (the Plasma Claw).

The 36 Event cards are all the charming things that make a stay on an alien spacecraft so memorable, such as Alien Patrols, Temporal Fluxes, Malfunctions, and, of course, the ever-popular Anal Probe.

Many Events have Evade target numbers. These must be exceeded by a d6 roll or the player Blacks Out. This is as close to Abductee death as the game comes -- the player's turn ends, he loses his card hand and any equipment, and his piece is returned to the Holding Cell.

Play begins with all of the playing pieces placed on a single Location card, the Holding Cell, and with each player dealt a hand of five cards.

On their turns, players can take three actions. These actions can include adding Locations, moving through Locations, searching for Items, activating the Powers of Locations or Items, playing Event cards, discarding unwanted cards, or simply doing nothing.

However, after each action, all the other players get the chance to play Event cards in an effort to make escape -- and life in general -- as difficult as possible for the active Abductee -- siccing Alien Patrols on him, rearranging the ship's layout, turning Exits into dead ends, forcing swaps of card hands, etc.

Play ends when one player ends his turn on an Exit Location card. The catch? Exits must be placed at least four cards away from the Holding Cell.

The Playtest

The box claims that the game takes about 20 minutes to play, making it ideal for play before a roleplaying session as you wait for everyone to arrive.

My first game was between my wife and myself one morning on our vacation. (Since we had the amazing luck of staying at a bed-and-breakfast right on the Guadalupe River during the Great Flood of 2002, we had some time to kill while we waited for the floodwaters to recede.) Anyway, it did, indeed, last about 20 minutes, although a goodly portion of the game crawled as we waited for Location cards to start showing up in our hands. Event cards we had in plenty, but it's pretty pointless to cause an opponent to Black Out when s/he's already in the Holding Cell. And once the action got rolling, it seemed to wrap up pretty quickly. This was likely due to the fact that the odds of having enough applicable Event cards to harry your opponent after each of his actions is pretty small when there are just two of you. While I haven't actually tried this, I think that two-player games would work better if each player had a hand of more than five cards in order to get more types of cards in play.

The second game was with my roleplaying group and featured the recommended four players. Twenty minutes? Try an hour-and-a-half. Fortunately, despite the unexpectedly long session, everyone seemed to have a great time.

Part of the game's length seemed due to the time it took for the ship's layout to expand enough to allow Exit placement, perhaps due in turn to players' fears of making escape easier for their opponents. And once the Exits were in play, everyone dog-piled any Abductee that got close to one of them with every Event card in the book. (Or in the hand, rather.)

I noticed that the Alien Exoskeleton Item card seemed disproportionately powerful, giving the Abductee equipped with it a 50-50 shot at avoiding the effects of any Event card. (This is in addition to any applicable Evade rolls.) The result was that the Abductee wearing the Exoskeleton roamed the corridors like the Terminator, shrugging off Events that otherwise would have cost him his cards and equipment. Naturally, this just made the other players all the more determined to make him Black Out, leading them to concentrate their Event card fire on him to little effect. To make matters worse, the Alien Rail Gun -- an item that lets Abductees attack other Abductees and against which the Exoskeleton is powerless -- was in the hands of the Exoskeleton-equipped Abductee.

These issues didn't seem to bother the players, however. The main complaint was that it is so easy to lose your cards at any given moment that it's almost impossible to plan any sort of strategy. According to the game's web site, however, this is by design: the game is supposed to be pure chaos.

Personally, I enjoyed the chaos. The main fun comes not in carefully planning your own escape, but rather in being the monkey wrench in the plans of your opponents. Just imagine the fun of hitting an Abductee who's fought and struggled his way to an Exit with a Hull Decompression, for example. "Oh, so you want out, do you...?"

STYLE

The art is a nice combination of the cool and the humorous, with ominous-looking aliens and alien technology alongside the cartoonish Abductees. The cut-out playing pieces seem sturdy enough to get the job done, and the choices of Abductees contributed to much of the evening's humor -- it was hard not to laugh at the image of a cow in an exoskeleton pursuing a little girl with a giant rail gun. The only style-related issue I had with the game had to do with card readability -- the eerie green-and-white color scheme is appropriate enough but is a little hard on the eyes, and the room exits could have been more clearly marked.

CONCLUSION

For $10, you get a hilarious beer-and-pretzels game that's complete in one package. Furthermore, the constantly changing ship layout ensures plenty of replay value. Sounds like a good deal to me. If you're a UFO buff, conspiracy geek, X-Files fanboy, or just someone who gets a laugh out of screwing over your friends, this is the game for you.

