n 1996, artist Phil Foglio and game designer James Ernest launched a collectible card game called Xxxenophile to complement Foglio's playful pornographic comic-book series of the same name. Players were all-powerful gods orchestrating a massive orgy, in which character cards in a 12-card grid were rotated to "encounter" each other, and under certain conditions might "pop" and be removed from play. ("Hey, it's a sex game, you figure it out," the instructions explained.)
Xxxenophile the card game is now out of print, but Foglio has a new comic-book series and Ernest has a new game imprint, spinning off from his popular Cheapass Games company. So here's Xxxenophile again, in a new form. This time, it's called Girl Genius: The Works, and the
character cards are all cogs in a giant, world-spanning machine. Players are now all-powerful scientists tinkering with that machine, making certain parts active, which sometimes causes them to "pop" out of play.
The main difference between Xxxenophile and The Works is that the new version isn't a collectible card game; each set includes all 108 game cards. This eliminates the cooperative setup phase, during which players took turns contributing cards to the grid. Otherwise, play proceeds the same way. A grid is laid out on the table, face down. Each player (the game is meant for "two or more") gets five cards, and players take turns flipping cards face-up, rotating cards, checking the symbols around the edges of the cards to see if they match and popping cards out of the grid and into their score piles.
Each card has a point value, a title and a series of adjectives. (For instance, Agatha Heterodyne, star of the Girl Genius comic, has the adjectives "Girl," "Genius" and "Spark.") Many cards also cause special reactions when they pop: things like "pop one Spark" or "pop all cards touching this card." After popping all relevant cards and following their instructions, the active player refreshes the board from his or her hand, then draws back up to five cards. The first player to reach 100 points wins the game.
Smaller, simpler and less silly
Xxxenophile definitely had its problems; because players were meant to keep all the cards in their score piles at the end of the game, they would walk in with one deck and leave with another. This meant they couldn't actually play with their cards without risking losing them. The Works eliminates that issue, but also reduces the total number of cards in the game from 270 to 108, and eliminates "settings" and "gizmos" altogether, which makes the proceedings far simpler and more
predictable.
Of course, perverse players could just throw their The Works cards in with their Xxxenophile set. The card backs and paper stock are different, but the cards themselves seem to be calling for cards that aren't present. For instance, The Works has several "queen" cards,
but no queen-related card powers. It also features a vampire-hunter card that pops vampires, but no actual vampires. Xxxenophile, meanwhile, features both vampire and queen-related powers. The symbols around the edges of the cards, which determine how cards interact, are different in the new game, but the colors are the same, so compatibility shouldn't be a problem. Of course, it's also possible that James Ernest Games is just leaving some character types open for a later The Works
expansion.
But the real issue for Foglio fans is likely to be the small-scale, straight-faced nature of The Works. Where Xxxenophile featured a wide variety of well-known card artists and hilarious, groaner characters like "Indecent Exposure Gordon" and the "Aether Bunny," The Works cards all feature basic Foglio portraits straight from the comic book, and relatively humor-free cards. (The "Flatten The Earth Society" is a notable exception.) Stripped of its risqué, clever art, its sense of
humor and its wide variety of cards, Xxxenophile doesn't leave much behind but a moderately enjoyable, if somewhat inflexible, simple card game. The Works is perfectly safe for younger players ("10 and up," advises the box), which is good, because the game's repetitive nature may cause older players to lose interest quickly. On the positive side, The Works is a thinking person's game that requires concentration and strategy, but it doesn't balance the work with as much fun as its
predecessor did.
That said, at least the game may call more attention to Foglio's new comic, which--like all his unique and colorful work--deserves far wider exposure.
-- Tasha
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