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Racing pigs is a time-honored tradition among people who ride tractors to work and have shared sets of dentures. (Please, take no offense if you race pigs. Instead, just remember that for most of us, having children with first cousins is incredibly taboo, and you are a member of the privileged few.) But now, thanks to a silly little game, your children can also enjoy this storied and thrilling sport!

The game that recreates this exciting pastime is called Dunger Derby, and for the first time ever, your kids will be able to join in using tiny plastic choking hazards and a board that they can destroy the very first time they play. Sort of like Candyland, but less kid-friendly.

Dunger Derby is a very simple game, which is an important feature in a game designed for kids who still eat their boogers. There are four gates located around the board, and your pigs have to go through each one in order. The trick is that every turn, you check to see if your wild hog goes the direction you wanted him to go, because more than half of the time, he just runs like an idiot directly into another pig, a pit full of bright lights, or a stone wall.

The resulting chaos bounces between being utterly hilarious and painfully frustrating. However, if your child is at the age where Candyland is compelling and Life is a thrill-a-minute, he might really laugh at seeing Daddy's dirty pig bounce off a trampoline just to headplant into a stone wall. The chaos can be entertaining, if you approach it right.

Unfortunately, Dunger Derby has some pretty serious problems. It needs better pieces, for instance. In kid's games, even more than in games for grown-ups, the pieces are important. And a paper mat with tiny plastic pigs is not going to cut it for kids who fit the age bracket. Not only that, but the standard rules make your hogs wander more than half the time, which is amusing but causes untold frustration and chaos. The rules recommend allowing for a little more control if you're playing with children, but I really think anyone playing the game ought to use the little kid rules.

Dunger Derby is a funny game, especially if you're able to laugh at the misfortune of wild animals forced to race on a dirt track (and I am). But to be a successful game for the wee ones, it should have bigger pigs, a sturdier board and brighter colors. It's a cool idea, but there are some significant errors in execution. Done properly, it should have had the less frustrating rules, and some serious component upgrades. Still, if you're looking for a silly way to kill time while you're buzzed on cheap beer, or just have kids who can overlook production issues if it lets them stage pig fights, Dunger Derby could be a lot of fun.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Pig mayhem is funny
Great plastic pig figures (especially if you want to use them in a different game)
Easy to play, so your kids might get a kick out of it

Cons:
Too chaotic, and could frustrate... well, anyone
Components problems make it questionable for children

If you're looking for a fun game about racing pigs, or just need some neat wild boar miniatures to turn into Heroscape customs, check out Dunger Derby at Noble Knight Games:
RACE YER HAWGS

I am not a fan of professional car racing, as a sport, though I am more than willing to concede that it could be pretty cool. But I might be a lot more willing to sit through a few laps of NASCAR if a giant indicator on top of the vehicle told me how fast the car was going at a glance. Of course, in the case of NASCAR, I'm pretty sure they go the same speed, running in circles, for about three hours, and then someone crashes and takes out spectators with flying debris. So the numbers wouldn't be that interesting, because for three hours you're looking at 180, and then all of a sudden, a big 0. And maybe fire.

In Nitro Dice, though, your car shows your speed the whole time, so you can just take a quick gander at the table and tell exactly how fast everyone is going. And the reason this is so easy is that instead of cars, you drive ten-sided dice around the track as fast as you can. Which is a pretty crazy idea, because dice don't even have wheels on them.

Nitro Dice has a bunch of really cool ideas. For starters, all the cards you use are track sections that either go straight, turn right, or turn left. You don't just play with these cards, either. You build your track out of them, which means you can build just about any track you want. If you build a seriously humongous track, you might have to buy a second deck, but if you build a track that big, the game is going to take four days and everyone will hate you for asking them to play.

Every racing game has to have some way to simulate handling and speed and stuff, and in Nitro Dice, your cards are your racing prowess. Every time you enter a new piece of track, you have to discard a card that matches that piece of track or take damage to your car as you skid out of control. Want to juice it for a quick start? Discard a card. Change lanes? Discard a card. Slam on the brakes so you don't pile into the back of the guy in front of you? Discard a card.

This works pretty well, because at low speeds, you won't have as many chances to use your cards, and at high speeds, you better be really careful about the cards you dump. On the other hand, you could spend too long mulling over your options, deciding which cards to dump and which to keep, and people who do that will not only make the game go a lot slower (and thus not feel much like a race, unless you like to race snails), but you will want to punch them in the duodenum. So don't do that.

