written by Chris Farrell and published in Sumo 44, 1998

FRPG (the makers of Legend of the Five Rings) have been promising us a Dune game for quite some time. My copy of Dune says that its the best-selling Science Fiction novel of all time, with some millions of copies in print, so I imagine a lot of other people were awaiting this also, with high expectations. After all, Legend of the Five Rings was a fine and interesting game, and with Middle Earth proving how good games of this type can be, so we had reason to hope that they could follow L5R up with a successful Dune game (despite some disturbing rumors that the CCG was to be based solely on the Dune movie; in the end it FRPG and their proud new owners, Wizards of the Coast, did obtain the rights to the book). So, what exactly did we get?

The premise of the game is that each player takes the part of one of the minor houses of the Landsraad. The goal of the game is to deploy both your own forces and the forces of your patron Great House(s) in an attempt to gain entry to the Landsraad as one of the Great Houses yourself. To do this, you have to accumulate Favor and Spice. Your primary resource for doing this is cash, or solari; everything in the game is deployed using solari. Your charters and homeworld generate solari, and you use these to deploy cards from your two decks: your House Deck, which contains your own house's resources (men, material, training, and operations or ventures), and your Imperial deck (personas from your allied great house or houses). During the game you will typically have a hand of 7 House cards and an Assembly of 3 Imperial cards - both are fully replenished at the end of the turn, and you may always discard as many of either type of card as you wish. The other key assets of your House are your Favor and Spice; both are both most easily purchased with solari, although both can be acquired (spice through mining directly off of Dune, as you might expect, and Favor through winning Duels and Battles). The first person to get to 10 spice and 10 favor during their House Interval and engage (tap) their homeworld wins immediately.

The starting conditions can be customized somewhat, but typically you will start with about 20 solari, 10 favor, and no spice; you can swap up to 5 of the solari to add some small amounts of favor and/or spice. You will also start with the homeworld of the main house you are affiliated with; this will generally give you 5 solari of income when tapped. From this, you build your house.

The game then proceeds in turns consisting of three phases: The Opening Interval, House Interval, and Closing Interval.

The Opening Interval is done simultaneously for all players, and includes the by now ubiquitous untap phase, deferment phase (what happens here will be explained under combat - basically its damage removeal), and initiative phase. The initiative phase determines the order in which everyone will take their turns in the House Interval. Generally, the default is the highest favor goes first and the lowest favor goes last. Obviously, there are advantages to be had by moving in the right position with respect to your rivals, so there are cards which allow you to manipulate favor for the purposes of initiative. Particularly as you tend to close in on victory, you really want to be going either close to first or close to last - and if you can swing it, the infamous double-turns (where one goes last in one turn and first in the next) can all but lock down a victory. The only snag is an awful rule that says that ties are resolved by flipping a card from your house deck and comparing deployment costs (more expensive card goes first). Especially with limited card sets, it is hard to watch one of your only two harvesters go by to an initiative resolution pick. I recommend rolling dice instead. I don't see any game advantage to using the cards and it can be very frustrating to see critical cards burned in this way since your deck never recycles.

Anyway, the real meat of the game is in your House Interval - while you may be involved in conflicts and such in other players turns, the majority of your activities will take place here. You have a list of standard actions you can perform, and you can deploy Ventures from your hand to take additional actions.

First, one mechanism that is innovative: the Guild Hoard. This is basically a very simple economic system. The Guild starts out the game with a chunk of spice, which they will sell at the CROE (CHOM Rate Of Exchange), which will vary from 1 to 3 at start depending on the number of players. As players buy or sell spice and the size of the Guild Hoard fluctuates, the CROE will go up or down, between 1 and 6. Each player has the option to either buy or sell up to three units of spice per turn. This creates an interesting dynamic as players who are harvesting spice from Dune sell it to raise cash, while other players tend to buy it to get to their 10 spice victory conditions. Of course, the more players you have the more the CROE will fluctuate and the more opportunity there will be for manipulating it for either your own advantage or other player's pain. Additionally, there are many events whose effects are tied directly to the CROE, generally to provide the Governor of Dune with some penalty or bonus.

All in all, the CROE is interesting and works. In the end it's a little simplistic because it models only supply and not demand (if there are 8 units in the hoard, the offering price is the same whether players have personally harvested a ton of spice and there is a glut, or if no-one is actually on Due and everybody is clamoring to buy it), but its still provides an interesting twist without the undue complexity of trying to calculate a more accurate price model.

