Progressive-Thrash-Rock band created from the ashes of the Seattle band Sanctuary.

The few songs I've heard are really well-done, if a bit cheesy. This is what heavy-metal in the 80's should have been. Glam-Rock sucks.

Members:
vocalist Warrel Dane
bassist Jim Sheppard
guitarists Pat O'Brien and Jeff Loomis
drummer Van Williams

Discography:
1995 Nevermore label: Ill Labels
1996 The Politics of Ecstasy label: Century Media
1996 (EP) In Memory label: Century Media
1999 Dreaming Neon Black label: Century Media
2000 Dead Heart in a Dead World label: Century Media

Edgar Allen Poe nearly put his famous refrain in the beak of a very different bird entirely.

When he first lit on the idea that "nevermore" would repeat itself throughout his poem, he imagined it issuing from a human speaker, but, devising no elegant means for a rational person to senselessly repeat the word, he settled rather on attributing the line to an irrational animal. The first to suggest itself was naturally the parrot, but, as Poe writes in The Philosophy of Composition, that bird was "superseded forthwith by a Raven as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone." Indeed, it's hard to imagine the same poem beneath slightly comic title The Parrot.

Ravens can mimic human speech. In fact, according to the American Society for Crows and Ravens, "they do it quite well, with potential vocabularies large or larger than parrots."

Nevermore is a drafting card game published by Smirk & Dagger Games. It is somewhat more complex than most drafting games, and people tend to be fairly split on the whether this is a great game of a horrible game.

The central mechanic of Nevermore is a very simple draft. The deck consists of only five different types of card, and each player is dealt five cards. All players pass first three cards, then two cards, and then one card the the player next to them, hopefully collecting the cards that they want. Then players reveal the sets of matched cards; as an example, the player with the most health cards will gain health equal to the number of health cards that they have collected minus the number collected by the player with the second most. The same is done for each type of cards (health, victory points, attack, magic, and raven).

The raven cards, however, have to cancel out other cards when possible. If you have three ravens and two health cards, two ravens and two health cards are lost from your hand. The last remaining raven does get a you black magic card (if you had three ravens left over, you would get three black magic cards).

There are a number of cases where things are different. Magic cards, both light and dark, do all kinds of things: stealing cards, allowing you to draw extra cards, making people trade hands, giving health, and etc. Any time you have five of a kind you get a special bonus, each type of card having a different bonus. And if you lose all of your health, you don't die, you just turn into a raven... which comes with a whole different set of rules.

The win conditions are to get 6 victory points, to be the last human alive, or to be a raven and turn everyone else into ravens.

As you can see, this is a pretty complicated game. The first few times you play, you will have to refer to the rule book multiple times, and every new player will have lots of questions. Given that the basic play isn't really different form Sushi Go or Tides of Time, it's safe to say that this game exists specifically for people who like complicated game play. There are benefits to this; there are lots of different possible strategies to pursue, you can fail miserably but still be an important force in the game (and even come back to win), and you are not likely to get bored even after repeated play.

However, you do have to like complexity just for the sake of complexity. The unpredictableness of other player's hands and the often chaotic results of the magic cards make it hard to plan a safe strategy, and because the other players can always gang up on you and attack you directly, having a clear path to winning is not even desirable. This is also longer than most drafting games, taking about 45-60 minutes for a game.

Overall, I don't tend to recommend this game to people. But a lot of people do like it, and it certainly isn't boring. If this sounds fun, and you find the more simple drafting games boring, it might be worth giving Nevermore a try.

Nev"er*more` (?), adv.

Never again; at no time hereafter.

Testament of Love. Tyndale.

Where springtime of the Hesperides
Begins, but endeth nevermore.
Longfellow.

 

© Webster 1913.

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