spikydavid said:
"Kill Dr Lucky" was the first of the cheapass games, which I played a few times when it first came out (about ten years ago). It's okay - very odd sort of game, which is much, much better with a lot of players. There's no real strategy or tactics - just draw cards, and see what happens.
Yeah, we played a game this weekend.
Impressions:
Concept: Reverse clue. A bunch of randoms are in a mansion and attempt to murder him. Collect movement cards to move, weapon cards to attempt a murder, and fail cards to stop other players from murdering Dr. Lucky. Dr. Lucky constantly moves, and you need to be in the same room as him, alone, and with a clear line of sight to attempt the murder. Failed murder attempts give weapon-strengthening spite tokens, so you are incentivized to try to kill him whenever possible. MSRP ~$30 Canadian.
Positive:
- Basic concept was "family-friendly". I can't imagine anyone wouldn't be up for "like clue, but opposite". After trying in vein to get people to play some of the more complicated games we own, it was good to have a low stress option.
- The board and card art was very nice in the edition we purchased (which actually included the expansion gratis)
- Flavour text is fun and the game does encourage a little play acting when you're playing it
- Game has some very obvious strategy depth. There's a mechanic mentioned in the manual which allows you to exploit turn phase order to take multiple turns in a row.
- Because you can't make a murder attempt unless the line of sight into the room where you're trying to murder Dr Lucky is totally clear, we witnessed a number of very elaborate plays get foiled when the unlucky player played a series of rare cards to get themselves in position only to find out another player was in the next room, thwarting the murder attempt.
- Every player needs to pitch in to fail a murder. If I try to murder Dr. Lucky with a +5 weapon card and 2 spite tokens, failure cards with a total sum of 7 are required to stop me. Players contribute to stopping me in a clockwise fashion, so the last clockwise player MUST use as many card as it takes to stop me, while the first clockwise player could either stop me herself or save failure cards and calculate that subsequent players have enough to stop me. This results in an awesome war of attrition.
Negative:
- It is so difficult to get into the same room as Doctor Lucky that we'd sometimes have runs of 10-15 turns before someone made a kill attempt, which was boring.
- The player who won our game had been essentially useless the whole game. After several near-winning murder attempts by other players, she fluked into the same room as him, happened to have a weapon with a crazy bonus property, and took advantage of the fact that the rest of us were plum out of failure cards. In some cases, this would be a shrewd strategy, but in this case it ended up being a fluke. We all collectively felt cheated at the anti-climax.
- There are so many rooms on the board that sometimes it's visually difficult to get a clear indication of your movement options.
We had 4 players.
