Pyramid Review
One False Step for Mankind
Published by Cheapass Games
Designed by James Ernest
Art by Phil Foglio & James Ernest
Full-color game with eight board sections, 33 City cards, 18 Rocket System cards, three Know-how cards, & six "Days of the Week" cards; $7.50
Required but not included: 100 poker chips in four colors (red, yellow, green, gray), 40 counters per player, two six-sided dice, one button (or distinct token), & three paper clips (or one large clip) per player.
James Ernest has made a name for Cheapass Games by not providing more than the bare essentials for his works. Making a customer pay for dice every time he buys a game, Ernest has said, is a little like bundling a can opener with every tin of beans. In a game like One False Step for Mankind, however, you end up starving for components.
The best way to become, and stay, mayor in the Old West is to give the people a real show. The fad sweeping the countryside right now is the space program. Never mind that the whole enterprise hasn't a snowball's chance of working; people flock to see these crazy coots try to launch rockets into the stratosphere. Winning popular support gives you Influence, and the first politician to rack up 30 points worth of this valuable commodity wins the game.
The three resources are Influence, Food, and Gold. Influence comes from getting your rockets to work -- or at least, getting parts of them to work -- and from controlling towns throughout the West. Towns . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: May 14, 2004
Copyright © 2004 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.