Four Questions with Frank Branham

Frank Branham is a game designer (Nodwick Card Game, Warhamster Rally, the upcoming Battle Beyond Space) whose own personal collection includes many of the oddest games ever published. He's the caretaker of the Island of Misfit Games and one of my favorite guys to play games with. Especially when the games involve lots of mayhem and destruction.

Q: What's your favorite recently played (for the first time) game?

Frank Branham: That would be Nexus Ops. You read through the rules and it looks like yet another "grab resources and roll dice" game. The sort where you roll dice, eventually someone attacks someone else and gets involved in a border war, and the third person swoops in and wins the game. Except that Nexus Ops ends before the third person swoops in. Once players realize this, the game comes down to "attack lots and don't worry so much about the resources."

The rest of the game is a total masterwork of development. The unit balance is great, the mission card and action card balances are good, there is EXACTLY enough chrome to keep the game interesting without being overly complex. It was just such a shock to see such a good game pop out of Avalon Hill after the development tragedies that befell Betrayal at House on the Hill and Swords and Skulls. (Swords and Skulls' fatal flaw is that is is WAY too long for the game that is in the box.)

Q: What game do you want to play most that you haven't played yet?

Frank Branham: Roads and Boats. I have the extremely rare first printing where they tried to fit 30,000 bits in a standard bookcase sized box. This has been relocated to a much larger box along with spare tiles form the second or third edition. I am one of the few people that likes Cannes, and I think that Antiquity is a remarkably good game.

The problem is, it is 4 hours, there are a lot of rules, and if I get unlucky enough to play with a slow player, it will make me hate life. Plus there is the sorting out and prepping of all those pieces.

Q: I'm automatically a fan of any game that brags about having "60 to 80 ships slugging it out in space." What can you tell us about Battle Beyond Space?

Frank Branham: It took me 5 years to finish the silly thing (a fact which annoys me greatly, when you see how simple it is.) Since seeing the big giant space battle at the end of the fourth season of Babylon 5, I wanted to play a game which was a massive space battle with lots of ships flying around and blowing each other up. The general trend of space battle games is that a large fast-paced game is about 3 to 4 hours involving 4 to 8 ships on a side. Silent Death probably gets that down to a couple of hours with experienced players.

I spent forever trying to take those kinds of games and make them faster. Eventually, I ripped it down to an almost '80s Milton Bradley kind of complexity. (Carrier Strike was my favorite game when I was young. If you look closely, there is a fair amount of influence from Carrier Strike in Battle Beyond Space.) The odd thing is that the game has no dice, and really doesn't have all that much luck -- yet still might be fairly fluffy. The fluffy feeling comes from the extreme exposure the game has. After the first turn, any move or attack opens your ships to attack from other player's ships.

The best part is that a 4-player game with 20 ships per player (2 capital ships and 18 fighters) takes 45 to 60 minutes. I've spent a year so far trimming the game down from 10 turns to 9, and cooking up a few special powers. The game itself is absolutely terrifying in how fast things die. By turn 5, often a third of the ships are gone, and it is possible to lose your 20 ships by the end of turn 9. (The person who did that came in second. You pretty much only score points for what you kill, nothing for surviving. That keeps the game aggressive.)

Q: What's the absolute strangest game in your collection?

Frank Branham: The strangest game? Botts and Balls (which is a handmade game with clay robots and balls and bumpers of which 5 copies exist). The Evolution Game (100 copies and includes specimen cups in the component list, and comes from Finland). Chase Your Neighbor (an abstract with moderately racy art from the Saudi Arab Republic), Finger Dinger Man, Tiger Island (with a foot-tall plastic tiger that bops you on the head with a club).

I think I'm going to go with Hui Spinne. It was designed by Reinhold Wittig, and self-published as part of the Edition Perlhuhn line. This pretty much guarantees that it is an unusual game. It comes with a little toy AM/FM radio that looks like a spider and spiderwebs cover the board. The theme is something about surfing the airwave web, and you get points for pressing the button on the spider radio (it only has one button which causes it to jump up the dial) and getting particular categories of things playing.

The strangest game I don't own, or even know if it exists, or what its freaking name is... is a British game which one person told me about long ago. You stuff little foam babies into a call box. That is all I know about it, and I've been looking for any bit of information on the game.