allgeektout

Like the sound of Artifaxx? Enter to win Chrononauts and its expansion pack, the Gore Years, sponsored by Gator Games, here!

Okay, remember everything we learned about Solonauts? Throw that away. Well, file it in the back of your mind – we’re going to need it later. But for the next game game mode, Artifaxx, we’re going to have to learn a whole new set of tricks. If you’re familiar with them, you can go ahead and skip down to the review. Everyone else – are you ready?

Artifaxx is a Fluxx-variant of Chrononauts (or so I’m told, having never played Fluxx). It uses four types of cards: missions, time warps, artifacts, and actions. At the beginning of the game, every one draws a mission, and three cards. The mission looks something like this:

As you can see, whoever draws this card (let’s call him Stu) is going for three different copies of the Mona Lisa – the genuine article, a good forgery (a winking Mona Lisa), and a horrible forgery (a mustachioed Mona Lisa). He doesn’t have any of these cards in his hand. In fact, the only artifact he has is this one:

Steggy, the live Stegosaurus, is an artifact – an item that was pulled out of the time stream by one of our intrepid time travelers. Stu starts off his turn by drawing a card, but he doesn’t have anything useful in his hand that he can play at the time, so he plays Steggy by putting the card out in front of him.

Sometime during the round, however, someone played the Real Mona Lisa – which is what Stu needs to win! For a minute, he’s worried, but then he looks down at his hand, and sees something that’ll help him. So on his next turn, he plays this:

Get There First is an action – a card that you can use to steal artifacts or get extra cards depending on what the action says. In this case, Stu uses it to travel back in time to the moment that his opponent took the Mona Lisa out of the time stream, and stole it for himself.

But then, something even worse happens before his next turn – someone DISCARDS the mustachioed Mona Lisa! In any other card game, this would spell inevitable doom – at least, until they reshuffled the deck. But not in Artifaxx.

Timewarps let you do special things to get cards. Normally, you still end up with the same number of cards in your hand, but you can get them in ways you normally wouldn’t – by searching through the deck, or going through the discard pile. So Stu uses his timewarp to get the forgery out of the discard pile. Now he only has one artifact to get – though by now, the others may have noticed what he’s going for.

Artifaxx is a great game. It moves pretty fast, and it doesn’t have too steep of a learning curve. What’s great about it is how quickly the tables can turn on you – whether someone forces everyone to swap their hands with a Discontinuity, or they switch missions with you against your will.

It is hilarious too, especially if you people who are in the right mood. The first three or four moves in my first round were all people stealing the exact same artifact from one another – turns out three of the four of us all needed a Video Tape of the Beginning of the Universe (on Betamax, of course).

One problem is that there are a limited number of Missions in the deck, so conceivably people would start to get familiar with the missions, and could tell what somebody was trying to accomplish. This actually became part of the game, though, as we tried to trick each other into thinking we had different missions than we actually did. I could have easily won with the Mona Lisa mission, because I had one in play and two in my hand, but I was too worried about not getting noticed that I ended up losing.

I’m pretty sure Artifaxx is one of the most fun games I have played recently. The speed keeps it from getting dull, and it’s funny even when you lose. If the other Fluxx games are anything like this, then considering me a fan of Fluxx. And you know what? It’s educational too.

After all, I certainly didn’t know Voldemort wore the Crown of Thorns!

Like the sound of Artifaxx? Enter to win Chrononauts and its expansion pack, the Gore Years, sponsored by Gator Games, here!