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[TT] The 7th Continent First Impressions

The 7th Continent is “a solo or cooperative ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ exploration board game,” in which you play a cursed explorer returning to the eponymous continent. It is a game of exploration and survival. It is expensive and comes in a big box with 1000 cards. If you want to know more, you could look at the original Kickstarter campaign. I backed the expansion Kickstarter campaign after hearing good reviews of the original.

This is the first time I have ever sleeved a game. That seemed like a good idea for a game that is expensive and not found in stores. In retrospect, that was probably overkill; sleeving the commonly used cards (a few hundred) makes more sense, although this provides protection against beverages and casual damage. As I mentioned, this is not as easy to replace as a set of Dominion cards. Even more than just seeing the stacks of cards, you get a sense of how many cards 962 really is when you sleeve every one of them.

My first impression while playing was “why is this not a computer game?” The mechanics are something that computers do well. The “choose your own adventure” approach is something known well in computer games, a solved problem. Making it a game rather than a “choose your own adventure” book adds gameplay mechanics, but replicating that with cards is unnecessarily complicated. It is really neat, but it seems like an expensive luxury. It is an $80 board game that could be a $20 computer game. The way that the cards work is neat, but doing this with cards seems like a lot of effort just to do it with cards. And I love me some cards, but I also like offloading mechanics on computers.

The mechanics really are not that complicated. But your first playthrough has that effect where you check the rules more or less every turn, which slows things to a crawl. Every terrain card has multiple things going on, and some of those “things” also have several things going on, so it takes an hour for a new player to explore the first island even though it is very small. You feel like you have gone through a lot, and you also feel like you have played through four cards in an hour.

My other big impression is that the game has limited replayability because of the exploration factor. Like going through a deterministic computer game or a real “choose your own adventure” book, once you have gone through it, you have gone through it. Card 10 will still be card 10 if you play again. There will be differences based on other cards that randomize and which skills and items you have available, so your path will differ, but once you have seen something you have seen it. If you have a good memory, you are following the path from before, using physical cards for the equivalent of “click everything once to see what happens,” minus skipping purely negative things from your previous run(s). Most things I have encountered so far could be variably good, but a few are just unambiguously bad, and the only variation is how badly you are hurt for checking all the options on a card. Something feels wrong about going through a game and just knowing “that’s a trap, avoid it entirely,” although the game is almost certainly balanced around a bit of that expectation.

That presents a different question of longevity and replayability. When it takes multiple hours to play the game (5-12 for a first playthrough? I haven’t logged that many hours yet), and there is a permadeath mechanic, some of the longevity comes from failing and starting those hours over. I am not saying that the game should be a cakewalk with a guaranteed victory your first time through, but there may be grumbling about “thanks for playing for six hours, everyone dies, want to play again?” And if that is how you get 20 hours of play from the first curse, because it took you a few tries, that’s … suboptimal, especially if the early game is known and the first hour is just going through the motions and seeing what items you have this time. Plus spoilers you have in your head or on the team.

So far, not a great return on investment in terms of gameplay. It has been okay but clunky doing all of this with cards, combined with an aura of doom because you don’t expect to win your first time out. The journey had better be worth it considering the time and cost involved. The game and word of mouth suggest that I should keep going, see how the first playthrough goes as I get closer to the end and get quicker with the rules, and write up some second impressions. Not yet impressed.

The game has a save state “just like in a video game” that lets you pause between play sessions, because few people play for 5-12 hours at a time. I paused at a point where that looks exploitable, so I can keep refreshing a fishing card to refill my action deck. The game mechanics seem to encourage this, while the spirit of the game seems to push against it. I perhaps should not be happy that I was attacked by a bear while fishing, but it was really helpful because bears have a lot of meat.

: Zubon

Correcting Errors

I have previously mentioned tabletop games’ publishers and their eagerness to help their customers and fellow gamers, even at cost to themselves. Today’s example comes from Serious Poulp, publishers of Kickstarter smash The 7th Continent. Production inconsistencies led to some cards having a different shade on their back (effectively marking the curse cards in the deck) and some being cut up to 1mm differently in size. Neither is a huge difference, but gamers notice these things, as you might if you spent more than $200 on a card game. Their response:

After a lot of consideration and discussion we have taken the decision, in coordination with Panda, to reprint ALL the cards for the “second edition” core box as well as for the upgrade packs provided to Veteran backers.

So yeah, here’s another copy of that $80 game you bought, because the first one had some cosmetic flaws.

: Zubon

Easy Access

Last week, I had a crash while playing Slay the Spire, the sort where you need to hard boot. I called it a night. Playing the next day, my save file was gone. Wow, ugly crash. Google led me to forums led me to where save files are kept. Okay, the backup save was gone too, and I probably just overwrote the cloud save with a newly created save file when I started the game. And it looked like I only lost the save file for the Ironclad, which would normally gate access to everything else but the other save files were there once I did whatever for re-unlocks on the Ironclad.

