Reviews

Warhammer: Invasion is the latest living card game from Fantasy Flight Games.  After many years out of the CCG game, I decided to come back to it.  The lure of Warhammer, great art, and a really fast playing 2 player game were too much to avoid.

A couple of months ago, Gameshark.com editor-in-chief Bill Abner said "no Barnes, I want to do the CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD review". This was back when I was a doubter and I thought the game was going to be another also-ran in a year with too many also-rans. So instead, I reviewed garbage like WORLD WAR IV and pissed everybody off with articles such as "The Ceiling" while we all waited for Abner's take on the game. Earlier this week, Bill asked me to finally write it up since he's been preoccupied...

At first glance, you might look at Magnifico and think, 'oh, great, another Risk clone.' But that's like looking at RuPaul and thinking, 'wow, that chick has great legs.' Sure, there are some things in common, but the differences are a lot more important than the similarities. I'll let you decide for yourself if you think I'm talking about Risk or RuPaul.

A few years back, Eagle Games was at the top of its game. It had some of the biggest, greatest, most beautiful games you could buy. Bootleggers, Age of Mythology, Attack! - these were huge games, and they were awesome. Back then, Eagle Games was a mighty juggernaut of gaming awesomeness, and every new release was practically guaranteed to be huge and pretty and expensive and fun (except Blood Feud in New York - that game was in my collection for exactly as long as it took to trade it for something else).

I am the type of gamer who desires depth, not breadth. I'd rather play one game fifty times, than play fifty games one time each. A standard such as that requires a game that can hold up to fifty plays. Quite frankly, that is a rare case. This hobby is littered with the flotsam and jetsam of games that held up for five plays and were then traded away to someone else so that THEY could play it five times and trade it away. We tend to call any game a "classic" if it is pretty good (and sometimes...