Sadly, the part that doesn't work very well is the namesake for the game. It's called Nitro Dice, because your dice go fast, but the best thing you could do for the game is get rid of the dice and use little cars. It's tremendously irritating to have dice for pawns. A normal six-sided die would be enough grief, but having to spin and spin a ten-sider to find your current speed before you forget where you started your turn is simply irritating.

I can kind of envision the design process that happened in the creator's head. He was sitting around, probably half-baked and eating a bowl of Froot Loops, when inspiration hit and he said out loud, 'Hey! I'll make a game where you use the dice as race cars!' His cat, who was the only living thing present, ignored him and began to chase imaginary mice around the room, because it had a serious contact high and was tripping balls. So the designer set about making a pretty darn good racing game, but was completely married to the idea of using the dice as cars, and wound up with a cool racing game that sucks because of the dice. He also wound up with severe munchies, and his cat eventually went into rehab.

However, I encourage you, if you like racing games, not to throw out the baby with the bath water. For God's sake, take your baby out of the water before you empty the tub. How absent-minded do you have to be throw out a baby? Stupid.

As I was saying, Nitro Dice is a clever little racing game. It just needs one tweak - you need to not use dice. At all. Make another little card that you put next to your damage card, and keep track of your speed on that card. Then get some Micro Machines race cars and play the game with those. Then the game would be called Nitro Cards, which would not be as catchy, but at least it would not be as massively irritating to play.

In fact, I enjoyed Nitro Dice enough that I intend to find some small car models and play it more. It's a fun game that lets you picture a high-stakes street race in your head while you scream through corners and knock other cars off the road. It can be brutal and smart, and there's plenty of room for tension. Don't be bothered by the fact that the dice completely ruin an otherwise exciting game. Just get little cars, and this will be a very fun game.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Great little racing game
Cards offer a neat way to abstract handling without being cumbersome
Plays pretty fast - a two-lap race will probably take about 45 minutes

Cons:
The dice are a horrible idea, and should be replaced

I like Nitro Dice, and once I find some cool cars for it, I will be playing it a lot more. If you want to try this neat little game, you can find it at Noble Knight Games, and even save a few bucks:
REV IT UP

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Having a fire take out every game I own really sucked, mostly because it left me with a real shortage of review copies. Not only that, but when I go to play a game, I can't just pick up Bootleggers or Risk Legacy or Nightfall, and I haven't been totally dazzled with a game since the fire. Sure, there were a few I liked, but none of the new games I've accumulated since December can compare to Nostra City or Claustrophobia for sheer 'holy crap I want to play that right now' factor.

So Monday night I got a bug up my ass and decided to go to the thrift store, because by God I wanted to play something even if it sucked. And as I walked the aisles, stepping carefully around, over and sometimes on other people's small children, I came across something that amazed me - a copy of Clue: Harry Potter that was still in the shrink-wrap. It was only five bucks, which is about what I would be likely to pay for the game if I was buying it new. But it was in a thrift store and it was in the shrink wrap, which practically obligated me to buy it. And that explains why I'm using this perfectly good website to talk about a themed retread of a boring old game.

First off, Clue is near the top of the charts when it comes to games I really don't want to play. It may have been an interesting deduction game when I was a dumb kid, but these days, it just bores the socks off me. You wander around, completely slaved to the dice, and then if you ever do manage to get to a room somewhere, you get to play a lame 'show me your card' game to see if you can check off one more box. Hopefully someone at the table will be smart enough to figure out what's in the envelope before you get so distracted that you end up falling asleep at the table.

So why did I buy Harry Potter Clue? Well, it was flashy, it was in a thrift store, and it was still in the shrink wrap. That doesn't explain why I played it, though (and really provides a totally ridiculous reason for having bought it). I played it because it had thematic upgrades that seemed really cool at the time.

The most immediately obvious upgrade is the fact that the board changes, thanks to big spinners located under the board that you turn almost every time someone rolls the dice. Doors might open or close. A secret passage that took you to the potions lab might dump you out in the girl's showers next turn, which would be handy if you wanted to film a porn called Harry Potter and the Giant Rod.

And sometimes, when you turn the wheel, a dark sign might appear. This is not to be confused with trying to read road signs at night when the streetlights are blown. Those are normal signs, but just really dark. No, a dark sign is when a snake crawls through somebody's head, which I think we can all agree would be pretty bad regardless of whether or not the streetlights were on. And when you see the dark sign, something bad is going to happen. To find out what that bad thing is, you have to all clutch your wands (or pillows, if you're girls), and draw a card.

