Category Archives: Game Reviews

Gib Diretide

Happy Holidays to all my gorgeous readers. And Happy Holidays to you too, Derek.

It’s been quite a year; I think we can all agree on that. November was particularly hectic for me. Partly because of Nano. Partly because of a pandemic. Partly for other reasons. I’m exhausted and needed a little recovery. Now I’m back into editing the third novel in the Red Sabre series. Though, I’ve been speaking to Kait, and we have some lovely ideas for the new year. Hopefully something will shake out for that.

Anyway, I want to get a couple of blog posts out before we wrap up 2020, put a little bow on it then shove the entire year in the attic and forget about the whole darn thing until we die and someone has to clear our junk out. They won’t necessarily be the most exciting blog posts but hey, at least I’m fulfilling my duties in writing them.

This one is actually going to be about Dota 2 content. So if you’re disinterested in all that jazz, feel free to pop back later in the month.

However, I wanted to discuss Valve’s most recent event because it has been rather interesting and I’ve been tossing some words around in my head about it. And where else am I going to share my useless thoughts on a little seasonal game mode in a free-to-play computer game that’s pretty niche in terms of computer games?

So, Dota 2 has been around for quite some time. Not only is it a sequel (of a mod) but it “officially” released in 2013 after a few years in closed beta. And while I wasn’t the first through the door, I have been enjoying the game as it’s passed through its many iterations. Now, it’s a Valve game, which is to say it’s really well made but took its time. For those who don’t know, Valve has an atypical corporate structure that encourages collaborative and self-directed work amongst its employees. While great for moral, it certainly leads to products that don’t follow your typical development arc from other companies.

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Diretide and all associated whatnots belong to Valve

First, the enthusiasm for a game just about to release is off the charts. When Dota 2 was finalizing its beta cycle and approaching it’s grand opening, there were so many updates, communiques and tools released that it was positively staggering. For instance, to celebrate Halloween in 2012 (yes, before official release), Valve wanted to showcase their own modding tools in the game by releasing a fun event mode called Diretide. Dota 2 is a game of five versus five players running around and trying to be the first team to destroy the other’s base. In Diretide, bases were removed and instead players had little candy stashes. Players ran around the map trying to collect the most candy – either through stealing it off the corpses of neutral creatures or from the corpses of their enemies before they could deliver their candy back to their team’s bucket. And, of course, you could steal it from your enemy’s bucket as well.

All the while, players were hunted by Roshan. Roshan is a giant monster that normally sits in the middle of a Dota 2 map passively awaiting for a team to come and kill him for a unique item and lots of experience. The Diretide mode was billed as a sort of “Roshan Revenge” where now he stomped across the map demanding candy from teams. Those that failed to deliver were pummeled to death at the end of his enormous claws.

After two ten minute rounds, players then came together to fight the much stronger Roshan. I believe he was even stronger depending on how much candy teams accumulated. But it was a peculiar moment of cooperation at the end of a grueling duel between two opposing teams.

It was cute for a festive event especially for a game that hadn’t received official release yet. Bizarrely, however, it was a cult hit. I remember discussing the mode with my old team after it concluded. While we appreciated the break in the regular Dota 2 format, we largely stuck with the mode for one simple reason: free hats.

I still think the enduring popularity of Diretide rode solely on the fact that the game mode was very, very, very, very generous in its rewards. Winning a round provided the victorious team with a free cosmetic. Prior to Diretide, the only way to get these were to either buy them from the marketplace or the store. I’m not even certain raising your profile rank dropped items yet at this time. Thus, people threw themselves with avarice upon the mode, yelling and screaming at teammates that may have cost them the chance of getting the precious new chapeau. Not only that, but at twenty minute long matches with a very difficult fight at the end, the mode wasn’t really relaxing even though it had ostensibly ripped out most of Dota 2’s regular strategic elements. As a test of what the game could do, it was cute. But even at the time, people were quick to point out the structural issues.

However, when 2013 rolled around, the community became rabid when there was no sign of Diretide in sight.

It was perhaps one of the most ridiculous things I had ever witnessed online. The community forums were spammed in all discussion threads with “Gib Diretide” as the players demanded the return of the mode. The fevered pitch at which their anguished cries reached extended well beyond the Steam forums or subreddits. Players began to “review bomb” Dota 2 on review sites. They would submit mass single ranking reports to drive the game’s community ranking into the toilet. Not because they thought the base game was bad. Only because they felt this was the only way for Valve to “hear them.”

Perhaps the most ridiculous display was when a whole brigand of players showed up on Volvo’s Facebook page to spam the endless “Gib Diretide” demands on their social media website. Needless to say, Volvo was confused why they were being inundated with these messages. Especially since the only connection between Valve and Volvo is literally just the misspelling of two vowels.

As I said, it was the lowest I’ve seen an Internet community stoop. Was I disappointed that Diretide didn’t return the next year and there was no word of a replacement? Sure. But I’ll honestly say the only reason I wanted the mode was for the free items. Valve cobbled together a playable version of the event mode, which was probably harder to do than it would typically seem since somewhere along the line between beta and release they had changed the game’s engine. The new version of Diretide had no item drops. While I didn’t engage with it outside of a few novelty matches, I got the distinct impression that people were thoroughly unhappy with it. I felt that was the peak example that no one actually cared for the damn mode, they just wanted easy, free hats.

After 2013, Diretide thankfully never showed its face again. Every Halloween there would be some cheeky “Gib Diretide” call but thankfully these were restricted back to the Dota 2 online communities and usually in sad threads that longed for some idealized version of a game mode that never existed.

Seven years later, and there weren’t even any more mewlings for the damn thing.

And yet, Valve went ahead and released Diretide this year.

I want to add a little context in that the annual Dota 2 grand tournament, The International, was cancelled due to the pandemic. Valve still released the compendium for the tournament, however, generating a lot of money from sales for a tournament that still hasn’t occurred. With that compendium, however, we got an excellent new event mode called Aghanim’s Labyrinth. Kait and I played this quite a lot as it was a cooperative four person romp through a rather complex rogue-like dungeon. It was excellently crafted, with a ton of new voice lines, a unique boss and quite a lot of challenging rooms. Outside of the characters, there is very little that connects it to a normal Dota 2 game. Unfortunately, it released a little late in the compendium’s run and ended when The International would have ended had it gone through.

But it demonstrated just how far Valve had come in creating custom games.

And then, out of nowhere, they drop a little trailer for Diretide 2020. I don’t know who is in charge of doing the animations for these new trailers at Valve but they are fantastic.

While seven years is quite a long time for a return of a mode, I must say the wait was well worth it. Diretide 2020 is a culmination of all that Valve has learned in custom game mode design. It looks fantastic, with a custom ink cell shading that visually sets it apart. And I can’t say how much Valve has fixed this mode. Kait and I get drawn back to Dota 2 for the International hype and then usually finish off the year enjoying the game before forgetting it until the next grand tournament rolls around. However, Diretide has been incredible for us.

For one, it’s a silly little mode. This is still a competitive 5 versus 5 mode. However, rounds are only five minutes long! And it’s a best of five so are often much shorter than the twenty minute slog of the original version. Furthermore, there’s no big fight at the end with Roshan. This is strictly you playing the game mode to win the candy rush. And speaking of the mode…

Valve created a completely new map for the game. And it is fantastic. I can finally see the appeal of Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm game. HotS wanted to set itself apart from the other Dota 2 like games by having a variety of maps with unique objectives scattered about them. In Diretide 2020, you’re still trying to collect more candy than your enemy. However, there are only two lanes that circle around Roshan’s cell. At the top and bottom of the maps are spots were scarecrows spawn three times a round. These scarecrows drop ten candies and a neutral item for whoever kills them. Three secret shops mean that you can keep on the playing field to fight it out without having to retreat back to your base to heal. And your neutral creeps spawn around two candy wells – one in each lane. These are like towers in the regular game however they don’t attack and when destroyed also drop ten candy from their owner’s bucket to the enemy team. The candy wells are guarded by a strong, tethered monster allied with the team that offers some mild defence for your base.

And quite literally every change Valve made has turned Diretide into a frantic, brawling, violent romp over Halloween candies. Roshan still pursues teams while demanding candy tributes though he can’t be fought off. And his tithe increases the more ahead you get from your opponents. Fail to feed Roshan and he’ll kill his tributary while cursing the rest of the team with a wasting disease that will constantly sap your hero’s health until it expires. Kait and I have been playing this mode exclusively and, honestly, we’d probably be playing it even if it didn’t have item drops.

But it also has hats.

Recognizing that the only reason people played the original Diretide was for hats, Valve has a candy counter for rewards in playing Dota during the Diretide season. These rewards, smartly, apply to both regular Dota 2 matches and Diretide which allows those who are only interested in the hats to keep playing regular Dota while us pub stars stick with our stupid game mode. That was sorely needed and kudos to Valve for recognizing that. Everyone gains candy points for playing a match, regardless of winning or losing (also very smart to reduce toxicity from players). The bulk of your points are rewarded for how long the game goes. So five round, close matches will give more though short three round matches means you have time to queue up for another game so it balances out. There’s a single “First Win of the Day” bonus and then there’s very small bonuses for accomplishing certain things within the mode itself. These are worth two points and given for First Blood, First Scarecrow, First Candy Steal and the like. They’re nice to pursue but since a three round match gives everyone 9 points, we’re not talking about really vital goals to pursue.

Once your reward candy counter reaches 100, you are gifted a random item from a staggeringly large list of items. These include discontinued chests which I never expected to see since I don’t spend any more money on this game outside of International Compendiums. There’s also Diretide exclusive items and two chests that you can get this season too. One is just a normal item chest. These have spooky outfits for about nine of the heroes (and I was lucky enough to get two of these to drop and I didn’t even get the pudge set out of them too!). There’s a second Diretide chest which requires a paid key to open, reminiscent of the old Team Fortress 2 crate system. These chests can be sold on the market and include a lot more items from ambient sets, immortals to immortal sets worth several hundred dollars on the steam marketplace. Anything you want from these can also be sold on the marketplace so needless to say I haven’t opened any of these “money chests.” There are some ghostly item effects that drop as well, seasonally limited to the fall and can be applied to certain heroes and couriers.

