Sunday, August 28, 2005

TAKE OUT HIS FUNNY BONE FOR 300 DOMARS: If you, like me, enjoy a good board game now and again but have worn out on Trivial Pursuit, Cranium, Pictionary, and the like, may I commend to you the terrific line of games from Cheapass Games?

We here at Cheapass Games are aware of two basic facts about games: they cost too much, and they are at some level all the same.

If you ignore the clever shapes they come in, the cheap little plastic pawns are an interchangeable part of most of the board games in your house. So are the dice, the money, the counters, the pencils, and just about every other random spare part. These generic bits and pieces can account for as much as 75% of a game's production cost, and that cost gets handed to you. . . .

Cheapass Games come with the bare essentials: boards, cards, and rulebooks. If you need anything else, we'll tell you. And it's probably something you can scrounge from a game you already own, or buy at a hobby store for less than "they" are charging you for it. Heck, if you need to, you can even buy the parts from us.

And the games are both cheap and clever. U.S. Patent No. 1, a game where you try to be first to patent your time machine in the face of any number of competitors, Kill Doctor Lucky, which asks the important question: "why do mystery games all start after the fun is over?" And One False Step for Mankind:

California: 1849. Where the mayors of stupidly rich Gold Rush towns can squander the resources of their citizens on pretty much whatever they want.

This month, it's a race to the Moon. Will it work? Probably not. The real goal is to earn enough votes to become governor. But it seems the best way to impress your constituents is by doing something grotesquely stupid and dangerous, like blasting them into space. It's one false step for Mankind, one giant leap for you.
And there's hardly a game more than $8, most considerably less. So if you are looking a novel way to blow an evening at home, give these guys a whirl.

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