The dark sign cards make all kinds of things happen. Like the boys might find a troll in the crapper, or all the girls might accidentally eat puking pastilles. This is something evil Lord Voldemort was fond of doing to plague the living - make them mildly nauseous. But if you have the Weasley Twins as allies, you don't have to throw up. Everybody else, though, is going to lose house points for blowing chunks all over Professor Snape.

This is one part of Clue: Harry Potter that was pretty darned cool - player elimination. There are all these special spaces on the board where you can pick up help cards, like spells and potions and happy magical friends. And you will need them, because those dark sign cards will eventually send everyone to detention unless they're protected by Hagrid or Fawkes the Burning Chicken. When you lose all your house points, you're just plain out of the game. And since it's Clue, you still have to stick around and show your cards to people. You have to play, and you can't even win any more.

On their own, these dark sign events are kind of weak. They're just arbitrarily random misdeeds that will have you running away from man-eating vegetables and writing on your hand with magic pens (unlike my daughter, who writes on her hand with a real pen, until she looks like she spends every Saturday at the henna tattoo parlor). But combined with Clue, they make you hurry. And if there's one thing Clue needs, it's a shot of haul-ass.

Ultimately, Harry Potter Clue works for me because I like Harry Potter. It's a weak reason, too, because it's still Clue. But I like the changing board and the race against time provided by the dark sign cards. I get to play Neville Longbottom, who is definitely not my favorite Harry Potter character, but who is still cooler than Harry Potter because Harry Potter is a whiny bitch. The board is pretty, the theme is one I enjoy, and the gimmicks are surprisingly cool. So what if it's Clue. It's fun, and that's why I play games.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Harry Potter (and you don't have to be Harry Potter)
A few cool gimmicks that really work
It cost me five bucks at the thrift store

Cons:
Still Clue

If you want to play Harry Potter Clue with your kids who love Harry Potter (assuming they still live in your house, because Harry Potter is so 2001), you should run over to Noble Knight Games and pick up a copy:
FETCH ME A PORTKEY

A while back, I reviewed a prototype of a game called Startup Fever, which was, at the time, running a Kickstarter promotion to turn it from a wooden puppet box into a real game. The creator of the game told me that if I liked it, he would put Vietnamese prostitutes onto one of the scandal cards. I did like it, so I was excited this week when my real-game version showed up. The first thing I did was unwrap all the cards and look for one about Asian hookers.

Well, unfortunately, there were no easy women of any kind, but then, since Startup Fever is essentially a family game (if your family is full of mean people), I wasn't too surprised that nightwalkers didn't make the cut. What did make the cut was a pretty impressive package.

First, the art got completely overhauled. The original art was a little weak, but since it was only a prototype, that was fine. The new art has a very cool minimalist look, and is a lot easier to read because of how simple and succinct it is. Some people are not going to like it, though - while I liked how the board looks like it could have been part of a boardroom planning meeting, my wife was not a fan of the coffee stains in the corners.

The rules changes were very minor, but I found that they improved the game considerably. The game used to have lawyers, whose special abilities rendered far too many of the cards kind of worthless. They also clogged up your hiring pool, with the end result that once everybody had hired all the executives, there was no poaching because you didn't have room. Without the legal staff, the game gets a lot more brutal, and stealing away your competitor's Chief Information Officer becomes a seriously strategic move - and meaner than hell, to boot.

Some of the problems of the original game were not fixed. For instance, many cards are overpowered, while others are practically worthless. Some are really useful at the beginning of the game, but pointless when you're in the home stretch. At the beginning of the game, when you're getting one dollar of income, a card that provides four bucks can be a big deal. But in the last couple turns, when people are amassing personal fortunes, four dollars is mostly just stupid.

I still really like Startup Fever. We played it twice this weekend, just because we liked it. It was fun as a cool wooden prototype, and it's fun as a completed work. There are a few problems, but it's still good enough that I expect that my family will be asking to play it again.

But there are still no Vietnamese hookers.

Summary

2-6 players

Pros:
Prettier than it was
A few small tweaks make this a better game

Cons:
Still pretty European
Still no whores

I think the biggest problem with Startup Fever is that since it's a Game Salute game, you can't get a discount on it anywhere, and while I like it, I don't think it's worth sixty bucks. Still, I'm glad I have it, and if you want it, you can find it here:
http://shop.gamesalute.com/collections/meetpoint-llc/products/startup-fever

When I was a kid, I always thought the country between Eastern Europe and Russia was called The Ukraine. Like there was more than one, so they had to call it out with an article that would designate theirs as the original. 'Sure,' they would tell their friends, 'you could visit some other Ukraine, but you'll never find one as good as The Ukraine. It's The Best.'

