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.

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If you haven’t seen iPlay4e.com and you do play 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons then you must go and check out their latest offerings.

Screen shot of an online character sheet at iPlay4e.com

iPlay4e allows you to store as many characters as you’ll need, you simply upload the .dnd4e file that is saved by the DDI Character Builder. If you’re not using Character Builder then why not! Check that out as well!

I use iPlay4e during a game, both as a player and as a Dungeon Master. As DM I can have multiple characters open and keep and eye on all the PCs in my game. No longer do I have to ask, “What’s your AC” or “What’s your passive perception”. Often I can easily find information quicker than the players themselves and answer their own questions.

It can link into the DDI Compendium so that you can bring up full descriptions of powers, something that’s not printed on the Character Builder power cards, this is very useful as a DM for helping describe the effects of an exploit or spell.

iPlay4e can also save changes and keep track of a number of things, such as current hit points, encounter and daily powers used, and more. This helps me keep a track on my players as DM and as a player helps me not forget what’s be used and what has not.

So check out the latest at http://labs.iplay4e.com.

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