Part of Cheapass Games'
statement of purpose says, "If you ignore the clever shapes they come in, the cheap little plastic pawns are an interchangeable part of most of the board games in your house. So are the dice, the money, the counters, the pencils, and just about every other random spare part. These generic bits and pieces can account for as much as 75% of a game's production cost, and that cost gets handed to you." Thus Cheapass publishes games that contain just the most unique components needed for play: usually cards, boards, and rules.
If you want you can go out and get gold-plated pawns and semi-precious markers for use in all your Cheapass games. Or, alternatively, you can purchase the required pieces straight from Cheapass.
This review quickly runs through most of the game pieces that you can purchase directly from Cheapass for use in their own products.
The Components
Components reviewed here include: microchips, pawns, dice, and money.
Microchips: Microchips come in 4 colors: red, green, yellow, and black. They're small plastic poker chips which are stackable. They're most useful as markers--for damage in Light Speed, pipe control in Steam Tunnel, etc. They could also be used to mark victory points or even money.
(The alternative to Microchips, which I haven't reviewed here, are stones. The stones available from Cheapass come in 8 colors: the old favorites red, green, yellow, and black, as well as bonus colors blue, white, clear, and purple. I personally prefer the microchips because they're lighter and more compact for travel play, and you also get 100 for $2 rather than 20 for $1.50. The only deficit is that the microchips are only available in 4 colors, which often won't be enough if you want to play Cheapass games with more than that many players.)
Cost: 100 microchips of a color for $2; or microchips in all four colors for $7.50
Pawns: The pawns are fairly attractive and large pawns. Seven are sturdy plastic and one is wood (for use as a master pawn in games like Kill Doctor Lucky and Parts Unknown according to the web site, though that's Greek to me). A set of 8 pawns includes the following colors: red, green, yellow, black, blue, white, wood, and purple (a nice match for the microchip or stone colors, you'll note, with wood substituting for clear).
Cost: all 8 pawns for $1.25
Dice: Cheapass has lots of dice at their site. Among them are some transparent polyhedra dice which come in a variety of sizes and colors. Among the transparent colors available are: red, green, yellow, smoky (black), clear, and purple. If you want to complete the matching set of dice for those pawns and markers above, you can also get an opaque white die. They're all attractive 6-siders, cleanly inked with black or white numerals, as appropriate.
Cost: You can buy these dice individually for $.75 for the transparents and $.50 for the opaque--though the set of 6-siders should really be sold in a pack, just like those pawns and stones are.
Money: The series 2003 Cheapass bills come in eight different denominations. Each one has numerals for the bills on the four corners (2 arabic numerals, 2 roman numerals) and a picture in the middle related to one of the Cheapass games. Each one is also a different color, making it easy to tell them apart (a lead which the Federal Treasury seems to be following). Unfortunately the arabic numerals are generally low contrast though readable; oddly, the roman numerals are quite crisp and easy to read.
The denominations are: $1 (Dr. Lucky), $5 (Give Me the Brain), $10 (Freeloader), $20 (Witch Trial), $50 (Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition), $100 (Unexploded Cow), $500 (One False Step for Mankind), and $1000 (Fightball).
All the money is printed in black ink on slightly heavy paper stock.
Cost: $6 for a large stack of bills (totalling $42,000 according to the web site).
The Whole Package: All said you can get everything reviewed here (microchips, pawns, dice, money) from Cheapass for $20.50. They don't sell it in a set, but they probably should (or, alternatively, a set that just includes 4 colors, to better match the microchips). A set that is available from Cheapass is their Ultimate Bits package, which substitutes 8 packs of 20 stones for the 4 packs of 100 microchips, but otherwise matches what's reviewed here.
So, how do you rate a simple set of components like this?
All the plastic bits are sturdy, colorful, and attractive. I'm also impressed by the job that Cheapass has done matching up 4 or 8 colors through a number of different products, and am sure that that'll improve the gameplay of various games (Cheapass or not). I don't find the money particularly exciting, but it'll do the job, and players who have played more of the Cheapass games will probably enjoy the references.
The best thing I can say for this pack of components is that the price is right. In particular the microchips and the pawns seem very cheap for what you get.
I always use the Style rating to give my overall impression of components. Based on the color-matching and the quality-to-price ratio I think the Cheapass game components are above average: "4" out of "5".
I always use the Substance rating to measure gameplay. I'm sure you could play some simple games with just these pieces, and won't be surprised if James Ernest starts packing boardless game rules into his "Ultimate Bits" Pack at some point, but despite that I'll just punt and claim that these components have a "3" out of "5" (average) Substance rating, because it's actually totally irrelevent.
Conclusion
This is a set of utilitarian but still attractive components for use wih Cheapass games. If you've got more than a couple, you should stop using those pennies, wooden nickels, and Monopoly thimbles, and instead invest in a set of "bits".
Review Summary