Give me the Brain – An interlude from RPGs

When we don’t have enough players to play our normal current table-top RPG, we often pickup a card game or two to play.

One of our favourites is Give me the Brain, a simple card game by Cheapass Games.

Our copy of Give me the Brain is one of Cheapass’s orignally seriously cheap games, the cards are simple black and white art on basic card stock. We treat it well and it’s lasted over a decade. Cheapass now do a deluxe version of Give me the Brain, actually it appears to be the only version now.

My tunh is stuh ta da fluh!

The basic premise is that all the players are zombies working in a burger joint. Players are dealt a number of cards and the aim of the game is to be the first person to dispose of all their cards.

There are two main types of cards, numbered bid cards, and job cards. Bid cards are used to help you pickup the brain. The brain is represented by a d6 dice, and there’s just one brain between all the players.

Job cards allow you to do a variety of things, such as drawing more cards, forcing ownership of the brain to move, taking cards from other players hands and all sorts of crazy shenanigans.

Some job cards are marked with a brain, and can only be played if you are currently the owner of the brain, making them much harder to get out of your hand, which means the brain moves around a lot as people fight over it.

A game usually takes 10 to 20 minutes to play out and we rarely stop there, but usually play three or four games before moving onto something different.

For a quick diversion from usual RPG play it’s a great stand in and I recommend it whole heartedly.

What do you do when you haven’t got enough people for your usual game? Let us know below.

Since the dark days of the late '70s, Iain has been playing and running RPGs of one type or another. When not with his wife and children or working as a software engineer/Photoshop monkey he spends spare time either shooting pointy sticks at pointless paper targets or spending time enjoying the varied worlds of role playing.

Tags: Review