teve Jackson Games takes first-person shooters offline with Frag!, a board game that recreates the stylings of Doom and Quake in a pen-and-paper format.
The game begins with character generation, as each player divides a pool of seven points among three attributes: health, speed and accuracy. The characters power up using cards drawn from one of three decks of cards: Weapons, Gadgets and Specials. Chainsaws, lightning blasters and rocket launches populate the Weapons deck, while body armor, power leaps and other enhancements can be found in the Gadgets pile. The final deck—Specials—lets players break the game through a variety of special metagame powers like "teleportation" and "automatic miss." Frag's square-grid-based
map is reminiscent of a thousand FPS mods, with acid pits, teleportation zones, spawning areas and weapon power-ups.
Movement, attacks and damage are resolved with a little math and a boatload of six-sided dice. Shots require players to count out the number of squares separating their figures and then roll a number of dice equal to their accuracy. If the total shown by the dice is greater than the range, they hit. Damage is handled similarly: each weapon does a certain number of d6 in damage, which is compared to a number of dice equal to the victim's Health score. If the attacker roles more damage than the defender has "life," wounds are scored.
Blood and equipment counters are used to record where someone got fragged, and both counters can be picked up by other players. The victim—sans equipment—reappears during the next combat round in a randomly determined spawning area. The first person to score three frags wins.
An old-fashioned fragfest
Frag! faithfully reproduces the digital first-person shooter experience from the simple pistol that every Marine since Doom has carried to the "disconnects" that have dumped so many gamers offline.
The game's mechanics are easy to learn, although experienced board-gamers may have a slightly better time of it than newbies. Despite the slight math involved, and even when playing the maximum six players, the game moves quickly. Just as importantly, the re-spawn rules ensure that the Slow and the Fragged return to the game almost as soon as they leave. This, plus the fast action, keep players happy and body counts high.
Another nice touch is game's character generation phase. Allowing players to choose their own ability scores adds an element of strategy to the game, and makes for some pretty entertaining results when folks realize that a great Accuracy score doesn't count for much when their terrible Movement attribute keeps them from jumping across acid pits.
Frag!'s only major flaw is that—aside from its table-top format—it offers no major innovations to the FPS genre. The weapons, from assault rifles to missile launchers, have all been done before. The same goes for the power-ups, like body armor and first aid kits. The game's simply more
interested in paying homage to the genre than improving on it.
The innovation void could have been filled with humor, like the dark variety found in Pagan Press' The Hills Rise Wild or the lighter, self-mocking kind featured in Steve Jackson's own Chez Geek. Unfortunately, though, the giggles are limited to a few one-shot jokes on the
game's box.
Frag!'s 21" x 33", two-sided, full-color map looks great, but its fixed design limits the game's replay value. Breaking up the playing area into configurable tiles would have worked much better, but the current design isn't a crippling problem. Frag!'s square grid is used by
plenty of other games (especially the miniatures-intensive Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition), and more maps can easily be scrounged on the net.
Expansions are planned for the game—the first one is already being printed—so these drawbacks may be temporary. As is, Frag!'s a decent beer-and-pretzels board game that's good for a few Saturday afternoons' worth of play.
Steve Jackson's Illuminati and Car Wars are staples of my gaming group, so we had high expectations going into Frag! The game may not have met them, but we still enjoyed ourselves.
— Kenneth
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