Pyramid Review
Paranoia Mandatory BONUS FUN Card Game
Published by Mongoose Publishing
Designed by Steve Gilbert & Gareth Hanrahan
Illustrated by James Holloway
Proofed by Ron Bedison & Sarah Quinnell
Boxed, full-color card game for three to eight players; 150 cards, 154 clone, treason, & wound tokens, & rulebook; $24.95
Mongoose Publishing has released a Paranoia card game, and with such a property you'd think, "Well, of course." It's even called the Mandatory BONUS FUN Card Game. Such obvious merchandising opportunities probably weren't lost on the designers of the original game, either, nor their loyal fans, but it never came to pass. Now that it's finally off the ground, the question is whether it was worth the wait.
The object is to be the highest-ranking Troubleshooter when any player loses his sixth clone.
As a primer for those on the outside looking in: The roleplaying game is about a futuristic society forced to live in a huge complex under the watchful eye of an insane computer determined to protect its charges from "the Commies." Troubleshooters are The Computer's elite cleanup squad, ready to follow orders even unto certain doom to fix what goes wrong. A lot goes wrong, constantly, and conflicting loyalties and schemes among the agents mean the result is usually a bloodbath no one survives. And there are jokes.
The card game throws your team of Troubleshooters at a series of missions, like rooting out traitors and training Vulture squadrons. . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: April 21, 2006
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