First Impression: Wizard’s Gambit

By W. Eric Martin
May 8, 2008

Publisher: Gryphon Forge Games
Designers: Eric Drever & Matthew Stipes
Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Rules Language: English

Game Played: Production copy
Number of Plays: Thrice, once each with 2, 3 and 5 players

Ryan Bretsch must be affecting my mind. In comments on BGN and elsewhere, Bretsch, a mainstream game fan, has cried out for publishers to stop using geeky subject matter. “No more elves or trolls or generic fantasy worlds or obscure foreign cities or Renaissance art fests or all those other things that game publishers do repeatedly,” he demands. While I normally roll my eyes at such requests – since many people dig fantasy worlds and topics shunned by mainstream games – I found myself unexpectedly sighing while reading the ad copy on the back of Wizard’s Gambit:

Long forgotten as myths of a time past, the Fallen have returned, bringing war to all the Kingdoms of Hyrathia. It has been over a thousand years since the convocation of Wizards has had a need for a war mage, and now they must just a Grand Siege Magus to take on that role, leading the wizards of Hyrathia against this ancient enemy.

And so on and so forth. Normally I’m theme agnostic and breeze past themes and settings no matter how pedestrian and overused in order to focus on the mechanisms of game play, that is, the ins-and-outs of what you need to do to win. This time, though, I found myself wishing for a game that didn’t involve wizards and made-up myths. Were the particulars of Wizard’s Gambit that unappealing, or have I just burned out on such settings?

Setting the Dishes

Whatever the case might be, let’s see what’s going on inside the first release from Gryphon Forge Games, Omelets of Infinite Power. Each player is a sous chef, practicing his skills under the tutelage of Master Chef René Fouet-a-oeufs. While all of you are skilled at creating fine omelets, only one trainee can don the Toque of the Ages and take charge of the Overlord’s kitchen, earning the right to feed him healthy and nutritious breakfasts as he prepares to restructure the kingdom’s tax code and develop a realistic budget for the next fiscal year.

To win this scrambled skirmish, you must assemble ten pounds of delicious omelets before any of the other competitors. Four omelet recipe cards, with listed weights of one to five pounds each, are randomly laid out on the table. Each omelet card shows some number of ingredients, along with a special power that you can use once you’ve added the card to your recipe book. You can use the power of only your most recently gained recipe as you always have your hands full stirring eggs and can’t spend lots of time flipping through the laminated pages of your recipe book. The stove is on – get cookin’!

Players start with a hand of ingredient cards, action cards, and a single Egg Smash! card. (Additional Egg Smash! cards are shuffled into the deck; more on them later.) On a turn, you must play an ingredient card on one unclaimed recipe and you can optionally play an action or Egg Smash! card. The action cards allow all the things you’d expect of naughty student chefs: Steal ingredients from a competitor; clean out your fridge and get a new set of ingredients; force a player away from the stove for one turn; discard all ingredients on a recipe; and so on.

There are six types of ingredients – peppers, onions, mushrooms, ham, tomatoes and cheese – and one wild ingredient – bacon – that can replace any of the other ingredients in a recipe. (Everything’s better with bacon, right?) If a player adds the final ingredient to an omelet card, he claims it, adding it to his recipe book and revealing a new recipe from the deck for players to fight over, i.e., slowly add ingredients to turn-by-turn.

The Egg Smash! card lets you (1) block everyone from adding ingredients to a recipe, (2) neutralize the special power granted by someone else’s completed recipe, or (3) counter either one of the first two actions that are played by someone else. Note that in case #1 you can’t add ingredients to the blocked recipe either, but you can choose to discard your own Egg Smash! at the start of your turn to free the recipe card for that final ingredient.

Spoiled Rotten

As you might have gathered while reading the paragraphs above, Omelets of Infinite Power is the game of not wanting to set up other players but being forced to anyway and not being able to do much about it. Sure, you may hold action cards that might be useful and you start with an Egg Smash! that lets you reserve one nearly completed recipe for yourself – but another player can counter Smash! and take the recipe anyway. I did just that in a two-player game to take possession of my first recipe.

