Reviewing Cheapass games presents something of a dilemma. These games break all the rules. They come in paper envelopes, often lack components like dice and pawns which you must supply, and cost under five dollars. How good do they need to be to provide good value for your money? For that price, some people would be content if the game provided a few chuckles on the first play and never got used again. I'm not one of them. Regardless of price, I want a game to be fun to play more than once. The question I ask myself is, "Given my other options, would I choose to bring this game to the table?" Price certainly plays a role in the value equation, but this is the test any game—even a cheap one—must pass to earn a recommendation.
Well and good, you say, so does Ben Hurt pass muster? I'd love to give a nice tidy answer to that question, but I can't. I like the underlying game and enjoy the experience, but I wouldn't elect to play it again using the given rules. With some changes, on the other hand, it might be much closer to what our group was hoping for. We had two major gripes with Ben Hurt: bad luck can really screw you, and it's just too long a game for what it is. Bookmark that thought—we'll be coming back to it.
Ben Hurt might have been subtitled "The Really Nasty Chariot Racing Game". It comes with a cardstock racetrack (some assembly required) and a deck of cards. You've got to supply poker chips and a pair of uniquely colored dice for each player. A game consists of a series of races, with the winner being the player with the most cash at the end of the series.
Chariots move according to the roll of a die. Chariots are represented by one of each player's dice. At the end of a move, a player sets his die to show the value he rolled that turn. On the next turn, this value is added to a new die roll to determine the chariot's maximum movement. So each die roll actually carries over into a second turn. Good rolls set up for further gains in the future, while bad rolls slow you down dramatically.
The deck of cards tries to compensate for this. At the start of each race players receive a few for free and a bunch more (depending on the number of laps) are auctioned. The auction uses a vicious progressive system in which the "bid" goes around the table. When it reaches you, you must pay the pot a number of chips equal to the current bidding round (1 chip the first time, 2 chips on the next pass, 3 on the third and so on) or else drop out. The last player to pay takes the card into his hand. The auctioneer can preempt the auction entirely by paying the card's marked quicksale price himself. Either way fattens the pot, which gets divided in a 3:2:1 ratio among the top three finishers of the race.
The deck includes a variety of different card types. Drivers (one per chariot, please) and Enhancements must be installed before the race begins and bestow special abilities which often carry fees to invoke. Move cards are played during the race to modify die rolls, either by adding to them or simply changing them to a new value. Events are wacky effects played during the race, ranging from a Basket of Nails which blocks part of the track to the popular Well-Aimed Cat which prevents a chariot from passing you (but gives the driver the cat for later use).
Card play is lively and the races are truly evil, which makes for some rollicking fun. And if the game maintained a frantic pace it would be a clear beer & pretzels favorite. But as mentioned earlier, it bogs down in a few key places.
The importance of luck, both in rolling dice and getting good cards, is very high. The Move cards are designed to help compensate for this, but if you're not dealt any you're at the mercy of the dice. You can hope to buy some at auction, but players quickly realize their value and tend to snap them up for the quicksale price so they never go on offer. Longer races would help die rolls even themselves out, but they take more time and make it hard to fit in enough races to make a competitive series. And it also means more cards get sold, lengthening the auction.
The auction system itself is devilishly effective at its primary function (building the pot) and I quite like it, despite the advantage it offers to the auctioneer's right-hand neighbor. The problem is that it just takes too bloody long. The race is the fun part; the auction is just preamble. Yet the sequential procession of the auction eats up game time. Replacing it with a simultaneous bid system in which all bids (even losing ones) get paid to the pot might help, but the time players would take to decide their bids would probably cancel any benefit from the simultaneity. We've thought about eliminating the auction entirely, instead dealing out cards which players simply pay for when used. This wouldn't satisfy groups who play the game for nickels (as the designer does), but for those of us who just use chips the auction may be expendable.
The pricing on some of the cards seems out of whack. The best cards in the deck—some of which can make an enormous difference—are only marginally more expensive than lesser cards. They should be expensive enough to make their purchase a genuine decision instead of the current no-brainer. You may wish to tinker with some of these, raising the prices of cards like the Piece of Rope to make them more proportional to their effect.
Like all Cheapass games, Ben Hurt's production values belie its price. This isn't some podunk mimeographed gamekit slapped together by someone to whom graphic design means a set of stencils. The inexpensive components are handsome, functional, and aesthetically cohesive. I've seen professional games which don't look half as good.
And there's a game in there. There's even a fun game in there. But there's an overly long game in there. This is a beer & pretzels game, but the pretzels run out well before the game does.