I finally got the chance to put this game on the table and play it this week. me, my girlfriend and my 2 brothers years 25, 22, 13 and 12.

Components

The components of this game are awesome. The artwork is fantastic and the cards and character sheets are very colourful and fun to look at. The minions and empires have funny text and tag lines so everything looks good and is pretty funny. Also the box is awesome but you can see that just by looking at it. The rulebook is too big for the amount of rules that are actually in the game but that's a personal gripe since I spent an hour reading it and it only took 3 minutes to explain it to someone else. Cest la vie or whatever.

Ok, moving on to.... I guessgameplay? Ok here's where I have some serious problems with the game. For one, I ASSUME I'm playing by all the right rules. If I'm not someone jump in. I love the phases, they are simple and short. You got the creation phase where you are dealt 5 cards or replenished to 5 cards which are all spent to get various resources to power up your device. Here you also get to hire minions to protect or steal your own or other players resources, or buy an emprie card to allow yourself to get more resources on a future turn. Simple.

Then comes the rivalry phase where you attempt to rob other players of their resources or empire cards by sending your hilarious minions.

This is followed by the final phase, domination. Here you threated in order a city, then a state, then a country then the world for the victory if you have the resources to do so.

So this is the gist of the game and we were all having a great time! I was thinking 'damn, this is a fun one everyone is laughing and enjoying it'

Then the materials deck ran out of cards. Quickly.. probably the 8th round one player had just threatened a country and was storing up to build the world. Well we all ended up cashing in all the resources we could while 2 of us were left on only the state phase... meaning even with a full compliment of minions it was IMPOSSIBLE for either of us to ever get the resources to win. One brother was close, but with no more resources coming in it turned into repeated theft phases.. again and again... and again and again... and again... and it was flat out boring as they tried to steal back what was stolen from them while 2 players were essentially just messing with people because they had zero chance to win.

This went on to the point of us wanting to quit which doesn't happen to much (this game was prompty followed by a long 4 hour descent session) and I had opportunities to play the screw your neighbour 'dirty trick' cards but I was so sick of the game by then I didn't bother. I also let me stuff get easily stolen just to shortent he game until someone did eventually win only he wouldn't have won if I didn't do that so in essence the game seemed uncompletable.

Well that was a pretty major gripe and if this is truly the way the game was meant to be played i doubt any of us are interested in another go through.

So there you have it. I loved the game up until that point, and thought it was great... But I figure the no reshuffling of the raw materials deck is enough to pretty much kill it for us.

So a total score of 7 evil laughters out of a possible 12

If I understand correctly, you'll need to steal enough to take over the world, but you can't because everyone is stealing from the leader, meaning the game might never end? If so, that's a shame, since the game sounds fun.

this was exactly the problem. I was 20 resources short of firing my weapon and with no new ones coming in to play it made for a horrible end.

Actually it's slightly worse than that as your minions keep dying from stealing... no new resources come into play and you're forced to keep buying minions so it goes backwards. truly dismal

The trick then is to discard your Doomsday Machine and grab a new, hopefully lesser resources, one. Specifically the Bomb or Global Warming - machines that only need around 25 resources total to threaten the world. If the game was going on for that long, it's worth the gamble, especially assuming you have the nec. maniacal counters to up your odds.

Additionally, you can make a hard hitting doomsday machine, and make repeated threats against a city. Yes you get humiliation counters, but so what? You can only accumulate 3 at any time and if you played decent enough you should have 1-2 +1s to cancel most of that penalty out. Each city threat or state threat on a machine like that nets you 3-5 resources. That's more than enough in a turn to keep things churning.

We've played three times now. Usually we just run out of resources by the time someone is close to making a world threat. The one game that no one was, we had lots of repeated threats until someone had enough to win.

Repeat threats will net you resources nicely. That and I think one is supposed to use their "power" often enough during the game to keep the deck from running out too quick. The game we just played, I sent the undead on wisconsin (moderate resource req) after i failed, and drew into maneating plants (low resource req.) and threatened the world that next turn.