Author: Zubon

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[TT] Ascension

I have been trying the deckbuilding game Ascension on Steam. Good sale, and it includes a bunch of expansions, so it seemed like a very inexpensive way to try the game. I have not tried all the expansions to see what design space the game has explored, but the first couple sets seem pretty shallow.

The natural comparison is between Ascension and Dominion. Ascension is a much more tactical game, based on its use of an offer row of cards rather than a fixed set of kingdom cards. In Dominion, 10 stacks of kingdom cards are available for purchase each game, in addition to six stacks of standard cards. In Ascension, 6 cards from the the entire deck are available for purchase each turn, in addition to three stacks of standard cards. In Ascension, potentially any card in the game could appear any turn, but you never know in advance which cards will be available to purchase on your turn.

This makes Ascension more tactical, Dominion more strategic. in Dominion, you should sketch a plan for the game before the first turn. In Ascension, you have no idea what options will exist three turns from now. In a four-player game, your options each round are effectively random; BoardGameGeek recommends it is a two-player game.

Ascension has fewer attacks than Dominion. The game has less interaction between players. Defeating some monsters affects opponents, but most interaction is indirect, through buying or banishing cards from the center row when you expect other players to want them.

Ascension’s dual currencies are a great response to Dominion’s victory points. In Dominion, victory point cards do nothing in the early game and are the only things that matter in the endgame. During the game, they are completely uninteresting, just dead cards. That is a catchup mechanic, as a player with lots of victory points has a deck clogged with dead cards, but that is not exactly exciting. Dominion more or less immediately set out to alleviate that with new cards: victory point cards that do other things or interact with other cards, ways to earn points without cards, and ways to remove cards from your deck but keep their points. Ascension addresses that problem from the beginning because the main use of its second currency is to buy honor points by defeating monsters. Honor points are tracked by tokens, not cards. This gives you the same need to balance cash- and point-generating cards across the game, but you are not penalized for early honor nor is the late game slowed under the weight of dead cards.

Ascension is much easier in terms of setup. Dominion starts with picking, laying out, and learning a set of cards. Lots of reading, lots of time. Ascension flips over six cards and goes. In the physical game, shuffling the single huge stack of cards must be troublesome, more so if you want to mix expansions. That is a huge stack of cards, and you are going to get unmixed lumps.

The computer version is nice in that it alleviates that problem and takes care of the bookkeeping. The Steam version is an unambitious port from mobile, not even bothering to eliminate “swipe” from text. Use of activated construct abilities is clunky, because those cards are held mostly off-screen. It takes four clicks to view, activate, and dismiss the construct. In person, you just say you are drawing a card, maybe tap the construct to show that it is used. But the computer always remembers passive abilities like construct income. Similarly, the game will give you a warning if you try to finish a turn without taking all possible options, which keeps you from forgetting to kill cultists. It also keeps giving you that warning every time you decide not to buy a low-value card or use an ability that would require banishing one of your cards.

It is not a bad game. It is quicker and easier than Dominion, and it works better with two players whereas Dominion works better with four. Maybe the later expansions shore up its weak points without taking away the simplicitly that makes it attractive to players who do not want to strategize the whole game before it starts.

: Zubon

Monster Slayers

I enjoyed Monster Slayers enough to beat it with all 12 classes, so that is an endorsement.

The early game is bad. Monster Slayers has an upgrade grind, and you will not beat the game without spending some time on it. How long is a bit of a question, since because you will be learning the game at the same time, so it is unclear how much of that is “I am failing because I do not know the game yet” and “I am failing because I do not get all my abilities until I fail X times.” (There is also better equipment you can buy in later zones but not equip until you die and start over.) My early game was probably extended because I started with the Cleric.

Start with the Rogue. Continue reading Monster Slayers

[TT] 10×10 Challenge 2018

New thing this year: more boardgames, particularly with my wife. After accumulating many games that I rarely get on the table because they require more people than I regularly have for local gaming, I have been paying attention to what I can play with two players.

This must be measured, because we must have metrics! And achievements! The 10×10 challenge is a straightforward idea: play 10 games 10 times each. We are going to do that together over the course of the year, so 2x10x10.

So far, we are at 2×10 (Lords of Waterdeep, Voyages of Marco Polo) + 1×5 (Hardback). That’s not bad for late February. Committing to spend time together is good.