Turns out, the country is just called Ukraine. There's no article. I guess that's what you get for learning geography from a 1968 copy of Risk. And I know this for sure now, because a couple weeks ago, some people who live there sent me a game called My Happy Farm (at least, that's what it says on BGG. The cover of the game uses what I assume are Cyrillic letters, so it kind of looks like the game is called Becena Pepma, which is obviously wrong (well, it's wrong to me, but maybe if you speak Ukrainian - which I'm pretty sure is just Russian - that means My Happy Farm)).

My Happy Farm is clearly a European game. The goal is to plant crops and feed farm animals. This, combined with the fact that it was created in Europe, make it a European game. You cannot kill your farm animals, not even for their delicious meat. You just fatten them up and show them off to the neighbors. You're obviously not breeding them for the money, because you can get richer than hell just selling turnips (coincidentally, this is also a great way to make money in Animal Crossing, a game in which I had to rename my character Rockefeller Von Moneybanks, the turnip magnate).

The purpose of making all this money is to buy seeds that you can plant. Then you grow those seeds and harvest the plants. Then you feed those plants to your animals, only you have very picky animals who would rather wait six years for a meal than eat wheat and carrots in the wrong proportions. Basically, you trade these veggies for a feeding card that you slap on your animal, who will get fatter and then be happy with you.

There's a lot of stuff in My Happy Farm that will be relatively old-hat for serious fans of games where you don't punch anyone. You have a limited number of options on your turn, and there's always more you wish you could do. There is absolutely no interaction of any kind beyond racing to get the best cards to feed your four-legged friends. You trade one resource (money) for another resource (seeds) which you turn into a different resource (vegetables) in order to procure victory points (in the form of overweight sheep).

A few things make this moderately more interesting than organizing the crisper drawers in the bottom of the refrigerator. The art, for example, is almost painfully cute. I mean like Hello Kitty meets the Smurfs cute. You'll want to feed your pig just because he looks so adorable when he's smiling (as opposed to real life, where pigs are pretty gross-looking and you feed them so that one day they will be bacon).

And you really will have to use your head if you decide to play My Happy Farm. You can't afford to waste your actions, so you'll need to plan several turns ahead and make every action count. A happy farm is an efficient farm, after all. Your storage barn can only hold six vegetables (because you suck at building barns), so you don't want to fill it up with clover when your cow really wants wheat.

Just make sure that by the end of the game, you've fed all your animals. Because if you don't, the hungry ones (the ones who have been starving for ten years like bovine versions of Mahatma Ghandi) will get angry and leave you, an option that I can safely assume would be greatly coveted by most factory farm animals in America. Apparently, in Ukraine, farm animals choose their people, and come and go any time they want. Where I'm from, farm animals are food, and as much as I would love to keep them and love them and pick up their endless piles of poop, they are made out of yummy meat. Killing them not only nets me some tasty short ribs, but it means I don't have to follow them around the yard with a plastic bag and a pooper scooper.

For me, My Happy Farm is the kind of game where I would rather stab a fork into the back of my hand than spend a whole day playing. However, my daughter absolutely loved it, and forbade me from giving it a bad review. So if you're a curmudgeonly old man who prefers games where people die, forget it, but if you're a silly teenage girl who likes to feed your cute animals because of how much you love them, then you might think this dry little game is the best thing ever. Of course, there's also the middle ground - the guy who just likes European-style games and doesn't mind that he doesn't actually have to interact with the other players. Those people might get a kick out of My Happy Farm.

Summary

2-4 players

Pros:
Tightly scripted mechanics that work very efficiently
Crazy cute art

Cons:
No interaction of any kind
Very, very dry

Do you know where you can buy games made in Ukraine? That's right, Ukraine. Here's the website for the game, all in Ukrainian (which, I suspect, is Russian):
http://boardgame.com.ua/

There are not very many games like Mob Ties. Yes, there are mobster games, like Nostra City. And yes, there are games with lots of diplomacy, like Battlestar Galactica (or, you know, Diplomacy). There are even games with a lot of dead bodies and player elimination, like almost every game that is awesome. But I don't think I've played very many games that only end when an atrocious number of players have been murdered or imprisoned, and I especially don't remember playing games that were such a constant game of 'Let's Make A Deal.'