I’ve been very happy being able to farm this mode to get new goodies. And I can’t imagine that Valve hasn’t made a bundle off these sale chests considering I’ve made around seven dollars on my own from people’s enthusiasm. There were some bugs and balance issues when this first dropped. Given that Dota 2 has over a hundred heroes with an enormous skill pool, certain heroes were considerably better than others. Valve had the foresight to allow each player a single ban at the start of the match and released a number of patches to the game mode post launch to bring certain heroes in line as well. I’ve enjoyed the evolving “meta-game” around the picks and bans of Diretide as well as finding my own list of heroes who everyone ignores at their peril.

Which is to say, Snapfire is OP. Wraithking as well. I think I lost maybe three times over the entire run with those two.

So, yeah, this has been an incredible surprise from Valve and I just wanted to share some positivity over a well constructed and launched custom game mode in Dota 2.

Gib Diretide indeed.

The Kid in the Fridge

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you are pleasantly full of turkey, turnip and appreciation for the wonderful things we have in these interesting times. I was fortunate to see some of my family bubble for the festivities and acknowledge the luck and fortune that I was able to spend it with them when others are still isolated or separated. With any luck, next year we’ll look back on just how crazy 2020 was.

So, I was going to do several blog posts detailing my preparation for NaNoWriMo but I have a different course to take today. I’ve been slowly chipping away at Fallout 4 with Derek and, because I like to be on the cutting edge of discussion, have decided to dedicate today’s blog to this five year old video game. Bare with me, this will be a rant.

I readily admit that I have a complicated relationship with Bethesda’s products. On the one hand, I haven’t played anything like their open world games and there is a unique niche in which they occupy. Bethesda crafts very interesting worlds to explore. I won’t necessarily say good. I won’t necessarily say skilled. But the maps and locations they fill their little game worlds do provide a sense of wonder and exploration I have yet to find in any other place. It’s certainly a love/hate relationship, mind you. Perhaps, it is the closest I’ve come to feeling legitimately ambivalent towards something.

You see, for everything that Bethesda does right, I always find two things that are frustratingly done wrong. I applaud, however, the commitment to changing formulas and trying new things even as they pump out franchise sequels year after year. However, if there’s one area I feel you can squeak away with flogging an intellectual property, it is perhaps best in the fantasy genre.

Bethesda is best known for their Elder Scrolls games. These are Dungeons and Dragons inspired fantasy jaunts through a bizarre fantasy land of their own creation which thankfully has cleaved itself from the traditional Tolkien mould. Sure, they have elves and orcs but there’s a lot quite different about the Elder Scrolls that makes each foray into a different section of Tamriel rather exciting. I started way back with Daggerfall which was both mind blowing for its freedom and also frustrating for its obtuseness. Granted, I was a kid when I played that game so I certainly had a hard time following even simple instructions and this was back in the day when design sensibilities didn’t include mini-maps, compasses, glowing faerie lines or what-have-you to lead the player by the hand to the next set piece. I absolutely adored Daggerfall and all its weird peculiarities even if I could not tell you a single portion of its story. I think I beat it on one of my numerous games. Probably playing the weird cat-people race because I was apparently a furry in my younger years. But I’ll be damned if I could tell you anything about it.

But I can tell you all my personal stories. I can tell you about the time I was an infamous burglar – climbing, jumping and somersaulting through the streets of Daggerfall’s cities stealing from wizards and merchants alike. I remember a character being infected with lycanthropy and worrying when the full moon approached and wondering where I would wake up next hoping I was not surrounded by the bodies of innocent farmers. And I can recall joining the mage’s guild, crafting my own spells and teleporting vast distances before dying at the hands of some horrific otherworldly demon. In those days, story didn’t mean much when I could simply tell my own.

As such, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim were all enjoyable experiences. Sure, it was nice that their narratives improved somewhat. However, I went into these games knowing they would be sandboxes for playing around in a fantasy world doing mundane things like property management and farming. It’s like Stardew Valley but every now and then a dragon shows up randomly to kill your horse. In theory, Bethesda Fallouts should be no different. It’s not like I was wedded to that series prior to its acquisition by Bethesda. I think I tried Fallout 2 when I was little but played very little of it. My first true exposure was Fallout 3 and yet, somehow, I came away feeling a little less enthused than if I had just played a Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls game.

Perhaps it is the setting of Fallout that sets it apart. Yes, it takes in an alternative retro-future where the United States fell into some fevered reality of a 1950’s vision of what the world would look like in 2077. But it’s also post-apocalyptic so you’re not actually living in this strange chrome and bulbous robot future. You’re picking through its wastes. I’m not sure what it is about this world but I find it more interesting on the surface and, consequently, more apt to being pulled apart. Perhaps it’s the lack of wizards.

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Fallout 4 and all associated images and what not belong to Bethesda Softworks. Which, I suppose, now means it belongs to Microsoft.

I mean, fantasy as a genre flies by a lot given that it’s working in a world where people can wave their hands and a person turns into a toad. And certainly Fallout has never been a serious setting. New Vegas, my favourite of the franchise, has an entire area populated by talking video screens terrified of robot scorpions. But there’s a difference in tone that Bethesda seems to keep fumbling. And it’s not helped that it feels like they try and push their Fallout narratives more seriously than their Elder Scrolls.

For example, both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 hinge on a very personal connection the player has to the narrative. In both, they have a missing family member. In Fallout 3 it was Liam Neeson. And who wouldn’t want to be related to Liam Neeson? In Fallout 4 it is your actual son. So they design the game so your stakes are immediate and visceral. It applies a certain amount of incentive to picking through the canyons of discarded toasters as you search for your loved ones. Yet, Bethesda’s open world is less a world and more an amusement park. I’ve complained about this before, but there’s an incongruity in needing to find your father/son and constantly being pulled and distracted to ride each ghoster coaster you pass along the way.

Unfortunately, Bethesda’s writing just does not hold up when it’s meant to carry you through the experience. I will say there are some improvements. I’m certainly not done Fallout 4 so can’t really say how it’ll eventually shake out. I think their companions are a lot better. They are a lot more developed, probably getting up there to the worst of the New Vegas or old BioWare level of companion writing. Which is a huge improvement over their prior try where Fallout 3’s standout companion was the dog. And I think technically the Elder Scrolls games have companions but really they’re just AI decoys to pull monsters off as you scramble back and fire your spells.

However, I want to highlight where Bethesda’s writing still lags behind by committing far more words to analyzing a side quest than the quest has in itself. The titular Child in the fridge quest is easily the worst quest in the game. I’m tempted to say it’s one of the worst quests I’ve seen. And I found it absolutely baffling to stumble across it in this game that has at least tried to improve in the company’s prior deficiencies.

But first, some background. Child in the fridge is a quest that you stumble across randomly while poking around the ruins of south Boston. I received a muffled cry for help and a load knocking. Looking nearby, I found a fridge which, when approached, you could engage in conversation. Apparently, according to the fridge, a child crawled inside in order to escape the bombs but has become locked in due to there being no latch. You are requested to shoot the door off to free them.

I will take a small moment to sidebar an important conversation. I mentioned earlier that Bethesda is always trying new things with their game. This time they adopted the dreaded “conversation wheel” made popular (undeservedly) by BioWare with their Mass Effect game and has since seen widespread application. It is easily the worst system I have seen adopted into the RPG genre and significantly reduces player roleplaying opportunity. Granted, any video game is going to naturally be constrained by choices that the programmers write into it unlike a tabletop game that adjusts to your choices on the fly. However, the dialogue wheel shatters the flimsy illusion of choice in games by taking things one step further and obfuscating your choice by reducing responses to two or three words. Many times those words aren’t even found in the response and can be quite misleading to what you’re going to say. I would say this system was a natural consequence of having a fully voiced character. Nut after installing a mod that simply lists the full responses in a menu, I can honestly say that it is bad just to be annoying. I hope that it gets dropped in future releases.

Anyway, once you shoot the door, a child tumbles out and looks up at you. The child is hairless and covered in scars – identifying them as a “ghoul.” In the Fallout universe, excessive exposure to radiation can transform some people into a wrinkly, unaging mass. There’s some manner of secondary themes surrounding ghouls and their discrimination at the hands of “normal” survivors in the world. Part of it stems from the fact that, many ghouls that live for an extended period of time start to lose any semblance of higher cognitive functioning. They revert into a more genre typical “ghoul” that is a mindless monster trying to kill anything that comes near it.

So, this child who claims to have escaped the nuclear holocaust by crawling into a fridge could very well be telling the truth. However, there’s one rub. The nuclear war that destroyed the world happened 200 years ago. This is a salient point to the narrative since the main character also survived the war by being cryogenically frozen in a lab. The protagonist’s time displacement is an important detail in the narrative. Well, as important as any details are in a Bethesda game. The protagonist barely survived this lengthy internment even as all the other subjects perished in their cryo-pods. How a child in a fridge survived 200 years, presumably without oxygen and most definitely without food, is a wonder. However, things get even more bizarre.

See, the child wants to go home and see his parents. He asks you to escort him. In Fallout 4’s wonderful dialogue system your options are literally “Yes, of course” or “No but maybe later.” Regardless, you walk maybe twenty feet before a mercenary named Bullet comes up to you and asks to buy the ghoul child from you. That’s it. No explanation why he wants to buy the ghoul. No reason for why he’s literally standing several yards from the fridge in the first place. And certainly no reason why he’s low-balling the offer for the child either. This “moment” represents really the only choice in the entire quest chain. You can hand the kid over for a measly 250 bottle caps or tell Bullet to pound sand. Taking the latter, I then had to escort the ghoul kid carefully around the nearby ruins of Quincy so as to avoid an entire stronghold of mercenaries before arriving him at home.

Which comes to another problem. Not only did this child survive for 200 years in a fridge. But they were stuck in this fridge, literally on the side of the road, right beside a settlement that is explicitly looking for people like him to purchase into… possibly slavery? Maybe a circus sideshow, it’s hard to say. Bullet certainly wouldn’t.

How was it possible that this kid locked in a fridge went unnoticed for so long? Once again without food, water and likely oxygen?

And yet, strangely enough, when you arrive at his former house, you find his mother and father patiently waiting in the hollowed our ruins of a rotting two story building wearing their Sunday bests and acting like literally nothing was different. Granted they too are ghouls and both actually have the “twelve packs a day” smoker’s voice unlike the child. But it seems highly suspect when they cry out that they thought their kid was dead. Well, no shit. It’s been two hundred years and apparently you couldn’t leave your empty house to walk twenty minutes down the road to find him in a fridge.

At this point, Bullet arrives to restate his desire to purchase the child. I guess he doesn’t care for adult ghouls. Also, Momma and Poppa Fridge offered you the exact 250 dollars for returning their child. So outside of being pointlessly cruel, you have no reason to hand Icecube over to the two bit ringmaster. A short firefight later and congratulations, your quest is done!