Other than buying and selling spice, you may also perform the usual function of deploying cards from your hand - you just look at the number in the upper left, discard that number of solaris, and play it. Somebody really must explain to me sometime how a single personal shield costs as much as an entire battalion of the Atriedes' best troops, but it all works after a fashion. At any rate, stuff in your hand (house cards) will generally be Personas of a generic type (like the Guard Commander or House Mentat), battalions of troops or other bodies of people (like the CHOAM Delegation), weapons and defenses for both individual personas and your legions, and fortifications or other equipment for your holdings (the 'Thopter Base, Harvesters, Command Posts, and so on).

This deployment mechanism, however, applies only to generic men and equipment, all of which everyone can have as many of as they want. If you want to deploy the unique heavy-hitters associated with a house (Leto, the Baron, Paul, etc.), actual chunks of land (at this point, Fiefs are all various holdings on Dune, like Arakeen or the Open Bled), or Charters (various miscellaneous revenue sources), you have to deploy from your Assembly of three imperial cards, kept face down next to your draw deck (although you may inspect them). This is done by picking a card and flipping it over to start an auction for it, beginning at its printed deployment cost. High bidder wins - if it's you, you pay the high bid and get the card. If it's somebody else, they pay the difference between the bid and the deployment cost and get nothing. This mechanism actually works a lot better in a two-player game than with lots of players. When you have a lot of players, the primary motivation for bidding is to keep duplicate personalities that you are using out of other player's hands; if you have a Leto in your deck, you don't want somebody else deploying theirs first. In a 5-player game, it's not to hard to figure out that if 2 people are playing Atriedes-based decks, these two players are going to have some (potentially serious) problems. Otherwise, it's hard to justify spending a couple of bucks to slow down yourself and one of the other 5 players. This concept of non-active players not actually getting anything for their high bid is a bit unusual, perhaps somewhat artificially constrained by the Golden Rule of card ownership common to all CCGs.

In the end, the bidding works out OK. I am certain a better mechanism could be devised, however.

Once you've got all your stuff out, what do you do with it? You whack people with it, of course. While at least one of the concepts behind the combat system are quite interesting, this is where the game has some critical problems.

You have 4 combat options (rites) available to you: Landsraad Rites (Battle and Duels) and CHOAM rites (Intrigue and Arbitration). Each persona is ranked (generally between 1 and 4) for their prowess in one or more of the 4 rites, and this rating dictates how well they can dish it out. Basically, the rites differ in what they can target: Battle targets Fiefs, Arbitration targets charters, and Duels and Intrigues target personas. You may engage in only one Landsraad and one CHOAM rite per turn. Basically, a combat consists of you declaring your attacking persona and the target, the defender then taking any declaration actions (by default, just saying uh...OK, although tactics or special abilities may be used here), then engaging (tapping) your attacking personas and personnel, engaging the defending cards, and then resolving the attack. Resolution is simple - add up your attack strength as printed on the cards, and apply that force to
your choice of opposing cards (with the restriction that you can't apply force to the target Persona, Charter, or Fief until all the attached troops and other attached forces have absorbed as much as they can) and if the force is greater than the resistance (printed almost invisibly in the lower right hand corner), the card is subdued (flipped over).

The key of course, and what makes the system not completely trivial, is that action cards that affect combat can be played at every phase. Tactics may engage you before you have a chance to hit the Engagement phase and thus cancel the attack, the defender may change the target of the rite, the attacking player may use cards to declare additional rites, and so on. This is fortunate, because without these actions the combat system is pretty bloodless and it's more or less impossible to actually get anything done. Personally, I've gone through 3 phases of dealing with the Dune combat system.

First, I tried to play a game right out of a starter, when both players had very few tactics to influence combat (and given that each tactic can generally influence only one type of rite, basically never had the right card at the right time), and it produced a crippling first impression of the game. Basically, you pick a target and deterministically whack it. Virtually no strategy, and nothing the defender can do to prevent his choice personalities from being dueled out of existence. Whoever starts to get an edge with the strongest Dueling or Intrigue persona rapidly controls the board.

Then, we got a few more cards, and started to actually build decks and survey the available combat options, key among which is the ability to counter. If the defender can counter through a card or special ability
he can change the target of a rite, so instead of dueling with easy pickings like Baron Harkonnen himself, you end up facing Feyd (bummer). With all the cards available to affect combat, and the availability of the
counter ability, I started to think, hey, this might actually work!.