Mob Ties is definitely a game about violence. It makes no attempt to pretend that it's a family game, except that on the side of the box, it says, 'A Family Game,' but that's not family like Leave It To Beaver, that's family like Sopranos. The cover of the box shows a guy with his fingers broken, and there's art in the game that shows a couple thugs shoving a man's hand into a meat grinder. It's not bashful about being a grown-up game. If it were any less kid-friendly, it would come with a loaded gun and a balloon full of heroin.

The game play is just as bloody as the art, too. You'll have multiple opportunities to kill your friends or send them to Riker's Island. The cards that control nearly everything you do are chock full of drive-by shootings, drug overdoses, and accidental-on-purpose dismemberments. In fact, in one game we played, more than half of our mobsters were murdered in the first turn.

It turns out, though, that it's not always a good idea to do as much killing as we did. For one thing, the guy who had goons left over ran away with the game, and we never had a prayer of stopping him. For another thing, the threat of impending doom is sometimes more powerful than the doom itself. Hold up a hand of seven or eight cards, and people will think twice about calling hits on your bag-man. But blow your last card on a failed assassination attempt, and you'll call down the wrath of God - which will especially hurt on account of you being bare-assed naked in the defense department.

The way to play Mob Ties is to dicker, deal and sneak. When someone decides to attack you, offer them some money to hit someone else. If you need a guy to sleep with the fishes, offer to make another person the new don if he'll help you take out your target. Split the take at a particularly juicy racket, or strike up a deal with a third player to swipe the whole thing. The whole game is about making deals and then killing people.

I suppose you could play Mob Ties without making deals, and just try to be all strategic. But there are two problems with that. For starters, this is not a game that lends itself to smart play, because it is entirely too chaotic. I mean, on one turn, you could be running the board, and the next, half your guys are in the local lockup and the other half are in the morgue. That can make long-term planning rather tricky.

No, the way to play Mob Ties is to dive in up to your neck and get your hands dirty. Threaten and intimidate. Extract protection money and pay other players to kill each other. Basically, this game looks like the entire premise arose from that famous line in The Godfather about making a deal he couldn't refuse. It's all deals, all the time. The rest is window dressing, and playing without the negotiation would be like having sex with your pants zipped - completely unsatisfying and thoroughly pointless, even if you do eventually finish.

There are things I really liked about Mob Ties, and things that sort of bugged me. I love the interaction, and I'm always a fan of games where people die. But the unbridled chaos means that if you've got one or two players who aren't really into the game, they can ruin it for everyone else. You have to be willing to strike alliances one turn and break them the next, go for the jugular or go on the lam. And even still, it's going to take you a few games to really get the hang of playing Mob Ties, and you have to have the patience to work through a couple irritatingly random games before it really starts to gain any traction.

Luckily, Mob Ties is a pretty fast game. It has a built-in timer in the form of the Feds, whose presence grows very quickly and can shut down most of the board before the end of the game. Between the Feds sending mobsters to death row and fellow mobsters sending your guys to a cold metal slab, you'll be able to run through a game in less than an hour. Which means you'll have time to knock out a few games to get the hang of it, and by the third or fourth game, everyone should be more than ready to start quoting Scorcese lines and talking like New York pizza chefs.

And if you really want to expand your horizons, there's an entire second rulebook full of nothing but advanced rules and variants. One of you mobsters might be a snitch, or you could have reinforcements show up. You might be able to shuttle your mobsters out of town as the heat rises, or you could have the option to trade cards instead of money. You can even take out contracts on a particular player, if you can afford it. There are all manner of interesting ways to make Mob Ties even more interesting.

A game as unique as Mob Ties is going to appeal to a limited number of people. If you have looking for a good mob game and you really like affecting a New Jersey accent, or if you love games that force you to deal with the other people at the table, you might really love Mob Ties. On the other hand, if you prefer games where playing a tile or placing a wood cube is a difficult decision, the game will make you crazy. Leave Mob Ties to those of us who like to see a little blood in the water. This is no Euro, kids. Also, it's not for kids.

Summary

3-6 players (but don't bother with less than four)

Pros:
Buckets of bloody interaction
Negotiation is key
So mobster, you'll have to buy a ridiculous track suit and start calling your mistress a goomar

Cons:
Almost psychotically chaotic
Strategy will not help you if you can't strike a good deal
It's about the story - don't play if you're looking for a clever abstract

So you're looking to make a good deal? How about save ten bucks on a fifty dollar game? Now that's a good deal. Check it out at Noble Knight Games:
FUHGEDDABOUDIT