Meuterer : A Pocket Full of Fun

A review by Martin Griffiths




Meuterer is a fantastic little game that doesn't get nearly enough GeekLove, and I think that must be down to two things: it's 'only' a card game; and there's no English edition. So I thought I'd dispense with those objections first.

1. It's not really a card game. It doesn't have suits, number values, tricks or trumps. And it could very easily have been turned into a medium-box board game. You'd just need a board with 12 islands marked, island tiles to randomly place on them, a ship piece (like the ones in Age of Empires) and some gold doubloons to keep score with. So just think yourself lucky that you're getting all the gameplay of a board game for the price and size of a deck of cards.

2. It's not really in German. Yes, there's some German text on the cards, but it's mostly unnecessary. It's easy enough to tell the five types of goods apart by the pictures, so you only have to remember what the six different roles are. Kapitan for Captain and Maat for Mate aren't particularly difficult, and Meuterer for Mutineer is even the name of the game. English rules can be downloaded and printed right here on the 'geek.




So with those caveats out of the way, what's the game all about? Your intrepid crew of four (it can be played with three, but four is much better) are aboard a merchant ship, sailing round a chain of islands attempting to score points through profiteering and power struggles. The clever interplay between the trading system and the fight for the captaincy is what makes this game great.

Power struggles: One player will start as captain. The captain is a powerful role because he gets to choose which island to visit next and score points for successfully sailing there. On the other hand, the Captain is the only player who doesn't get to secretly choose from one of five other roles. Three of these roles are concerned with power struggles on the ship. If a player chooses the Mutineer, then there will be a fight for the Captaincy. The Mate role offers support to the captain and the Cabin Boy to the mutineer. If a mutiny is successful, the Mutineer becomes Captain and the Cabin Boy is rewarded for helping; if it fails the Captain stays in charge and the Mate gets one point plus however many the Captain offered as an incentive at the start of the round.

Trading: Each of the twelve islands that the ship can visit likes one of the five different goods (two islands are wild). Each player has 5 goods cards in their hand at the start of a round, and they can choose how many of these they will play before refilling at the end of the round. This gives players the option of selling goods this round, saving them to sell on a different island, or just discarding them in the hope of drawing better ones. Only the player who can sell most goods on an island will score any points. Two of the roles allow the players to ignore the fight for control of the ship and concentrate on profiteering. The Merchant gives a player maximum points for trading even if he only tied for most goods sold; while the Loading Master gives a player a choice of cards to pick from when refilling his hand.

The clever part: So far, so good, but what really makes the game tick is the way these two systems interact. The twelve islands are set out in a circle, and how far the ship moves round is determined by the number of cards that the Captain didn't play this round. If there's a successful mutiny, then the same applies to the Mutineer. So the Captain has to maintain a balance of playing the cards he wants to play while setting a course for a desirable destination. And because the cards are played out one at a time round the table there are some interesting tactical decisions for the other players. You don't get to choose your role until you stop playing cards, so do you play one ruby then grab the Merchant role, hoping no one has two rubies to beat you? Or do you discard a corn that you won't be able to sell this time to give yourself time to see what the other players offer up? Also, some of the cards are not goods at all but conflict cards that are used in the resolution of mutinies.

The game ends after eight rounds -- usually about 45 minutes to an hour -- and points are totalled up. Unfortunately there's no way of keeping score included in the box, so you'll have to use pen and paper. Whoever has been most successful at selling goods and exploiting the political intrigues will win the day. There's also an option for advanced players to add in a pirate ship that can plunder all the goods played in a round. All in all, I can't think of another game that packs as much into such a tiny box and low price. I find it a far better role-selection game than the much better-known Citadels as long as you have exactly four players.

Masters Gallery - A Family Filler

I’m a philistine. I’ve been to (well dragged round by my art appreciating wife) Momo, Tate Modern, and a few other torture chambers masquerading as temples of culture . It all has the same effect - I get a head ache looking at all those swirls, colour explosions, pictures that look like nothing more than the pavement after a particularly drunken night out. . I just don’t get it. It got so bad that half way round a Brigit Reilly exhibition I had to leave the gallery to lie down - I was just about to throw up.

