Saturday Morning Gaming: Gremlins, Inc

I realized the other day that the game that I have probably played more than any other in the last 8 years is one that I still haven’t reviewed. Which is nuts! So here it is: Gremlins, Inc. It’s a digital board game and it’s one of those board games that can pretty much only be played on a computer. (Technically, they have stuff that you can download and print yourself… but, seriously, there is waaaaay too much to keep track of).

Here’s one of the two game boards:

You will be one of the twelve different avatars:

The Engineer
The Politician
The Manager
The Pauper
The Gambler
The Damned
The Banker
The Thief
The Secret Agent
The Merchant
The Presecutor
The Collector

Each one of these avatars has a different power. (It is starting to sink in why I hadn’t reviewed this…)

The Engineer, for example, has these abilities:

The Manager has these:

The Merchant has these:

You move around the game board by playing a card. See the pips in the upper left of the six cards? You play one of your cards and move that many spaces (most cards have 3… but there are a bunch that have as few as one or as many as six). The second you play a card for movement, you draw another card so you will always have six cards in your hand. You go your spaces and then, if you can play a card on the space you land on, you have the opportunity to play it (usually only one card but there are other cards that allow you to play multiple ones).

Playing a card doesn’t have to cost money (but it can) and if you don’t have the cash, you can’t play it. And then the card will do its thing.

Some cards give you money. Some cards give you gears. Some cards give you votes. Some cards screw over one of the other players (usually the one with the most gears, money, or votes but there’s always the “personal vendetta” option). There are 179 different cards. All of them do different things.

There are three kinds of cards. Normal ones, Secret ones (grey bar at the bottom), and Criminal ones. If someone else looks at your hand and you have a Secret one, it’s discarded. If you have a Criminal one, you go to Jail. (But some of the Criminal ones are really good… free gears, free money, steal stuff from your opponents…)

As you wander around the board, you’ll sometimes pass (or land on) “income” spots. Passing them gives you the amount of income your avatar is due (you start out at 30, but you can bump that up at The Bank and other players can play cards to make it go down). You’ll have opportunity to take small shortcuts that go through Bribe spots. These will cost you the amount of a Bribe that you have earned so far (you start out at 20 but picking up karma will make it go up 1 per karma point). If you land on a risk space, you roll the die and, on a 1, you get a misfortune (you can pay 40 gold and get insurance so that if you roll a 1, the opponent of your choice will get a misfortune).

There are 40 misfortunes that run the gamut of “I kinda wanted that to happen” to “oh my gosh that’s awful”. Like, you can force an election (the person with the most votes wins… after the person with the best karma gets 3 extra votes). Sometimes the misfortune sends you to Jail. Sometimes it sends you to The Court. Sometimes it sends you to The Inferno. Sometimes it reduces everybody’s income by 10. Sometimes it takes a gear.

First person to get the assigned number of gears (usually 20 or 30) wins.

And I’m irritated because I absolutely slaughtered explaining it. Oh yeah. That’s why I haven’t posted about it. I didn’t even talk about what Jail is like, or the special Inferno cards, or the gambling spots…

It’s the most cutthroat board game experience I’ve ever had (including multiple Monopoly experiences). You don’t have to play against other humans (though you can). You can play against bots. You probably should. It’s not good for your soul to play this game against friends.

You should seriously check it out. This is the game that I have played more than any other.

So… what are you playing?