Review of Dune: Eye of the Storm

A while back, one of my friends went against my advice and bought two starter decks of Dune. One he gave to me, and the other he kept. Now, there is one great test of a collectible card game: after you've played it once, do you feel like buying another deck?

Unfortunately enough, the answer is No.

It's not that Dune is a particularly bad game. It has its high points, like the spice market and the way that Dune is at once the best thing that happens to you and a real white elephant. It's just that Dune has some real flaws that keep it from being a very good game.

First off, Dune uses basically the same concepts used in any other game in its rules for playing cards. Yeah, there's a nifty bidding system, and sure, you don't have to pay the whole cost if you can wait for deployment counters to lower it for you, but you're still spending resources ("solaris," in this case, but it could just as easily be "mana" or "force") to play your cards. This kind of gameplay worked great for Magic, because Magic has a setting that's uniquely suited to these rules, but it just doesn't work (as anyone who's played Star Wars knows) for any other games.

Combat is much the same. Instead of really trying to innovate, you just compare the statistics and see who was bigger. In an interesting twist, instead of destroying your troops, you subdue the piece of property where the troops are fighting. Troops merely fortify the area. It's an interesting concept, but it'll take you forever to figure out.

And this brings us to Dune's worst point: the rules. They are confusing, badly organised, and obtuse at best. My friend, who is of above average intelligence, didn't even try. I had to read the rules and play about 6 games against myself before I even had a basic concept of the rules. Take movement, for example. It says in one spot that you move your troops during such-and-such phase, but it doesn't say how, or how much it costs you, or anything of that kind. It turns out that personnel cannot be moved without a vehicle of some kind, but you have to figure this out for yourself after wondering where the $#@%ing movement rules are and flipping through the microscopically printed rulebook about ten times. Even this doesn't make sense. After all, in Dune, didn't Paul and his mother make it from a few miles from Arrakeen (the capital city) all the way to the Fremen sietch (a location in the game) without having to rent a jeep or ride an ornithopter? The Fremen didn't always! ride worms, you know. These were a people that were perfectly capable and content to walk across the desert, yet in Dune: Eye of the Storm, they are incapable of doing any such thing!

Yet this game is really embarrasing, not because of horrible rules or silly combat, but because it had so much potential. After all, Dune is the setting that most sci-fi games owe their existences to (especially Fading Suns and Warhammer 40,000). Dune is the master sci-fi setting of all time--heck, it may be the only sci-fi novel you'll ever read where the book includes twenty pages of glossary for all the factions, terms, and history involved. Surely, Last Unicorn could have tried to do a little more justice to the setting by making it more detailed and appropriate of a game.

So, if you're a real Dune fanatic, you can buy the game and have fun. You'll be half-blind from reading the rulebook, so you won't be able to enjoy the art (one of the real high points of Dune: Eye of the Storm) and you'll have had to compromise your love of the book or movie so you can understand how, in said book or movie, Paul Atreides and a few talented Fremen managed to take over a galactic empire, but your Fremen Legions always get their butts handed to them on a plate when they go up against a legion or two of Sardaukar. Those of you unwilling to go through this nonsense would be better off using the ten or so dollars you'd spend on this to finance a bag of popcorn, a cold drink, and a rental of the movie.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 3 (Average)