With a tempest in a teapot brewing about Atlas Games' latest foray into the stand-along card game arena (see accompanying story, page 1), I was eager to play the game and evaluate it on its own merits. Now that I've played Lunch Money, I expect that any controversy it creates will be brief, as the game should shortly vanish into obscurity.
Lunch Money is a pick-on-other-players game of the Nuclear War and Family Business school. Unlike the nuclear battlefield or the streets of Chicago depicted in those games, the milieu this time around is harder to pin down. The box suggests that the game depicts "the raw dynamics of a merciless street fight" while the cards all show a solitary young girl clad in a white gown, leading me to wonder what streets this is supposed to be taking place on.
Players begin with 15 counters (you have to supply your own) and a hand of five cards. A turn consists of playing a card, discarding any number of cards and replenishing to five, or passing. Cards come in four varieties: basic attacks, weapons, defenses, and specialty cards. In a simple turn, a player might play a simple attack card— an Elbow, Headbutt, or Kick, perhaps— on the opponent of her choice. If the opponent plays no defense card, she loses the number of counters indicated on the attack card. If she has a defense— Dodge or Block, commonly— the attack fails. Either way, the attacker's turn ends and all players replenish their hands to five cards.
Weapon cards are played like basic attack cards, but these aren't discarded— they're returned to the player's hand. So you can use that Hammer over, and over, and over again as the game progresses (but only once per turn). A victim with a Disarm card, however, can stop your attack and force you to discard the weapon.
Specialty cards are maneuvers with extra preconditions or effects. The Big Combo allows the attacker to describe any two fancy moves she likes (say, spitting in your face and kneeing you in your groin, or strapping you to a chair and making you watch Barney) for six points of damage, reduced by 3 for each defense card the victim can muster. Choke can't be played until after a successful Grab, and does a point of damage every turn until the choker decides to let go. While you're being choked, you can't defend against any other attacks— but cards like Freedom, Headbutt, and Stomp will help you break free. Humiliation can be played at any time, letting you "describe a sequence of events that will humilate, but not physically harm, the victim," rendering him helpless to defend against any basic attack or weapon at your disposal.
When you run out of counters, you're out of the game. The last person left standing is the winner.
Lunch Money has no surprises— it plays pretty much exactly as it sounds. You're free to gang up on whomever you choose and be as capricious as you wish, reasons detractors often give for avoiding Nuclear War and Family Business. The luck of the draw plays a huge role in determining the winner— if you've got no defense cards, you're a sitting duck.
The game's biggest problem, though, is it's excruciatingly poor design. Graphically, the cards are stylish and intriguing. Each features an unusual photographic image of that white-clad girl, overlaid with the card's name and damage. Flavor text in an anarchic typewriter font further defines the game's dark aesthetic. But glaringly absent from the cards are any indication of how and when they can properly be used. As with the second edition of Once Upon A Time, their otherwise superb storytelling card game, Atlas has sacrificed function for form. You'd think that Atlas would learn from Mayfair, who put descriptive text back on their Family Business cards after removing them in the previous edition. Instead, players must constantly slide the rule sheet across the table while learning the game. And that's entirely too annoying for such a lightweight game. The mechanics of Lunch Money are not geared toward serious gaming enthusiasts, who often have no problem consulting multi-page manuals to resolve obscure rule questions. Casual players, if not put off by the game's theme and controversial graphic design, will not persevere through this learning curve— they'll just put the game down and play Hearts.
I wouldn't blame them. Lunch Money isn't a horrible game— it moves quickly and with the right group of players and a little bit of role-playing can create a funny, if somewhat dark, diversion. However, the game offers nothing its conceptual ancestors don't already provide. Moreover, its imagery is inclined to offend a good part of the audience such a simple card game is likely to attract. If the game were outstanding, I'd be puzzled by Atlas' decision to produce it with such controversial graphics. Now I suspect that the company may have hoped to divert attention from the derivative and random gameplay.
Another problem is that you may have trouble getting some people to play the game. All three of the people I played with (two women, one man) were offended to some degree (one was instantly, very offended) by the imagery and content, and none wanted to play again.
In this era of the collectible trading card game, it's encouraging to see companies buck the commercial trend and provide complete "original" card games. Although Lunch Money turned out to be a disappointment, I truly hope Atlas will continue to publish such games. With any luck, the next one will be worth buying.