Pyramid Review: Hamlet! A Game In 5 Acts

Pyramid Review

Hamlet! A Game In 5 Acts

Published by Interactivities Ink, Ltd.

Designed by Mike Young

Cover Art and Assembly by Laura Overman

b&w card components in envelope; $6.50

Some question whether William Shakespeare did -- indeed, could have -- written all those plays, attributing it to Bacon or someone else. Anyone who had to sit through endless iterations of his works in high school won't be inclined to look favorably upon them. Everyone complains they can't get into Shakespeare's head; maybe that's why Interactivities Ink, Ltd. made Hamlet! A Game in 5 Acts. Now you're in Shakespeare's head, literally. You're a voice (3 to 8 voices can play), born to set it right, trying to guide the Bard to write the ending you want for one of his most famous plays.

The method to the madness: A player is chosen to be First Player (the position of First Player rotates one person to the left each round). He takes all the actions allotted to him for his turn (called a Scene), performs some "free-action" bookkeeping, and passes the play to the left. When everyone's had a turn, that's called an Act. If you have victory conditions at the end of an Act, you win; otherwise play continues to the next Act. If no one has met his conditions by the end of Act 5, the game ends in a draw.

Each player gets one of 14 ending cards. These indicate a status for some or all of the Dramatis Personages (DPs) in the game. The play. Whatever. This is the condition you want . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: November 15, 2002

Copyright © 2002 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.