April Weimer
United States
Silver Spring
Maryland
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Set-up is pretty standard in this game. There are two decks of cards, a Victims deck and a Let's Kill deck, and both are shuffled separately. The Victims cards stay in the playing area. The Let's Kill cards are dealt five to each player face down and drawn from each turn, for the remainder of the game.
There are three steps to each turn. The first step is to draw from the Victims deck. There was some confusion at first as to how the Victims cards were dealt. In the Victims deck there are two types of cards, victim cards and location cards. After reviewing the rules it was decided that a player must draw until they get one victim card. These cards are all placed in the general playing area and if there are no locations the victim is placed in general play area and can be killed. The advantage to placing victims on a location is that you can only kill multiple victims when they are all in one location.
The second step to each turn is to use a Let's Kill card from your hand. These can be Weapons cards (used to kill victims), Surprise cards (placed upside down under a victim) which modify a victim and can add to or subtract from the victims point value, or Event cards which can boost your points by adding an event to a kill you've made. Finally the third step in a turn is to replenish your hand from the Let's Kill deck. You may have up to five cards in your hand and may replenish up to that many.
Shootouts seem rather pointless as there are only 8 gun cards in the entire game and one of them is completely useless. Basically a shootout can occur when a card already in play that has been activated initiates it. There are four cards in the deck that call for a shootout, Undercover Cop (Surprise card), The President of the USA (Victim card),
Just Woo It (Event card), Postal Worker (Victim card), and Post Office (Location card). My group was quite unclear on the rules. If you try to kill the postal worker she shoots back (a shootout occurs) do any of the other players have to participate or not? We played it that if I had one gun card I automatically won if I threw it down.
The game ends in one of three ways. The Victims deck runs out of cards, the Let's Kill deck runs out of cards, or a player has 20 points. If either deck runs out you play until there are no more victims available to kill. Players may choose to call that they will win next turn at any point during the game, even if they have more than 20 points. The object is to try to get more points than your opponents.
Overall the game was fun and it will get played again. I think the rules and the design are rather weak. There need to be more cards to really play the game to its full extent. Shootouts need to be re-worked as well. It may be worth trying to find an older copy and mix the two together for more combinations. It may also be worth writing new cards to add to the game.
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Posted Mon Nov 27, 2006 6:35 am