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While contacting companies prior to the con to find out what they'd be demoing and selling, Queen Games teased a 2014 release titled Greed, with the Queen rep mentioning that "it has cards". Hrm, not much to go on. Having now played the game twice, I can confirm that yes, it indeed contains cards— tokens, too, along with a box to hold everything. As for what's on those cards, they have words and images. (Shocking, I know.)
Less sarcastically, Greed is a design from Donald X. Vaccarino in which crime lords (the players) try to earn more money than anyone else through clever use of their cards. At the start of the game, which supports 2-5 players, each player receives a random hand of twelve cards from a deck of 80. Players draft one card, pass the remaining cards left, draft a second card, pass again, draft a third card, pass again — and then the game changes; from that point on, players simultaneously choose and reveal a card, carrying out its effects, then they draft another card, pass the remaining cards, play again, and so on until ten "playing" rounds have occurred, at which point the game ends and players tally their holdings.
As you can see in the image of the prototype, the card types are thugs, holdings and actions. Each card has a unique effect when played. Thugs and holdings might have a cost to be played (perhaps cash paid to the bank or the discarding of a holding) or a condition that you must meet in order to play the card (having two thugs, for example, or a collection of symbols on cards in your possession). When you play a holding with one or more symbols on it, in addition to carrying out the effect, you place a token on that card for each symbol on it and an additional token for each symbol of that type already in your possession. These tokens are worth $10k each at the end of the game, and you add this value to whatever cash you've collected through your card plays.
I was in love with the game halfway through the first play, with Greed reminding me of Vaccarino's Nefarious — poor neglected Nefarious — in multiple ways: the quick flow of game turns, the tactical jumping from turn to turn to react to opponents and to account for the ever-changing nature of what you hold in hand, and the simultaneous play of actions with players having some idea of what opponents might be doing. (In Nefarious, you can try to guess the action that opponents will play, while in Greed you can take a stab at which cards opponents are drafting and when they might want to play them.) In addition to the combination of a quick playtime, tactical play (through both the draft and the need to respond to opponents) and high variability (since you use only a subset of the deck), Greed plays into my love of special powers and of emergent combinations, traits evident in games like Innovation, Glory to Rome and the aforementioned Nefarious.
As mentioned, I played twice — once with four players and again with two (with that opponent having also just played) — and it was a kick to know next to nothing about what's on the cards and develop a strategy on the fly. I started with a holding that gave me $5k for each holding I played subsequently as well as a $5k discount on the cost of those holdings, then followed this with a holding that gave me $10k each turn if certain symbols weren't in play, then carried on with a holding that gave me $20k immediately but forced all future holdings to come into play with one fewer token than normal. I played an insurance holding that would gain two tokens whenever I had to discard a holding or thug, then dumped the holding with a drawback to play a holding that discarded a token from each holding owned by an opponent. Eventually I played an action held from the first turns that added a token to each holding with one or fewer tokens, then an action that added tokens to a holding equal to the number of tokens on an opponent's card, and finally an action that liquidated a holding while paying $15k per token on that card. Boom — $105k in one shot! (Well, $35k really since I was already getting $70k from the existing tokens, but the story's more dramatic this way.)
The second game added a new twist to play as with only two players, you (theoretically) know every card in the game other than what each player chooses first. Being new players, naturally we didn't take full advantage of that information as it's tough to (a) memorize 23 cards and (b) understand the ramifications of playing card A before B with the opponent possibly responding with (or counterdrafting) card C, etc. That said, we did both immediately catch on to the holdings being few and relatively worthless, which made certain other cards less interesting as well, so then we were fighting over a few other cards, with me (and her) trying to float cards from one turn to another to line up chains of cards that seemed like they would work well together. I squeaked out my second Greedy victory of the night thanks to a lowly thug that pulls in $5k each turn. Every fiver counts in a game this quick and tight, and I'm looking forward to future plays once this game is available sometime in 2014.
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