Barf Through the Apocalypse in This Fantastic New Card Game

Barf Through the Apocalypse in This Fantastic New Card Game

If you've ever wanted to chew a Tire of Doom and spew Laser Teeth for glory, the board game Guts of Glory is for you.
Photo courtesy Jesse Fuchs

Barf Through the Apocalypse in This Fantastic New Card Game

Photo courtesy Jesse Fuchs

Earlier this week, I tried to bribe a man into spewing a chewed-up time machine at me.

It all started when I backed Guts of Glory, a board game by Ridiculous Fishing developer Zach Gage, designer Jesse Fuchs and artist Jess Worby, on Kickstarter in 2012. On January 1, my copy arrived. The $35 box set looks and feels great, so I wasn't too upset about the wait. To be honest, I had totally forgotten that I had backed it in the first place.

Figuring out how to play Guts of Glory the first time can be a bit of a challenge, since the included instruction booklet insists on immersing you in its food-themed language, which is full of verbs like fill, feed, froth, chew, spew and swallow. None of these concepts are particularly hard to grasp once you're playing, but any live human player familiar with the game could do a much better job of explaining things coherently.

But it does have a fun sense of humor. The first rule is my favorite: Players determine who goes first by arguing over who's the hungriest, or, failing that, the angriest. From there, you'll take turns drawing cards with special effects that range from funny to straight-up cruel. Once these oddball food items are in your mouth, you can "chew" them to digest and swallow them, which gives you the Glory points you need to accumulate to win the game. But if you have too much food in your mouth and more is added in, you have to "spew" some extra into your opponent's hand. And every time a card gets spewed, it gets extra glory. So there's a delicate risk-reward balance for filling your mouth up with food.

After you figure it all out, you'll be uttering sentences like "After I feed that condiment, I'll chew and swallow my food for 2 Glory," which really means "When it's my turn I'm going to draw that card and play this other card for two points."

Two-player games of Guts tend to be the least strategically taxing, as they allow players to draw from a deck built out of just 25 of the 57 total included cards. Since any single card's value is determined by how it relates to other cards in the deck, you'll spend your initial few games memorizing their abilities and drawing connections between them. You'll learn, for instance, that a Get Buff food is a dangerous pick in the early game, or when there's a Laser Teeth condiment in play.

Guts hits its sweet spot in three-player matches, which offer a perfect mix of luck, strategy, and politicking. Since there are plenty of cards in Guts that allow you to target specific opponents with attacks, there's built-in motivation for players to build temporary alliances and develop strategies that benefit two players at once. In a three-person game, two players working in tandem can usually tear down another who has an early lead or other advantage.

Games can occasionally drag on as the stakes get raised and players crouch over the board, calculating the effects of the chain-reaction that will occur if they play this card or that one. People start to get that look in their eye like they're really spinning their gears to solve a math problem, absentmindedly muttering things like "These dentures will let me double chew my box of spiders, but I need that de-masticator to stop her tar attack."

Because other players' cards are just as important to your strategy as your own, the game's occasionally slow pace isn't as much of an annoyance. When it's not your turn, you're carefully considering every card on the board, thinking about big plays your opponents might try to put together. The feeling you get when you know you'll be able to throw together a huge combination, and no one can stop you, is amazing.

The game's smartest mechanic is "spewing," which forces you to offer one of your cards to an opponent whenever you draw a card that won't fit in one of the five slots in your "mouth."

Spewed cards automatically get "glory" cards attached to them, drastically increasing their value and raising the stakes for everyone in the game. It only takes seven glory points to win the game, so as the game nears its final stages, players will become desperate to set up situations that force opponents to spew valuable cards their way.

This is when the politicking gets really passionate.

"If you spew that Time Machine at me I will reward you richly," I promised a friend, in one particularly close game. "I will set a crown of fine gold upon your head."

"Listen," interrupted my roommate. "If you spew it to him, he'll get two turns in a row and completely screw both of us. Spew the Hot-Hot Sauce instead and when it's my turn I'll spew this gloried Tire of Doom at you."

"Do this for me and you'll be given a place of honor in my glorious kingdom," I insisted. "Betray me and you will feel my wrath."

It didn't work. He sided with my roommate, and I declared him to be my mortal enemy, spending the rest of the game systematically undermining every effort he made to put points on the board.

Some say there's no glory in bribery and revenge. They're so wrong.