That’s it. That’s the entire thing. It is… maybe ten minutes long and that’s because I took a wide circle around Quincy. So, not only is there really only one choice, and a shallow one at that, in this quest. It’s all over a meager amount of money and some good feels. Normally, this sort of thing wouldn’t annoying me. However, the game’s other minor quests are at least a little more involved. I mean, there’s one where you’re literally asked to go and mix paint to decorate a wall that has at least one more step involved.

But it isn’t just the brevity of the quest that irks me. I can get over a minor, throwaway task. Obviously, or I wouldn’t play video games. No, what really grabs my lion by the tail is the fact that it’s so… insipid. It’s so stupid. There was really no time put into this miniature story. The entire tale is “mercenary bad. family good. fridge thick.” And yet, there’s not a single step in this three step dance that follows any internal logic. I know that pointing out plotholes is out of fashion in these times, but there was zero effort or thought put into this chain. And I can’t even say that the effort in writing matches the effort in production. I mean, all these awful lines of dialogue had to be voiced by four separate actors. And sure the sequence is quick to program but it probably took several weeks or possibly months for it to see full implementation (granted accounting for the voice acting delay). And yet, I have to wonder over the reason for it.

I can’t imagine anyone buying a kid surviving locked in a fridge for 200 years beside a busy road. I don’t care how much radiation magic you throw at it to justify it. And then having the parents magically survive all this time without even looking for the child is even crazier. And Fallout 4 actually has some decent set pieces so I know they can write something bombastic at the very least. It’s not so much laziness that gets me as there’s a fair bit of work involved in creating video games. No, it’s the thoughtlessness that sticks out more than ever. You could have literally replaced the kid with a dog stuck in a bear trap or whatever and told the same exact story while keeping it rooted within the setting. We’ve already seen enough raiders with dogs to know they want them as pets. It stuck in a trap would give the necessary impression that you stumbled across the creature by happenstance and not include this ludicrous timeframe. And you can even save some money by not getting a child voice actor to sound off on some really bland lines.

You do lose those sweet references to Indiana Jones and Ladybug, Ladybug but considering that New Vegas already did it better, I’m not sure that’s worth it.

And then, of course, there’s some really weird implications which I can one hundred percent say Bethesda did not consider when they wrote this quest. First, not only does turning into a ghoul extend one’s life for an indefinite amount of time (certainly a point that comes up often in Fallout games) but it also halts all manner of aging. Icecube has been a child for 200 years. Two hundred years of isolation in a fridge, never growing, never interacting with anyone. Stuck forever in this perpetual nightmare of cramped darkness. Icecube has spent over two hundred times his non-ghoul life not knowing anything more than a five by three foot space. How he isn’t blinded the moment that door comes flying off must certainly be more radiation magic. But it also means that, barring being eaten by a bear, Icecube is going to exist in perpetuity as an approximately nine year old kid. Assuming he doesn’t go feral like the hordes of ghouls you murder throughout the game.

But there’s even more. Icecube is the only ghoul child that you encounter. Which does leave one wondering why there aren’t more. It’s not even a matter of programing – the developers created a model for Icecube – so they specifically chose not to have feral ghoul children anywhere else. There are no ghoul children with any of the mentally stable ghouls. There are none spawning with the ferals in dungeons. Prior games explained this by saying ghouls are infertile so they aren’t making any more. They left what happens to a child exposed to excessive amounts of radiation to the imagination. Perhaps a kid does turn into a ghoul but continues to grow. Perhaps children simply cannot survive that amount of radiation poisoning.

Now, however, Bethesda has no excuse. They have a single ghoul child. The fact there aren’t more falls into the standard Bethesda writing excuse of “Don’t think too much about it, we certainly didn’t.” And I get that children are a touchy subject in open world games. Having a game allow you to kill children is basically a non-starter in this day and age.

Dying Light has left the conversation

But Bethesda normally skirts it by having a handful of immortal children immune to all damage. They normally get around pesky programming issues by making a number of people unkillable regardless of what happens. Which, you know, I get. This is not a tabletop game, some concessions are expected in this creative contract between storyteller and audience. However, why then bring attention to so many incongruities on a bloody sidequest which easily sidesteps all these issues by just using a damn dog?

This is classic Bethesda. Here’s a simple story that is too simple to be enjoyable and yet somehow manages to contradict so much about all their other stories that it detracts exponentially from the whole. And there’s no excuse for this. It’s not due to low effort because a lot of effort went into making it happen. It’s not due to not knowing better because they have contradictory statements elsewhere in their own worlds. It just simply exists. Right there. Like a buffet table laden with succulent homemade meals and a single plate of mouldy cheese swarming with flies and maggots.

And simply put, no matter how nice that dessert is next to it, you can’t keep the flies from flying over and crawling all across it.

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The Summoner Wars of the Future: New Year – New You

So it has been a few days or so since my last posting. 2020 has turned out to be quite busy, both worldwide and in my own little microcosm. I’m hard at work finishing up the second Red Sabre novel: Cinderborn. This has been a very arduous journey and I feel like I’m nowhere near finishing it yet. Though no one comes here to read my work woes.

I’ve also had a lot of personal changes going on in my life. I’m trying to get things finished for a large move to another country that has eaten up more of my attention and time. It feels like I’m starting a new chapter of my life: filled as it is with the typical apprehension and anxiety that such changes bear with them. So this blog post is hardly a sign that I’ll be getting back to my old posting habits. Mostly, it’s a brief oasis in a turbulent sea of uncertainty.

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But, more than anything, I have returned with the news that Plaid Hat Games has turned independent again. There is word that Summoner Wars 2.0 is in the works which got me pretty excited! There’s been no details – naturally – of what that will entail. Will it be a reboot? Will it be compatible with the old decks? Will it be so overhauled as to be entirely unrecognizable?

Who knows? But that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate about it!

In honour of this announcement, I wanted to make a list of things that I would like to see changed or returned whenever this game comes to the market (assuming, of course, it does). These are presented in no real order as this post is entirely my first impressions and enthusiasm for one of my classic games getting a very unexpected breath of fresh air!

So let’s begin on my Things I want to see in a Summoner Wars sequel!

  1. Better Theme

We’ll begin with the easiest. I wrote at length how bland and generic I found the original Summoner Wars. It’s artistic design was… well… functional at best. If you want to see why I found the Jungle Elves and Swamp Orcs so creatively distracting, you can search through my archives. But it wasn’t just bland flavouring. I also spoke to a great degree how the drab art detracted from the game as well. The original Mountain Vargath look rather indistinguishable which can lead to moments in a game where units blend undesirably together.

However, I also feel like this wish is almost all but guaranteed. I doubt anyone is particularly wedded to the old designs because they were so basic so changes are doubtful to cause outcry. Furthermore, Crystal Clans and Ashes demonstrated Plaid Hats’ evolution in far more distinct art direction. Regardless of whether you like the art in either of those, it at least stands out and I think it pretty much all but guarantees that this is a field in which Plaid Hat will have a one hundred percent improvement. And I hope they push more into their weirder design ideas while keeping a wide pool of wacky factions. Despite having bland names, the clans of Crystal Clans had some nice fantastical variety.

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Crystal Clans, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn and Summoner Wars all belong to Plaid Hat Games. I think. I don’t quite get their independence deal.

2. Keep the Dice

Here might be my most controversial request. I would really like to see the attack dice return! I know this is often the most maligned aspect of Summoner Wars but hear me out.

I think the dice in Summoner Wars is rather integral to its game. I’ve read numerous articles and design documents from developers explaining how randomness improves complexity and strategy rather than diminishes it. Which runs counter typically to how players and fans respond. But the one thing that randomness does is create dynamism. Summoner Wars is a rather simple game by design and I think its simplicity is an important part to making it popular (it’s certainly useful in teaching it to new players). Removing the dice shifts it to a far more predictable game that both reduces the excitement of turn by turn decisions (since attack actions would be assured) but also decreases design space. We’d lose abilities like Precision, Toughness or even interesting ones like Infernal Preaching (ignore the higher result of your attack rolls). The final second summoners managed to find plenty of additional interesting design space in a system that doesn’t have a whole lot in the first place.

So I’d like to see the dice remain but I would prefer if the system was expanded to give it more support. Having played a bunch of Arkham Horror LCG, I wouldn’t mind something like its “card commitment” system or another one analogous to it added to Summoner Wars.

Finally, Crystal Clans departed from the dice while still adding some element of uncertainty with its hidden card play. And while it was cute, I found it mostly highlighted that I preferred dice. Crystal Clans combat was basically a straightforward game of addition and the hidden card mechanic made it impossible to really play the game by yourself.

And I must shamefully admit that I’ve played a bunch of Summoner Wars on my own. Particularly when I was designing my custom content. I found this unworkable with Crystal Clans even though my games against people hardly took into account what card they played in their defence. It was all but impossible to not consider that information on your own.

3. New Economy

For me, this is the portion of the game which I would really like Plaid Hat to consider and experiment. The issues with Summoner Wars mechanics has been debated simply to death. Everyone has their own answer for what went wrong. For me, the problem lays here. It was clever to have your events and units also double up as your economy. But in the end, I feel that it was also the greatest handicap to the game’s desired flow.

Particularly, killing your own units controversially awarded you with magic. I’ve heard a number of people comment on how unintuitive this is. Furthermore, it led to a particularly bleak period of the game’s lifecycle wherein the most popular mode of playing was to kill all your commons for magic, build all your drawn commons for magic, then hide behind your walls hoping your opponent would come to you so that your saved champions could wallop them and secure you a victory. I’ve been rather critical of the argument that this style of playing was the “best” and that its proliferation was more due to the delicacy Plaid Hat applied to aggressive faction and unit design.

But this system also pushed the game into a rather tight design corner that made certain units and mechanics far less desirable than they should have been. For example, single attack cards were almost all but useless. Two attack was far more guaranteed to wound your opponent with a decent chance to give two wounds. This made 2 attack 1 health units far and above more valuable than 1 attack 2 health units. Failing to secure a kill had a compounding problem. First, you didn’t get the expected magic from the death of your enemy. Second, it gave your opponent a good chance to claim your unit for theirs. A unit for unit trade at least is an equal exchange. But summoning a unit only to have it fail to generate magic and then die the next turn was far too punishing, especially if your opponent killed it with the unit you failed to eliminate! It set you back the resources on your failed summon, gave them the resource of your failed summon and (in all likelihood) resulted in them claiming their own unit as a small refund! It also made it so 1 attack 1 health units were essentially non-existent outside of very niche decks as they accomplished nothing and gave too much resources to your opponent.