Even worse than the egg on his face after that assault, my opponent had to suffer through the power of my newly claimed recipe, “Clumsy Student,” which reads: “At the beginning of your turn, you may choose a player. That player must discard their hand.” While this recipe would inspire respect even with five players, with only two players it lived up to the game’s promise of Infinite Power for if at any time a wizard has no cards in hand, he must end his turn and draw five cards. All my opponent could do was draw and discard until I claimed another recipe and turned the page on this malicious one.

But wait! What recipe-to-be became available for learning but the one pictured above, “Remix.” (The card might be hard to read at actual size, as shown, so click on it for a larger image. You also might think it’s called “Sleight” and not “Remix,” but you’re mistaken.) I was able to claim this recipe next, which brought “Clumsy Student” back to the top of my recipe book and a look of dismay back to my opponent’s face. No egg drop soup for you!

The graphic design of Omelets of Infinite Power works against its usability. The blue and purple on the ingredient cards are too similar, as are the white and black(!), something you don’t normally encounter in a game since they’re opposites. Not this time, though, as the dark background on the white led to confusion with the white highlight on the black. The ingredient cards include no corner index, and the font chosen for the name is craggy, multi-layered, highly detailed, and blurred with a drop shadow. You don’t need to read the ingredient name to know what it is

What’s worse, the ingredients on each recipe card are huge, while the text is in ALL CAPS and really tiny. Once a recipe card is on the table and three feet away from your eyeballs, you can’t read what it does; tellingly, none of the players seemed to care. The game design screamed “Don’t read me!” so we shrugged and didn’t bother, just playing ingredients willy-nilly until someone mastered the art of the egg. Even with only two players, when we were able to crowd closely around the cards, my opponent (a former Magic: the Gathering player) didn’t bother to read the recipes to see what they did until I reminded him of their powers. “Oh, is that what those tiny lines are?”

The graphic and design problems are evidence of a starter company learning how not to make products. The Gryphon Forge website, with orange text on a mottled dark grey background, is further evidence of the training wheels. While some gamers will dig a randomish egg-themed card game with some “take that” action – as I undoubtedly would have in my youth while playing constantly against my brother – here’s hoping that future offerings from the Forge prove to be more appetizing for this diner…

Want to make the meals and judge the game for yourself? Then head to the Games for Animals page and take this review copy from me!

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Comments:

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Regarding the “Clumsy Student” card, I mentioned the Scythe on BGG, and the publisher (Eric Drever - is there a law about people named Eric and gaming that I’m unaware of?) contacted me directly, wondering about the “broken card” we’d found in two-player.  Here’s what he said: Ahh… I see the problem. Any time that a player’s hand drops to zero cards, that player immediately draws five new cards - even it is not their turn. Checking our rules again, the rules may be unclear on this matter. The rules state under Play Rules on page 4, “If at any time a wizard has no cards in his hand, they must end their turn and draw five cards.” The “end turn” statement can imply that a player must wait until the draw phase of their turn. ...a bit confusing, if I say so myself. I think that solves the issue, but we need to post errata to clarify the rule. I really appreciate your help with this issue. We will get it posted ASAP. The rule about being able to withraw your own gambit is also cleverly hidden. Posted by Eric Franklin on May 8, 2008 at 08:39 PM | #

Thanks for pointing this out, Eric! Yes, that section of the rules is unclear. With the errata, my opponent would still have to dump his hand each turn, but playing one (and possibly two cards) would perhaps let him squeeze out of my vise. Still, I’m not eager to play the game again. Eric-4 on the Unity Games mailing list Posted by W. Eric Martin on May 8, 2008 at 08:50 PM | #

I guess it’s already been covered but there was a thread on the Geek about a similar issue: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/312230 Posted by Greg Williams on May 9, 2008 at 04:57 PM | #

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