OUR REVIEW

HPYNOTIC Ray or Pet Yeti

Nefarious

The Mad Scientist Game

Dominion, Dominion, Dominion - each casual gamer who knows one or two games beyond Uno and Monopoly could not avoid to at least becoming aware of Donald X. Vaccarino’s master piece including its apparent 47 big and small extensions and several promo cards. After all, he won “Game of the Year” in Germany in 2009 with it. Dozens of other awards came afterwards. But the inventor of the deck-building genre has other arrows in his quiver, too.

Nefarious - The Mad Scientist Game - is another card game by Vaccarino and was published at Essen 2011 by Ascora Games, a small American publisher. So far there is only an English-language version with English rules and card texts. There are rumors that a German version is in the making, but don’t ask me where and when!!

As indicated by the game title we are nefarious mad scientists. Our aim is to acquire 20 or more victory points by making as many inventions as possible of as high a value as we can manage. For this purpose you get a player board featuring four so-called investment areas and a safe for storing your money. Kindly enough, there is also the course of a game round pictured on this board, which only comprises four phases with the 4^th one only being used to check victory conditions. You start with 3 invention cards, 10 bags of money in your safe and 5 so called minions (they look like the hunch-backed Igor, as pictured by Marty Feldman in Mel Brooks Frankenstein Junior, thanks to Christoph Proksch for the reference!), which can also be translated into lackey; they are placed outside the board. Finally you receive one set of four action cards, identical for all players.

In Phase 1 you choose one of your action cards according to what you plan to to in the ensuing action phase, “Speculate”, “Invent”, “Research” or “Work” - explanation coming up - which all then turn up simultaneously. In Phase 2 of the round you check if the action cards played by your left and right neighbor correspond to minions that you might have placed on investment areas on your board in previous rounds. For each correlation you receive 1 bag of money per minion from the bank. As you can have up to five minions placed, maybe even on the same area, you can cash quite an amount of money, usually a maximum of 10.

In Phase 3, the core phase of the game, the action cards chosen in Phase 1 are executed in order of their numbering, from 1 to 4. If you played 1 - Speculate you can place one and only one minion into an investment area of your choice and pay the price indicated which ranges from 0 to 2, in correlation to the importance in the course of the game. With 2 - Invent you play an invention card from your hand. Most inventions have a price, the more expensive the more victory points they are worth, usually. Costs can vary from 0 to 24, but 20 bags of money need quite some efforts to accumulate that takes time and several rounds. As already mentioned, each such invention earns you victory points, they vary between 1 and 8, and there are some cards yielding variable victory points, that is, one point per invention already made.

Which invention cards you hold is of course a question of random chance, because contrary to Dominion there is no open display from which you could acquire something. As soon as an invention is built/made/ it might result in once-only effects which are depicted on the card. Green arrows pointing downwards, that is, at the player who played the card, are only applicable to the player and resolved by him independently of other players; the effects can result in gain or loss of invention cards in hand, one or more bags of money, free placement or removal of minions or combinations.

Very favored are the so called “Pro” actions, which result in free placement of a minion, receiving money or drawing cards equal to the amount of inventions already made. After those green arrows you deal with all red arrows on all inventions built in this round, those arrows involve all other players with the exception of the one who played the card. Of course, there is a bit of gloating when all other players but you must remove a painstakingly built minion or lose money or cards in hand. But there are also red arrows which give something to all other players; those inventions are of course only reluctantly built. But, after all, the other players can have their pleasures, too. An inventor’s life is hard enough!

Choice of Action 3 - Research gives you a new invention card for your hand and two bags of money units. By the way, there is no limit to cards you can hold in hand. If you did choose Action 4 - Work, you simply take four bags of money from the bank. Then all pick up the actions cards that were played and check if there is a winner with 20 points; if not, another round begins.

Sounds like a very average game so far. The rules are simple, action cards and their functions are easily understood, each game will probably run a rather similar course, after two or three games I will put the game back into its box and - if I should have nothing better to do or play - might put in on the table again sometime in the future. But STOP, here comes the twist, literally. The designer was aware of this problem and has invented the so called Twist cards, a truly ingenious element for the game. He has given us 36 of them, and only two of them are drawn for each game at random. Mathematicians among us can calculate how many possible combinations that provides, I believe it to be 630 of them, but it could be that I am wrong. Those Twist cards can spin the course of the game rather madly. Besides some rather harmless cards like “you start with 5 instead of 3 cards in hand”, “you start with 20 instead of 10 money bags” there are quite a few which can change the game considerably as compared to a previously played game. So you might draw “the action you chose last round cannot be chosen in this round” or “all actions can be executed twice” or “you can choose two actions in each round” or “the effects of all inventions are doubled” or “after each invention made you lose all remaining money”, you must reduce your money at the start of the round to the nearest multiple of five” or “you must acquire 30 instead of 20 victory points. These were only a few examples for the changes you can expect from those Twist cards. Thanks to them I have seen a games evening where during five hours we did nothing but play Nefarious, which is quite an achievement for a game in which one game lasts between 15 and 40 minutes, depending on the number of players. This gives you another glimpse on the designer’s genius.

Therefore I have only one thing to say; if you do not have a problem with English, you should get yourself copy of the game, despite it being rather hard to find at the moment. The fun in playing Nefarious and the allure to play it again are tremendous and one of a kind. Each game runs differently. I probably have played 40 to 50 games already! The drawings on the invention cards are beautiful and you can play it easily with your family. 2 to 6 can play, with 5 or 6 it gets a bit raucous, as all talk at the same time due the effects of the red arrows. Furthermore, the game does cry out for expansions: New invention cards, new twist cards, maybe even additional actions. Therefore “Buy it, buy it, and buy it”.

Gert Stöckl

Players: 2-6

Age: 13+

Time: 60+

Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino

Artist: Glenn Gustafson, Jason Flack, Terence Tong, Scott Tepper

Price: ca. 35 Euro

Publisher: Ascora Games 2011

Web: www.ascoragames.com

Genre: Card game with choice of action

Users: With friends

Version: en

Rules: en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Short and simple rules

Enormous allure to play again due to changing additional rules

Nice adaption of the Neighbor-joins-your-game mechanism

Compares to:

Basically all games with choice of action from identical card sets; 7 Wonders for involving your immediate neighbors, all in all first game of its kind

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 7

Gert Stöckl:

Enormous allure to play it again, short duration, no game is the same - want to want more from a game except the game itself!

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0