One to four players pick from four character cards: Ash, Arthur, Henry, or Sheila. Each has a good version and an evil version on opposite faces of the card, and the players must choose which side (literally) to play.
Regardless of the good/bad choice, each character has one special ability: Ash is better with complex weapons (like the boom stick or bags of gunpowder), Henry's better with Medieval weapons (like swords and spears), Arthur gets a bonus when using Allies, and Sheila – being a hottie – gets a bonus to keep Allies. (Well, okay, so Evil Sheila's not so much the hottie. Maybe it's her sunny disposition.)
Other than the character cards, four types of cards make up the deck: Monster cards, Event cards, Ally cards, and Item cards. All of these feature appropriate scenes and quotes from the movie.
Monster cards include a challenge rating the player must beat on a roll of 1d6 (with 6 always winning), any special immunities the creature may have to certain kinds of attacks, and a Victory rating indicating how many cards a victorious player can draw from the deck after slaying the fiend.
(Oh, and the six-sided die isn't included. If you don't have a six-sided die, you have no business reading this web site.)
Item and Ally cards provide various perks, often involving a bonus to attack rolls; however, after use, many Items (especially those powerful complex weapons Ash likes so well) and all Allies require a roll on a 1d6 equal to or less than the number indicated on the card to avoid losing them. (Appropriately, this is especially true of some of the handier complex weapons. That stuff tends to break down or blow up, don't you know.)
With a few exceptions, players can have only one Ally, one weapon Item, and one non-weapon Item active at any one time, although they can change the active card at any time. That's important to bear in mind, since certain weapons work more or less effectively against specific opponents. When menaced by Tiny Ashes, for example, it's forks or scalding liquids you want.
Event cards… well, they just make all sorts of annoying things happen, often whenever the player holding them wants. Things like everyone having to pass their hand to the player on their right, for example.
So each player sets his character card with the active face up on the table, puts a monster card above the character card, and draws a hand of five cards.
On your turn, you draw one card from the deck to add to your hand. Then, you must either play one card from your hand or else discard one.
Note that there's really no incentive for a player of a Good character to put Monster cards into play. They're handier to keep around as a buffer whenever the player must discard from his hand due to lost combats. This seems like a small bug to me. It might make more sense if a player were forced to play a Monster card if he has one and doesn't want to play any other card.
Ally cards and Item cards are stacked on either side of your character card, Monster cards above it. Finally, you must attack something if you have a monster above your character card: either "your" monster, one of your opponents' monsters, or an opponent's character card. (The target number to beat an opposing character card is always 8.) Victory against a monster earns you the number of card draws indicated by its Victory Rating. (If you're fighting a really wimpy monster, than number may be zero.) Lose, and you lose a card from your hand.
And speaking of losing – or not losing, rather – the victory condition depends upon whether you're playing a good guy or a bad guy. Both sides want to have the Necronomicon as an active non-weapon Item. The good guys, however, want to have it active with no monsters in their Monster card stacks. The bad guys want to have it active with five monsters in their Monster card stacks.
This presented a problem during my playtest – a two-player game pitting me against my wife. I played Good Ash, and my wife played Evil Arthur. The problem was that on the "Attack" portion of my wife's turn, the only option that really made any sense was attacking my character. She didn't want to attack my monsters, because that would be helping me win. And she certainly didn't want to attack her monsters, because that would be helping her lose. Now, if we'd had three or more players, Evil characters would have had an incentive to attack the monsters of other Evil characters in order to hinder their progress.
This situation also meant that my wife had fewer cards coming in, because she wasn't killing off any monsters. And that's a big deal, because the number of cards in your hand is equivalent to your character's Health.
So if you run out of cards in your hand, you're out of the game, right?
Wrong. You switch sides. Good becomes Evil. Evil becomes Good. Draw a new hand of five cards and continue, only now your goal is the opposite of what it was.
"Aha!" you say. "Does that mean you can win by 'dying'?"
Yup.
If, for example, you're playing Good Ash and have the Necronomicon, a great big stack of Monster cards left to slay your way through, and only one card left in your hand, the smart move would be to attack something you doubt you can beat. Lose the fight, lose that last card, become Evil Ash, and hey, look at that! You're Evil Ash with five monsters and the Necronomicon! You win!
Unless, of course, some smartass plays the "Goody-Goody Two-Shoes" Event Card on you. Then you're instantly switched back to Good Ash, and you still have to get rid of those monsters you've accumulated. (Thanks, jerk.)
The rules are neither as engrossing as those of Eden's Abduction nor quite as thematically wacky as those of Eden's HACK!, although they do have the advantage of being far simpler than either. My test game took about 45 minutes from opening the box to my wife's victory, and factoring in the indicated standard playtime of 30 minutes and my standard time in getting the rules straight, that's pretty good.
Offsetting what the rules lacked in Army of Darkness flavor, however, was the very Army of Darkness feel of game play. By that I mean that while the game didn't feel like a direct simulation of the movie in the same way that HACK! feels like a simulation of a Knights of the Dinner Table gaming session, the slapstick chaos of game play matches the slapstick chaos of the movie. Heck, the game itself seems like the sort of maddening situation that could have happened in the movie. I can well imagine Ash having victory yanked from his grasp one too many times by a Good/Evil switch, then getting one of those "I am now officially losing it" grins on his square jaw as he nods to himself in dawning comprehension:
"Ooooo-kay… Allllll-right… I see how this works now... So c'mon… Who wants some…?"
It's an entertaining little game, and I suspect that it would be more entertaining still with a full complement of four players. I'm not sure I'd play it enough to get $20 worth of entertainment out of it, but I'm also not sure that I'm enough of a card game fan to be in the target market. So if you can round up three or four buddies who are both Ash fanatics and card game enthusiasts, this one's definitely worth a try.
Help support RPGnet by purchasing this item through DriveThruRPG.
