It’s rare that a simple review of a simple game would cause ethical dilemmas for me as a reviewer, but here’s a case in point.
L-C-R is a simple dice game that’s a lot of fun and worth the price when by all rights it shouldn’t be either.
L-C-R consists of a clear plastic tube containing three six-sided dice, a stack of 24 small poker chips, and a single 6"x3" sheet of instructions. The dice have one over-sized pip on each of three sides, and the letter L, C, or R carved into the remaining sides. The chips are yellow, the dice are white, and the lettering is painted in red, black, and blue, so even in such simple components there is good use of colour.
The rules of L-C-R are very simple, and here’s where the first dilemma crops up: If I explain them here in the review, it’ll be laughably easy for you to cobble together your own components and start playing the game on your own, making my review, supposedly a vehicle for increasing the sales of good games to readers, into the mechanism for readers to circumvent the game’s producer entirely. But if I don’t explain the rules there’s not a lot to say about the game beyond my opinion of its fun value, and therefore you’d only have my word for it about the game’s value, making my review essentially useless. Trusting that a good number of readers will “do the right thing” if the description appeals to them, and being of the “more words is always better” school of review writing, I’ll take the risk and go into the mechanics.
Each player starts the game with three chips; there are enough for 8 players, but there’s no limit to how many can play if you just add coins or other tokens. The first player rolls the dice: for every L that comes up, he passes one chip to the player on his left; for every R, he passes one chip to the player on his right; for every C, he puts one chip in the pot in the centre of the table; and for every plain dot, nothing happens. Then the dice are passed to the next player, and so on. If a player has only two chips left when his turn comes up, he rolls only two dice; one chip, one die; and if he’s out of chips, he passes the dice to the next player, but he’s still in the game, as he could gain a chip at any moment from the players to his right and left. The last player to have any chips at all wins.
See? I told you that you’d be able to counterfeit this game with stuff you already have handy (poker chips or pennies, blank dice that you letter yourself, or even standard d6s, with 1 being treated as an L, 2 an R, 3 a C, and 4, 5, and 6 as the neutral dots).
The second dilemma comes up in our players’ reactions to the game. Everybody who played it (a group ranging from 6 to 40 years old) learned it before one complete turn had gone around, and everyone liked it; we ended up playing maybe four quick games in a row (depending on the number of players and the roll of the dice, a game can be as short as a minute, and is unlikely to go over three), and more games later (including in the airport waiting for the boarding call for our plane). That’s understandable for the youngest players, but the adults and the older kids who played realized that there wasn’t any strategy or thinking involved in play: You roll the dice and do what they say, and eventually, entirely at random, one player will be left with chips in front of him and will be the winner.
Logically, once you figure out that the game is nothing but random shifting of chips back and forth until through sheer luck someone wins, you would expect the enjoyment factor of the game to disappear, but for some reason (whether it’s the act of manipulating the bits of plastic on the table, or the silly banter that crops up to accompany the trading of chips back and forth, or the inexplicable excitement that builds up as more and more chips are moved to the off-limits centre and players can see the end of the game approaching) those playing the game get caught up in it and forget or ignore the fact that their participation is only tangential to the game.
If I’d tried to review L-C-R without having actually played the game, I would have dismissed it as being as mind-numbing as Candyland (another purely random game with no player input at all). But after actually playing the game, despite the fact that it shouldn’t be any fun for any but the youngest of players, it’s entertaining for a few minutes at a time (and I suspect the game’s duration goes a long way to explaining why it doesn’t bore adults and older kids as quickly as Candyland) and worth the pittance you’d pay to get a genuine set.
Review Summary