What could they do differently? I’m not certain because changing the nature of the game’s economy will have a massive fundamental change on all aspects of the game. Crystal Clans had an interesting push and pull economy with the crystal tracker. I’m not certain it was successful. Partly because I didn’t play enough to really understand the game. Partly because I think it led to a different issue of evaluating better exchanges and value.

Had I a good suggestion for this, though, I wouldn’t be sharing it here. I would be designing my own game. So I wish the best of luck to Plaid Hat on this front.

4. Maintain the Board Size

So, I know I’m referencing Crystal Clans a lot but that’s partly because of my disappointment with it being a spiritual Summoner Wars 2.0. It is largely its own beast and the similarities between the two are more superficial than they are worth highlighting. However, the nice thing about Crystal Clans being so different is it allowed me to hone in on what I really liked about Summoner Wars.

There’s a really fascinating spatial puzzle aspect to Summoner Wars. You have to manoeuvre your units around your opponent’s forces and open up corridors of attack. Or you have to funnel an invader into death alleys while protecting your wounded leader from surprise flanking measures. Crystal Clans lacked all this because its board was so small. You had no sense of actually outmanoeuvring your opponent. But that’s what the difference of 48 squares to 9 squares will bring. I want to have to plan crazy sprints of swift units around enemy bodyguards or using guile to shift units to open valuable columns to rush my assassins through. I don’t know if I would want to see the board shrunk, I’d be happy to see it grow but at the very least it should remain substantial.

5. Balance Defence and Offence

Summoner Wars matches can really grind to a halt, especially against some of the earliest designed decks. There are two reasons for this: the board is large enough that you can put your opponent’s summoner on the retreat (this is good). The other problem was that invading your opponent’s board was far too difficult because of the power of summoning walls. Walls were too strong to reliably address in a timely manner if your opponent’s summoner slipped behind them. And assaulting the walls or trying to work around them left you far too vulnerable to your opponent summoning off those walls and stealing momentum and advantage.

Yes, the summoning wall mechanic was the other great contributor to the stagnant turtle strategy. But I don’t want it abolished. I want a nice balance between defensive strategies and offensive strategies. Playing defensive shouldn’t be an inherent advantage (due to the awkward economy of the cards combined with the positional advantage of defending walls). Instead, it should be strong for factions designed around them. The Deep Dwarves losing offensive value to gain an economic edge is a great design. It puts pressure on the attacker to come and get their opponent otherwise they’ll sit and meditate their way to victory. But it also means that, to truly capitalize on the meditating advantage, the Deep Dwarf player has fewer units to defend herself from an assault.

On the flip side, you had Tacullu who was only strong on defence but did not apply any pressure for doing so. His abilities triggered if the enemy was on his side of the battlefield but there wasn’t anything to encourage the enemy to come to him. So it was often advantageous for his opponent to sit across from him, passing and twiddling their thumbs since Tacullu’s defensive style applied no pressure – it merely punished his opponent if they tried to play the game.

I think Plaid Hat was slowly arriving at a good balance near the life cycle of Summoner Wars between offence and defence. But more than that, I want there to be some mechanic to encourage offensive play. Crystal Clans had its crystals which armies fought over. I think Summoner Wars 2.0 would benefit from some manner of map objectives that allowed an aggressive player to seize momentum or an advantage by claiming territory on the board. I think this could open up greater design space too but having defensive factions built around the idea of reinforcing a space on the battlefield instead of just taking advantage of inherent defensive perks. A theoretical faction could then be geared towards claiming a map objective and sitting on it, making it very difficult to reclaim by their opponent instead of being designed around hiding in a corner behind unbreakable walls.

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6. Take Time to Future Proof

I will always sing the praises of the final releases for Summoner Wars. Alliances and the last second summoners were, overall, really interesting from a complexity and creativity standpoint. It really stretched the game’s system and made for some really fantastic abilities.

But goodness was Farrah and her deck a novel. Moyra had her own collection of awkward wording and overall the writing on the cards got smaller and smaller as more text was squeezed into unchanging boxes. A large part of this was trying to come up with ways to write really narrow gameplay fixes to prior cards or strange interactions. I think the game would benefit from having a more fleshed out toolbox. Having things like keywords, generic abilities and unit traits can hopefully avoid needing to remember who has the word Light in their ability name and whether Flight counts for that trigger.

I’m hopeful that this is almost a guarantee as well. Crystal Clans and Ashes had these necessary core elements. Crystal Clans hardly tapped into its trait system as it died on the vine a little early. But I’d rather the system in place than the questionable grammar we got from Summoner Wars.

Also, consistent wording and formatting on cards would be a lovely little bonus cherry.

7. The Filth

I want to see the Filth return. That’s it. I just liked the weird demon cult and how their basic unit was body horror’d into all those delightfully weird mutations. But please leave the pink demon clutches in the past, if you would be so kind.

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Old Friends and New Faces

Well, it’s been a little quiet from me, but I have finalised my draft for the reading beta. If you are interested in helping me out with my next release, code name Cinderborn, please sign up for the beta reading list and get an early draft of the novel. Only you can prevent forest fires!

So, I thought I would write about something that I haven’t discussed on this blog in a long time. You see, I recently was graciously given access to the final second summoners for Summoner Wars! Yes, it’s been over a year but, you see, the cards have been out of print and I never got my grubby hands on most of them. So it was a pleasure to finally give these elusive decks a try.

Now, I would normally like to write an indepth review of the decks. Partly because it would give me far more content to post on the blog but largely because I enjoyed analysing the product. Alas, my time with these releases was too short to get a really good understanding of them. But I was able to get a general impression.

And I have to say, it’s a real shame that Summoner Wars ended. Though it was just several brief games, I found these last six decks to be an absolute blast to play and I think they are some of the best design Plaid Hat Games put out for this system. Now, I say last six decks because I do own two of the final summoners: Farrah Oathbreaker and Saturos. So those I have played on my own time. But the remaining ones (Brath, Scraven, Little Meda, Shiva, Natazga and Melanatar) were all fantastic.

Granted, these are hardly the simplest decks released. But though they can kind of get wordy, I am not certain I found them any more complex than the Alliance decks. I also had the misfortune of playing against Oldin as well, and the stark contrast not just in design but in balance was remarkable. Summoner Wars is a weird little game, and I don’t want to slag its early design too much, but given all its mechanical quirks it is so great to see that it ended on such a high note. Even if some of the later releases pale in performance to the first decks, they are all pretty balanced and – more importantly – enormously fun (barring Hogar)!

I am humbled how you can take a fairly simple system and continually add greater strategical complexity. For example, Shiva gives a player the chance to forego an entire turn phase in order to have unprecedented control of the battlefield. Lessons were certainly learned and, had the game been predominately the releases from the Master Set and on, I think it would have been in a fantastic state. It would possibly be even more loved than it was. These last releases actually renewed my interest and love for the game, which is remarkable because I think after two years of following its product line, I got a bit disillusioned with its glaring flaws.

I won’t rehash its issues here, but seeing Oldin in play and the dreaded “defensive playstyle” I can see where the product line got a bad reputation. And what’s fascinating is the interplay between these final summoners and those early releases. You see, Oldin’s gameplan is to play about eight of its thirty-three card deck. Everything else goes to the magic pile. Playing Oldin looks to be a real drag. Most turns seem to be “draw five cards, kill your starting units, build your five cards for magic, pass.” Repeat until you get a hand of champions and Heroic Feats, throw out Magic Drains to nettle your opponent then summon a beefy champion and kill your enemy with all the extra attack dice your Heroic Feats grant.

But despite how drab that plan is, there was still excitement in the matches against these new summoners who almost all are designed to fight Oldin with this game plan. In fact, some of the summoners just outright destroy Oldin if he does this, forcing the Oldin player to actually play the game the way it was intended. And it was glorious.

Granted, the best games I played were ones between two of these final summoners. All of them have a brawling, fast and active play style and those games were really interesting and engaging.

I’ll give my impressions of the decks. Though, as I said, it have too little experience to really get a grip on their strengths, I’ll roughly organise them by my initial sense of their power from weakest to strongest.

Shiva – Benders

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I think my favourite thing about Shiva is how she really captured the Bender feeling without anywhere near the aggravation of playing against Tacullu. Shiva can skip her movement phase to move three of her enemies one space each. This sounds like an awful trade, except Shiva’s deck revolves around Puppets – units that can’t move during her movement phase in the first place. Between them and Sirens (who can move a unit one space as well), you really get a strong sense of controlling the battlefield.

Unfortunately, because of her immobility, Shiva doesn’t make for a really strong attacking deck. And the one thing I noted about most of these last summoners is that they are very strong on the attack. Her events are far less impactful and I found that she got overwhelmed rather quickly when she tried to apply pressure that she sort of fizzled out. She’s probably the deck I played the least, however. I only got one of her champions on the board (Puppetmaster both games but he does seem really good) and I never had an opportunity to play with the Shifter at all which allows you to steal your enemy’s units! So I certainly missed out on some of her shenanigans and power.

Scraven – Sand Goblins

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I really like Scraven. However, his base commons leave something to be desired. However, his ability to give three commons a free move at the start of his turn plus guaranteed blockers at the end is so great. I certainly found myself constantly thinking about distances and angles. And it is really hard to get your opponent in a tough position with your army ping-ponging back and forth during your turn. You feel crafty but it is difficult to wield. I’d like to try him some more so I could wrap my head around his battle flow, especially after being told that Wraiths make for fantastic vanguards. I personally had trouble getting him to do anything and he folded pretty fast beneath the other summoners’ pressure. I wanted to get Dinky to the board but was always dead before I got a chance to throw nine dice!

Natazga – Swamp Orcs

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Wow, Natazga is crazy. I don’t remember how I ranked her when she was previewed but I know I had a lukewarm impression. I know I thought that she would struggle since she was throwing her attention at walls instead of the enemy’s units. However, most people like to play passive, so there isn’t a big downside to that. Plus, her Skulltakers don’t generate magic on kills so are better for hitting walls. And with Erosion, those walls go fast. My favourite game was between her and Brath, where Brath lost her starting wall and her other two were in the last four cards of her deck! Needless to say, Natazga won though it was a nailbiter game despite this huge advantage!