(Rules gripe #1: the rules for Dune are absolutely awful; nowhere more so than in the rules for countering, which is not a very good sign, given this is such a key game concept and only takes about two lines to accurately explain. The rulebook says that Counter operations allow the defender to change the target of the rite. The defender declares any eligible persona as the defense leader ...; clear enough, and as such, counter is granted to a defending player. However, most of the card wordings clearly say that counter is granted to an individual persona, who can then counter - the defending player is not actually allowed to select any available leader as the rules clearly say. For example, Count Hasmir Fenring says: Kazimierz [sic] may counter during duels targeting Corrino personalities. When countering, he gains +1 resistance. This is a serious inconsistency and leaves me somewhat confused as to how exactly this was meant to work.)

OK, now fast forward to having played a few games now. You're going along quite happily, and then at some point it is likely that you will face this scenario: Your opponent, the Atriedes, has fortified Arakeen to the hilt - a couple of battalions of troops, a 'Thopter base, command post, whatever. You, as the Imperials, need to deploy your own Arakeen, and want to cripple the Atriedes, so you send Shadaam IV with 4 battalions of Sardauakar to take it out ... fair enough. You've got sufficient force to subdue everyone, it's just a question of casualties and how the tactics works out, right?

Well, not quite. Because, you see, the Atriedes will just use their Guard Commander (who reads: Guard Commander may counter during battle rites) to reassign the target to either himself or someone else expendable who has battle skill and who is cheap (depending on how you interpret the counter rule). You will, of course, crush whoever steps up and as the victor earn 1 favor for your trouble; but because counter allows the Atriedes to physically change the target of the rite, rather than perhaps more logically move additional personnel to help defend the target, your Saudaukar get rerouted and never make it to Arakeen. To heap insult upon injury, next turn your wily Atriedes opponent can probably redeploy whoever you mauled for a solari or two and repeat the whole process. This is very unsatisfying, and it forces you, as the attacker, to take out all defenders with countering ability, no matter how insignificant, through Intrigue and Duels before you can send out your troops - an especially difficult task given the normal limit of two rites (one Battle or Duel and one Arbitration on or Intrigue). Without the benefit of tactics (and it should be noted that there are as many tactics to foil your attacks as their are to facilitate them), the plethora of cheap personas with the counter ability makes it virtually impossible to get anything done - most definitely not in the spirit of the books.

Anyway, the price of being defeated in combat is subdual. Like the rest of the combat system, this is an effect that very nearly works. Whenever any rite applies sufficient force to a target persona, troop, or installation to equal or exceed its resistance, the target becomes subdued, i.e., flipped over. Then, in every Opening Interval, every card which is subdued gets a deferral counter. Essentially, anything that is subdued can be deployed as if it were in your hand, for a price of it's deployment cost minus the number of deferment tokens on it (it must accumulate at least one deferment token before it may be deployed, however). There are two catches: first, you can't redeploy troops, installations, weapons, or other upgrades until their parent persona or fief is back on-line; second, you can't redeploy an imperial deck persona, fief, or charter if someone else has deployed their own copy while you were out.

In an abstract sense, this works reasonably well. When a personnel is subdued by battle, they have taken casualties and need to be rested and refit. When a persona is subdued by intruige, they have been caputered or otherwise incapacitated for a period of time and they need to be extricated. This feels more reasonable than discarding stuff and waiting for more copies to come up in your deck. It also means that two players can battle back and forth over some piece of real estate comfortably without having to use a more usual mechanic of discard the fief and wait to draw it again.

Where it breaks down is that it is virtually impossible to actually get rid of people permanently, no matter how badly you savage them. The Guard Commander who was trampled by 4 legions of Sardaukar can be back next turn to gallantly guard the gates of Arakeen just as if he had been subdued by a single House Mentat. This makes it extremely hard to get rid of all of your opponent's chaff.

It also just doesn't feel right when two major characters (say, Paul and Feyd) duel. After all, in all of the duels in the book, one party typically winds up dead (and unless he's Duncan Idaho, we never see him again). In the game, losers of duels are just subdued like everyone else and can be back very rapidly. This lacks a certain compelling do-or-die feeling of the duels in the book.

Now, I should say that it is possible to discard vanquished targets through various special card abilities. However, we have only seen one such card - the Sandworm - so I think it's fair to say this ability is pretty rare.

