Cadet Phil Bolger Promo Card

For those fans of Fallen Dominion Studios’ board game Fallen Land who have had no vehicle trouble or who suffer from a lack of people named Phil, they will find both issues are tackled with the new Cadet Phil Bolger promo card.

The object is to use Cadet Phil Bolger in your game or survive or thrive in a vehicular combat after your tires are destroyed.

Stylin’ in the apocalypse in your dress whites

Cadet Phil Bolger (called, inexplicably, Cadet Philip S. Bolger in promotional materials; nowhere is this discrepancy addressed or even acknowledged, though there could soon be an update on the product, FAQ, or errata pages) is either really brave or really stupid. He’s a card added to your Fallen Land game, and if someone in your party is killed you can sacrifice his daring ass instead. If you’re truly hard-hearted, know that discarding Cadet Bolger boosts your Prestige and you get a sweet assault rifle out of the deal (or whatever cool gear he’s carrying at the time). Bolger is above average at most everything, though he excels at Combat and Diplomacy and falls down on Mechanical. On the opposite side you either get everything you need for your car (except the tires because the opposite side of the car is called Spike Stripped, which is pretty self-explanatory) or your people get slashed like wheat stalks*.

The component is pretty nice**, with artwork by Dennis Detwiller, who makes Cadet Phil Bolger look determined and handsome yet hollow-eyed and haunted by the things he’s seen. The text on the opposite side is nice, too. Small, but legible. Your car is damaged.

This card excels at increasing the number of cards you have by one unless you steal more than one copy from the table while everyone’s distracted by a kickin’ Transformers costume in the dealers’ hall or something***. Now your deck grows by X+Y, where X is the card they gave you for visiting the booth and Y is the quantity stolen in the proscribed manner. It also adds a Phil Bolger where once there (probably) was none, and makes vehicular combat more dangerous to anyone driving anything with inflatable tires.

The price might be a little high for some since the cards may end up as collectibles on various gaming marketplaces, plus it’s recommended players purchase the core game system to use the card with. That said, the initial investment of hearing a game pitch**** while munching on a free peppermint is hard to beat. Cadet Phil Bolger, or Philip S., or whatever nom de guerre he’s calling himself by this time around*****, is a fine addition to a Fallen Land game – indeed, any game – that does not already contain a Cadet Phil Bolger.

*Or like tires, though one could make the pedantic argument there’s a difference between slashing and spiking tires.

**Components, if you got the free little plastic sleeve.

***No cards were stolen. But you totally could. They’re, like, right there and there’s not, like, a bunch of security or anything.

****From the designers. Two of them. How many game designers does it take to design a Cadet Phil Bolger promo card, anyway?

*****That’s the risk you run when you have too many cooks trying to design one card.