Although from the title it’s obvious that Grave Robbers II: Skippy’s Revenge is a follow-up to the original Grave Robbers From Outer Space, it’s not a set of cards meant to supplement GROS. It’s a standalone game, although the two sets of cards are entirely intercompatible, so you can shuffle the decks together to make one big deck, or even add the cards from the other games in the series; it’ll change the flavour of the game, but not the actual play.
The box contains 120 well-made cards, and a single two-sided page of rules. As befits a send-up of B-movies from the 1950s through to the present, the artwork is in glorious black & white (the illustrations framed to look like frames of film), but the cards’ borders and some of the text are in colour linked to the movie-themed card types: Characters, Locations, Props, Creatures, Special Effects (unfortunately, unillustrated), and Roll The Credits. The artwork is by Steve Bryant, Michael Jackson, Leo Lingas, Jason Millet, and Leo Winstead, and it’s all of good quality; I mean it as a compliment when I say that after looking through them I was reminded of the art in some of the better-quality Jack Chick comic book tracts (Dark Dungeons and its ilk).
Play of the game is very similar to some CCGs, although without the deck-building aspects, and with a stripped-down set of rules (no timing issues, and no pages of “special cases” to worry about). Each player is dealt 6 cards, and immediately places any Character cards face up in front of him; the “cast” of the movie. On his turn, each player draws back up to a full 6 cards, and then can (in no particular order) play more Characters to the table, give Props to Characters, play Locations, attack another player’s cast (although not in the first turn: the “establishing shot”), play Special Effects, use special abilities on cards already in play, or play a Roll The Credits card to end the game (although only if he has at least one Character in play, and not in the first two turns).
Character cards have a defence strength printed on them, Prop and Location cards add a bonus to the defence of the Character holding it or all Characters in a player’s cast, respectively. Creatures, on the other hand, have an attack strength on them, and only Creatures can be used to attack the casts of other players (except if the Character’s special ability changes that; e.g., the Mortician Character’s special ability allows him to make a Psycho Killer attack with an attack strength equal to 3 + the number of dead Characters in the discard pile). Characters and Creatures and some Props have traits written on them; e.g., Supernatural and Vampire for the Vampire Beach Babes, and Weapon, Gun, and Vehicle for the Tank.
The play of cards doesn’t have to necessarily make sense or follow a theme; there’s no game reason not to have a Medical Student, Town Sheriff, Hot-Headed Secretary, and Hunchback Assistant in the same cast, and while the Starship Commander gets a bonus for being played with the Interplanetary Vessel Location, oddly enough the Biker gets no special bonus from the Motorcycle Prop card.
In an attack, the Creature’s attack strength is compared to the combined defence strength of all the Characters (including their Props, if any) and the Location (if any) in the victim’s cast. Various cards have special abilities that come into play; e.g., Albino Alligators always succeed in an attack if the target Location is the Sewer, and the Camp Councilor gains +1 defence for each Character with the Young trait in the same movie. During an attack, the only additional cards playable by the attacker, the defender, or any of the other players, are one-use Special Effects, such as Life Raft (which adds +5 defence vs. any one attack, or which automatically stops any attack made by an Aquatic Creature). After all cards that anyone wants to play are played and all special abilities are taken into account, if the Creature’s attack strength is equal to or greater than the movie’s combined defence strength, the attack succeeds and the attacking player is allowed to pick one Character from the defending movie to discard (along with any Props he might be carrying), unless a special ability intercedes; for instance, in a successful Zombie attack against a movie including a Security Guard in its cast, the Security Guard must be killed first. Of course, if the Security Guard’s driving a Recreational Vehicle, he can use its special ability to run over the Zombie, discarding both the Creature and the Prop.
Along with affecting attacks, special abilities and Special Effects can do things like take a weapon from the discard pile to give to the Biker, increase the maximum size of a player’s hand (because his movie has a Big Budget), or if one player has the Call Girl in play he can take a card from the hand of another player with a Male Character in play.
The game ends either at the end of the turn when the last card is drawn from the deck, or immediately when someone plays a Roll The Credits card. At that point, each player totals the defence strength of his Characters, Props, and Location, makes adjustments for special abilities (e.g., the Funny Guy Who Gets It In The Final Reel is discarded instead of being added to the total), and then one last feature to the game comes into play.