Generating vine walls immediately at the most valuable locations is a very strong ability. And all of her units hit really hard. It feels like a fast tide of green flowing over your opponents side. Is it fun? You bet. Powerful? Perhaps not. I think she may be the weakest of the swamp orc summoners due to her low vine wall generation (you really take notice of all the unit wall generating powers). On the flip side, she did beat Oldin despite the threat of Besiege the Walls due to the heavy wall pressure she applies plus the small wall generation by her units discouraging the event play to set her back. Also, she totally got lucky on a Gror whiff but that’s neither here nor there.

I like playing her, though, even if she isn’t the most effective. I think she does well against the opponents which are strong against Mugglugg but she certainly struggles with everyone else. Though there’s lots of fun tactical considerations in those struggles. And who knew using Erosion on your own walls would be a good idea!

Brath – Deep Dwarves

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Here’s where we get to the meat of the releases. I think Brath, Little Meda and Malenatar are very competitive out of the box and can only get better with deck building if that is your kind of thing. Brath in particular is rather interesting because she sports the lowest average attack value in likely the entire game! Her deck is built around the zero attack Gem Golems, continuing a recurrent theme that most of the second summers kind of minimize their deck building potential by making them reliant on certain commons for their abilities. This concept isn’t new but the integration of these units feels better designed and more cohesive.

Brath, for example, gets around her low attack options by having several ways to make the Gem Golems better. First, she can take a card off the top of her deck to give them an additional die. Second, whenever her Gem Archers attack near a golem, the archers give the golem a free attack. Third, Brath has two events that increase the golem’s attack and she has two more events that allow her to recycle any card she has (and I generally chose those attack increasing ones).

Now, my feelings towards Brath are a little limited as she’s the second deck I played the least. She stomped Oldin, however, even if she lost to Natazga. I found her very fun and very aggressive as she throws her strong golems and supporting army at the walls of her foes. Even trying to wall yourself in doesn’t help as those tricky golems can even attack diagonally! I love them.

Little Meda – Filth

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If I was hard on Natazga, I know I was lacklustre towards Little Meda. I really wish I bought her now that I got to give her deck a go. I don’t know how, but the second Filth summoner I think is better than the first. And that’s saying something since I think the Demagogue was one of the best. Now, I’m feeling he’s the worst of his faction!

That said, Demagogue is easier to play and far more defensive so there is a certain amount of play style preference at work. I thought Little Meda would be unwieldy because she needs to keep to her Nanny’s side if she wants to survive. But, in the end, I feel that she’s almost more survivable than the Warden! And she hits three times as hard too!

Granted, she has a bit of a learning curve. She has some magic economy but it is reliant on her Amoeba mutant. Though she has two events to pull it out, my first game with Meda I failed to get the Amoeba until the last couple of turns of the game and by then it was too late for it to have any impact. In later games, it kept getting Magic Drained so mileage on that will vary. Her mutations are a mixed bag too. I think her best ones are worse than Demagogue’s best but her worst aren’t as bad as Demagogue’s worst. She’s more levelled the usefulness distribution. Her events are, much like her forebearer, where she shines.

Probably her best event is her most innocuous. Daddy I’m Scared allows her to move at the end of an opponent’s movement or attack phase, either setting her up in a good position for an attack next turn or (more often) getting her our of harm’s way. I dodged a Heroic Feat bomb doing just that and if you snatch Oldin’s Heroic Feat threat, you nearly defang him. Ironically enough, I find that you are spending more time trying to protect Nanny than you are Meda. Also, their immunity to events and abilities is straight up aces.

That said, she does struggle on a traditional offensive front. Since she’s largely the source of consistent damage and you spend so much time manoeuvring her and her nanny, you can’t rush down your opponent like the other decks. In that sense, she’s more of a traditional deck though she has some measure of applying defensive pressure to force a confrontation even if that pressure is somewhat easily countered.

Very fun though and I feel less complex than the Demagogue because she’s not nearly as reliant on her mutations. The ones she uses are generally ones that you have already drawn so you don’t need to memorize your deck either.

Malenatar – Mountain Vargath

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Malenatar has the distinction of having the most hilariously one-sided fight against Oldin. And that’s considering that Brath chased him into a corner and punched him between walls.

Malenatar is a juggernaut. He comes so fast out of the gate and he just does not let up the pressure. He could crowd the walls of all his opponents in the games I played by round two which gives little time for an effective defence. And he hits so hard that the wall is unlikely to stand for very long. Assuming you want to go for that wall. Generally the summoner is waiting just behind it and given a turn, Malenatar has a decent chance to just end the game against a number of summoners.

Funnily enough, his commander common is fantastic yet I find I never used more than the starting one. The guard can keep it alive for so long, is cheaper and also can protect aspirants who were pitching most of my dice.

Malenatar did make clear that the biggest thing holding aggressive decks back was the restriction on moving units. When pushing across the board, you have to choose whether to keep up your attack or replenish your line. But if you weren’t going to commit to the attack, why did you go into it in the first place? So aggressive pushes traditionally were more like assassination attempts. You throw a lot of resources on a single attack and hope it gets you the game.

But Malenatar alone can move five other cards when he moves! Will he? Of course not! But you will likely be moving an additional one for free (with Battle Procurement) and that alone helps maintain a continuous assault. Aspirants, of course, help things shimmy along.

Guards, of course, help things keep going since (with some Unity), they can help protect Malenatar from being in poor positions when the enemy walls start to come down. And talk to a Moyra player about how big keep a well placed unit around for an extra turn or two can be.

I have to say, I was really impressed with Summoner Wars last hurrah. It was such a good note to end on and refreshing to see such variability in design. My favourite games were the ones between these last summoners. They were fast, frenetic affairs that felt like they could go either way. That the game was balanced on the edge of a die roll. And now I’m sad to know that these great decks are out of print and impossible to find.

But at least I got two of them before they went.

Digging Up Old Wounds

Well here is something new today. I don’t usually comment on social media and, outside this blog, fairly disconnect from the industry in general. But today I’m going to be commenting on someone else’s interview. Because that is a thing which people do, right?

So the fine folks over at win.gg were able to get a brief interview with some ex-Artifact developers. For those of you who don’t know, Artifact is a digital card game developed by Valve, skinned with Dota and one of my biggest disappointments of last year. You can check my full thoughts on that in an old blog post.

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Artifact and all its associated images and mistakes belong to Valve.

I have, for a long time, had an interest in the nuts and bolts of productions – whether that being what goes behind putting together a successful play or the efforts and testing needed to complete a game design. It’s a peek into the creative process and I like seeing how other artists face the struggles of their chosen medium.

For this interview, win.gg spoke with Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias. These were the, for lack of a better descriptor, the outside consultation for Artifact. Garfield and Elias are the minds behind Magic: The Gathering – possibly one of the largest games in the world. That they partnered up with Valve to create a card game was exciting for many since their pedigree has dominated the card game genre nearly since its inception.

The game has been, to put bluntly, a disaster. As of this writing, there’s only a hundred or so concurrent players in the game. Valve has posted that they’ve practically gone back to the drawing board and doing a deep recalibration to the game in order to bring it in line.

Consequently, everyone and their mother has an opinion about why Artifact failed. I’m going to unironically share mine. But first let’s see what Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias think.

Largely, the first question is about the monetization of the game which is possibly Garfield’s more controversial answers but also cuts to the heart of the Artifact story.

When asked about the game’s “pay-to-win” component, Garfield says this:

“Pay-to-win is a sloppy term leveled at any game where you can buy components. You will see it leveled at any game in which a player, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to engage… I am an OK player and a mediocre deck constructor in Artifact, and access to all of the cards won’t change that. I might be able to overcome the mediocre deck construction by copying someone else’s deck but it won’t make me an excellent player. Likewise, I can spend thousands on golf clubs, but it won’t make me a golf champion.”

And, honestly, he’s right: to a point. Had Artifact actually taken off and there was a million dollar tournament like they promised, I would not win it if I owned all the cards. You can see this with really anyone that gets into a hobby. Owning all the gear won’t make you the best of the field. This is true.

It also completely sidesteps the issue of pay-to-win. For it ignores the fundamental problem which Garfield only barely acknowledges: if two equally skilled players face each other, the one who spent the most money will win.

For Garfield, this seems acceptable. He does say that netdecking (copying someone else’s deck, usually from a list online) will cover his flaws of being a poor deck constructor. He might not be able to pilot the deck like a champion but he will do better than if he were to face a theoretical mirror of himself who doesn’t netdeck.

At a competitive level, this is inconsequential. All players who want to be contenders are prepared to drop the money necessary to own all the cards – or at least the cards necessary to win tournaments.

But successful games aren’t made on their professional players. For a game to thrive, it needs a fanbase. And the average player is the one that baulks at the enormous entry cost of the game. It doesn’t matter that it lacks the ludicrously expense of Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall or Mox loxes or whatever is the newest overpriced piece of cardboard they have nowadays. That Garfield thinks it’s a winning argument to dismiss concerns over Artifact’s price by saying “Hey, at least you don’t have to spend $900 on a single card!” kind of strikes the head of the nail.

That Valve failed this is outstanding if only because Dota 2 literally built its entire game on this understanding.

I don’t know where things went so wrong. Maybe no one felt they could say no to Garfield. Maybe they just assumed Garfield knew more than them? I struggle to think that the developers at Valve are so out of touch with their own company that they couldn’t see the huge financial success of Dota 2 and think “No, that’s not how we’re going to do it… but we’ll try to convince these players otherwise by wallpapering everything with their favourite stuff.” Like… Dota 2 players don’t play Dota 2 because Axe is in it. They play it for the game (and, frankly, because it’s actually free otherwise they’d probably just be in League of Legends).

And I’m not certain the Dota 2 brand is interesting enough for someone to take a look at it and go “I have no idea what that is but hey, I really want to play the game with the big shirtless red guy with the weird mutton chops!” I think you pull in new people by word getting around that the game is really good. Good luck getting them through the door with the addendum, “Oh but it’ll cost you an arm and a leg to play. But hey, if you want to win a tournament, you don’t also have to sell your kidneys as well!”

So I’m fully unconvinced with the detractors who argue it wasn’t the price that sunk Artifact. There’s numerous people I’ve seen comment on Artifact being “not fun.” I hate this criticism. Largely because it’s empty. You know what I find “not fun?” Magic: The Gathering. Hasn’t stopped Wizards of the Coast making billions of dollars from the damn thing. At the very least, try to pinpoint what you don’t like about the game.

