Some Other Tim

Best of 2011: Guards! Guards! (the boardgame)

A friend of mine brought this game home with her from the North American Discworld Convention (which I was sadly unable to attend with her this year), and our little band of adventurers made time for a couple of matches before we all had to disperse for the fall semester.

I’ve made arguments in the past that I am not a traditional nerd, but this is such a nerd-thing that I’m not even going to try to defend that position for the duration of this post. It’s a boardgame inspired by Discworld that borrows elements of gameplay from Dungeons & Dragons; you see the futility.

Now, this is also the part where I admit that I have played Dungeons & Dragons before and would do so again. Dang, I’m never going to be able to make an argument for coolness ever again, am I?

I enjoyed Guards! Guards! a lot more than Dungeons & Dragons, though. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand DnD, and the creativity aspect of it puts me on edge; I just can’t compete with a penguin magician or a cleric that is also a fruit. But I’m willing to give it another chance; playing with good friends kept it fun and I hardly ever like a game the first time I play it (something that makes Guards! Guards! stand out, actually).

Enough with this prevarication. On to the Game!

None of us had ever played before and when we opened the box we were pretty intimidated. It contained no less than 8 decks of cards, 2 types of unidentifiable wooden markers, 5 types of cardboard items (6 if you count the 2 denominations of currency), dragons, The Luggage, guild cards, a large multipage rule book, and a rules cheat sheet (the fact that this is necessary tells you something right there). All that was in addition to the things you would expect to find: the gameboard, pawns, and die (8-sided by the way). I think the words “we’re never going to figure this out,” passed my lips more than few times. And rest assured the complexity of the game does not end with the contents of the box, there are also various meaningful spaces on the board, and symbols on the cards to figure out before you can proceed. By the time we were ready to play, with everything duly unpacked and properly distributed things had gotten a bit chaotic:

We needed a bigger table.

The basic premise of the game is that you have been recruited to return 5 of the 8 great spells to Unseen University, enlisting the help of some of the Discworld’s notable characters along the way. For some reason the wizards have decided to challenge you as you go even though you are trying to help them, and neither the the City Watch nor the Patrician have much faith in you, so it’s quite a quest. There are also plenty of opportunities to do yourself an injury in any number of exciting ways: blowing up, getting trampled by the Luggage, contracting the pox, losing a CHALLENGE, being sabotaged, and something about dragons (rather fuzzy on this bit, we never managed to summon a dragon in either of our games).

But, anyway, the point of all this is to say that once you figure it out it’s a really fun game. Actually, it’s still fun when you haven’t fully figured it out (turns out we played all the way through our first game using an understanding of the rules that was not at all the right one). And, in fact, the complexity gives the game a kind of frenetic energy; hardly a turn passes without something ridiculous happening. It’s great! I’d recommend it to any Discworld fan, and if you don’t read Discworld what the heck are you waiting for?

I wondered if maybe my desire to put this on the list was more driven by the fact that I miss my friends than anything about the game itself, but I got an urge to play just last week that assuaged those doubts. I do miss my friends, and I’d obviously prefer to play WITH them, but Guards! Guards! genuinely was one of the best things I discovered this year.

Tagged: Best of 2011Guards! Guards!Discworld