From: Allan Goodall Subject: Re: [SUPREMECY] A review please. Stephen E. Persons wrote: > > Hello all, > I have seen the game Supremecy on the shelves recently and am somewhat > interested in purchasing it. Could someone please post or mail me a > review about the game? Thanks in advance. I bet you thought this was just a simple request. "Please review the game." SUPREMACY is one of those polarized games that people either really like or completely loathe. I happen to enjoy the game. I've played it dozens of times since I bought it (when it first came out) and I've never had an unenjoyable game. Just remember, what you are getting are opinions. It's a game of superpower politics and warfare. You build armies, navies, nukes and laser satellites in an attempt to dominate the world. There's a stock market of three commodities: grain, oil and minerals. You need these commodities to build armies, navies and weapons. You also need them to move and to fight with your armies and navies. You can sell the commodities at a profit, since you need money to build your armed forces and strategic weapons as well. You get commodities by grabbing territories that hold these commodities. This is controlled by a deck of territory cards (called the resource deck). The game is fairly simple to play. It's along the same lines as Axis and Allies in complexity. There are a large number of expansion sets (more than a dozen) that can be purchased separately. The most important of these is WARLORDS AND PIRATES OF THE NEUTRAL ZONES. These give the neutral countries on the board armies and navies. You can sell weapons to the neutrals and their armies and navies stop the game from being a mad rush to grab neutral territory ala Risk. While simple to play, the original rules were far too vague. A FIELD MARSHALL'S HANDBOOK cleared a lot of things up but now there is a MEGASUPREMACY RULEBOOK that compiles almost all of the rules and clears things up a great deal. MEGASUPREMACY is an expansion of the original SUPREMACY. The MEGASUPREMACY mat gives you a larger playing surface and introduces cities to the game. The game is not without its warts. There are two main bones of contention. First, I've seen a number of novice players give up because the game seemed to revolve entirely around the stock market. It is very easy to drive the price of the stock market into the ground during the sell phase, meaning that any players after you can't make any money by selling commodities. Likewise, you can buy commodities in the buy phase and drive the price sky-high for anyone that wants to buy after you. The obvious answer to this is to form trading blocks that trade as much with each other as with the stock market. This seems to be lost on a number of novice players who are more at home with RISK than DIPLOMACY. The second contentious issue is the nuclear winter rule. A disgruntled player can easily destroy the game for everyone by dropping the "last" nuke. After so many nukes are dropped (12 in the basic game or 13-18 using an optional rule) the world is plunged into a nuclear winter and everyone loses. I've only ever had this happen once, and that was by accident (someone miscounted his nukes). Some players, though, report that every game seems to end in a nuclear holocaust. I've found that groups that have the most fun playing the game are out not so much to win but to not lose. These groups often take treaties, and the breaching of same, very seriously. This might have to do with the fact that most of the people I've played it with are DIPLOMACY players. To help with a nuclear winter result, we came up with a Martian Archeologist rule. After the Earth is turned into a frigid desert, we rate the players as though an alien archeologist had landed on Earth and was trying to figure out what happened. The player who dropped the last nuke is the overall loser (after all, it was HIS weapon that destroyed the world). If he fired his weapon off as a counterattack to an attack by someone else, that attacker comes in second last. Every other player is then ranked by the game's Field Marshall ranking. With this rule, it is possible for a player who built no nukes and was eliminated early in the game to be the overall winner (his nation is looked upon more favourably by the Martian Archaeologist). Well, I hope this helps. As you can tell, I like the game. Others detest it. If you have any follow-up questions, just e-mail me. -- Allan Goodall, Sales and Marketing Systems, Kodak Canada, Inc. INTERNET: WORK: allang@kodak.com HOME: agoodall@sympatico.ca VOICE: (416) 766-8233 ext 35473 FAX: (416) 760-4597 Visit the Kodak Web site at: http://www.kodak.com