But most people, when pressed, complain that Artifact is “too random.” That or they complain that it isn’t fun to watch on twitch. As if that matters at all. For the latter… have they seen Fortnight? Or League of Legends? Or ducking Dota 2? If you have no idea what is going on in the game, it makes no damn sense and it doesn’t look fun in the least. People aren’t browsing Twitch for random game streams. They’re either a) looking at the most watched streams or b) looking up a game they’ve heard about. You don’t window shop on Twitch. As such, it doesn’t matter if it is understandable in five minutes of viewing. Someone will either say “Oh it’s a card game. I like card games. This is really popular, it must be good and maybe I’ll sit and figure it out.” Or they’ll say, “Why the hell are a bunch of people playing chess with Dota pieces? This nonsense is stupid and I’m going back to watching people try to build impromptu tree houses and shoot each other in the face.”

As for the randomness, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Actually, the RNG (random number generator – used as a shorthand for randomness) fulfils two purposes. One, it actually makes the game more watchable. If you don’t have some manner of randomness, you actually have a boring game. No, change that. You have a puzzle. Like, if you played Solitaire but the deck was always set up in a specific way, you wouldn’t play Solitaire for very long. You might enjoy figuring out the puzzle but once it’s solved, you’re done. You shelve it because there’s nothing else from that constructed deck for you.

I mean, all card games have a large portion of RNG built right into them. The deck is RNG! You shuffle the deck at the start of every game. You get kicked out of tournaments for stacking your deck. You have to have a randomized pile from which all of your actions are drawn. This is inherent to the genre. Begging for a mulligan is basically arguing that you don’t want to play the game at all.

Course, this isn’t an invitation to descend into arguments about mulligans. Mulligans, in-of-themselves, are a whole other conversation. Suffice to say, Artifact gives you two card draw at the start of your turn which is more than enough to make up for a lack of a mulligan. It works for Artifact. You don’t need a mulligan at the start.

Second, and most importantly, those damn arrows in Artifact give you something on which to blame your losses.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from the average player, is they want above all to protect the ego. They will say otherwise, but it is really the only explanation I can make for the constant complaining around the direction arrows in Artifact. Frankly, if you don’t like the arrows, then maybe you simply don’t like the game. That’s fine. I don’t like Magic. Not everything is made for you. You can go back to Hearthstone or Magic or whatever. You will be missed.

But seriously, the arrows are perhaps one of the most ingenious mechanisms I’ve seen offered in a card game and really set the distinction for Artifact. It makes Artifact not a “digital adaptation of a tabletop game” but something that literally could only exist in a digital space. This opens up really interesting avenues of design and even impacts the skill level of the players. Fighting for initiative is an important layer in Artifact and having a card like Apprentice Assassin who can “waste” an action trying to force your opponent to play before you is a moment of beautiful clarity in Artifact. Possibly because Apprentice Assassin is a good card for more than just durdling and it’s just yet another application of an ability that is inherently good. It also impacts the decision on where to play cards.

And this, I think, is what turns off more players than are willing to admit. Artifact isn’t an “autopilot” game. I’d argue, it’s possibly the most intensive card game to play. For constructed card games, there are two important skills for a player to develop: building a deck and playing the deck. If you’ve watched League of Legends or Dota, the closest equivalent would be playing the game and drafting the game. And the two skills are wholly different. Some card games really emphasize deck building. I’ve been told that Magic is about 90% deck building and the rest is just playing what you draw. Most of my friends who love Magic keep telling me that constructing a deck and realizing your construction is the heart of the game. Course, the colours in Magic allow some leeway in this push and pull of piloting and building but I’d argue that Artifact is somewhere in the realm of 80-90% about playing a deck and not building it.

There are so many decision points in Artifact that entirely revolve around the flow of play that you really have to consider your choices. The better you get at the game, the more difficult choices you discover in the course of a match. For instance, when you first pick up Artifact, you try and keep your heroes alive as much as you can. Death is the most discouraging fate for your heroes and you bemoan every single stray arrow that leads a minion curving into your poor Luna and away from that fat, twenty health tower.

Course, once you realize that dying gives you a “free” teleport in that you can now position Luna into a more advantageous lane and that losing one tower doesn’t end the game, you start to purposefully kill your own heroes. Stranding your opponent’s Bristleback, Axe and Centaur to a lane they’ve already won as you redeploy into the last two lanes and destroy them before you opponent can reposition is such a great feeling when you pull it off. And this is why I consider the complaints of the arrows to be utter nonsense. Not only are you aware of arrow placements for all units already on the board at the start of every round, but there are so many decisions and plays you can make that there is never a game where you lost “because of that one stupid arrow.” An Ogre Conscript may have curved into that dumb Crystal Maiden instead of whacking off the last four health of that second lane tower right before your opponent takes throne in the third, but to get to that position required so many other branching options that I can guarantee the losing player could have done something different at an earlier point in the match to have avoided that fate.

And that’s what I love so much about Artifact. Despite appearing to be more “chaotic” the design actually gives the player more control than almost any other card game I’ve played. It’s in the Netrunner category of high strategy without relying so heavily on asymmetrical knowledge.

Now, I do understand some people finding the base game boring. Which is fair if they’re coming from those games years of maturation and iteration on their game mechanics. Play the first release of Magic or Hearthstone and you’ll also find a rather straightforward game. If you just want a mature scene, that’s fair. But if given the opportunity, I’d argue Artifact has far greater depth to explore than either of those games because it is free of their design limitations. Valve even introduced some new mechanics when rebalancing several of the cards right before they entered radio silence. Lion got the Quicken ability which reduces the cooldown of a skill every time it gets used. I can easily envision some sort of ability or card that would allow a free use or a faster use of an ability that could combo with Quicken and make Finger of Death a real reckoning force.

Since the game is designed around a computer doing much of the computation, there is a great deal of directions that the game could take. After its release, I was enthralled with following communities who created their own custom cards. Some of them were really smart and if Valve took even half of their ideas, they would rival Magic and Hearthstone combined.

Unfortunately, there is a final component to Artifact’s failing that I must touch upon. I don’t quite know if its the gaming community at large or just those specifically with Valve. However, there’s a concerted group who want to see Artifact fail. It is… unhealthy. I don’t like Keyforge. You wouldn’t know this because I wouldn’t bring it up other than to make a point. I don’t go to the Keyforge subreddit and bitch about it constantly. I don’t make an active effort to deride Keyforge, mock its failing numbers (I honestly don’t know nor care about its numbers) and I don’t insult and belittle the people who do like Keyforge.

The same can’t be said for Artifact. There is a hate brigand the likes of which I have never seen – and I saw the Gib Diretide nonsense. This might be something that Valve has to consider going forward. Whatever they do, there is a large and active community that wants to see it fail. I can’t imagine that Artifact by its lonesome stirred up such ire. I don’t want Valve to address it directly. But I hope they consider it when proposing more experimental approaches to releases. Hell, they may even have to break down and do some proper marketing to overcome it.

I still think there’s a fantastic product available. But Valve really has some hard decisions to make. I think revoking some of their earlier stances – stances I see echoed in Garfield and Elias’ answers – which really held the game back. Abandon this nonsense of “perceived value.” It’s ludicrous how overpriced and artificially inflated Magic cards are. We don’t need to go down that exploitative road. I’ve said it before, but Artifact could really benefit from the Dota treatment. Give it free (or at the very least dirt cheap) then offer alternate art, hats, imps, boards, loading screens, card effects and whatever other cosmetic nonsense to the players to jazz up their game. No one is going to place the same value on a couple lines of code as they would a physical piece of paper.

And it was ridiculous for them to even think that people would. Whatever they do, they have a lot of work ahead of them. The stink on Artifact will last a long time and Valve can’t rely on their goodwill anymore to overlook it. But they have the talent, skill and game itself to make the wait worthwhile.

So I’ll see you all again when Artifact 2.0 launches.

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Fang and Fury – Vermintide 2 Review

It struck me today that I have not done a game review for Warhammer: Vermintide 2 by Fat Shark Studios. This is, really, a bit of a tragedy. Especially since for the last year it’s basically all Derek and I have played.

So you shouldn’t be surprised when I say that I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Just a little bit of context: Derek and I made our way through Vermintide 1 but we were hardly experts. We played enough to get a sense of the game but arrived to it fairly late in its life. Adam convinced us to take the plunge, getting the game for very cheap in a Humble Bundle. If you haven’t heard of Humble Games, you should definitely check it out. It’s a fantastic way to get some slightly out-of-date games at amazing prices while supporting developers and charities alike. I don’t really use or follow it closely but every time I do use it, I get a steal of a deal.

Accessed from https://www.gamesload.com/images/products/Fatshark/Warhammer-Vermintide2-Collectors_XL.jpg
Warhammer: Vermintide belongs to Fat Shark Studios and Games Workshop in whatever capacities those two reached an agreement.

As an aside, this game review is brought to you by Humbles Game Store. Totally unrelated, I swear.

Long story short, Adam played one map while Derek and I have become expert Vermintide players. I blame Derek.

And it really is his fault.

See, Derek is a completionist. He doesn’t like to consider a game finished until he has done everything there is to do in it. I thought he was crazy. I still do, actually. But now that we can compare our stats, and because I’m stupidly competitive, I’ve been trying to finish more games than him. So when we have a game we both play, we’re locked in until someone gives up. Sadly, we’re both stubborn.

Thankfully, Vermintide is actually fun.

See, Vermintide despite carrying the unfortunate Warhammer window dressings, is a rather engaging co-operative action game. I’m not sure how to classify it other than it is Left 4 Dead with swords and giant rats instead of shotguns and endless zombies. In Left 4 Dead, you and three other players work your way through a map fighting off periodic hordes of the undead while trying to survive and make it to the next “safe room.” It was a very successful game made by Valve. Which is to say once they released its sequel a year later, they haven’t touched the franchise at all leaving fans longing for more and wondering if one day they’ll ever be heard.

I’ve learned my habit of disappointing your audience straight from the masters themselves, you see.

Thankfully, where Valve left off, Fat Shark stepped in. They didn’t make an exact copy, what with Vermintide taking place in a medieval fantasy setting instead of a post-apocalyptic modern American setting, but the spirit remained the same. Four players must traverse levels while constantly besieged by rodents of unusual size, temperament and abilities. Vermintide 1 was fun and hectic, taking place in a city being overwhelmed by these tunnelling man-sized monstrosities during something called the End Times. I’d go into the story of Vermintide but it is neither particularly interesting nor particularly important. You show up. You kill rats. You get rewards. Mostly, the rewards don’t matter and you just repeat the same process over again because, strangely, killing the little furballs is rather fun.