: Zubon

Roguelike Deckbuilders

I picked up the nearest competitors to Slay the Spire: Monster Slayers and Dream Quest. If you were to put them on a spectrum from “roguelike” to “deckbuilder,” Dream Quest seems clearly the most roguelike, Slay the Spire the most of a deckbuilder. Hearthstone’s dungeon run stands beside them as a mess of randomness that has elements of the two genres without doing much coherent. I am setting it aside for this discussion.

The frustrating thing about these two other games is the need to grind to unlock things. There are unlocks in Slay the Spire, but not just 6 for each class, and they are not necessary to beat the game. Monster Slayers and Dream Quest both have many unlocks, and you need to grind to have a chance at the later maps. A skilled player could sit down to a fresh install of Slay the Spire and beat it. I do not think that is mathematically possible with Dream Quest or Monster Slayers. There are just too many upgrades that you unlock.

Dream Quest was not a lot of fun, so I set it aside after what seemed like a fair test. Bonus points for having poor stick figure graphics that show what West of Loathing is doing the right way.

Monster Slayers is a better game, but it lacks an enjoyable beginning, middle, and end. If you have not completed enough unlocks, you cannot reach the end. If you have enough upgrades to reach the end, the beginning is trivial. It shows growth across runs, but within a run, the first half or so is of trivial difficulty, and you are just seeing how your deckbuilding options fall out. I am interested in seeing how the lategame looks now that I have enough grinding under my belt to get to it. At least the grinding is once overall then once per class, rather than needing to be repeated per class. Most of the upgrades are shared across classes.

Of the four implementations I have tried, I favor Slay the Spire. Please mention if you have seen other variations on this theme or deckbuilding games making use of the options that computers bring.

: Zubon

Local Maximum?

“What got you here won’t get you there.”

I am getting better at Slay the Spire. I can now consistently get to the final boss. But I am pretty consistently losing there, and I am wondering whether my approach is at a local maximum. To borrow a metaphor, ladders only go so far up, and if you want to climb higher, you need to climb down and start over on a new ladder.

It may be that I am genuinely getting better and just need a bit more optimization to cross that line to consistently winning. It is also possible that I am consistently getting to the end by avoiding both good and bad risks, and therefore consistently arriving at the end underpowered. That approach will consistently get you to the end, and then you lose.

The goal is to take the good risks and avoid the bad ones. You need some good risks, assuming there are commensurate rewards. This is part of playing efficiently, learning which trade-offs look scary but are ultimately to your benefit. You need to push hard to find what the real limits are.

That is the goal for winning consistently. If you just want to win at all, dive after any risk you like. If a conservative strategy consistently gets close but does not win, a reckless strategy will occasionally win (and probably lose quickly so you can try again). What I was saying about inconsistent strategies amounts to a local maximum: you can probably win more often than I am by committing early to a strategy that depends on a few cards that may not come up, but you cannot build up a win streak that way. There are people winning consistently with long win streaks; the top of a foothill is not the peak of the mountain.

I just need to figure out how high this ladder goes. I think I have most of the deckbuilding aspect (lots of experience there) and just need to work on the roguelike aspect of picking my path (less experience there). But I could be wrong and heading down a dead end.

: Zubon

Learning

I am enjoying Slay the Spire (obsessively) and getting better at it, but I am not yet good. I have only 5 victories, whereas I understand better players can consistently get 5 in a row. So I have some distance to catch up. The basic lessons seem to be “focus on defense,” “keep your deck small,” and “no really, keep your deck small, skip like half your rewards.”

Any recommendations for folks to watch or listen to for tips? I see some suggestions that are extended versions of the above, but at least half the suggestions I have seen would be good for improving your odds if the combo comes together but not consistently. For example, suggested cards to pick with several essential pieces. You cannot reliably get essential pieces in Slay the Spire.

A disappointing thing is that there seem to be few viable approaches for long term success. There are a few “win condition” cards or combos, and you plan around whichever approach becomes viable. Both classes need massive defense, and offense is usually one of two big strength boosters in red and poison or shivs in green. The path is narrower than I had hoped.

: Zubon

Smaller Units of Randomness

Slay the Spire gives the player many small decisions where Hearthstone’s dungeon run uses a few larger decisions. The big swings are more exciting but ultimately lead to more frustration, as losing one big roll ends your run while you can easily recover from a few bad small rolls.

