I don’t want to Save Dr. Lucky

After we had quite a bit of fun killing Dr. Lucky on Saturday, I picked up the prequel Save Dr. Lucky from Drexoll yesterday. Laura was feeling a bit guilty about killing him the day before so we set out to saving Dr. Lucky from the ship they called "unsinkable". Game mechanics for saving him were identical to killing him, but in addition the game board was shrinking while the ship was sinking which was done in a really nice and clever way – so it all looked quite promising.

However the first time someone tried to save Dr. Lucky, the differences become painfully clear. Firstly, the "saving aides" unlike the weapons where somewhat forced, but worst of all was that the failure cards were all identical abstract cards. Whereas in Kill Dr. Lucky the failure cards were funny and could be role-played and you could see what was happening in your mind’s eye, the failing save attempts where just a mechanical "oh well, it didn’t work". We did play the game till the end – I saved Dr. Lucky – but I sincerely doubt we’ll ever bother doing it again. In fact, we talked about killing him as soon as possible as our hate for him just grew with this stupid game.

I don’t get it – first game was carefully thought through, balance of weapons, failure cards and move cards was good and the cards themselves were funny and easy to understand and corresponded well to the background of being in a mansion. The second game – it was like they just copied the rules, printed out three different types of identical failure cards that filled half of the deck, then threw in few not very well thought saving aides and some moves and called it a game. Balance between the cards sucked big time – most of us had huge amounts of failure cards in our hand all the time, few move cards that we didn’t feel we needed, and very little saving aides whose value was mostly very low anyway so countering them was just trivial.

The problem is not with the rules – the rules play well enough as they are pretty identical with Kill Dr. Lucky – it’s that all that made the original game funny is missing, so the game just becomes another game of moving the pawns and playing the cards without much though.

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