Go one stare at this for two minutes and see if your lunch stays down




Give me a picture with real things in, people and landscapes, even a bowl of fruit. I can look at one of those for at least ten minutes with out sweating and reaching for the Tylenol .

That’s the same way I feel about Masters Gallery vis a vis Modern Art. I admire Modern Art as a game design and I want to like it but I’m terrible at it. I suspect any game that has inspired geeks to write mathematical valuation formula that makes Black-Scholes look like the two times table is something that is going to be beyond me. So the news that a de-auctioned version of Modern Art was being released with pictures of old masters intrigued me. My initial reaction was ‘Ha, Modern Art for Dummies!’. And whilst Master’s Gallery takes the rocket science out of Modern Art it adds a great deal of game play and not only for the Modern Art challenged. It turns an auction game into a set collection game.


Master’s Gallery is a recent release in the treadmill of Gryphon bookshelf games. It comes in a small box that fits nicely along side the other games in the series. It consists of 100 cards, five place holders for each of the five ‘masters’ (Vermeer, Van Goch, Degas, Renoir and Monet) and ninety five cards divided unequally between the five starting with 21 Van Gogh down to 17 for Vermeer. The cards are made of good quality stock, though I would recommend sleaving them as mine are showing small sings of wear after ten games. The rule book is well written and easy to follow.

Game play is deceptively simple. The five place holder artist cards are placed on the table, Two to five players are dealt a stating hand of 13 random cards and an artist card is drawn and placed face up on the table. Each player takes it in turn to place a card from their hand on to the table in front of them. The round ends immediately when a sixth artist card is played on the table with the initial random draw counts towards the six. Cards are then scored, and a new round starts with players receiving more cards (except for the fourth and last round when no more cards are dealt) and another random card from the draw pile placed on the table. The game finishes after four rounds with the points being tallied and a winner decided.

Some of the cards allow special plays. One allows the player to immediately lay as second card of the same artist face up, the second allows a second card of any artist to be played face down (., another allows the player to draw a card, another has all players simultaneously playing a card from hand to the table and the last allows a 2 point award token to be added to one artist (and each artist can only have one of these tokens place on them).

The scoring at the end of each round is simple. The face down cards are turned up and the artists who has the most cards played (tie breaks are broken in favour the artist which have the fewest cards in the deck) receives a three value token the second a two and the third one. Players then multiply the artist cards (that came in the first three) in front of them by the total value of the points tokens for each artist. Tiles points on the artist place holder cards are cumulative and therefore some artists become more valuable than others as the rounds progress.

Key to success in the game is planning ahead, and trying to draw other players into scoring artists that you can score in later ( and more valuable) rounds. The ‘special’ cards add some spice to the game and timing when to play them can be crucial though I have seen some one win without drawing any throughout the game.

In a few areas Master’s Gallery falls down compared to Modern Art, first the table banter is missing from Master’s Gallery, players don’t talk up the value of their hideous pictures. You can get the hideous pictures in Master’s Gallery’s sister game Modern art the card game (and its a few bucks cheaper). The other area is that you can win in Modern Art without buying many pictures, just selling stuff at inflated prices. In Master’s Gallery you have to play a card each turn. Another concern I have is scalability the game is great with three or four players, Ok with two and poor with five. With five players the rounds finish so quickly you do not have time to play many cards and try and influence the outcome of the ranking. Despite these reservations I whole heartedly recommend the game for families and those who like the idea of Modern Art but not the valuation.


Comparisons with Modern Art are inevitable howeverthese are two different games that share a theme and some mechanics. Master’s Gallery is set collection and manipulation Modern Art other is a valuation and arbitrage game. Both have their place, though if both are on offer I will be found, wearing my dunces’ cap, sitting at the Master’s table.

Fzzzt : The perfect filler

When ever I switch on’ Britain’s Got Talent’ I expect to be wowed by the opera singing, super dancing , multi instrument playing candidates. But it’s always the cute young contender warbling their way through ‘My boy lollipop’ that gets my vote - and the same thing happened at the 2009 UK Games Expo. Expecting to come away star struck by the big hitters one gem stood out for me and that was the new card game Fzzzt! from Surprised Stare.