For deckbuilding in either game, the decision you are making at any given time is about the same: pick one of three. The total amount you are deciding is roughly comparable, a couple dozen cards. Hearthstone groups those into big chunks, where Slay the Spire lets you pick cards individually, or skip if you don’t like those options, or collect gold to shop from larger selection pools, or remove or upgrade cards. You get more options and you feel more in control. I cannot tell you how many times I picked a Hearthstone artifact or card pool and then got almost nothing to go with it.

High stakes are exciting! Talent trees that give you 1% bonuses each level are boring! But small decisions are more impactful when the big decisions are mutable. Adding Arthas to my deck is more exciting than upgrading a card in Slay the Spire, but the choice of whether to pick Arthas is usually overdetermined. Maybe his card pool is clearly the best, or I already have a Cloak of Invisibility so picking a taunt pool is clearly bad… What I am getting at is that there is not much deciding going on, so much as recognizing what works well or badly given what was available/decided previously. You make exactly 11 deckbuilding decisions in a Hearthstone dungeon run, of which maybe 2 or 3 have any tension.

The stack of the deck is another source of randomness. In Hearthstone, you get 1 card per round, and you do not expect to see all your cards in a typical game. If you get your dungeon run artifacts in the first few turns, you win. if they are on the bottom of your deck, they don’t matter at all. You lose to A. F. Kay if you draw the wrong cards. In Slay the Spire, you go through your deck several times per fight. There are lower stakes to the randomization, and you can lower it even further by keeping your deck size small. That shifts importance back towards your decisions, not the luck of the draw.

These two build on each other. That small decision to upgrade a Spire card matters a lot when you play that card several times per fight, versus a few times at all in a Hearthstone dungeon run. Picking your Hearthstone artifacts is the big, exciting decision on getting powerful toys, but the second one happens so late in the dungeon that you use it at most twice and often never, due to the stack of the deck. I upgraded a Spire card just before walking into the final boss fight, and then I played it six times.

High variability with high stakes pushes towards “go big or go home.” But the randomness determines which of those happens.

: Zubon

Higher in the Spire

After many dungeon runs in Hearthstone, I decided that I liked this idea of roguelike deckbuilder games and picked up Slay the Spire. It was exactly what I wanted, and I immediately enjoyed a four-hour binge.

A great virtue of Slay the Spire is that it is designed to be what it is. The Hearthstone dungeon run is grafting the idea onto an existing game, which has been done quite well in Blizzard games (tower defense, DOTA) but ultimately bears its full flower in a dedicated game. Hearthstone’s dungeon run starts with much greater resources in terms of art, already developed cards and mechanics, and a minion-based combat mechanic. Hearthstone’s dungeon run is bigger and bolder, flashier, and more random and frustrating. Bringing along the infrastructure of Hearthstone brings along the baggage of Hearthstone.

Slay the Spire almost certainly must have configurations that are impossible. It is a roguelike still in early release. It seems to have less opportunity to stack perverse randomness on top of more perverse randomness. With practice, I have become rather good at the Hearthstone dungeon run, but I would be surprised if I could sustainably win more than a third of the time. I get the sense that Slay the Spire takes the same idea and gives it a much higher skill cap, along with more manageable randomness.

: Zubon

Sequel and Expansion Exhaustion

I started Civ VI, but it failed to grab me. It felt a lot like going back to an old MMO after a few expansions: all the mechanics are slightly different, in a way that either inspires or alienates you. Some of the mechanics have the same name but changed, some are more or less the same thing but were renamed to a new system, and there are a few new things that synergize with all of that. I feel like I would need to relearn a game I have already learned at least five times.

It feels like an uncanny valley. If it were less similar to what I already know, I could start on a clean page. If it were more similar, it would be a new edition of something I already know, off to the races. It is disorientingly somewhere in between, where the familiarity makes it more alien.

I like the notion of breaking new ground. Veteran players do not always like that (see hatred of hexes from the last edition), but if we just wanted a new version of something we have already played 20 times, we could get the latest Madden or FPS. Trying something new does not always work, but I already have several versions of Civ. I wouldn’t need to buy a new one if this were just the same thing, started over without the systems that DLC will put back in.

Also, my first game started surprisingly cramped. Within a 7-10 hex radius, I have at least two other civilizations and three city states (or whatever they are called this time), and the only reason I don’t have more is because I started near an ocean. This is after having less than the standard number of nations on a map, so either the map is smaller than I think or the other continents must be really empty. On the forums, people speak of starting with other nations literally within visual range. The game is 15 months old, but there is perhaps some work needed before it is ready for release.

: Zubon