While there are a few more details to your House phase I won't go in to, seeing how as I've gone on long enough, the one other key rule is that unless a card or effect is a tactic (in which case the card will explicitly say when it may played), you can only engage it to produce its effect during your own house interval - your cards are generally locked (outside of being attacked during rites) outside of your turn. While player interaction takes a hit as a result, it does greatly simplify the rules and eliminates virtually all nasty timing issues. This is a huge plus. When first confronted with some of the odd timing issues present in CCGs, most peoples eyes will glaze over. Getting rid of these is a good thing.

These are the basic guts of the House Interval. Everything else you might want to do - harvest spice, redeploy troops, blow up the shield wall, have visions of the future, and so on, is covered by card special abilities, ventures, and tactics.

Ventures are just cards that, for a price in solari, allow you to take some game action during your house interval. Tactics are cards that, again for a price in solari, allow you to modify some existing game action. These are another aspect of the game that is done quite well. Every tactic and venture card says explicitly when it can be played and what it affects; for example, a tactic might be a Tactic - Intrigue - Declaration, which means it can be played during an intrigue rite, after the attacker has declared the target of the attack but before anyone engages. Everything is resolved sequentially, so there are no timing issues, and life is generally good.

So these are the core concepts of the game. There are a few additional details (Events and some details about favor which I've largely glossed over being the key ones). Most of this stuff is tried and true from FRPG's other game, L5R, where it works well enough. Does it all work well together as a game? Well, here are my personal impressions from my experience to this point:

- While the plethora of Tactic and Venture cards does present the player with a lot of options, the actual rules of the game are not complicated. There is a fair amount of chrome, but if you have played any CCGs you will be at least somewhat familiar with most of the mechanics. Dune is getting sort of a bad rap on the Internet for being very complex, but the real culprit here is an outrageously bad rulebook. Among other things, it appears that the combat system got a significant last-minute overhaul and changes either didn't make it into the rulebook or onto many of the cards - many of the basic functional cards have texts which are out of synch with the rules. Additionally, a lot of the cards have fairly mind-bending special texts which take a while to figure out or are open to some interpretation (the texts on the troop cards are especially confusing and nobody has yet been able to adequately explain them to me. Now, I have an intuitive understanding of what they are supposed to do, but the card texts as writted defy explanation). Now, virtually every CCG that I have had exposure to (not an all-inclusive list, certainly) has had a lousy rulebook and problems with card wordings to various extents; this is no excuse, however. Now that the CCG market is becoming more crowded with quality products and the games themselves are becoming more accepted by traditional gamers, the general level of CCG rule-writing and card-text-writing simply must be improved dramatically, and soon.

- While a all of the mechanics are basically sound, whether or not they integrate to describe the Dune universe is another matter entirely. There are many irritating details which make it hard to get behind the game. The oddity of the combat system is the most obvious problem, but the whole portrayal of the Fremen is another. While in the book the Fremen possess such critical advantages as a nearly endless supply of cheap, battle-ready manpower that is right there on Dune, the Fremen in the game are for some reason the most expensive troops to deploy to Dune, per point of battle strength. Also, for some reason the Fremen home fief is not Sietch Tabr. The whole bidding system, while again fundamentally sound, feels very strange; the mechanism of bidding and paying money purely to deny your opponent a resource is certainly a mechanism that would be used only in a CCG. The premise - that of playing the role of one of the lesser houses - is a potentially promising one, but in the end it's hard to swallow. After all, Duke Leto, Paul, Emperor Shaddham IV, Baron Harkonnen and the whole crowd are under your direct control once bought and paid for. In the end it feels much more like you are playing the major houses directly. There are also certainly a lot of made-up material in the game, both characters and ventures. One would have thought that there was plenty of material to cover in Dune without making stuff up. Oh yeah, and if you shoot a Lasgun at a Shield there is no thermonuclear explosion. Sigh. I always enjoyed those in the boardgame.

- The art is extremely mixed. There are a lot of decent pieces and a few that are quite good, but as usual there are many that are plain bad (the Imperials get especially short shrift). This is another problem the CCG genre has to cope with, since obviously obtaining such a large number of pieces and keeping any kind of consistent quality must be incredibly difficult. I think clever CCG designers need to come up with some clever way to improve the overall quality and keep out the real losers.

