All My Children (split from Savage Gamism)

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I picked up the All My Children board game (AMC). Mostly because it was a TSR product and probably has some ebay value but mostly, unlike more current soap opera games, is not trivia but is a pseudo-rpg. It is not unlike Clue in this regard.

Consider Monopoly and Clue. In both you take a role. In Monopoly it's of a real estate tycoon. In clue, a murder suspect & amateur detective. However, Monopoly turns the entire situation into abstraction. See the discussion on "white board monopoly." Clue, OTOH retains a bit of the representationalism. It is still fairly abstract, but not as abstract as Monopoly or even Chess.

AMC is like this. It is close-but-no-banana roleplaying game. I tried a little bit just a few hours ago. No horrible, but a little complex in some ways to be a pick-up roleplying-like fix.

The Board is laid out with a map of the town. No one who had played followed AMC at all, but Soap Operas are fairly formulaic. There is the hospitol, the police office, the big company, etc. To be honest, the lay out could have been a little better. That is, it was not very definate what space was where, mostly for these locations.

Play goes thus: each player takes the role of a star. You get a playing piece and character card. The card basically give a brief description of the character, This has no effect on play uless you let it. I'll get to this later.

Each player gets cards that give you Goals or Actions. Goals are soapy things like "Seduce Hillary on her Birthday" All goals hinge on a character or a place. To fullfill the goal, you must either go to a place or land on the same space as the character listed. If you happen to be playing the listed character, you must go to the location but you will gain double the points.

When a player reveals a goal in this manner, the other players may capture the goal by bidding action cards. Action cards must be of the same suit of the Goal to be useable. The player who had reveal the Goal may also bid to keep the Goal and the points.

That's enough of the genreal overview.

I, the wife, Brian and Lisa gave this thing a try. It went OK. Rolling dice each turn to move was pretty dull unless you got somewhere to reveal a goal. I cant help but think some kind of random minor event would be useful. Some of the spaces have thiongs like "Steal card from another player" but not enough to have something happen every turn. The wife remarked that the game relied too heavily luck and not on player skill. You either get the cards you need or you don't.

I am liking the method of this game, but the execution and color don't really thrill me.

Comments?