Handsome American guy is vacationing in Spain when some guy in a shop asks him if he has healthy desires and gives him a centuries old antique board game for nothing. No, sir, I see nothing odd or sketchy about that. He takes the board game and gets the other characters to play it with him. Hilarity ensues. I mean evil ensues. Oh no, you die for real if you lose the game.
So it's an about evil board game that kills people. This would be a tough premise to pull off effectively under the best circumstances. They don't really pull it off here. Eliza Dushku is always good and the rest of the cast is serviceable enough. The dialogue is more than a little stilted and awkward. The plot is a mish-mash of other movies about cursed, evil stuff that's cursed. They way it is set up takes away nearly all of the suspense. There's a fair amount of CGI and it's really bad even for the time. It's bad enough that it kind of ruins the impact of some of the death scenes. The ending is just terrible. I mean throw stuff at your TV bad. The ending alone brought this one from a 5 to a 3.
