I am woefully behind on all my reviews. None am I more late on than reviewing what should have been something I jumped on right away, Chill 3rd Edition.
I was very disapointed when I saw that Chill was not up for a ENnie for Best Game this year. The consolation though is that the rather excellent Quickstart for Chill is up for Best Free Product.
This is good since you can experience Chill for the price of a couple of clicks.
Now my love for Chill is WELL documented here on this blog. When everyone else was playing Call of Cthulhu (and watching their characters go mad or die) I was playing Chill (and watching my characters die). Or more to the point I was creating elaborate scenarios involving SAVE. I loved Pacesetter Chill and even drove out to the old Mayfair Games warehouse to score a brandnew hardcover a few years back. I own pretty much everything for Chill and even Rotworld/Cryptworld/Majus.
On to the product as hand.
Chill: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors is a 46 page "Quickstart". It has everything you need to play the game now except for people, dice and some tokens. Don't have 10-sided dice? Fine, get a deck of cards, remove the royals, put all the black suits in one deck and all the red in another. Shuffle them. When you need to roll choose a black card and a red card. Count tens as "0" and aces as "1". Save the face cards, the royals, for your tokens.
With this Quickstart author +Matthew McFarland has distilled Chill down to it's essence. It's a game about fighting the Unknown. There are a couple of pages devoted to the mechanics of the game; find a target number, roll that or under. Avoid botches (doubles over) but hope for a Colossal Success (roll doubles and under). Tokens are also covered.
An overview of the character sheet comes next breaking down the Attributes, Skills, Edges, Drawbacks and where you record damage. There is also a spot for The Art, or some magical/psychic abilities. This edition seems to focus a bit more on this than the previous, normal-human-centric point of view of the previous, but that will wait for a full reveiw.
This makes up the first half-dozen or so pages. The next dozen covers Combat and The Art. Combat is just another type of test/roll and The Art are "fancy" skills. The nice thing is when one system is learned the rest are easily picked up.
The rest of the book is the adventure. I don't want to give out any spoilers for potential players, but the adventure is a classic one for Chill. What kind of adventures are good for Chill? Well anything you might see on "Supernatural", "Grimm", "Kolchak" or "The X-Files" would make for a great Chill game, but also the stories you told as kids about the haunted house, or the mean old neighbor lady or the monster in the sewers.
The quickstart includes some characters to get you up and running fast. There are maps, artifacts and investigation sheet to make this feel like a real investigation into the paranormal, or what Chill calls The Unknown. Enough background is given on SAVE to make it interesting and to make you want to know more.
For the price you can't beat it. If you ever told a scary story to others with a flashlight under your chin, dared a friend to go into a "haunted house" or watched a Hammer Horror film then this is a great game for you. An ENnie win for it would let others know that too.
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I am up for an ENnie this year for Best Blog!
Please click on the link and vote "1" under "The Other Side".
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