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And thankfully, Fat Shark kept to the same successful script as the first. What you get in Vermintide 2 is just more of that sweet murder goodness. Not to say the two games are an exact copy. The first major difference is that the five returning characters (Kruber, Kerillian, Sienna, Bardin and Salzpyre) come with three different classes each. These are more than just colourful personalities (like in Left 4 Dead), each of them has a particular set of weapons and skills available to them. Salzpyre runs around with a precise rapier and a truckload of single shot pistols. Sienna, on the other hand, burns rats with her magical sticks or bops them with a rusty mace.

In Vermintide 2, you’ve got even more customisation than just changing their weapons. These classes add a unique ability to the heroes as well as giving them separate class trees which provide small buffs to different gameplay aspects. With Hunter Kruber, you focus more on his ranged capabilities, giving him ammo on successful headshots or less weapon spread. Foot Knight Kruber, on the other hand, wants to rush in with his charge and slash monsters with his halberd. As such, he gets better stamina regeneration for blocking attacks and wider block angles. The talents have less impact than the class selection itself but you can kind of nudge the character in different directions to fit more your favourite style of slaying.

And it is good that players got more tools for killing because Fat Shark added a whole new faction of villains out to sever your head from your shoulders. Not only are you contending with the Skaven who lend their name to the title but it appears these manlike mammals have made an alliance with northern raiders who have devoted themselves to pestilence and decay. The Chaos Warriors have their own special characters that appear alongside their hordes to make your day difficult.

See, there are more than just an unending tide of mooks for you to kill. Left 4 Dead demonstrated that you need some rare, special enemies that can disrupt player lines and keep them from simply hunkering down in a corner to wait out the simple AI of rushing like lemmings into your awaiting bloody arms. In the original game you had poisonwind globadiers who would throw glass jars filled with poisonous gas. Packmasters ran forward with mancatchers to grab unsuspecting players and pull them haplessly into the heart of the swarm. Now, we have leech mages that appear behind you to vampirically siphon your soul or the blightstormers who conjure a tornado that will whip you around the map while they teleport behind cliffs so you can’t kill them and end your suffering.

Vermintide 2 also added three additional monsters to fight. These act as bosses for the level that represent a challenging fight against a hulking terror that is capable of killing the entire group on its own. In the first game, this role was filled by the rat ogre who, after twenty or so different maps, had become so predictable as to offer little challenge or concern. Fat Shark introduced the Stormfiend, Chaos Spawn and Bile Troll. Each act entirely different and force players to adopt different tactics depending on which and where they face down.

Perhaps most heartening is that Fat Shark have really improved their design from the first game. There are some companies and products that… demonstrate a complete lack of ability to self-reflect either on their genre or even their own past work. These studios somehow manage to make sequels that are weaker than their original inspirations, drowned in poor design choices that choke out what good they’re able to create.

When it comes to maps, however, Fat Shark have really stepped it up. Granted, gone are the shorter maps that I really enjoyed in the first game. But, I’m not certain if I enjoyed those maps because of the design or because I could fly through them in half the time of a regular map. While Black Powder and Waterfront provided a nice change in pace, given that those maps often required alternative means to end the mission, there were few really standout entries. Wizards Tower was perhaps the most interesting. Vermintide 2, however, has done a lot in terms of mixing up objectives in maps while providing interesting layouts and locations with distinct personalities. Temple of Shallya has a very interesting visual progression from a hospital into some body horror hellscape before culminating in a big bowl of algae soup. Interestingly enough, it also happens to be the only map which you have to complete about ten laps around a track to finish.

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But the most exciting part of Vermintide 2 is the support that it has received since its release. Not only were there two DLCs (that I skipped because I’m poor) but there’s also an announced expansion coming out this summer which will introduce a third faction of critters to kill: the Beastmen!

So, here’s hoping to hundreds of more hours of murder with my favourite non-contributing author in the months to come.

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Behind Rewind Review: New World, Old Problems

It’s been awhile since I’ve given a good little review of a video game. Well, outside of mentioning my mixed adoration of Artifact’s design and lamenting it’s anemic launch. Well, over the holidays, Firaxis has been slowly revealing all the bright and juicy details for their next expansion to the sixth entry of their Civilization series. Civilization has been a mainstay in my life and a cornerstone franchise of the video game industry. It’s the poster boy for the 4x strategy genre (so called for its key game mechanics surrounding eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) that tasks players with choosing a civilization from human history and navigating it from the stone age to modern times and beyond, racing against other heavy weights of textbooks to see who can achieve victory first.

Course, there’s a lot of definitions in that explanation that require a bit more exploration and certainly the discussion around each of them could be a post in of themselves. For simplicity sake, victory is typically broadly defined as achieving dominance in one of several key developmental fields, whether that by dominating all your opponents by capturing their capitals, completely a space faring project and being the first to successful set out into the emptiness of space or (much recently) convincing everyone through the sheer power of your pop music and blue jeans to adopt your culture over their own or anyone else’s.

Accessed from https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/000/103/842/large/autumn-turkel-marquee-beyondearth.jpg?1443931718
Civilization Beyond Earth and all associated imagery and what-have-you are properties of Firaxis and 2K Gaming. Well, maybe my thoughts are my own.

The evolution of the series has certainly touched upon some fascinating concepts and later additions are starting to question even the basics of what it means to be a civilization or what victory truly means. Religion has become a mainstay element. Diplomatic relations between leaders and world governing bodies are becoming more prominent. Perhaps that most interesting is the development of cultural game mechanics and the idea of a victory sheerly through these cultural means and peeking at a world beyond colonial expectations and philosophies.

It is hard to tear Civilization and the 4x genre away from clearly western colonial ideals and the clearest example of how cultural influences heavily impact our lens through which we process our understanding of the world. Literally all four components of the 4x genre are key elements of colonization and, as a consequence, Civilization gameplay typically revolves around repeating the brutality and severe consequences of colonial activity. It values land solely by its productivity or commoditization and treats the people and environment in that territory as simply a further evaluation in the cost/benefit analysis of that territory. Sure, there might be quite an enticing deposit of steel over in those hills but is there enough arable land to warrant plopping a city down in that area and do I have the strength to beat out the Shoshone who are angling to settle that territory? Can I afford to have them gain access to more iron and build up more of an army to threaten my own borders?

It’s a decidedly limited scope to view all of human history and motivation though I have no intention to obfuscate the fact that colonialism certainly led to the foundation of my home country. In fact, it was the inclusion of said country, Canada, that brought me back to the genre recently. Civilization VI is far too expensive for my blood currently but it was the perfect time to jump into its predecessor Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Now all this rambling about colonialism isn’t some long winded academic whinging. It’s the very foundation for Beyond Earth – the spin-off game released between Civilization V and Civilization VI. Here is where I take a moment to explain my own biases and background. I’ve never played Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri which  most certainly had a huge influence in the development of Beyond Earth. As such, I cannot judge the game based on the expectations of those looking for a proper spiritual successor to that game. On the other hand, I think it can allow me to look at Beyond Earth with a little more objectivity.

Second, I have the complete version of Beyond Earth. Which is to say I’ve been playing on the Rising Tide expansion. I did briefly disable the expansion in order to earn an achievement impossible to unlock otherwise and I can definitely say whatever mixed reviews Beyond Earth received on launch are quite likely justified. If you’re interested in Beyond Earth, Rising Tide is a necessary component. That brief game without it certainly made the experience far more shallow and a lot less interesting.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the bones of Beyond Earth.

Civilization V had a science victory awarded to the player first to launch a spaceship to the far distant Alpha Centauri. Beyond Earth is a theoretical continuation of this timeline with some necessary assumptions set into place to make it work. First, it takes place quite a few years into our future where long distance space travel is possible. It also occurs after an event referenced simply as The Great Mistake which is the impetuous for these spacefaring seeding ships to launch into the next great frontier.

The Great Mistake is never truly elucidated, a clearly conscious decision by the developers likely to allow players their own interpretations of what constitutes its events. What does seem clear is some terrible ecological tragedy occurred that changed the shape of the earth and its geopolitical organization. If countries exist, they are certainly not drawn along lines familiar to us. Instead, Beyond Earth utilizes a “sponsor” system wherein twelve great conglomerations have pooled resources in order to huck a bunch of theoretically doomed individuals into almost certain death and obscurity. As a player, you get some choice in how these sponsors shaped the fateful ship that, against all odds, managed to find a habitable planet (of which you can choose some basic qualities like size, terrain and climate). Then, you set down on this planet and begin the difficult process of colonising it.

Course as fate (and game settings) would have it, you were not the only seeding ship to make the successful discovery and your opponents make planetfall an indeterminate number of turns after you. This is such a simple but I find effective measure since it gives you those initial turns of loneliness in an alien world that is surprisingly populated by some terrifyingly alien organisms. Functionally, this is no different than the starting turns of a regular Civilization game since you’re unlikely to discover your opponent right away anyway (and the AI always has some advantages to ‘catch up’ on the player regardless). But Beyond Earth has taken some notes from the Endless Legends game and tried to wrap more of its pacing in a loose narrative overview.

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I like one of the options during game creation is to pack your seeding ship full of artists. Because someone thought “Yes, a bunch of arthouse hipsters would make the perfect saviours of mankind and suitable colonists for an alien world!”

This narrative hinges entirely around your relationship with the planet around you. It breaks down three generic routes that a hypothetical space colonialist would have to their alien world. They could cling to their native home, trying to cultivate their new planet into a replicate of the Earth they left behind. They could seek to understand this strange and radically different environment, seeking to reach some sort of communalism with the radically and oftimes hostile nature. Finally, they could lean heavily on the advanced technology that brought them here, incorporating the new resources they’ve discovered to develop their cities and themselves into hitherto unimagined heights of new synthetic superiority.

These ideologies, named Purity, Harmony and Supremacy, serve as the primary pathway to victory. By specializing and developing your ideology, you’ll eventually unlock a means to bring this discovery and taming of a new world narrative to a close. If you’re an adherent to Purity, you eventually establish contact with Old Earth, construct a warp gate through which the population can travel to and rescue the old world from whatever indescribable horror had led to its near extinction. Harmony members turn their back wholly on Old Earth, recognizing a heightened awareness and sentience with the planet itself. Through a fusion of gene manipulation and technological integration, they develop a mind flower that will allow communication with the planet as a whole, bringing ultimate unity with the human species to the oddly coordinated flora and fauna already found there. Lastly, Supremacy establishes contact with Old Earth but not to bring its remaining refugees to their new home. No, using their advanced cybernetic enhancements, they send an undefeatable “diplomatic envoy” back to earth in order to cure the last remaining vestige of humanity of the flaws of their decidedly weak meat bodies so everyone can live peacefully as one synthetic society.

