Review of Spree! Hong Kong edition

Last Saturday night, we skipped our planned D&D game to play some board games. After two games of Escape from the Death Star and one game of Powerpuff Girls (both fun quick games that involve battle and are over with in less than 15 minutes), we decided to play the Cheap Ass Game, Spree!

We had never played Spree! before, and didn't know what to expect. Little did we know how much fun it would be!

The basic premise of Spree is a mall with no security that's just begging to be robbed, so you and your friends park your cars in the parking lot and go on a looting rampage, stealing stuff from stores and each other.

The game needs a character playing piece and car playing piece for each player. We used Dragonball Z mini-figures and micro-machine cars for ours. Gaming miniatures or small army men would suffice as well. You also need two decks of poker cards and two six-sided dice to play.

To start, each player is dealt 5 cards. This hand of 5 cards is your shopping list and each card corresponds with a store on the game map. It's your job to go to that store (or as many stores as you can in one trip), put the card(s) in your "shopping cart" and get it back to your car, where you can "bank" the card(s) for points. You roll the dice to move your guy. Sounds easy right?

It would be if the other players weren't shooting at you and stealing your stuff!

Whenever someone gets a particularly sweet shopping cart and is trying to get it back to their car, everyone else will try to shoot you, move over your square, and take your stuff and put it in their shopping cart. Luckily, they can only take stuff from you that matches their shopping list, so you probably won't lose everything. But more than once, I had a shopping cart with two or three Kings and was trying to get back to my car when I got trounced by another player that had a King on his shopping list. Those Kings changed hands at least 3 or 4 times after that as the game became tackle the guy with the most cards!

This, by far, was the funnest aspect of the game. It allows players to be real bastards to each other!

Special cards like Jokers (which are Wild), Aces (which save your butt from getting shot or robbed!), 10's and 2's (which increase your Movement) also keep things unpredictable and interesting.

The game is very well balanced. The final score was incredibly close and any one of us could have won. Winning the game relies more on your ability not to be noticed more than anything like tactics or strategy, but there's plenty of that too.

The game is simple and playable. Our session lasted two hours or so, but the time flew by very quickly. The pace of the game is breakneck high octane. Speaking of which, there are even expansion rules in the back for using your car as a weapon to run over your opponent! We didn't use those rules, but they were very simple and easily integrated if we wanted to.

The game left us wanting to make our own expansions and house rules (the rules promise Mecha-Spree coming soon). But that's just because we're hardcore gamer geeks. By itself, the game is great high-action fun.