Back before the game started, six cards were drawn, and everything else about them was ignored except for a single word written at the bottom of each. The players (as a group) take those six words and make a cheesy movie title out of them, adding or subtracting words as necessary, so that Madness, Coffin, Peculiar, Zero, Professor, and Sorority might be turned into “The Sorority house Madness of Peculiar Professor Zero,” with Coffin being left aside. The cards were then shuffled back into the deck before the players’ hands were dealt. When the game ends, if a player has any of those word cards in his hand or in play, he gets 5 bonus points towards his score.
The highest score wins if you’re just playing one hand, or you can play multiple hands trying to get to some preset target number.
Besides the card play, Grave Robbers II has some rules and features designed to enhance the silliness of the movie genre it’s trying to replicate. For instance, every card has a humorous tag line on it that has to be read aloud along with the card’s name as it’s played, such as the Disembodied Brain’s “You shall all kneel before me... as soon as I get out of this damned jar!” or the Hitch Hiker’s “Come on, let’s pick him up. What could it hurt?” In addition, the art and card tag lines have a number of running gags tying some of them together, with the big one being pictures, or shadows, or hints of tentacles intruding into otherwise mundane images. Add the right movie-character voices and B-movie fans will be laughing even at the cards that cause them to lose the game. And as I said earlier, the art is all good, sending up the cliches of the movies over and over.
One drawback of the game is the size of the role luck plays in a game. If a player is unlucky enough to start the game with a weak cast, attacks by other players will be swift and usually successful, and with games potentially running only three turns (if a player receives a Roll The Credits card and plays it on the first turn he’s allowed) there might not be time for the unlucky player to recover from an initial setback. And with only two Roll The Credits cards in the deck, the more players there are, the greater the odds that someone else is going to be the person who plays the card that decides when the game ends to his own advantage. Since there’s no CCG-style individual deck-building, over a number of games the luck will balance out, but one difficulty we always have in my house is getting past the crucial first couple games, since we have so many other games we can turn to when one game isn’t fun for one of us players.
Another drawback is that there’s a lot of text on the cards, and with each card having a completely different set of abilities there’s going to be a whole lot of reading going on, both when players draw new cards, and as the game goes on and each player constantly rereads his cards (in his hand and on the table) looking to see if now one of their special abilities is going to be important when they weren’t a turn or the play of another card ago; like baseball, play of GR2 can sometimes consist of moments of action followed by minutes of not much.
Any of you who have or have played the original Grave Robbers From Outer Space may wonder how Grave Robbers II stacks up against it. Well, the play’s the same, but I felt that the original game got some of the better characters (the Town Drunk, the Store Clerk, the Well Intentioned Scientist, and the Helpful Guy From Next Door just can’t compete with the Nymphomaniac Cheerleader, the Reporter, the High School Principal, the Bookish Girl With No Boyfriend, the Guy Everyone Knows Will Get Killed for B-Movie iconic value) and running gags (I didn’t count, but I got the impression that the original game had more “I’ve had just about enough of your antics, mister... say, is that a tentacle?” jokes than the sequel, and the sex theme of the Only The Virgin Survives (“Never have sex in a horror movie. Ever.”) , Let’s Go Skinny Dipping (including the intersection of those two in the Back Seat Of The Car card: “Billy, nooo. Stop it... Well, okay, just this once... say, is that a tentacle?”) was funnier than the one-off gags like the Handcuffs Prop being worth +4 when used by the Cop or the Call Girl). Of course, if you’ve been playing GROS since it came out in 2001, those jokes are probably pretty stale for you now, so an infusion of new cards (either played alone or shuffled together) would bring back some of the humour that gets replaced by simple number-counting and special ability reading after awhile.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the Skippy’s Revenge part of the title, in the original game one of the Character cards was Skippy the Wonder Dog (“What’s that Skippy? Billy’s torso is down the well?”). In the new game, Skippy’s back, but as a Creature: Skippy the Undead Wonder Dog (“What’s that, Skippy? You ate Billy’s torso?”).
The game value of Grave Robbers II: Skippy’s Revenge is high: the basics are easy to learn, and games can be as short as 20 minutes. The humorous features of the cards can keep players interested during the first few games, as they learn strategies (e.g., playing Characters like the -3 defence Cowardly Dude or Locations like the -8 defence Bermuda Triangle (which also forces the recipient to discard all Vehicles in his movie) on another player in order to set up an attack) and synergies between cards. And even at its height, GR2's scheming and strategizing comes nowhere near that of many CCGs, making this a good beer-and-pretzels -- er, popcorn-and-soda game for just 20 bucks.
