Pyramid Review
Beer Money
Published by Atlas Games
Written by Charles Wiedman with Michelle Nephew & John Nephew
Photography by Andrew & Anna Yates
110-card deck, 9 by 10-inch double-sided rule sheet; $19.95
Time to move on. Get out. Recess is over. And so is school. Nobody wants what your Momma put in your pocket to pay for your lunch. Somebody still wants to kick your butt though. And afterwards, if there is money enough in your wallet to buy them one more pint, they get double the reward.
This is the premise for Beer Money, the "grown-up" sequel to one of the most disturbing little card games ever published, Lunch Money. That game had as its theme, the merciless playground brawls fought by kids in recess over their lunch money. What made that game stand out was not its game play, which could be best described as simplistic. This is not to say that the game play failed to capture the nastiness of a schoolyard scrap, because it certainly did. Rather Lunch Money stood out because of its graphic design, which made use of unsettling images of children combined with off-kilter, but eloquent captions that together combine to give Lunch Money a dream-like quality that sits surprisingly well with the violence inherent to the game play.
Here the theme is not playground fisticuffs and the pulling of hair, but post-last orders brawls in the dingy ill-lit behind the bar. Participants fight not for the pocket change needed for lunch, but for the dollar bills that will buy the victor his next draught. . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 10, 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.
