From: sos@oz.plymouth.edu (Steffan O'Sullivan) Subject: REVIEW: Howling Falcon games Date: 7 Sep 1994 07:51:39 -0400 Review of two Howling Falcon Games: 1) King of the Sandbox; 2) Za! Thirty Minutes or Free. Howling Falcon Cross Dimensional Trading Company is a relatively new gaming company, and definitely a low-budget one. These are the only two games they make at this point - at least, their booth at GenCon only had these two products. The games, while not perfect, have a lot of merit, and I believe these fellows should be encouraged. Given enough incentive to stay in business, they could be producing some very fine games in the coming years. Both games are inventive and fun, but suffer from low-budget components. King of the Sandbox is the better of the two games, but the low quality components hurt it worse. If you buy this game, and I recommend you do, I strongly urge you make the effort to make the components more playable *before* you cut them up. Glue (rubber cement is better - the kind you spread thinly on both sheets and let dry, then press together) the counter sheet to some thick cardboard before cutting out the pieces. Also glue the six playground areas to cardboard. Now you've got a good game! King of the Sandbox is for two to six players, and recreates the most basic wargame situation of them all: 1st through 4th graders battling it out in an elementary school. The game is fast-paced, easy to learn, and fun. Aside from making the pieces sturdy enough to use, the only other caveat is if you play a two-player game: raise the victory conditions to control of *four* areas, not three. Each player controls one "troublemaker." In your turn, you can Grab, Go, and Do - a very simple, easy to remember turn sequence. Grabbing is just that: grabbing items you can use as weapons or bribes. Going is just that: moving. All kids move 5 spaces unless carrying more than one item in each hand. (Exception: the pail allows you to carry five items. It can also be used to bash someone with, of course.) The Do phase is either persuading a kid to join your side, or beating up on them. To win, you have to control three of the six special areas in the playground. Control means you have a kid in your faction on it, and no one else does. Since your single troublemaker piece can only be in one place at a time, you need to recruit some gang members. Each piece has a Smarts score and Size score - both range from 1 to 5. To persuade a neutral kid, you roll a d6, add it to your smarts, and someone roll a d6 for the neutral kid and adds it to his/her smarts. You have to get higher to persuade them to join your side. You can offer bribes: quarters, candy bars, soda pop, stuffed animals, shovels, etc. All have an appropriate bonus marked on the piece. To encounter a neutral kid, who are not normally on the board, simply go to one of the six special locations and in your Do phase announce you are trying to persuade a neutral kid. You then draw one from a cup at random, and try it. Beating up kids is basically Size + d6 vs. Size + d6. Weapons (sticks from the tree, shovels, soda cans, even stuffed animals, though they hinder rather than help) add, and adjacent gang members can add half their Size to help you. A simple combat results table details results from Defender wins big through Defender barely wins through Attacker barely wins through Attacker wins big and then Real Big. Results can include broken weapons, running away, being beaten up, and being utterly whomped - out of the game, run home crying. The game is well written, both entertaining to read and clear rules. There are enjoyable and workable rules for getting quarters, buying candy, soothing beat-up kids with the candy, buying soda, making grenades with the soda (gotta shake it in your Grab phase, and throw it in your Do phase), running home for stuffed animals, throwing sand, major embarassment for getting beaten by a stuffed animal, and so on - all fun stuff! As they say in their advertising, "Remember that Genghis, Caesar and Rommel were all kids once too!" And my favorite quote is from a parent: "It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye." The major problem with the game is the low-quality components. While comparable to the early SJG games of Ogre and Illuminati, the components are more damaging to this game because of the nature of the mechanics. When a kid is aligned with your gang, you have to align the piece with its base facing a certain way. (There is a diagram, numbered 1 to 6, showing which hex facing each faction controls. Each troublemaker piece is numbered 1 to 6.) Also, there is a lot of bribery, so item pieces change hands a lot and are stacked under kids. If you just use the flimsy counters as they are, both aligning them and constantly changing items is *very* tedious and problematic - things get bumped easily. Heavy cardboard pieces help a lot. "Za! Thirty minutes or Free" is their other game. This is a game of pizza delivery: players are pizza delivery persons vying to become Employee of the Week. The first one to deliver 10 pizzas on time (within 30 minutes) wins. The components are again low-budget, but in this game that doesn't hurt much. There's no facing problem, or much stacking at all, so the counters aren't an issue. There are some problems, though: this game rates only a B, compared to the A of King of the Sandbox. I like the pizza aging and call-linking mechanic - nicely done. In fact, the concept of the whole game is nicely done. There are really only two problems, one minor and the other a bit more severe. Each player's turn, a card is turned over with a map location on it: A20, or E16, or M3, etc. A phone counter is placed there, and a pizza counter with a matching number to the phone counter is placed on Za central, on time phase 1. Each complete round of play, the first player ages all pizzas one level on Za central. (There are 8 levels, with the 8th one simply being Late.) Likewise, each individual player, on their turn, ages any pizzas in their cars. (Everyone has a table to show their pizzas and Successful Deliveries on. When you pick a pizza up at Za Central, you put the pizza counter on the same number on your table as it was on Za Central's table.) Each level of the table has a number of tips that each pizza delivered at that time is worth: deliver by turn two and it's worth 3 tips, by turn 5: 2 tips, turn 7: 1 tip, and turn 8: 0 tips and doesn't count toward your 10 on-time deliveries. A pizza has to be delivered to the matching phone counter space (unless you get a tip card that lets you ditch it). Tips are cards. You draw a number of cards equal to the tips you get. Some cards allow you to play them on other players, hindering their progress, while others help you out, mostly by avoiding bad cards that others might play on you. So everyone races around the board, delivering rapidly aging pizzas, trying to get 10 on-time pizzas delivered before anyone else. Cool game, actually - very fun! The two problems: a petty one is the map. While there are some lines drawn on it as roads, they have no bearing on play. You are told they are just for decoration. This is very disappointing - you may as well be playing on a checkerboard. Movement is from square to square, with no attention to the roads. This wouldn't be so bad, but frankly the lines drawn on the map aren't very decorative - they're downright ugly. So why have ugly lines that aren't even functional on a game board? Bad choice. The other problem is more serious, though: the tip cards. Most of these are of the "hinder others" variety, and most are rather severe. This means that the game is nearly useless as a two-player game (it has pieces for up to six players), since the first one to devastate the other with a crippling tip card will get ahead, which means draw more tips, which means further devastation to the other player. The game becomes a very one-sided stomp. For multi-player games, the "play anytime" rule coupled with the hinder cards means that it becomes very easy to gang up on the winner, and the game can go on a long, long, time. Fortunately, this can be fixed. The tip cards, which you have to cut out yourself, can be duplicated on many desktop computer systems so as to be nearly indistinguishable from the cards in the deck. My recommendation is that you change the cards to more "helping" cards and less "hindering" cards. The game would then be a much better game. The rules are simple, clear and well written. The low-budget components do not interfere with the game, except the ugly map, which offends my taste. Still, it's a good game for multiple players, and I recommend it, with the caveat that you'd better like games in which you get to play nasty cards on the other players. King of the Sandbox: $10.95 (if you can convince your store to order it. Otherwise, $13 postpaid.) Za! Thirty Minutes or Free: $10.95 (likewise.) Both in 9"x12" Ziplock bags, with cut-them-yourself components. Available from: Howling Falcon #2-1560a Dupont Street Toronto, Ontario M6P 3S6 Canada (416) 767-1987 I have no connection with Howling Falcon. Steffan O'Sullivan