Games : ~2027/Play_Off

Games / Rick Clark / Play_Off_thoughts /

X-Pod Play Off

Thoughts and Observations

This is a great game! I’ve been describing it as a combination of Magic the Gathering and Chess, and you build all the playing pieces yourself. I’m not sure why the company hasn’t promoted this game more, especially after what seems to be an extensive development process. Maybe part of the reason is that they’re still getting all the bugs out of it.

Unfortunately, the only way to obtain the game currently is to download it from the LEGO web site (http://www.lego.com/xpod). And it’s over 100 pages of color printing (50 pages minimum if you only start with two colors and the basic game; 124 pages for the complete game). If you’re like me, and have an ink jet printer, it can take 5-10 minutes to print a complex color document. That’s up to 20 hours worth of printing. Wow. So to shorten the process, I stripped out the graphics from the user manuals. That made the printing go much faster. But the cards still take forever. Oh, and of course you have to cut them out with scissors, so there’s another 1-2 hours of work involved before you can play

I recommend printing the plan cards and the X-tras cards onto light card stock. Otherwise they’re awfully flimsy. Also, if you print the advanced card sets, don’t bother cutting out the starter plan cards. They’re just duplicates.

Also, I have suggested to the company that the game be made available for purchase, due to the high time and materials cost of users printing it themselves. I also would like to see the card sizes standardized to playing card size, so that players can use the many peripherals available for trading card games. If you agree with this please call LEGO Customer Support at 800-466-8107 and suggest the same thing. Thanks!

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