Since this is after all a CCG, one has to include a discussion of packaging in any review of the game. At the bottom level, the Dune packaging is fair enough - while not generous, the 1:5:9 booster distribution is typical with only ICE, Deciper, and more recently Precedence really taking meaningful steps to make these games less outrageously expensive for players (it should be pointed out that Deciphers games are still brutal on the collector, but casual players will pay less for reams of extra commons. Whether or not playing Star Wars casually is a meaningful experience is a separate issue). There is some packaging gouging going on with the starter decks; while each starter has 3 of the basic house personalities fixed (so if you buy the Atriedes deck, youll get Paul, Leto, and Gurney), the remaining characters are distributed one to a starter deck. So if you want to get Jessica or Thufir, you are going to have to buy a lot of starters and pay for a lot of packaging and needless duplicates. Very bad. It also appears that there are some problems with specific (non-fixed, naturally) personas like Piter DeVries being extremely powerful due to their ability to force the discard of subdued cards. Also, there are a number of very powerful rare cards (all the cards that allow you to discard subdued cards are rare, and extremely powerful and versatile, breaking the reasonable axiom that rare and powerful cards should at least be hard to play).

However, the real packaging issue here is one of how FRPG is marketing the whole Dune CCG product. Dune is a 301 card set - pretty large, and expensive to collect a substantial portion of the cards. The kicker, though, is that you don't get a set which covers even a significant portion of the first Dune novel. Basically, this set leaves off with the Atriedes occupation of Arrakis, and as such is more of a prequel than actually covering any of the activity in the Dune book.

This is OK in and of itself, I guess. However, the fact of the matter is that I think a lot of people will buy this expecting a complete Dune game, which this is most certainly not. Let's be honest here; from Herbert's works, we know the Landsraad exists and that it is a voting, governing body. We know CHOAM exists and that it controls the spice. However, we really dont know anything about how these bodies operate, what their procedures are, and what Leto's goals, as a member of the Landsraad, are; we know he is gaining support with the lesser houses and is becoming a threat to the Emperor, but why this is or what his platform is is always unclear. And so, Dune: Eye of the Storm is not really a game about Dune, but a game of FRPG/LUGs impression of how they think politics works in the Dune universe. This, in and of itself, is not a problem; but Dune: Eye of the Storm is not a Dune game yet.

The entire Dune story will be played out through the upcoming 3 expansions, a concept that FRPG has used successfully with L5R. How well this works for you will probably depend on how much you liked following L5R's plot and how much disposable income you have, but it smacks to me of excessive profiteering. By the time the MECCG had 3 expansions, they were already well beyond the scope of Tolkien's original works and into playing the Dark Side - Lidless Eye was the third expansion. In my personal opinion, one 300-card set is already a vast medium compared to traditional (non-CCG) games, and FRPG/LUG could very easily have given us a complete Dune CCG in one set - after all, ICE did no less in the first Middle Earth set. If you talk to FRPG/LUG, they will also talk about the difficulties of the rights to the book vs. the rights to the movie, which is something to be considered (although why anyone would pursue the rights to the movie first is beyond the ken of most anyone I know). However, in the end they did get the rights to the book, and despite the already significant delays they had already experienced, they would have done well to further delay the set and produce a complete game rather than the small fraction of the Dune universe that we got.

With that off my chest, what's the bottom line?

While I can't condemn any aspect of the game as fundamentally broken, you also won't find me praising any aspect of it as innovative or outstanding. While the combat system is an easy target, the problem is not that it doesn't work, per se, just that it's not very interesting and provides many more restrictions than freedoms. It's a workmanlike game - drawn heavily from L5R, they did an adequate job of producing a decent enough game, albeit without any real inspiration. The obvious quality control problems with the rulebook and card wordings (mostly tied to the combat system) are really unforgivable, but nothing that a good solid rewrite and some official errata followed by a patched up 2nd Edition couldn't fix.

However, in the end the game fails to capture the compelling form of the novel. Where the MECCG successfully homed in on key aspects of Tolkiens work and did an admirable job of simulating it, Dune: Eye of the Storm lacks a fundamental understanding of Herbert's works and so fails to capture the spirit of Dune. I dont think the designers asked themselves, What is this Dune thing really about? Not just the politics and intrigue, because Dune is obviously so much more than that, and for me, that is where Dune: Eye of the Storm crashes and burns. They used more of a shotgun technique to do a bunch of stuff that was vaguely Dune-ish rather than focusing one the key elements of Dune that make it unique and compelling.

The second question then becomes, well, if its not a good Dune game, is it at least a good game? Id have to say its adequate. If it cost less, maybe I could even say that it would be worth a few plays - there are elements of the game which are interesting. Unfortunately, though, in the end its like all CCGs its simply way too expensive for what it is. For a gamer, a CCG has to provide an awful lot of value to offset their very high prices - and I must respectfully suggest that Dune: Eye of the Storm does not.