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Slay the Spire Daily Challenge

I was initially hesitant about the Daily Challenge mode added to Slay the Spire a few weeks ago, but I have been enjoying it a lot. I would not say that all the modifiers are fun, but when the daily combo works, it is a hoot. Today’s combination of tripled cards and starting strength adds value to the 2-energy attacks (Heavy Blade, Perfected Strike) that I often find difficult to fit into my deck; today, I just took as many as possible and laughed my way through fights one-shotting things. Yesterday was a beautiful cacophony of shivs that got me the achievement for killing a boss on the first turn.

Daily Challenge mode is sometimes a challenge, but it is often just different in ways that change the normal balance of the game. For example, one of today’s modifiers adds +3 strength to you and every enemy. That normally seems like a bad bargain, but you act first, so if you can destroy everything quickly, it is almost pure profit. One modifier gives you fewer cards and more relics, a trade I like. Another makes curses a resource and encourages you to take more of them.

I am above 50 successful runs, so the added variety is nice as is the chance to play with more and different toys. Adding modifiers can make cards you always skip into must-haves. My previous Slay the Spire post talked about the joys of embracing randomization a day that was a good approach. Some modifier combos just make it harder, which I can already do with Ascension mode, but the real fun comes in trying to turn the day’s disadvantage into an advantage by shifting your min-max approach.

: Zubon

Scale and the Long Tail

I am a Midwestern suburbanite, visiting the big cities of the East Coast this week. Walking through Time Square, I reflected that it was a lot like home, only bigger, more of everything crammed together. Which is of course wrong, because at larger scales more is different, which in many ways has become the point of the internet.

Before modern travel and communication, your community was the 150 people nearest you, and you had little say in the matter. Now you can go online and pick your community from 100,000,000 people (as well as the people physically near you). And things that could never be sustained in a small community can find a home once you can unite across those wide numbers.

An economist’s blog post (that I can’t find today) remembered his first time seeing pizza for sale by the slice. You need some population concentration for that, otherwise there is not enough of a market to make the economics work.

When Ravious and I met in 2002, it was in A Tale in the Desert. About a thousand people in the English-speaking world thought it would be super fun to come together and digitally pretend to live in ancient Egypt, doing things like making bricks by hand and pushing limestone blocks for the pyramids. (The game is still going in its latest incarnation.) A smaller subset around a dozen thought it would be fun essentially to form a crafters’ commune, which we did under the name “Southren Star Guild.” (Old typo, adopted as a permanent name.) After joining, I saw the guild forums, where existing members thought no one would sign onto a guild charter that more or less said, “You own nothing, we work together as a guild and everything belongs to the guild.” Which, funny enough, is more or less exactly the community I was looking for in an ancient Egypt digital simulation.

One of my online communities recently overlapped with someone who explained that they had taught classes on erotic Colonial America roleplay. (Someone out there just laughed and then remembered that he cybers with elves.) Because there is a market for that, and not necessarily just in America, if only you can find that percent of a percent.

So in New York City, we saw a musical on Broadway. Broadway shows and others tour through our hometown, but Broadway is not just the same thing scaled up for 73 times the population. A population of 8.5 million can support niche shows that will never tour, and it is the proving grounds for what is worth touring. 8.5 million people is fewer than 100 million, but it is certainly large enough to let you pick your own community, if only you can find them.

Celebrate every time you find some weird corner of the internet where people argue passionately about rarepair shipping, substandard copper ingots, or what counts as a grilled cheese sandwich. It took a lot to bring us all together.

: Zubon

Turmoil

The game I’m trying this week is Turmoil, an economic sim about the US oil rush. Buy land, drill well, sell oil. I have had the game for a while, but I was finally prompted to play it by the release of the The Heat Is On DLC (full disclosure: I got a free DLC code).

Turmoil is a straightforward economic sim with time management. You get so long in your oil field. Your goal is to pull all the oil out and sell it at the highest price possible in the time available. Later levels add more complications to the maps (rocks, diamonds, natural gas), and a campaign provides advancement and upgrades. The goal is to make as much money as possible, in the long run buying the mayorship. The expansion brings natural gas in as a factor earlier in the game and adds treasures and magma, along with some new subsystems.

Turmoil is enjoyable in small doses. I should be the target audience for this, but I did not enjoy trying to sit down and binge play. It is too repetitive for that. There is very little difference between levels, and each stage of the campaign has you going through that sort of map 10 times. You can quickly burn through a couple of drilling days at a sitting, and that is enjoyable enough for casual play.

I am enjoying it enough to finish the campaign, but probably not enough to recommend it. People who like this sort of thing may like this sort of thing. I usually like this sort of thing, but it lacks depth and variety. On a sale or in a Humble Bundle, it would be worth the time to play.

