Arctic Stud Poker Run could be several different things. It could be the newest game in a series of shills designed to capitalize on the current poker fad by moving the World Series of Poker to Alaska. It could be a highly unusual form of alternative erotica. It could be a challenging new Track & Field derivative! In actuality, though, ASPR is a unique blend of poker, combat driving (on snowmobiles), and racing - not to mention a lot of fun.

First off, let me explain how we played - after all, poker night is a night to get together with friends!

We gathered up a mix of GI.net writers including myself, SeanMike, Ophelea, Werdna, and Harm. We met in Teamspeak and got folks through any technical difficulties that surfaced. We added a bot or so (depending on the night) to round out the competition, and off we went. We played for three nights, with no fewer than 3 players (and a bot), and made our matches 7 races long - with the highest money total at the end proclaimed the winner.

Now let me explain how a poker game works when you're also in a race across the arctic and exchanging various forms of projectiles while riding a snowmobile...

Everybody ("everybody" being the racers, which are chosen from a pool of 32 comedic characters that range from cartoon Vikings to gremlins to voodoo priestesses) starts at the starting line and hauls butt for a pile of snowmobiles. Some may be upgraded from previous races - so go for the good ones! After hopping on your sled, you take off in search of 30 scattered poker cards that are distributed around a course rife with ice floes, powder patches, and cliffs spread across trailer parks, burger joints, gas stations, and ski resorts. You and your rivals will be exchanging gun, dynamite, and rocketfire - so watch your butt as well as where you're going.

A mini-map points you to the poker cards, though it doesn't show you WHICH cards you're headed for - that can only be figured out through visual contact. It also points you to weapons, food items (which restore the health of your rider), turbo fuel, and sled upgrades - so keep an eye on the radar for maximum joy.

As you find items, run over them and grab the goods. You can only hold 5 poker cards, but a logic engine figures out all possible hands based on the 30 cards in play, so if you run over a 6th card it figures out whether or not to grab it, and if so which card to drop in exchange. No matter how good their algorithms are, they can't be perfect, so if you run into one of the relatively rare instances where the logic engine isn't doing the right thing - dump your cards and grab the ones you want manually. (An example of this is when I found 3 of a kind, all right next to each other. None of the three INDIVIDUALLY bettered my hand, so the logic engine didn't pick them up. I dropped all my cards, grabbed the three of a kind as well as the pair I had been holding and bingo - full house.)

While you're building up your hand, you get missiles (heat seekers!), dynamite packs (think mines), and machine gun/armor/speed upgrades that increase your ability to inflict harm on other racers. Why do you want this? Because one of those bastards might have YOUR card! On the first night we played, I hunted down Harm because he had a King I wanted. 4 rockets and a machine gun burst later, his sweet, sweet king of diamonds was mine.

So, you have a full house - now what? Head for the finish line! First person to cross starts a 90 second counter, and their poker hand is "locked". Every subsequent person that crosses the finish line with 5 cards also has their hand "locked" and is in the running. If you're locked in, you could go hunting for people that haven't finished to cut down on your competition, but beware: if you get "Blow'd Up" you may lose your cards ... which really sucks. So choose your post-lock strategy well.

A game may be timed (ex: as many rounds as we can get complete in 15 minutes), it may be round based (ex: 7 rounds total), or it may be tournament based (go broke and you're out!). But, the ability to organize short games could really appeal to those with time concerns. Rounds have an ante that slowly increases, and those who feel that their hands are strong can "bump" the bet to double ante. If your hand sucks you can always fold, and minimize your losses - but if you luck out and find the magic poker chips your ante is covered, so why not go for it!

The real fun comes because you can (sometimes) see what cards your opponents have. In "open" rounds you always see all cards. "Stud" rounds show two cards and hide three, which brings bluffing to the table! Show a pair of aces, bump the bet, and the guy with two pair might fold even if you have nothing else. There are, of course, also closed hands in which all cards are hidden and nobody can see what cards are in anyone's hand.

ASPR is an excellent presentation of the classic "closed system" game. Cards are your resource, there aren't but so many to go around, and everyone (typically) wants a similar group of cards. Thus the combat! Revenge is a part of it too, as sometimes you're more interested in winning a fight out of spite than for any real strategic reason. In this spirit, you can place bounties on people - with the reward going to whoever makes the kill.

OK, that's about it for base mechanics. So - what did we think? I'll break that down into three sections, the strategic, the technical, and the thematic.

I'll start with the easy one - which is the thematic presentation. All of us appreciated the settings and characters of the game. There are a lot of laughs to be had when considering the backstories of the characters and how they fit into the beer-soaked backdrop of a northern town dealing with an evil corporation. Being able to race through the EvilBrau Brewery is a hoot. The feel of the game is nice and cartoony, while still conveying enough realism to be practical in the areas which call for it. Sounds and character comments are a little limited - but no more so than in a ton of other games. All in all, the mood of the game is appropriate to the expected gaming environment, and we as a group had fun running across a variety of funny things.

