David G. Cox Esq.
Australia
Lighthouse Beach (Port Macquarie)
NSW
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Girl Genius - The Works
A Strategy Card Game for Two or More Players
Designed by James Ernest & Phil Foglio
Published by James Ernest Games (2001)
Agatha Heterodyne is a girl genius. She lives in a comic strip world created by Phil Foglio. Agatha’s world is inhabited by mad scientists, intelligent animals, machines, submarines and dirigibles. Everything in Agatha’s world is a ‘cog’ in the a giant machine called ‘the works’. The players are mad scientists tinkering with the works (by playing cards). As the pieces interact in certain ways the cards will become and ‘pop’. As they pop they will make things happen and they will also jump into your score pile.
GGTW is not the sort of game that I usually find interesting – it feels like a puzzle as much as a game and I tend to avoid puzzles. Having said that, GGTW is highly interactive and has lots of meaningful decisions for the players to make.
Let’s start with a quick rundown on how the game works. The object of the game is to be the first to score 100 points – you do this by activating cards and moving them into your score pile.
The game starts with 12 cards (out of a deck of 108) placed in a particular pattern on the table – two cards are face-up and the others are face-down. Each card has a different ‘suit’ on each of its four edges. There are five suits altogether so each card will be missing one of the five suits.
During your turn you flip a card from face-down to face-up. You then spin one of the face-up cards 108 degrees. Check the card you spun and see if any of the suites on any of its four sides match the suite of an adjacent card. If there is a match the card will ‘pop’ – this means that you read the action on the card, follow the instructions and then put the popped card into your score pile. You then replace, from your hand, cards that have ‘popped’ so that there are still 12 cards on the table. You then draw cards until you have five cards in your hand. It’s that easy.
The key to the game is to be able to spin cards that will give you good points and good actions. Cards, as well as having a name and points value also have descriptions as to their characteristics – machines, clanks, sparks, villains, hero, girl, spy, pests, etc.
The strategy in the game is to be able to make valuable cards pop and then replace them with cards that may cause problems for the other players. Some cards, when they ‘pop’, have good consequences while others have bad consequences.
Some of the things that happen when a cog ‘pops’ are pop a hero card, pop one card touching this card, shuffle the board into the deck and deal out a new board, draw one card from any player’s score pile, if you pop nothing but this card then take another turn. There are heaps of things that can happen.
What I Like
1. The game has a sense of fun – the art and the text on the cards is clever and amusing.
2. The rules are simple and easy to understand.
3. During the game you have a myriad of meaningful decisions to make.
What I Dislike
1. When you first play the game it can bog down as there are a lot of cards to read before you make decisions (this becomes less of a problem after you are familiar with the game).
It doesn’t say how many people can play but I think that this really shines as a two-player game. With more players it can bog down and you can have a lot of down-time between turns. Also, in the two-player game you can set traps for your opponent and you will reap the benefit. With three or more players this doesn’t work as others will reap the benefit of the traps that you have laid.
I’m glad that this is not produced by Cheapass Games as is the case with most James Ernest games – the quality of the cards is high and this is certainly a large element of the fun of the game.
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