Pyramid Review
WMD: Weapons of Mass Destruction
Published by Flying Buffalo, Inc.
Designed by Douglas Malewicki & Rick Loomis
Art by SS Crompton, John Kovalic, Aaron Williams, Brendan Fraim, & Brian Fraim
110 full-color cards, rules sheet; $19.95
Given the current climate, you'd think there'd be more games based on the strife in the Middle East that fall into the "someone had to do it" vein. The pickings are slim, but WMD: Weapons of Mass Destruction is a good start.
WMD is the newest expansion for the Nuclear War card game. Flying Buffalo's satirical look at Cold War tensions hasn't lost much of its bite over the years, but its social relevance is updated here. As before, players always have two cards facedown on the table. On their turn they flip the first card face-up, the second card becomes the first, and a new one is put out facedown.
You're committed to your layout, so if circumstances change before your cards are revealed you're out of luck. For example, propaganda cards only work in peacetime. These are your country's attempts to badmouth others in the international community in hopes of getting their people to move to your far superior nation. Once nukes fall, they're useless (even the facedown ones). War starts when someone nukes someone else. You must flip up some sort of launch system (a rocket, missile, etc.) and follow that with an appropriate warhead -- get them out of order or use incompatible cards and your offensives fails. You may also have secrets with horrible effects . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: May 13, 2005
Copyright © 2005 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.