This led to the discovery that the save files are plain text. Well, that makes recovery really easy when I can just copy the text from one file to another. My statistics are broken, but then they were broken when I lost the first file. That is also a handy thing if you want to see later Ascensions or something; just edit yourself to Ascension 15 and now they are all unlocked. I have yet to exit mid-run and see if that opens interesting opportunities, but the leaderboards suggest that people have already found plenty of ways to cheat.

: Zubon

538 on BGG

I had somehow not noticed that fivethirtyeight.com (the site founded on political poll analysis, now expanded into sports, general news, and lots of politics) does occasional articles on board games. Being a data-driven site, they of course love boardgamegeek.com, which provides lots of data in terms of player ratings and logged play. I love data and board games.

The article of the day is about Gloomhaven, which has been atop the BGG rankings for a while as a very dense, rich game with heavy RPG elements. I have been tempted to play but would need a more dedicated, consistent group. Also, it’s $200, which is not a dealbreaker for me, but I want to get some play from that.

You can see past articles from when Twilight Struggle was #1 or on the worst board games.

As we have said elsewhere, ratings are not so much important as finding a rater whose ratings usually line up with yours. I don’t now if Kurt Loder is the best movie reviewer out there, but his ratings seem closest to mine since Roger Ebert died. BGG is full of people who have ratings globally similar to mine: serious gamers who do not like games determined primarily by chance. I am sure that I could argue with ratings all over the place, but it would be plus or minus two points. No one worth taking seriously is going to argue that Monopoly is a good game. (Monopoly was literally designed to be a horrible experience.)

: Zubon

Transparency

One thing I like about Slay the Spire is that it explains the consequences of your actions. Maybe folks consider hidden information to be Explorer content, but in a fairly difficult game with permadeath, consistent but limited information comes to “fail and die until you try every option and memorize it” or “read the wiki.”

For example, when you start a run (assuming you made it to the first boss), you get a choice of bonuses, some with tradeoffs. Many roguelikes would have you pick one of four doors with vague descriptions like, “the red door smells of blood and gold.” Slay the Spire just says explicitly, “start with half health and 250 gold.” Similarly, events in Slay the Spire tell you what your choices mean. For example, when an event offers you a choice between a banana, donut, or box, you are told the implications. There is no obvious reason why a banana would heal and a donut would add permanent hit points, so it would be just a blind pick without the info, until you memorized the outcomes of the event. Or read the wiki.

Perhaps what I am getting at is that many games punish you for not reading the wiki, and it seems like bad design to drive players to the wiki rather than putting the relevant information in the game. Yes, you could count that as a spoiler or learning the game, but given that the penalty for failure is starting over from the very beginning, hidden information is closer to Fake Longevity than Explorer content. And I’m saying that as an Explorer; don’t do that for me, I hate it.

: Zubon

Puzzle Agent

Continuing to bring you the latest reviews of decade-old games, my new game this weekend was 2010’s Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent. I picked this up in a Humble Bundle back in 2013, and I just now got around to playing it because I was looking for puzzle games. I enjoyed it, but it falls on the weak side of “recommend”; certainly play it if you get in a game bundle, but I would not say that it demands a space on your wishlist.

You play FBI agent Nelson Tethers, a master of crossword puzzles who is dispatched to solve a mystery at an eraser factory. For some reason, the factory and the town are obsessed with puzzles. In a Fargo-like, small town in rural Minnesota, you will meet the locals; investigate what could be an industrial accident, missing person, or murder case; solve standard puzzles like logic riddles, connecting pipes, and assembling jigsaw puzzles; and maybe risk your life with garden gnomes. Continue reading Puzzle Agent

A Tired Developer

I enjoyed Pixoji this weekend. It is a puzzle game like Pixelo with a bit of Minesweeper, which makes sense coming from the maker of Mine of Sight, which I also enjoyed.

An aspect of being a puzzle developer I had not considered is how tiresome it must be to deal with players, especially when achievements on a free-to-play site encourage everyone to try the game. Click through to Pixoji and expand the instructions. This is a very tired person.

No guesses are needed, every level has only 1 solution (feel free to prove me wrong with an actual screenshot).

I’ve had to simplify a few levels so that certain players will stop complaining about ‘guessing’.

It’s not a matter of opinion. The levels are solvable.

Again. If I’m wrong, it would be very easy to prove me wrong with a screenshot. A comment is not a screenshot.

If you fill/grey the whole level it will highlight ONE unsatisfied hint (or else you win). Please try this before declaring that it didn’t accept your solution.

And then there are several more variations on “please stop complaining, the game is not broken, you’re just not good at it.”

