Friday, December 5, 2008

Gnome Man's Land - Explaining Das Book

I recently purchased a game called Red November about a group of drunken, communist gnomes on a flaming submarine. (You can go ahead and reread that last sentence.)

It's co-designed by Bruno Faidutti, one of my absolute favorite designers who also gave us Citadels and Mission: Red Planet, as well as many others. The theme for this one is great, and so far the gameplay seems top-notch as well, but sadly the rulebook is a little lacking.

Fantasy Flight Games does this a lot. They put out a good game with high production values, and then they apparently get a roomful of monkeys with staplers to organize the rules. I mean, I can see not wanting to hang around supervising the monkeys when there are staples and feces flying about, but when your rulebook is 40, or 80! pages long, it needs a friggin' index and table of contents, not a bunch of advertisements!

Luckily Red November's rulebook is only 23 very small pages, but sadly these pages appear to have been combined in a seemingly arbitrary order, making the learning of this otherwise fine game unnecessarily difficult. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to basically rewrite the rulebook, and I have posted my extended explanation here. I didn't include it in this post because it's frackin' long and I don't particularly suggest reading through it unless you want to learn how to play the game or you suffer from insomnia and an excess of time. Instead I recommend silently making puns to yourself about gnomes for the next few minutes if you gnome what I mean...

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