Games - P

Parts Unknown - Manufacturer: Cheapass Games - Designer: James Ernest - Year: 1998 - $5.95 (boxed edition) AT FUNAGAIN GAMES
Review by: Nathaniel Dragon - My Photos

From Cheapass Games comes another strange idea... marketing body parts. In this game the players are shopkeepers in a town of aspiring mad scientists. Of course the players are not the ones that determine the fads of the town, a certain Dr. Victor Frankenstein is the trend setter, roaming the town and causing the young scientists to jump at whatever he looks at.

Your role in the game is to make the most money in this market of madness. Build your shop and set your prices in a way that will interest the buyers. If you have the best price in town, you will get the business - but will you make enough profit. If you raise your price, beware of fellow shopkeepers that could undercut your price, leaving you overstocked with an item that buyers have lost interest in.

Cheese, Mold, Lurds, along with your more usual Hands, Feet, and Nervz are some of what you market, but the game also has other interesting spins, such as riots and a roaming monster which can disrupt your marketing strategy. Planning for future moves along with some tricky undercutting have allowed me to do very well in this game.

Although the package says that the game is for 4-10 players, but I haven't seen how it makes much of a difference having only 3. One thing that I have heard would improve the game is for the players to draw for cards at the end of the turns instead of the beginning, since there is some time were the game stalls while waiting for a player to decide what to do with new cards, and of course that would be a simple change (which could also help shorten play time which averages 90 minutes). The game was not too difficult to catch onto, even though we did missinterpret the rules slightly during the first game. If your are interested in an interesting game of "buy low - sell high" check this game out.