Steve and I did finally get to play Clout Fantasy. It’s good. I would even venture to say that it is a better Diceland than Diceland. Thing with Diceland is that it’s both very random and very chaotic, which are not the same thing. The chaos in Diceland is made of the unrandom parts, the parts that are kind of knowable, in theory, but you’re never going to know them, without being some kind of savant or putting in way too much work ahead of time. The random factors in CF have been stripped to the bare minimum – there’s no directionality and one side – so all the cognitive load you have is the inherent qualities of the chip, and of course remembering what all the damn special abilities do. The set of abilities is pretty diverse up front, so that’s not inconsiderable, and I can see this game bogging down for some players as a result… but not as much as they would if you analyzed all the knowables in Diceland.
Anyway, it turns out that the price point is not a disaster – $15 gets you 30 chips in the form of two fixed, well-matched stacks that have very decent replay value. That price might have been a GenCon special but I don’t think so. I know that the boosters will be $2.50 for two chips. The boosters could have one more chip in them and I’d be happy, but having each player add four chips every week would not be an unreasonable way to grow the game.
Finally, playing on the carpet is fine as long as you are not anal about allowing rethrows for things that roll away to someplace inconvenient. Mind any furniture that you cannot reach under without injury or paralyzing fear. Clout safely, everyone!