Igor: The Mad Scientist’s Lament

Igor is a light-hearted little card game where each player is a mad scientist, trying to build his “Greatest Creation Ever”, with the help (or hindrance) of his trusty sidekick Igor.

The game comes in a light card box containing rules sheet, special dice, some counters and a deck of 108 square cards. The components are all reasonable quality, though the dice is odd. Instead of a normal dice with rounded edges, they’ve gone for a real cube (like a casino dice). They’ve also printed little colour pictures on each side instead of having the dice moulded and inked or using stickers as are the common options. This isn’t necessarily bad, just unusual. However, I can vouch for the resilience of the printing ’cos my dice got accidentally thrown into a glass full of wine whilst we were playing and survived happily enough. Couldn’t roll straight for the rest of the evening though ;o)

The cards are in colour, with jolly, cartoony artwork of Igor and the various creations you might try to build. The deck is made up of three types of card: blueprints, parts and maniacal laughter cards. Basically, the object of the game is to collect parts to build items from blueprints with each device you build giving you victory points. The first one to a set number of VPs is the winner. Manaical laughter cards are special events, interrupts and other “spanner in the works” cards that you can chuck at other players (not literally – though you could) to keep them on their toes. Some cost you your action for your turn, others can be played during other player’s turns or when someone makes a particular play (places a part, discards a blueprint, etc). Anyway., I’m getting ahead of myself.

Going round the table, each player takes turns until someone builds enough items to win. A player’s turn consists of three sections: the machine phase, Igor, and an action.

In the machine phase any devices that you’ve completed in previous turns do their special action. All machines have an action, and this balances how many VPs they’re worth and how easy they are to build in the first place: easy builds are less powerful. Machine actions are things like making subsequent machines easier to build, drawing a card, or altering the way the Igor phase works either for you or other players.

The Igor phase comes down to rolling the special dice and looking up what it means. The pictures on the dice are clues to the meaning and we learned them within a few turns. Certainly by the end of the first game nobody should need the reference in the rules. Igor does things like getting you the top card of the draw deck or the discard pile, stealing a card from another player’s hand or a part from in front of him or allowing you to play two parts in your action phase (when it’s normally your whole action to place a single one).

The action phase itself lets you chose to either place a blueprint in front of you to build, place a part or draw a card from the deck.

You can only have one blueprint in play at any one time (completed devices are marked with a counter and don’t count as blueprints any more). This means everyone can see how close you are to building and what you’re going to be able to do when it’s finished. Placing a blueprint forces you to discard an already placed part if you have one, and also bins any blueprint you might already have down. Harsh, but works well in practice.

The parts you need to build your device are no good to you in your hand. To be assembled into a machine they have to played in front of you, generally costing an action to do so. A further restriction is that they have to join up, and not all parts join to each other. Each has one or more edges with a symbol of a bolt, cable or other fixing, and the touching sides of two adjacent parts must match to be played. As you’re only allowed one machine (collection of parts) in front of you at a time, you can see how you might well have plenty of parts, but not be able to play any of them. Don’t worry, Igor’ll steal some for you from someone else :o)

If, at any stage in your turn, you have enough parts in play to build the blueprint in front of you, you may discard the parts and complete the machine. Place a counter on the blueprint to show it’s been built.

The turns fly past quickly, and there’s a commendable level of interaction between players, thanks to the fact that much of the game involves stealing things off each other. Remember also the laughter cards, many of which can be played out of turn, and most players need to be paying attention all the time.

My group were most amused by the (largely unintentional) double entendres, though the generally silly air of the game was good too. They don’t suggest it, but when someone completes an item you should make them read out what they built it with. All the parts have different silly names, and it’s very funny to hear quite what goes into making a Time Warp device, or Robotic Igor (ours even included a brain in a jar, appropriately enough. We weren’t sure whose).

Downsides? Well there were a couple of typos in the rules, but nothing that’s other than cosmetic. The game is light and fluffy, and won’t be competing with Princes of Florence of Europe Engulfed for the attention of your little grey cells, but that’s not really a complaint ’cos that’s obviously the kind of game it is intended to be. I think the only real downsides were that I felt it was a little long over all and that the cards can be fiddly in your hand. It does say you can set your own VP target, and next time we may lower it slightly. There is no hand size limit, so you can end up with a lot of acrds. As the parts have game info (how they join) on each edge, it makes it impossible to see ecactly what you can do with the things in your hand without riffling through your cards repeatedly. This got a bit fiddly when you had lots of them. Still, only minor quibbles and we will certainly be playing it again.

A couple of final thoughts. One is that I’ve read a few comments on there not being enough counters. These are used to mark complete items, and indeed if you wanted one per complete item you’d probably run out by the end of a game with 5 or 6 people. However, I suggested to our group that they simply overlap their built blueprints and put a counter on top of the pile, and this worked perfectly (the top two-thirds of the card is picture and irrelevant to gameplay, and so by just overlapping that bit you leave visible the VPs and special rules you need to see whilst making it obvious they’re piled up). That being the case, there are actually more counters than you’ll ever need.

My last thought is that the game reminded me very strongly of Before I Kill You, Mr Bond. Very, very strongly. Not that I’m making any suggestion of plagiarism here at all – the games are completely different mechanically. No, it’s entirely one of feel: they’re both light and funny card games with components bearing silly names which are assembled into groups. I think it’s that element that reminds me most strongly. Igor is a bit slicker than BIKYMB (though admittedly I do have the original version, not the “better” one), but both are fun games and I can see Igor joining BIKYMB as an amusing filler for our group.

I’ll give it a solid 7, as defined by BGG.