: Zubon

Whether or How

I frequently rail against games where winning or losing mostly comes down to a roll of the dice, on the basis that a game is taking away players’ agency if randomness is more powerful than their decisions. But I just had a game where I enthusiastically embraced randomness and had a great time, and I may want to elaborate on an old distinction between variability and uncontrolled randomness in play. Or as I am thinking of it this morning, randomness determines how you win, not whether you win.

The classic example from that link would be games with variable powers. You get a random character, faction, whatever at the start of the game, and you plan around it. Maybe this time you are the warrior king or the kobold mercenaries, with their different playstyles or win conditions. You get variation in the field of play, and your decisions build upon it.

I played yet another round of Slay the Spire this morning, still loving it. Continue reading Whether or How

Project: Gorgon on Steam Early Access

Project: Gorgon is now on Steam and currently on sale. Those of you who have heard us talk about this boutique MMO over the years may be excited about this prospect. Those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about may want to pursue the link or our archives in that category.

I am not sure I will ever pick up another MMO, but this is the top prospect for bringing me back to the genre.

: Zubon

Opinions Sought: Current Kickstarter Projects

[Update: after consideration and discussion with folks who responded outside comments, I am not backing any of these. This falls under the same rubric as not pre-ordering games without great confidence in them, along with the tabletop equivalent of “wait for a Steam sale.” The attractions of the deluxe game at full price are not great, and there is nothing exclusive to be lost by waiting. Still, please do back anything you’re really excited about, although don’t kid yourself that any of these would not have been printed without that support.]

I am interested in hearing from folks who have looked at/into the following projects, because I am considering backing but indecisive about getting yet another tabletop game without having played first. I have a mixed record of that on Kickstarter, with some gems acquired early and cheap, others that I have had trouble giving away.

Dice Settlers looks like an interesting mashup of mechanics with custom dice, empire building, and technology unlocks. The basic mechanic of the game is a bag of dice that you acquire over the game (deckbuilding), which you roll to determine your options for the round. You build the map as you “explore.” Lots of variation, several interesting mechanics, but expensive due to the fancy custom components and potentially just a mess of “throw in everything” design. Or maybe it works perfectly. [RULES LINK]

Edge of Darkness looks like a hella gamer game, although probably smaller than it looks when the components are in perspective. Still, just that box looks threateningly huge. There is a lot going on there with card-building (insert sleeves to change cards over time), group deckbuilding, variable locations, and worker placement. I like most of those, but it seems like there is a lot going on here and I have not digested it all. I haven’t even read all of this one, I am just taken by the apparent scope of it. [RULES LINK]

Sorcerer City is the other game I had looked at recently, but if I never played Carcassone that much, I cannot see me playing Carcassone plus Dominion plus whatever.

My recurring theme here seems to be that these games are tossing together a lot of mechanics, and I am not sure if that is exciting or a mess. Your thoughts?

: Zubon

“Language Independent”

I frequently see games try to minimize the use of text. This expands their market, internationally as well as across ages. I frequently see games do this badly.

You can see the reasons to do this. If your game is really intuitive (and of course it seems intuitive to you, you made it!), it should need minimal explanation. How often do you really check the manual (ha!) or help files, or go back to a tutorial? Some people are more visual than verbal, or they prefer what they can see at a glance to what they can read in detail. For an international market, localization is easier if there is little to nothing to translate. You see this outside games too; witness the action blockbusters targeting the overlap of the American and Chinese markets. Transformers translates better than Little Miss Sunshine.

Kingdom is an example of not explaining what is going on, then pretending that is intended difficulty or discovery rather than weak design. You can triple the playtime of your game by making players learn through trail and error, then make them lose for errors. Kingdom Builder and Hyperborea are games that try to replace all in-game text with icons. Some of those are clear, some of them are too similar to be clear, and some are completely incomprehensible unless you already know exactly what they are supposed to mean.

Language independence is good. Elegant designs frequently need little text to support them, and it is unfortunate if your board game needs a companion book of rules clarifications and explanations of edge cases. But you cannot just take the explanations out of your game and pretend it still works as intended.

I must also see this done well, but the better this is done, the more invisible it is. You notice more when the lack of text is incomprehensible, rather than transparent.

: Zubon

[TT] Ascension Standalone Expansions

I was not enthusiastic about Ascension after a little while with it, but I have been exploring the expansions to the game, and it has grown on me. It is not exactly deep strategy, but it is a fun little game that does some interesting things.

The best suggestion I saw was to try most sets in pairs. Where most Dominion sets do pretty well all thrown together, Ascension favors having one or two sets of cards. The link there has a good guide to which mechanics pair well together. I tried throwing a bunch in at once, and the game just stops working. All of the interesting interactions and synergies stop working, because each set explores a different design space without much overlap. The unique mechanic in each set is not shared between sets, so mixing 4 or 5 just dilutes everything interesting. Continue reading [TT] Ascension Standalone Expansions