Nodwick The Card Game

An Amusing Diversion for for 2-8 Sadistic Adventurers

Use your divine powers (and some duct tape)
to put some henchmen together again

A fast-playing and chaotic trading game descended from Pit.

This year's Hench Games has been interrupted, and all of the Henchmen are somewhat mutil...disassemb...sick. You need to use Piffany's powers of healing to put a henchman back together. With mostly the same parts he started out with.

To do this, you will need to collect healing ingredients and trade with other players for body parts and healing items. In real time.　

Features:

• 2 pp rule book
• 8 pp Hench Games comic
• 2 card decks
• Nice box
• timer
• For 3 – 8 players ages 7 to 99.

First and foremost, we should get one thing out of the way. Nodwick: The Card Game is a shares much of its nature with the classic game Pit. If you hate Pit, this game will not change your mind about simultaneous card trading games. It is loud, chaotic and obnoxious. On top of that it has a comic characters that were dismembered being reassembled hastily and poorly (and mixed and matched) as its theme, which perhaps compounds the loud, obnoxious chaotic gameplay by association. If this indicates you aren't interested, go ahead and stop reading now, nothing I say will change your opinion of this game.

As mentioned above, the theme involves reassembly of a character, in this case Nodwick or one of his henchman cohorts. Nodwick: The Card Game takes its theme from the comic "Nodwick", which chronicles the misadventures of the titular character. In the comic, Nodwick is a henchman (which in the fantasy genre is often the target of heaps of abuse and piles of things to carry). Nodwick has worse luck than most fantasy henchmen as not only is he burdened with immense amounts of stuff, but he tends to die. A lot. The parties cleric, Piffany, has unconventional methods of healing which involve lots of duct tape and happy thoughts.

In the game, Nodwick and several other henchmen have been participating in the Henchgames, a vicious and evil parody of Olympics in which every event is a deathtrap. Nodwick and the other henchmen have been eviscerated by the previous event and each player tries to reconstruct a henchman to participate in the next event from the various body parts: Head, Arms, Torso, Legs, Spleen and Spirit. Players can play a body part from any henchman as long as that body part has not already been used on their henchman. Each body part has a set of Piffany cards that are required to play it, usually two or three cards. You may mix and match henchmen (indicated by color and name) but you get bonus points for each matching body part in the largest group of matching henchman parts, so it is best to try to complete your henchman from mostly one henchman's part, if possible.

The first players to reconstruct a full henchman (comprised by one of each of the body parts) gets a bonus for completion and also the benefit of scoring points for each of the six cards that comprise their henchman, whereas the other players will have partially complete henchmen and no bonuses. The winner of a round is simply the player with the most points.

All that is odd enough, but the mechanism for gameplay is what sets Nodwick apart from most games. Instead of turns, players may offer trades at any time with anyone. Unlike Pit however, not all the cards are available at once, instead there is a draw pile that can be drawn from in three situations: discard two matching cards to draw one replacement, play a henchman part down to draw two new cards or pass the timer for one card.

Timer did you say?

In the game there is a thirty second sand timer. When the the game starts one player flips the timer over in front of themselves. At any time you can simply hand it to the next player clockwise and then draw a card. When you get the timer you may flip it over, or not, your choice. If however the timer runs out of time any player may say "time!" and the player who has it must flip and pass it to the next player, forfeiting their card draw.

The introduction of the timer adds an odd element. If you have a lot of cards in your hand and others are struggling, hanging on to the timer may make some sense as you execute trades or lay down multiple cards on your henchman with some of the time pressure off your back, but most of the time everyone tosses the timer like it was a live grenade. This means that you are drawing cards very quickly and must process the possibilities that the cards offer just as quickly. It also means your hand may grow to fairly unreasonable size if you aren't successful in making favorable trades. There is a side benefit to playing out a body part when you can: fewer cards to juggle. However, playing parts down too early may weaken your position for trades and tip your hand as to your needs.

Does the gameplay hold up? This is going to depend on your group. As mentioned at the beginning, this is a very boisterous and chaotic game. Fortunately for me, I have a boisterous and chaotic gaming group, so we fell into it quite quickly with trade offers, counter offers and outright snatching of cards when a trade was agreed to. I wouldn't recommend this as the only game for the evening, but it is a great way to blow off some steam after a game like Modern Art where your brain may be partially melted from analysis, or as a quick game when you only have 20-30 minutes to play. Everyone at our table enjoyed the game and has suggested that it be brought to the table again and again. I think this is because it restores the reason we play games: fun. For that reason I have given this game a 8... it is of a perfect length for a game of its chaotic nature so I am willing to suggest it and see little reason to turn down a game. This score is higher than Nodwick is getting from the other Geeks, but reflects our particular groups affinity for chaos. If your group prefers to ponder serious and weighty things over fun factor, avoid this game. However, unlike many novelty card games, this one is not based around reading funny text or vicious backstabbing attacks on your neighbors, just high speed trading and lots of fun.

This is a new, unused copy that has spent its life in a warehouse. It is unused and still in original factory shrink wrap. All interior pictures are archive shots.

JOL200 boxed