Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Complexity: 1 (of 10)

The Components

Fishing for Terrorists comes with:

• 75 cards
• 1 rulebook

The Cards: The cards are printed grayscale on medium-weight cardstock with rounded corners.

72 of the cards form the main deck. They’re divided into five major types: terrorists (which come in 10 sets of 4s), turn cards (essentially, actions), anytime and sometimes cards (essentially, out-of-turn actions and responses), and Now! cards (essentially, events).

Each card lists card name and type, then has a picture, and in the case of non-terrorist cards then has additional rules on how to use the card.

Overall, the cards unfortunately look quite plain. The grayscale art is nice (and, notably, unique for each card in each set of 4 terrorists), but it also just makes the whole card look washed out. This may just be a danger in printing black & white.

More importantly, however, the cards have fairly big usability problems. First, every card has its name across the top, which means you can't read them when you fan your cards. In addition, there's really no way to tell the terrorist cards apart from each other, except for the names. This means that if you're trying to complete a set of 4, for example, you have to puzzle over every card that the other players have on the table. An icon, a color, or a more distinctive picture for each individual set of terrorists would have helped, but as it is, the major activity in the game (collecting sets) is made more difficult because of the lack of something to match those sets up.

On the other hand, it's word mentioning the nice color of the game. It's funny, and intentionally so. You have groups like the "Miltant Satanic Gamers" and the "Certified Members of the Lunatic Fringe", and every one has a bit of fun color text at the bottom. For example, one member of the "Fanatical Bombers of Inrekistan" is labeled "Hajek: Received comprehensive weapon and tactics training from the United States of ... oops ... THE ENEMY!". (Unfortunately this color text is small and in a hard to read font.) This nice color extends into all the card types in the game.

The last 3 cards are simply lists of the 10 terrorist groups.

Rulebook: A small, two-sided rulebook, printed in black and white. No examples and no pictures, but the game is easy enough to play.

Overall, though the quality of the cards in Fishing for Terrorists is fine, and the art is nice, the cards are also quite plain, and have core usability problems. Even considering the fun color of the game, it still earns a below average "2" out of "5" for Style. If the cards had just been better designed, I could have given it a "3", despite the fact that it's all black & white.

The Gameplay

The object of Fishing for Terrorists is to collect pairs of terrorist cards.

Setup: The deck of cards is shuffled and each player takes two cards.

Order of Play: Each turn each player takes the following actions:

• Investigate
• Play Turn Cards
• Capture Terrorists

Investigate: First, the active player chooses another player and asks them if they have a certain type of terrorist. If they do, they must give the active one (e.g., "Joe, do you have any Outspoken Champions of the Hidden Agenda?"). If they don't, the active player must instead draw two cards from the deck (e.g., "No, Go Fish.").

The active player may take the other actions during his turn in any order.

Play Turn Cards: The active player may during their turn play one and no more than one "Turn" cards. These have various screw-your-neighbor effects, including: take two captured terrorists from another player (Prisoner Transfer) and draw two cards (Extensive Field Work).

Capture Terrorists: The active player may also, on their turn, capture terrorists, which means that they play a pair of terrorists from their hand to the table. The cards will be worth points later on, if they aren't stolen by other players.

Whenever a player gets a complete set of four terrorists down, they can "close a case"--which means that no one can later steal those terrorists from them.

Playing Other Cards: There are three other types of cards in the game, most of which can be played out of turn.

Now Cards. These are special event cards that are played during your turn as soon as you get them. There are actually only two of them, one that makes everyone pass a random card to their right (The President's Making Us Work Together) and one that causes everyone to discard their hands into the Draw Pile, reshuffle it, and take a new hand of two (Congressional Hearings).

Anytime Cards. These are out-of-turn cards which allow the player to do specific actions, usually involving looking at other cards.

Sometimes Cards. These are out-of-turn reaction cards. There's a number that discard captured terrorists (He's Got a Bomb!) or steal another player's captured terrorists as they're captured (We'll Take it from Here).

Winning the Game: The game ends when the last card is drawn from the draw pile. Each player then scores 3 point per pair of terrorist he's captured and loses one point per terrorist still in his hand. The player with the most points is the winner.

Relationships to Other Games

Fishing for Terrorists is, of course, a Go Fish variant. It takes the Go Fish gameplay and adds in screw-your-neighbor & event cards. Go Fish is, of course, a variant of set collection games.

The Game Design

As you'd probably expect, this Go Fish variant is almost an entirely random game.

The cards introduced in this version (supplementing the core Go Fish play) unfortunately increase the randomness and the frustration level of the game, rather than adding strategy. There's a lot of cards that take away captured terrorists, and a lot that force you to reshuffle the deck too. (You'll shuffle the deck 4 or 5 times over the course of a half-hour game, which is way too much.)

There is a very minimal level of strategy is this game, related to sometimes saving terrorists or other cards for clever future use, but really even that is largely false strategy, because there are just too many things that can happen to take cards away from you.

Overall, there really isn't much game to Fishing for Terrorists, and thus I can only give it a "1" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

On the whole Fishing for Terrorists is a plain and plainly produced Go Fish variant. Some of the cards are funny, but not enough to carry through even a single game. I don't know why people would choose to play this rather than a good, light set collection game like King's Breakfast or Coloretto.