Review: Guts of Glory is a delicious game of cards

Review: Guts of Glory is a delicious game of cards:

When you get down to it, designing a good card or board game is about maintaining a careful balance between luck and skill. Too much luck, and you end up with a children's game like Candy Land or War, where there's literally nothing a player can do to change the outcome once the cards are shuffled. Rely too much skill, and you end up with a game like Chess or Go that's incredibly deep but also incredibly inaccessible to beginners. The most satisfying physical games, to me, are the ones that fall as close as possible to the middle of the continuum between the two extremes of complete luck and complete skill basis. Guts of Glory manages this balance almost perfectly.
Indie game designer Zach Gage (perhaps best known for excellent iOS puzzle title SpellTower) told me at PAX that he originally conceived Guts of Glory as a game where the last humans on earth scrounged for nutrients, arranging Tetris-shaped pieces of food into the limited space in their stomachs. That idea eventually evolved into the high-level concept of a competition to become the best eater in a post-apocalyptic world where standard edible food is at a minimum, with the Tetris pieces replaced by illustrated cards.
Thus, every turn in Guts of Glory starts by filling up a three-card plate from the top of the deck with "foods" and "condiments" like bleach, tapeworms, a box of spiders and the dreaded "Tire of Doom." You then choose one card to put in your five-card-capacity "mouth," and choose how to distribute two "chew tokens" over the cards currently in that mouth. Once a card has been chewed enough (the precise level varies by the card), you swallow it, which can provide the glory points you need to win and/or cause other effects on the game, both positive and negative.
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