Technically, Arctic Stud Poker Run is both accomplished and lacking. From a hardware perspective, we had one player running on a very old machine with no issues - but we had another that was experiencing a problem where his game got laggier the longer he played. It supports gamepads, and I myself played using an XBox 360 controller with no issues. Sadly, there is no way to configure your controller if you don't like the defaults, and the same problem extends to the standard keyboard setup. It's like it or lump it - and for us this was pretty annoying. Lastly, the game could stand some more documentation. There were some things we "kinda got", but weren't sure about the exact in-game mechanics.

I'm going to tackle the strategic bit in two sections. The first is combat strategy and the second is poker strategy. I'll mix and match a little as needed, but first up is the combat:

For combat, I'm going to present the problems, and then some solutions we discussed.

Almost everything we disliked about the combat was due to rockets, their relative over-poweredness, and the fairly common availability of said weapons. From what we can tell, once rockets are locked onto you, the only (practical) option you have is to bail from your sled, let the rockets hit, and make a break for your sled to get back on. In this time you're relatively helpless, but it's still hard for your attacker to do anything to truly damage you. It's more an annoyance on both sides. In theory, once you've forced someone to bail from their sled you can attack the rider and knock cards from their hand. In practice, however, players usually make a break for their sled fast enough that you can't complete the deed - meaning you have to knock them off again ... which inevitably involves more rockets and stretches the whole thing out into an exercise of frustration on both parts. To make matters worse, this prolonged exchange typically puts both aggressor and victim at a disadvantage with respect to non-involved players. At one point, SeanMike was able to endlessly rocket me until I finally lost the card he was looking for. Even having gained this card, he'd wasted so much time on me that he failed to win the round. Rockets are, in fact, so common for us that it's not a big deal just to launch some at an opponent in the distance and trust that they'll harass him a bit while you're off card-hunting.

A separate issue is beginning the race. It is an uncomfortable furball of carnage. Everyone starts with two rockets, and nobody has any issues launching them at the first target of opportunity - knowing full well that more rockets will be easy to obtain. It may sound chaotic and fun, but eventually the first 10 seconds of a race are a chore that you hope to get through without too much losing of your sled.

Our suggestions to fix combat were varied, but they all included anti-rocket chaff of some form. We do note that if you had dynamite packs, you could dump them and they would cause the rockets to explode if the rockets got too near - but overall that seemed hard to execute. Other suggestions tended to be tweaks for the "off-sled" part of the game, running right on through my opinion that that should just be removed completely. Lastly we do suggest a "cease fire" period of perhaps 10 or 15 seconds at the beginning of each round to allow a little bit of breathing room. NOTE: our suggested fixes are more in-depth, and we're happy to share them if other players, or even the developers are interested in what we have to say.

Poker strategy was interestingly diverse, and revealed more places where game tweaks are needed. Harm tended to win with "big" hands, because he was typically less involved with brawling and spent more time hunting down good cards. He wound up with flushes, full houses, etc. Werdna tended to win with lesser hands, while being in a lot more of the killspam than the rest of us. He would get a basic hand and then mess with other people's ability to hunt for stuff. Both won fairly equal amounts in the early going. This proves that the theory is good, and that when people have time there are multiple avenues to victory. The problem, however, is something we learned from the bots. It is WAY too effective for the first person that gathers a pair (or similar "ok" initial cards) to grab a few more junk cards and hope for the best while hauling butt to the finish line as fast as possible. Why is this? Because nobody else has time to do much gathering either. They are forced to go to the finish or risk not making it in the allotted time and thus facing an automatic loss.

In addition, you (as the person who finished) have locked in your hand, so you can grab oodles of the aforementioned rockets and go hunting for people that are desperately trying to get a few final cards and hit the finish line. Think of it as a form of spawn camping. We all enjoyed the hunt for poker cards while building "sweet hands" coupled to casual exchanges of gunfire with people we ran across. What we found, however, was that the game lent itself too well to rushing followed by abuse of rockets.

Our solutions here ranged from a MINIMUM time limit through a minimum strength of hand to trigger the "end game" to an extension of the time allowed after the first finisher crosses. We even came up with the idea of multiple finish lines - which would thwart the ability of folks to guard the precious finishing area once they'd locked in their rush hand. We found that we didn't like using jokers - because they gave a huge advantage to whoever happened to find them. In our races, we never had a player finish with a joker but lose the hand. Again, we had some fun brainstorms on this issue and feel like there are a lot of good fixes to be had.

In the final assessment, I think we all agree that Arctic Stud Poker Run is a game with the potential to be CRAZY amounts of fun - but there is some tweaking that needs to be done. Right now there are a few too many gaps in the rules and strategies of the game, and there are a few too many frustrating tricks that you can pull with the combat that is so necessary to the game's spirit. In its current state, ASPR is certainly fun - and I think we collectively enjoyed ourselves - but your own enjoyment will probably hinge directly on your ability to absorb some of these frustrations and flaws in the game without it getting to you. Personally, I think a tweaked up "Arctic Stud Poker Run 2.0" could be one of my favorite party games ever, and I hope that the developers are willing to continue polishing their product that it might realize this fantastic potential.