I have been reading the Slay the Spire discussions on Steam, and that is more or less a recurring theme. “This game is pure random crap!” “Really, I have an 80% win ratio on Ascension 15.” “Getting past the second boss is impossible!” I have begun to sympathize with “git gud,” because I started doing much better once I got gud.

: Zubon

Slay the Spire Ascension

Ascension in Slay the Spire is more or less the opposite of ascension in Kingdom of Loathing. In KoL, ascension is New Game+, where you start over with more power and options. In Slay the Spire, ascension is a progressive hard mode, where you start over with less power and increased difficulty.

Ascension has the merits in game design. It adds an optional hard mode, which is great for players who have mastered the base game and are looking for increased difficulty. It is progressive, with 15 increments of difficulty that are cumulative. You need not play at the highest difficulty level you have unlocked, although that is the only way to unlock the next one. Ascension progress is not lost on failure; you can try that level again.

The downside is that not all the difficulty increases add more fun. Players tend to like dishing out bigger numbers, but they rarely seem excited about being hit with them. Six of the fifteen ascension levels are increasing numbers (damage, health) on the enemies (regular, elite, boss), plus shifting the odds of negative outcomes on events. Three of the difficulty changes are lowering your health (start damaged, heal less after bosses, lower max health). Three are reducing your resources (less gold, fewer upgrades, weaker potions). The other two are adding a curse (dead card) to your deck and increasing the number of elites.

This last seems the most interesting. Increasing elites is usually a good thing. Better players with stronger decks seek out elites, because beating one gives you a relic, which then gives you more chances for synergy and higher power. If your deck cannot beat elites consistently, it is going to have real trouble beating the boss. I am not yet to the highest levels of ascension, but I am led to believe the pendulum swings the other way later, when the increased damage from number-boosted everything means you cannot afford to fight as many elites as in the base game.

That also becomes a point where increasing numbers cross a threshold and do something more interesting than just increased numbers. You want more elites because you want more relics, so power yields more power. Once you cannot spare the hit points for the elites, that synergy goes in the other direction, less power yields even less power. That is an interesting and elegant outcome from a straightforward shift, although it seems like a lot of tweaking of numbers to get there.

I am gradually making my way through ascension mode on the two available characters because it is the progress and “something new” available right now, other than the daily challenge. As I am getting into “we take away your resource” levels, I am not really having more fun. Sometimes making decisions under increased restraints is fun because of the intellectual puzzle involved, but sometimes that just restricts the range of options to the few strongest, which narrows the game rather than adding anything new.

The daily challenge mode provides a window into how ascension could be handled differently over time. By mixing in some negative modifiers from that mode, ascension runs could be different instead of just having different numbers.

: Zubon

Slay the Spire Characters

The Ironclad is the warrior archetype, and he is more consistent. The three build paths are strength, block, and exhaust. The first two are both gradual accumulation approaches, via a few powers and skills. The last is the higher risk path, burning through resources for bigger impact. The Ironclad’s best approaches involve growth, concluding with explosive impact. For example, you might use Demon Form or Limit Break to build up strength, then hit hard with Heavy Blade (which has a strength multiplier), or you might use Barricade to build up block, then hit hard with Body Slam (which does damage based on block).

The Silent is the rogue archetype, and she is more combo-based. The three build paths are shivs, poison, and discard. Discard effects tend to be weaker than exhaust, but they are reusable. The Silent is more explosive, and to my mind more fun, but depends more strongly on having combos come together. The final bosses tend to punish the Silent’s approaches more than the Ironclad’s, partly because of needing the combo to come together, and the bosses punish using lots of powers or lots of cards. The Silent’s best approaches involve quick, overwhelming bursts. For example, you might use Accuracy and one of several shiv-generating cards to make lots of quick, cheap attacks that are not so weak after the buffs, or you might use the many poison cards then shoot that up to hundreds of damage per round with Catalyst and either Burst or Nightmare. You do not need much starting poison to kill anything when you can multiply it by 81.

I enjoy the Silent more because I am a great lover of combos and synergy. When it works, it works. I would normally be more about the Ironclad’s gradual accumulation of overwhelming power, but that resets each fight, and you will get a better return on a flurry of shivs than on waiting for strength to build up for a one-shot attack. But the Silent’s inconsistency means that some games it never comes together (you lose) or it might fail to gel on a big fight (you lose), so you get fun moments with a higher risk of disappointment. Playing lots of cards is fun, and the Silent gets to do that more often. That is also why I have come to love the Dead Branch on either character, because an exhaust deck that keeps serving up new options each round is a hoot, especially on the Silent where you can turn that into a cycle with Storm of Steel.

I find myself wanting to combine the fun of explosive synergy with the needed consistency for success. Maybe I need to be more militant about keeping the Silent’s deck small, but then I am gambling on ever finding the cards I need instead of hedging bets with a deck that carries more options.

: Zubon