Hacks and Variants

Rulebooks Are Meant to be Broken

The Game Changers = Game Genie for board games

**Game Changer** cards fucking up Risk, String Railway, and Super PAC$.

I rarely game with other people anymore. Possibly because everyone’s sick of my shit. Once I’m even a little familiar with a board game, I will almost always want to change the rules. Or use different dice. Or add a sand-timer. Or mash it up with another game. Or turn it into a roleplaying game. And if it IS an RPG, I’ll try to make it something else. Because the designer’s intent is irrelevant once you get the game home.

The Game Changers is like Game Genie for board games. Even though NO ONE NEEDS A GAME GENIE FOR BOARD GAMES. BECAUSE BOARD GAMES ARE JUST CARDBOARD AND PLASTIC AND RULEBOOKS YOU CAN IGNORE. I recently plugged it into Monopoly Cheaters Edition and mutated the game into something I hadn’t anticipated. That got me revved up for more tinkering.

Postmodern War | Risk Onyx Edition + Foul Play + Easter Eggs

I’m not a big wargamer. Outside of my elementary school obsession with G.I. Joe, I wasn’t into military stuff (Star Wars doesn’t count). But as a devoted news junkie, I listen to a lot of think-tanky podcasts. One of which is Bombshell, which covers the absolute cluterfuck our national security has become.

And make no mistake, our national security IS a clusterfuck. Conflict in the cyber and narrative domains are now very real, and space is soon to follow. Further, Trump has conflated economic and defense issues, complicating both arenas. On top of that, all the New Strongmen want to rule the world. Allies have become competitors, rivals are becoming collaborators, and everyone is officially in it for themselves and themselves only. No more “enlightened self-interest”. If someone gets more, someone else must have gotten less. And getting less is for losers.

The Onyx Edition of Risk already adds some modern touches. Instead of pure conquest, you have to grab three objectives to win. The Game Changers reflect the POSTmodern elements of the emerging global order.

Foul Play allows each player to get caught cheating once without penalty. After that, any other transgression eliminates the player. This reflects the leader of the free world tossing international norms over the side. Everything is fair game. Everything is up for grabs. Everything is on the table.

Easter Eggs add hidden objectives. Normally you’re supposed to write down said objective, but we did something different. At the start of the game, everyone draws 3 territory cards and puts them face-down under their Easter Egg card. If either of their opponents capture all three of the hidden territories, that opponent receives those cards PLUS as many stars worth of extra armies on said cards immediately. Plus it counts toward the three-objective goal. This adds even more uncertainty to the game. Anyone can stumble into victory for no reason other than dumb luck.

Green got caught snaking an extra army during Recruitment about 90 minutes into the game. After the game, he confessed he’s been smuggling extra armies since the second turn.

The Foul Play cards make cheating itself part of the game. Normally we don’t tell people we’re playing with “if you’re caught cheating, you’re eliminated”. It’s assumed that cheating is forbidden. No one EVER asks what happens if someone cheats. If they did, everyone else would sorta hem and haw, then say “Don’t cheat!”. But adding these rules implies that cheating was always alright as long you didn’t get caught.

The end came fairly conventionally. Red plowed through two territories and grabbed an 8th city, immediately winning the game.

About half way through the game, I realized someone could simply not admit that their opponent had captured the three Easter Egg territories. We wouldn’t know until the end of the game. I was tempted to bring this up, but I also wanted to see if anyone would actually do that, so I kept my mouth shut.

Cheating as a rule is a weird concept. Monopoly Cheaters Edition might be the first game to codify it, but I vaguely remember Blood Bowl 2nd edition allowing cheating. If I remember right, each player had 4 minutes to complete their entire turn. It was on the opponent to watch the clock. If you took longer than 4 minutes and the other player didn’t catch you, it was their problem.

In the end, no one managed to find any of the Easter Egg combos, and only one player got caught cheating. Unlike the experiment with Monopoly, The Game Changers didn’t upend the entire Risk experience. But it did add some flavor.

Trump Just Wants the Cash| Super PAC$ + The End

It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.

