Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too
Written: Oct 21 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Has every card for the game in a single set
Cons: Many players dislike using "non-standard" card set in a game
The Bottom Line: Wonderful group interaction game that is easy to learn and fun to play.
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| BlackBear's Full Review: Steve Jackson - Illuminati: The Game of Conspiracy |
When Wizards of the Coast (WOtC) released the insanely popular Magic: The Gathering Collectors Card Game (CCG), Steve Jackson Games (SJG) saw it as an opportunity to remarket a very old card game that had long since fallen off the market. At first, SJG attempted to do the same thing that WOtC had done, market a starter Deck and then sell Booster Packs that would give the players 15 cards for use in customizing his/her personal decks. This went on for about a year before SJG ran into the same problem with the new Illuminati game that has always, and forever will, be a plague to Magic. Most people just don't want to spend such huge amounts of money in order to get a complete set of cards for a frapping game!
SJG then looked back at WOtC again and noticed that sometime between the second and third Expansion sets for the Magic game that a boxed set had been put on the market in order to drive up interest in the game. SJG took this idea and ran with it, releasing Deluxe Illuminati early in 1998. But SJG made a few changes that have enabled their boxed set to remain popular while the WOtC attempt failed miserably.
The problem with the Magic boxed set was simple. The cards included in that particular set were slightly different from the cards that players gained through buying the booster packs. Suddenly, the fanatic players of the game started to refuse to play against anyone who used the "non tournament" cards from the boxed set. For all intents and purposes this reaction prevented those who just wanted to play the game without a huge investment from ever getting into it at all. Not so with the SJG boxed set. Every card is identical to those that can be bought with booster packs, so players can't tell what the origin of each others cards might be.
SJG also made a few changes to the game itself, in the spirit of the CCG system, but to explain that, I'll have to tell you a little about the game itself. The basic principle of the game is that each organization in the world has power and resistance to outside influence. Each of these groups also have their own goals, although many of them will often find themselves being manipulated by a more powerful group. That's just the way our world works. The Used Car Dealers dupe the general public into thinking that their cars are just as good as those at the New Car Dealership in order to make money, yet in the meantime the Used Car people are being used by the New Car people to drive customers their way. In turn, the New Car people are being driven to make the insanely high prices by the various Government agencies that want a part of the profits in the form of taxes so that they will have it for the military groups who are constantly demanding better and more powerful weapons. It's a symbiotic relationship; most people call it the economy.
Illuminati uses this and throws in those ultra elite secret organizations who spend all of their energies in the effort to become the most powerful group in the world, thus controlling the way things go. In this game, there are three different types of cards: Illuminati cards, the secret organizations or the players themselves, Group cards that represent the different organizations that have formed during the history of man, and Action cards, the various things that can be done to groups in order to make them do as you wish.
In the first version of the game, there were little money chits and each group had an income. Each group was responsible for its own actions and had to expend its own funds to do things like attack other groups or defend itself from attacks. In this new game, only power remains and that power is used by the Illuminati itself in all actions. Each group generally has some power that the Illuminati will tap into in order to make its actions, but an attack on any group controlled by the Illuminati is now considered an attack on the secret society itself.
Of course, each card has resistance to outside influence as well, and all the cards have an alignment, often more than one. Now in this game, the term alignment is quite different from any other RPG type game. It basically means that a Peaceful group is more resistant to attacks from Violent groups than they would be from other Peaceful groups. There are eight alignments and almost all of them have their direct opposite, Fanatic being the exception. If similar groups are attempting to manipulate each other, they are less resistant to each other, opposites are more resistant to each other and those groups without either are just normal. Fanatic groups are directly opposed to every other Fanatic group and have no lessening of resistance to attacks.
So the game basically comes down to power VS resistance as each player attempts to reach the goal of his/her Illuminati group. The game can be played with two or more players. Although there are a limited number of different Illuminati cards, more than one player can have the same Illuminati card in a single game, so there is no upper limit to how many can get in on a game. In the case of the same Illuminati being played by two or more players, they are considered to be different factions of the same society. A game can last from twenty minutes to several hours, depending on how many players there are and the various goals of each player. I have found that four players gives the best types of games, although more can add a bit of fun to things. Any way you look at it, this is a good set to buy because it has every single card for the game and allows a single person to host a game without having to rely on the other players owning it.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
BlackBear
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Member: Joseph Black Bear
Location: Kansas City, Kansas
Reviews written: 783
Trusted by: 122 members
About Me:
Just a guy who loves reading, videos, RPGs and collects various toys.
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