It's a betting game, which is damn close to me calling it off entirely. A betting game? Who thinks that makes a fun CCG? You start the game with $100 in poker chips, which you use to buy various dudes facedown. Then you choose an attribute (there are three - smarts, skill and luck) and you issue a challenge. Everybody antes in, and then you go through betting rounds where you toss in chips based on what you know about your (secret) dude and what you think you know about your opponents' dudes, based on what they bet.

There's no story, no board gamey specific table zones, only three card types, and most of your cards are facedown for the entire game. So it's not the sort of game I like. At all.

Here's where I throw you the big switch and say "Wow, damn, I really liked it!"

But not really. I don't really like it, it's only okay. It's not the Next Great CCG, it's something I may buy a bunch of once it fails in the marketplace and the price drops. So right there that makes it better than that Inuyasha game.

Two problems appear as soon as you open the starter deck: the rulebook is a mess and the card template is awful.

The rulebook's issue is that it tries to be one of those "Quick Start Rules Followed by Advanced Rules" deals. You can always translate that into "Horribly Crippled Tutorial Rules Followed by Real Rules." Every time I've tried a Quick Start game, I end up having to un-learn a third of it because it gets counteracted by the real rules. I say, get straight to the real rules. If your game's real rules can't be understood relatively quickly, then go file that bankruptcy claim now. And learn how to write your rulebook.

The card artwork looks really nice at first. Every card has actual Olde Americana photography, which is impressive and cool. When the game uses a real person's name, you're looking at a picture of that real historical dead person. That's only slightly creepy.

But after sifting through the deck, you can see that all three card types look exactly the same. The only visual difference to denote a Dude versus a Gear versus a Fortune is an icon in the top left and a lightly colored band behind the card title. The card types ought to be more distinct, so new players get an easy start and experienced players can more quickly analyze their hand.

As somebody who does work like that on occasion, the identical card frames and Wild West photography just look lazy to me. Sure, it took some time to visit the National Archives and gather all that historical imagery... but is that beige texture deal the best they could do with it? I can see the Photoshop file now: one overlay with a million photograph layers under it. Those photos are a great resource, one they didn't have to pay a bunch of artists to create (it's common knowledge that one of the reasons behind the death of Doomtown is that the last few sets didn't even make enough money for the company to pay off the teams of card artists!) I just think something much more interesting could have been designed around that photography. That one template is nice, but it's not nice enough to grace every card in the game. My guess is that they were trying to maintain an "old card deck" look and feel, but I also guess that it took one guy about one weekend to create.

The gameplay. Like I said, it's all tied up in betting and bluffing. Since your active dude is facedown, nobody knows how big a number he has in the attribute you're playing. You make a dude more of a threat by giving him gear cards, but since these are also played facedown, they could all be junk gear that you're stacking just to make him look impressive. Also, the money that you use to pay for cards gets stacked on the cards themselves... and gets tossed into the ante pot as the betting unfolds. So you can dump a ton of money on crappy cards just to make them appear bigger. Although in practice, Mike and I tended to not bluff much at all and only build up dudes who were legitimately awesome in one of the three attributes. Which, of course, meant that when one of us would walk our mega-dude into the Town Square for a challenge, the other would simply pass out and avoid the conflict. Not very climactic, that.

We did one-on-one matches since I only bought a starter and two boosters. It's probably a much different game with more people - since more players would consider themselves contenders on any given attribute - but where are we to find anybody else who has invested in High Stakes Drifter? My comic store has had the same untouched starter display box out since the game debuted, and I'm the only guy who bought one. Maybe we'll sign up for a multiplayer demo at Origins.