My Blog! My Blog!

esrblog and I spent tonight helping local friends break in a brand new copy of the "Order of the Stick" board/card game. The game, as some of you probably know, is based on a popular comic that spoofs the behavior of D&D players.

The game has some amazing properties. The first is that the errata sheet is almost as long as the "quick start" guide. The quick start guide, in turn, in written in the same format as the comic that inspired the game, and has as many pages (though less text) than the rule book.

Despite the players' lack of understanding of the game mechanics, the game succeeded in sucking 5 intelligent people into playing their characters eerily like the greedy, munchkinly, and ...less intelligent characters of the comic and game. I realized this, even though I have never read the comic before and know little about it.

(For those of you who are familiar with the comic and/or the game, I played Haley, and esrblog played Elan. Draw your own conclusions.)

On the other hand, the roleplaying element is the best part of the game. Mostly it seems to involve fighting lots of monsters at suboptimal odds, and it takes a while to get to the end game condition (find, and kill, the lich at the bottom of the dungeon and escape the dungeon's room-by-room collapse).

In short, we had fun trying to learn the game by doing, but I'm dubious about how much re-play value the game has, and am not especially eager for a rematch.