Review of Phart!: the Dispersing

Born in the era of skyrocketing Magic: the Gathering popularity, PtD seems to have been one of Wingnut's earliest products.

In appearance, it's not much. A ziplocked baggie, a slender rulebook, some extra-cheap quality rubberbands (I know because one of them wasn't even properly vulcanized in the copy I got), and two decks of white cards with simplistic black and white drawings.

Game play is easy enough, and the majority of the double-sized deck consists of the two sorts of cards needed to make attack-food cards, and food power rating cards, both of them coming in several strengths. Much like MtG, players have a kind of hit points, in this case clean air. Unlike MtG, there's nothing resembling monsters except for a few drawings. The remaining cards modify attacks, defend, restore some fresh air, change cards, or move an attack to another player. Like Mille Bornes, there are specific antidote cards countering the more exotic attack boosters.

While the captions on some of the special cards are amusing, I just can't see Phart! as providing much more than a few jokes useful in an RPG. Even if your character IS a fecalmancer.