Pyramid Review
Nexus Card Game
Published by Cheapass Games
Designed by James Ernest
48 cards and rules sheet; $4.00
How many times have you thought to yourself, "Sure, I'd love to get into Cheapass Games, if only they weren't do darned expensive"? Salvation is at hand for you miserly types in the form of Hip Pocket Games, "a Tiny Little Division of Cheapass Games." Although it has released only two games so far, Nexus and the re-release of The Very Clever Pipe Game, Hip Pocket Games aims to provide big fun in small packages. Both games are sold with just the necessary cards, a rules sheet, and a ziplock bag.
Nexus is an abstract strategy game for two to four players requiring only the cards, 20 counters of a different color for each player, and a table, preferably a large one. (According to the rules, if you run out of room "you must extend the table top with nails and glue before you can proceed.") The rules are simple, the play is quick unless your opponents ponder their moves for an eternity, and the strategy is interesting enough for repeat play.
The cards are long and illustrated in green and white; each of the cards contains a set of "Connectors" and "Nodes." A Connector is a pipe that starts at a Node and runs off of one of the four sides of the card. A Node is a circle or oval where Connectors end, or where multiple Connectors join each other. Every card has a Connector running off of each of its four sides, but whether they join each other at Nodes varies from card to . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: February 8, 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.