— Ilhan Omar

I wrote about Super PAC$ a while back, and liked it enough to order its lone expansion and futz with the rules. The last what-if pared Bernie against Trump in a do-over of the 2016 disaster (because Clinton was a terrible candidate). I’m stilling digging Bernie’s message this time around, and he could easily bury that orange fucker. That said, Warren wouldn’t just put Trump into the ground. She’d also delete about a decade’s worth of Conservative gains in one term.

The blank spots are for whatever component you want to refer to, but the Super PAC$ cards would have covered the art.

Here’s the logic. The new rules of politics have made running for office an excellent way to line your pockets, even if you lose. The End module reflects this with bonuses and penalties to the final Power scores.

Most Investments = +4 Power
Least Megabucks = -3 Power
No Elections = -3 Power

This variant is based on my assumption that Trump’s primary goal is to grab as much cash, influence, and blackmail material as possible before leaving office. Yeah, he’s also a racist, but that’s just his hobby. His goal is to be an oligarch. And if he can’t be one here, he’ll retire to Russia to be an oligarch there.

In this alternate timeline, The Hair Piece built a decent coalition, but most of his Power was in Investments. Very on-brand Investments. He also won NONE of the elections. Final score: 50 Power.

The Regulator conquered the entirety of government. Mainly because people want to see Warren slap the rich with a SAVAGE Wealth Tax. AND a higher Inheritance Tax, a Consumption Tax on luxury goods, and probably a Maximum Wage for good measure. Final score: 51 Power.

I’m all for taxing the shit out of the rich. And not just to fund the social safety net or pay down the national debt. Taxing the rich kneecaps their ability to warp markets, culture, politics, and democracy itself. Their caches of cash are so massive, they distort the economy. If the only way to reduce their power was by “deleting” the money instead of transferring it, I’d be OK with that. Just erasing the money helps counter inequality. Especially when you consider how financial innovations turn money into more money.

Dickbags on Fox News would say that all that money is currently being put to work, but that’s bullshit. The Panama and Paradise Papers demonstrate that a lot of that money just sits there, avoiding being taxed. It’s not “capital”. It’s just booty.

And if this was a normal game reflecting a normal election, The Regulator would have saved Humerica from The Hair Piece. But that wasn’t meant to be. Remember The Game Changers? The Orange Fucker won no elections, but he had ALL the Investments, AND Warren had less money in the bank at the end. That made Warren’s actual score 48 to Trump’s 51. Sure, she won all the elections, but Trump still had more sway over the nation. Now The Hair Piece can launch TRUMPtv and get Ivanka elected in 2024.

The Hair Piece didn’t want to run anything anyway. Sure he enjoyed locking babies into cages and goading idiots into shooting brown people, but now he can retire comfortably knowing he can keep destroying the international order. And he doesn’t even have to fuck off to Russia to do it.

We need to impeach the motherfucker right the fuck now.

String Railway 2081 | String Railway + Bets

My table was too small for the traditional set-ups, so was went with the odd-shaped variant.

I like the idea of 18xx games, but I can’t imagine actually enjoying them. They look dry and anything longer than 90 minutes is questionable. It’s the stock market mechanics that intrigue me. Since String Railway is technically a train game, adding the Bets module turns it into a vaguely 18xx experience.

After the first round, players put Bet cards in front of the player they wanted to bet on. Each correct bet would be worth 5 Points.

The game is played normally until after the first round. Then, players place Bet cards in front of any player, including themselves. These cards represent predictions that a player will come in 1st, 2nd, or Last. At the end of the game, after what would normally be final scoring, every Bet card a player gets right is a 5 point bonus.

At some point I noticed that betting on yourself coming in 1st simplified things. If you bet on yourself coming in 2nd or Last, or bet on someone else coming in 1st, you had to consider that in your calculations. Trying to come in a close 2nd so you could score Bet cards to win in the end is the definition of being too clever by half.

Red (20) came in Last, which no one anticipated. Blue(23) was 2nd, which netted Green another 5 Points (Purple cards used to denote pre-bonus ranking).

Green (24) bet on themselves coming in 1st, as did Red, netting them both an extra 5 Points. Everyone bet that Yellow (21) would come in Last, and everyone was wrong. After Bets were counted, Green was still the leader with 34 Points.

In retrospect, we should have made betting optional and penalized wrong bets. Or maybe called the bets before the final round. That said, the Bets module put life into a familiar game without mutating in into something unrecognizable.