I can, however, still tell you if I find a card game that’s particularly fun.
Paranoia: Mandatory Bonus Fun Card Game is particularly fun.
For those of you unfamiliar with the roleplaying game on which this card game is based – for which I have a review copy, by the way, but which I’ve yet to read – the setting is a futuristic post-apocalyptic darkly comic dystopia overseen by a well-meaning but thoroughly insane and homicidally paranoid Computer dedicated to the elimination of the Commie mutant traitors and secret societies who threaten the well-being of loyal citizens everywhere. To this end, it employs hapless individuals known as Troubleshooters – well-armed enforcers of the Computer’s will who are, to a man or woman, both mutants and members of secret societies.
What better setup for a card game of unmitigated, gleeful backstabbery?
At a mere 16 pages, the basic rules are simple enough – so much so that I was up to speed for the GenCon demo game in a matter of minutes.
Everyone gets a Troubleshooter card, and everyone gets a Clearance card indicating your Troubleshooter’s current Clearance level. Everyone starts at the lowest level – Red – except for the Team Leader, who starts at Orange. (The Team Leader may be chosen by several methods of varying fairness.)
Clearance level indicates how many Action Cards you get in your card hand, how many Wound tokens your Troubleshooter can take before dying, and how many Treason tokens he can accumulate before the Computer considers him a Traitor. (Traitors face summary execution at the end of a mission, by the way.) As in the roleplaying game, each player gets six clones of his Troubleshooter, so death is only a temporary setback until you run out of clones altogether. The winner is the first Troubleshooter to reach Ultraviolet Clearance or the Troubleshooter with the highest Clearance when the first Troubleshooter runs out of clones.
Play revolves around the Mission Cards that come into the game one at a time, describing the job the Computer, in its infinite wisdom, has assigned the Troubleshooters. Mission objectives tend to be very, very straightforward – generally something like assigning five Wound or Treason tokens to the mission. Missions can also end when any Troubleshooter runs out of Action Cards, when the “Abort Mission” card is played, or (obviously) when somebody wins the game.
Each player’s turn consists of receiving a number of Action Cards from the Team Leader based upon his Clearance-determined Hand Size (plus one bonus card for the Team Leader himself) and either playing or discarding an Action Card. (Some cards may be played at any time, however, with tends to keep everybody on their toes.) These cards may be directed at the Troubleshooter who played it, at one or more of his fellow Troubleshooters, or at the mission – assigning one of the aforementioned Tokens to the mission, for example.
Easy enough, right? After all, why would loyal Troubleshooters want to do anything other than work toward the successful completion of the mission?
Lots of reasons, as it turns out.
For one thing, why would you want the mission to succeed if the reward for success will end up bumping up another Troubleshooter’s Security Clearance – especially if he’s just one level away from Ultraviolet?
And don’t forget those mandatory execution sessions for Traitors. If you’re sitting on enough Treason tokens to make you a Traitor, the end of a mission spells a death sentence!
And speaking of Traitors, the Computer’s just as big on rooting them out as it is on seeing missions completed – possibly more so. Assigning enough Treason tokens to make a Troubleshooter a Traitor reduces the accusing Troubleshooter’s own Treason tokens by two, and killing a Traitor eliminates all of the killer’s Treason tokens. (But be careful! Wounding a Loyal Troubleshooter earns you two Treason tokens.)
(Well, unless the late Loyal Troubleshooter happened to have an unfortunate run-in with a reprogrammed Squeegybot. After all, it was the Squeegybot’s fault!)
In short, cooperation isn’t very high on any player’s priority list.
As you might expect, this makes the Team Leader’s job not so much fun. Sure, he gets that initial bump in Clearance, but that also makes him the prime target for his “allies” – after all, the bastard starts out one step closer to winning than everyone else!
To make matters worse, it’s the Team Leader’s job to declare the mission successful after the group has met the requirements for success. Why does that make matters worse? Because the Team Leader has to take his turn to make this declaration. That means that if, as is frequently the case, the big reward for success goes to the last Troubleshooter to assign a Wound or Treason token to the mission, it’s probably not going to be the Team Leader.
The end result of all this is a game that’s deceptively easy to play but a gloriously chaotic challenge to win, what with:
- Troubleshooters killing other Troubleshooters.
- Troubleshooters accusing other Troubleshooters of treason.
- Troubleshooters proving that other Troubleshooters’ accusations of treason are treasonous.
- Troubleshooters proving that other Troubleshooters’ accusations of treasonous treason accusations are treasonous.
- Treasonous Troubleshooters blowing themselves away to reap the rewards for killing a traitor.
- Treasonous Troubleshooters making sure that they stay treasonous in order to ensure their execution and subsequent promotion for dying in the line of duty.
- Troubleshooters calling for “Security Sweeps” that force another Troubleshooter to take a Treason token for every card in his hand he refuses to reveal to one and all.
- Troubleshooters using a weird device from the R&D Department to reverse the flow of time (and the order of players’ turns) just for the damn Hell of it.
The list, as they say, goes on.
Game play definitely falls into the “fast and furious” category, with only one longish rules-search required during my second game for a rule I couldn’t recall from the GenCon demo. Other than that, the only time play slowed to a crawl was the instance in which two players played such a long string of action-nullifying and/or card-swiping actions on each other that by the time each of them had finally exhausted his supply of countering cards, they had to carefully reconstruct the entire sequence a second time just to be certain what the Hell happened. (This, by the way, included a third Troubleshooter repeatedly dying and un-dying as the action that killed her was repeatedly negated and un-negated.)
And speaking of game speed, players can adjust the length of a game session very easily by reducing the number of clones, as was the case in the aforementioned GenCon demo. (That three-clone game took about 30 minutes.)
Every card features amusing cartoons in the classic Paranoia style, perfect for keeping players in the right mood. (As if the nature of the game itself weren’t enough.)
The only drawback I see in this otherwise nearly ideal game is the lack of the mutant powers that feature so prominently in the RPG. Those could have been used to differentiate between the various character cards, which otherwise only differ in their Paranoia-style names. That might have added an entertaining wild card into the mix, as would have a cost in Traitor tokens for their use.
That aside, this game now ranks alongside HACK! as my favorite card game, and has the advantages over the latter of being even less complex and of being complete in one set. I’d highly recommend the Paranoia card game to fans of Paranoia, as well as to anyone who sees the entertainment value in double-, triple-, or quadruple-crossing your best friends, leaving nothing but a pair of smoking boots in their wake.
Help support RPGnet by purchasing this item through DriveThruRPG.