Abduction
Abduction Playtest Review by Dan Davenport on 30/07/02 Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 5 (Excellent!) A hilarious non-collectible card game of escape from an alien spacecraft -- preferably at the expense of your fellow Abductees. Loads of chaotic fun and plenty of reply value for a decent price. Product: Abduction Author: George Vasilakos, M. Alexander Jurkat, Bernard C. Trombley Category: Card Game Company/Publisher: Eden Studios, Inc. Line: n/a Cost: $10.00 Page count: n/a Year published: ISBN: 1-891153-00-5 SKU: EDN2300 Comp copy?: yes Playtest Review by Dan Davenport on 30/07/02 Genre tags: Science Fiction Space Comedy	INTRODUCTION Those darned Grays are at it again. You, along with a handful of other hapless Earthlings, have been taken aboard an alien spacecraft, there to be subjected to heartless experiments. Surely you and your fellow Abductees will set aside any personal differences in order to unite against this common threat and escape. Ah, screw that! It's every man (and woman, and little girl, and cow) for himself! Abduction is a humorous non-collectible card game for two to four players. The goal is to escape from your alien captors at all costs... including the freedom of your fellow captives. CONTENT Abduction provides you with everything you need to play on the 72 included cards except a single six-sided die. This includes the rules (7 cards), eight game pieces (to cut out and fold from 2 cards), and three types of cards used in actual play (66 cards): The twenty Location cards are placed to form the layout of the alien spacecraft. Some of these locations, such as the Teleport Chamber, include Powers that the players can choose to use. Others, like the Breeding Chamber, feature positive or negative Effects that occur automatically. Each Location also has a Search Number. Players can place an Item card (see below) from their hand face down under a given Location card and attempt to beat the Search Number on a d6. If they succeed, the Item is theirs to use. If they fail, it stays at that location until it is found. The ten Item cards represent the goodies fleeing Abductees can find to aid in their escape. All of them have either usable Powers (such as the Alien Rail Gun and the Carbon Displacer), beneficial automatic Effects (such as the Quantum Phaser and the X-23 Distorter), or, in one case, both (the Plasma Claw). The 36 Event cards are all the charming things that make a stay on an alien spacecraft so memorable, such as Alien Patrols, Temporal Fluxes, Malfunctions, and, of course, the ever-popular Anal Probe. Many Events have Evade target numbers. These must be exceeded by a d6 roll or the player Blacks Out. This is as close to Abductee death as the game comes -- the player's turn ends, he loses his card hand and any equipment, and his piece is returned to the Holding Cell. Play begins with all of the playing pieces placed on a single Location card, the Holding Cell, and with each player dealt a hand of five cards. On their turns, players can take three actions. These actions can include adding Locations, moving through Locations, searching for Items, activating the Powers of Locations or Items, playing Event cards, discarding unwanted cards, or simply doing nothing. However, after each action, all the other players get the chance to play Event cards in an effort to make escape -- and life in general -- as difficult as possible for the active Abductee -- siccing Alien Patrols on him, rearranging the ship's layout, turning Exits into dead ends, forcing swaps of card hands, etc. Play ends when one player ends his turn on an Exit Location card. The catch? Exits must be placed at least four cards away from the Holding Cell. The Playtest The box claims that the game takes about 20 minutes to play, making it ideal for play before a roleplaying session as you wait for everyone to arrive. My first game was between my wife and myself one morning on our vacation. (Since we had the amazing luck of staying at a bed-and-breakfast right on the Guadalupe River during the Great Flood of 2002, we had some time to kill while we waited for the floodwaters to recede.) Anyway, it did, indeed, last about 20 minutes, although a goodly portion of the game crawled as we waited for Location cards to start showing up in our hands. Event cards we had in plenty, but it's pretty pointless to cause an opponent to Black Out when s/he's already in the Holding Cell. And once the action got rolling, it seemed to wrap up pretty quickly. This was likely due to the fact that the odds of having enough applicable Event cards to harry your opponent after each of his actions is pretty small when there are just two of you. While I haven't actually tried this, I think that two-player games would work better if each player had a hand of more than five cards in order to get more types of cards in play. The second game was with my roleplaying group and featured the recommended four players. Twenty minutes? Try an hour-and-a-half. Fortunately, despite the unexpectedly long session, everyone seemed to have a great time. Part of the game's length seemed due to the time it took for the ship's layout to expand enough to allow Exit placement, perhaps due in turn to players' fears of making escape easier for their opponents. And once the Exits were in play, everyone dog-piled any Abductee that got close to one of them with every Event card in the book. (Or in the hand, rather.) I noticed that the Alien Exoskeleton Item card seemed disproportionately powerful, giving the Abductee equipped with it a 50-50 shot at avoiding the effects of any Event card. (This is in addition to any applicable Evade rolls.) The result was that the Abductee wearing the Exoskeleton roamed the corridors like the Terminator, shrugging off Events that otherwise would have cost him his cards and equipment. Naturally, this just made the other players all the more determined to make him Black Out, leading them to concentrate their Event card fire on him to little effect. To make matters worse, the Alien Rail Gun -- an item that lets Abductees attack other Abductees and against which the Exoskeleton is powerless -- was in the hands of the Exoskeleton-equipped Abductee. These issues didn't seem to bother the players, however. The main complaint was that it is so easy to lose your cards at any given moment that it's almost impossible to plan any sort of strategy. According to the game's web site, however, this is by design: the game is supposed to be pure chaos. Personally, I enjoyed the chaos. The main fun comes not in carefully planning your own escape, but rather in being the monkey wrench in the plans of your opponents. Just imagine the fun of hitting an Abductee who's fought and struggled his way to an Exit with a Hull Decompression, for example. "Oh, so you want out, do you...?" STYLE The art is a nice combination of the cool and the humorous, with ominous-looking aliens and alien technology alongside the cartoonish Abductees. The cut-out playing pieces seem sturdy enough to get the job done, and the choices of Abductees contributed to much of the evening's humor -- it was hard not to laugh at the image of a cow in an exoskeleton pursuing a little girl with a giant rail gun. The only style-related issue I had with the game had to do with card readability -- the eerie green-and-white color scheme is appropriate enough but is a little hard on the eyes, and the room exits could have been more clearly marked. CONCLUSION For $10, you get a hilarious beer-and-pretzels game that's complete in one package. Furthermore, the constantly changing ship layout ensures plenty of replay value. Sounds like a good deal to me. If you're a UFO buff, conspiracy geek, X-Files fanboy, or just someone who gets a laugh out of screwing over your friends, this is the game for you.