Don't let the rules scare you away from this great game!

Box Art

Game - Chez Dork
Players - 2-6
Duration - 30 min to 1 hour

Intro - So we were given 35 minutes to play this game in class on Friday, however, as we had dealt the cards to start playing this odd looking new game, our time was up. This became frustrating to myself as well as the others in our group of players. What caused this frustration? Well, there were a couple of things that could have been improved to make this game run smoother at the beginning which I will explain later on.

Rules - This is a quick sum up of the rules. Everyone starts with 30$, a playable character and five cards known as Stuff. The goal of the game is to own a total of 25 points before anyone else does, that happens by buying the Stuff in your hand and counting the points that go with that Stuff you buy. Each player has a specific permanent Obsession (unless you're Carson) and you can obtain temporary obsessions from the deck of Stuff. You're only allowed one temporary obsession (again, unless you're Carson). These obsessions are important because they can double the points for the Stuff that match the obsession. There were also advantages and disadvantages to each character. The game is turned based and on your turn you receive an additional 30$, refill your hand to five cards, and can purchase additional cards for 10$ in which you must buy before you can do anything with them. Once purchased, on your turn you can then choose to keep, sell, or auction off. You can only do one of the three per turn. Then the turn moves clockwise to the next person and the process repeats for the next player. Oh, and on your first turn you can only buy cards from your hand.


Examples of the temporary obsessions, Stuff cards, back cover, and special effects cards.

What I liked - I am a huge fan of strategic games and this game turned out to be a big strategy game in the end. The strategy comes into play when you get special effect cards like being able to change someone else's temporary obsession so they lose lots of their double points or trading the right things to maximize your points and gain the lead in point score. This was a huge design pro for the game to have an innovative connection of prediction, collection, and trading dynamics with a supportive dynamic of racing to the end. With prediction you had to play as if it was like chess, thinking one move ahead of the other players with the available options you had. Collection was their strongest dynamic because the game was to simply collect Stuff. Trading became another major dynamic that really added a lot more strategy and overall fun to the game. Racing to the end to have the most amount of points was on everyone's mind at that table the day we played. The mechanics of the game were also a plus once you knew how they worked. There was just so much variety with the uniqueness of each character having their own obsessions and advantages and disadvantages. Also the additional temporary advantages along with the ability to trade and auction off your Stuff was a great way to put your social skills to work. Other things I liked were the creativity put into each card's picture and quote. The concept of a bunch of dorks collecting stuff was humorous as well as pretty much the whole game. There was humor under every face down card.

What I didn't like - This is not beginner friendly as our group had difficulties understanding the rules at first, mostly because of how it was written and organized. There were details on certain things such as how there was how to win details spread out throughout the rule book. I also felt there was gaps in some of the rules so we had to make up some rules for the special effects cards. It has a very slow start as well and to get back to your turn with 6 players is way too long. The biggest problem with this game is the lack of game bits for money, and just to be sure it wasn't just our copy of the game I looked up other blogs about this game and found the game doesn't come with game bits for money and people had to improvised food as their currency. We were lucky to have poker chips available when we played. Also, I found the character Ken to be unbalanced having no disadvantage and being able to accumulate money from discarding cards in his hand. It would have also been nice to have the game on a platform such as the pc because it would have had the game play much faster.

Ways to fix the above problems - Make the rules easier to read and understand, confirm odd scenarios with certain special effects in the rules, add more starting money and keep turn income the same to get the game moving faster, add currency game bits or at least pencil and paper to manually write the currency down, give Ken a disadvantage and change his advantage, and have a digital version of the game.

Conclusion - After all the minor headaches the game causes at the beginning and once you know how to play, the game has got you coming back for more with its great game play and required strategy to win.