Fzzzt! is a card game about a futuristic production line as imagined by a bunch of 70's computer programmers. 2 -4 players compete over five rounds to assemble a deck (Dominion comparison coming up later...) of point scoring robots, and to produce widgets from machines of varying complexity.

Each player starts with the same hand of a mechanic and three robots. These cards will be used to bid in auctions to buy new robots which will form part of the players deck, production cards which the players place in front of them which will give them bonus points (or negative points) at the end of the game and Frzzt! cards which give minus points at the game end but are useful for bidding for new cards in the mean time.

The robot cards have four values on them. The first is their worth in a auction (they range from zero to five , the second is there victory point value at the end of the game, the third is the component (or components) they can produce for production cards and the fourth shows how many cards are revealed at auction.

After each player has received their four starting cards a random start player is decided. He becomes the 'Chief Mechanic' - the rule book recommends that a spanner is given to the 'Chief Mechanic' - failing that the game box will do. The remaining cards are shuffled to form a draw pile and eight cards are drawn and placed in a row (the ‘Conveyor Belt’). The first card in the row is turned face up and the fourth value is checked - additional cards from the Conveyor Belt are turned up depending on the value and the range is from 0 to all 8.

All players simultaneously bid for the first card on the conveyor belt with one or more of their hand cards placed face down on the table. The winning bid is the highest total value of power symbols. Ties are broken b in favour of the player holding the 'Chief mechanic' spanner, otherwise by the closest player clockwise to the chief mechanic. The losing player in the tie becomes the new ‘Chief Mechanic’

All cards used to bid, and any card won, are placed in a players discard pile - ala Dominion. Unlike Dominion players, at this point, don’t draw a new hand of cards until all players have run out of cards. You want that uber robot a lot? Well use three cards to bid and you will end up missing out on later auctions as you won’t have a card to bid with. When all players have run out of hand cards they shuffle their discard pile and draw a new hand of six cards (or less if their discard pile contains fewer than six cards). These card auctions continue until all eight cards from the row have been won. If the next card to be auctioned in the row is face down it is turned face up and it’s Conveyor Belt value is checked to see how many cards are revealed.

If the card won is a production card it is placed in front of the player. The production cards have component symbols on them (that match symbols on the robots) that are need to produce a widget at the end of the game and the victory points value of producing a widget. They range from the basic one oil needed for three points to the advanced which needs all four types of components (Oil, Cog, nut , bolt - I did say this was the future as imagined by COBOL programmers) which gives thirteen points.

After the eighth card in the conveyor belt has been auctioned all players can place one of their robots from their discard pile and hand on a corresponding production card. Only one card can be placed per round on each production card and they can not be switched around later. From this you will gather there is no point hanging on to your hand cards towards the end of an auction and that placing low power cards on a production unit is a good way of thinning out the weak robots from your deck. But beware! - if you can’t produce a widget from your production card you lose victory points equal to the bonus points of the card (think Ticket to Ride).So you might really want to get the zero power robot out of your hand because it is no use for auctions, however it can produce any one of the components and might be best saved till the end of the game when you can place it on any production card where you are short of a component.

After everyone has placed robots on their production cards they shuffle their discard pile and draw six new cards. Eight more cards are placed on the conveyor belt and the auctions start again. The game ends when the last card of the last conveyor belt has been auctioned.

Players then allocate Robots to their production cards to produce bonus point widgets. A production card can produce multiple widgets if his has multiple, sets of robots on it. Players score points for the value of their robots and the value of any widgets produced and takeoff the value of any production card that has not produced a widget (i.e. has an incomplete set of robots on it).

The game plays in about half an hour and provides some difficult choices for the players, on the one hand you want to have as powerful a deck as possible to win auctions but you must balance that with the need for less powerful robots which help you produce victory points in the end game. The auctions are quick and tense and require you to second guess the needs of the other players as much as your own requirements. Because there are a lot of ties in the auctions use of the ‘Chief Mechanics’ ability can be a boon or a disaster. As some one who feels that Dominion is multiplayer solitaire the auctions in Fzzzt! really work well to create engagement with the other players. More over there is no repetitive shuffling injury!

Fzzzt! Is a perfect filler; quick to learn and play with some depth to the game play. I thoroughly recommend it.