There’s also a strangely disconnect victory condition of making contact with some alien species that had left a bunch of their own structures behind on the planet like an irresponsible child forgetting to put away their toys and discovering their walkie-talkie has managed to fall into someone else’s hands.

It’s an interesting system and one that kind of encapsulates Beyond Earth. It’s different and neat but not without some glaring flaws. For one, despite the emphasis on narrative, there’s not a whole lot of incorporation of these ideologies in with the leaders. Despite each representative of the sponsors having a fairly interesting and detailed background, there’s nothing stopping the exploitative and money driven Hutama from seeking harmony with the earth (like I did in my first game) despite there being little narrative justification for doing so. On the one hand I can understand not limiting player choice and strategy but on the other hand, the game does anyway in regards to the quests which provide specific rewards to your buildings when they are completed. These quests are essentially decided based strictly on the rewards and not on their narrative consistency, so I don’t know why there was so much emphasis placed on splitting them in the way they did.

On the other hand, I do like the idea of customising your units and structures towards your strategy. There’s just little rhyme or reason for how they justify the customization. Furthermore, the sole determinant for your ideology is based on your research order (and random quest rewards). So you are forced rather early into deciding which victory condition you want to pursue as any of the major three require you have a staggering level fifteen in their respective ideology. So once you land on your little plant, you get some early turns to check out your starting area and basically commit to whether you want resettle old earth here, make friends with the aliens or just assimilate everyone into your collective hivemind. There’s a bit of mechanical nuance to these three victories that means you need to decide early what you are doing.

A Harmony victory is the most research intensive but the least interactive. You want to have a wide presence on the map through multiple cities. There are two buildings you can construct that will speed the process of the mind flower’s awakening. Course, Beyond Earth is running on the Civilization engine, so you have a natural anti-synergy in that the more cities you have the more research it costs to unlock the mind flower wonder. This naturally pushes you down the science virtue tree which makes technology cost penalties lower from number of cities. Thus, a Harmony victory requires a science and settlement focus which at least aligns slightly with the technologies that give you Harmony affinity (mostly ones to alleviate unhealthiness which is a global malus on your cities’ growth and production that grows due to number and size of cities).

What you’ll find, however, is that you start slipping into a Harmony/Supremacy hybrid since Supremacy technologies are generally science boost technologies. Rising Tide added hybrid affinities which allows your units to customize in different directions from the primary three ideologies. It’s a necessary component but, sadly, should have opened alternative victory conditions as well which they sadly don’t.

Finally, I find it really incongruous that you can murder the indigenous life without impunity with no negative towards the victory condition that follows you merging with said indigenous life.

Purity and Supremacy are a bit too similar as well. They both involve researching a satellite to contact Earth then building a wonder like the mind flower. Course, the two gates are on different tech but it’s what follows after the gate that makes things a little more interesting. Purity needs to settle twenty refugees in separate colonies that follow normal city settling rules. Supremacy has to shunt one thousand strength worth of units through its gates. Thus Supremacy is going to require a high production city or have built up a large army reserve. Unfortunately for both gates, they each can only transport one unit a turn. So Supremacy ends up needing a fair bit of technology in order to unlock the highest strength units in the game to make its progress as fast as possible. It’s still less than Harmony since the strongest Supremacy unit is just a few tech nodes from its gate but it does require a lot of the firaxis resource. Purity, however, need only protect the colonists so once their gate gets up there’s a pretty hard twenty turn timer to stop them. Though their colonists do move slowly so it’s helpful to either have spots picked out along the ocean or build roads to the places you want to keep them.

So there are some interesting elements and strategies that arise from these different victory conditions. But they don’t intersect with the other elements of the game particularly well. For instance, while the leaders are colourful and interesting there’s a neat dynamism with their visual appearance changing to reflect which ideology they are pursuing. It’s a neat visual flair that’s great for quickly understanding diplomatic relations just by looking at the leader screen. It’s unfortunate that the leaders themselves have little connection with the goals.

There are some interesting abilities and I like that Beyond Earth leans more towards game warping uniques to set their sponsors apart. Daoming is capable of building wonders instantaneously in any city that does not have a wonder. That’s a pretty incredible ability tempered only by the fact that none of the game’s wonders really contribute to any of the victory conditions. CEO Fielding has incredibly fast spies who can accomplish their covert operations in half the time as her opponents and really opens up the espionage game. But, once again, this doesn’t really predispose her towards any ideology. While flexibility is appreciated, I think it holds back both gameplay and narrative. Without some direction, the leaders rather come off as generic. Half the time Elodie is in my game, she’s a warlord conquering the entire map. Other times she’s just sitting back trying to put out wonders and looking to build the mind flower. Outside of her avatar, there’s not much that really distinguishes her from Bolivar. It would sacrifice some replayability but if they could have given the leaders some manner of predisposition, it would have been great. Make some more likely to pursue warmongering or purity. Others focused on establishing contact (and generating lots of money to accomplish this) or looking to set up the mind flower. I think with more distinct victory conditions they could have made the leaders even more prominent and put their personalities front and centre. I can’t help but compare it once more to Endless Legend where some factions are cut off entirely from victory conditions due to their perks and detriments.

One thing that Beyond Earth does do really well is lean into its science fiction theming. I really like the separation between land and water cities and how both have slightly different mechanics for how they work. Then there’s the woefully underutilized satellite layer which has so much potential for additional strategy and development that it could turn into something really unique and distinct.

Beyond Earth is ultimately an ok game. I’ve enjoyed my time with it and don’t regret the purchase by any means. There’s lots of really wonderful ideas and ingenious twists on the genre kicking around in this game. I would really like to see these ideas given room to grow. I’d also like to see it push the boundaries of a 4x game and maybe start examining some of the core game mechanics and ask what can it do differently. Could you make a Beyond Earth like game that has different focus rather than on conquering, exploiting and exterminating? Technological or ecological integration are ideas ripe for bending the traditional approach to these types of strategy games. And I’m not opposed to the narrative elements but I am unsure how you can reconcile them with the base game mechanics as well as form a cohesive story arc.

Accessed from https://www.celjaded.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/CelJaded-Civilization-Beyond-Earth-Rising-Tide-Artwork-Banner.jpg
One thing I would have liked from a narrative perspective is if a player chose one of the expansion sponsors they actually arrived after the AI. Would fit their backstory and add an interesting twist to difficulty levels.

At any rate, I know this review is far too late to the discussion to provide much for impact on the game or it’s development. But perhaps it can serve as a source of inspiration or merely act as a resource for looking back on a release and examine why it wasn’t just quite right. Since I’ve kind of vowed to work through my backlog as well as do more of my purchasing on dated releases for cost reduction, I think I may have more of these retrospective looks in the future.

Or we can just see if older games truly stand the test of time.

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The Crystal Cracks

So this is the accompaniment article to last weeks disappointments of 2018. And, more than anything, I hope to bring attention to a little gem of a game that I feel has not received as much buzz or attention as it really deserves.

Last week I pointed out Artifact which is a digital card game by Valve Software and is really well made. Well, this time we’re looking at another game but this one is wholly physical.

For those that have followed the gaming posts on my blog, you are probably aware of my love for Summoner Wars by Plaid Hat Games. Despite being a bit niche amongst my board game friends – to the point I only know of Kait and myself who enjoyed the game – I managed to play a lot of games and actually buy many of the new armies for the game. It got to the point that Kait and I developed eight custom factions as well, so we could play decks both new and more tailored to our tastes.

The process of variant creation was an interesting one for me. It helped me to view the game through a different lens and I appreciated and despaired over different design directions key to Summoner Wars. On one hand, I came to really appreciate the element of luck and uncertainty that the dice provided. On the other hand, I did not like the use of high health walls for deployment and instantaneous response it provided along with the timing of discards and card draw.

Overall, however, I really enjoy Summoner Wars and my only regret is that I cannot find other people to play. Sadly, this carried over to Plaid Hat Game’s newest release: Crystal Clans.

https://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/crystal-clans
Crystal Clans, Summoner Wars and all associated imagery and whatnot belong to Plaid Hat Games.

I don’t know any other way to describe Crystal Clans other than it’s Summoner Wars version 2.0. This, unfortunately, turns off pretty much everyone I know because they do not like Summoner Wars. So a far more intuitive game with better balanced objectives and alternating game mechanics is not enough to alleviate people’s concerns. So, in order to do Crystal Clans a greater service, I shall attempt to describe it better.

Crystal Clans is an area control board game that pits separate clans represented by unique decks against each other to fight for the coveted crystals. Cards represent different forces of an army which move across a battlefield and vie for two of three crystal locations necessary to claim a crystal card. Players can contest crystal zones by moving their own armies into the space and duking out with their enemy.

Each clan deck is composed of six different commons and three hero cards. Two of the common cards form the backbone of the clan with six copies of those units while the rest have three copies each. There is only a single copy of heroes but heroes are generally stronger and cheaper commons.

Well, that’s the best I can really do. It is near impossible to discuss Crystal Clans while ignoring the Summoner Wars lens and, I feel, something only possible by a player who has never played Summoner Wars. But let me just tell you why I love Crystal Clans far more.

First, the game design is really slick. Clans have a reference card which denotes the signature ability of their faction. This ability isn’t found on all their cards but usually represents a core strategy for the clan. For example, the Skull Clan has Undying as their signature ability. This allows their warriors with that ability to be summoned from their graveyard as though they were in their player’s hand. Unsurprisingly, this represents the classic “undead” faction in fantasy games.

However, these aren’t your stereotypical graveyard robbing ghouls with an unhealthy obsession for black and mortification. One of my consistent gripes with Summoner Wars was how woefully shallow its theming was. Well, Crystal Clans is a terrifically beautiful game. While the style is a bit too cartoonish for my taste, I can’t deny how consistent and committed it is to that style. Those aforementioned necromancers are more Day of the Dead themed with lots of flowers, bright colours and – yes – an unhealthy obsession with skulls.

https://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/crystal-clans
Some cards have consistent battle effects across them, removing the risk in guessing your opponent’s hand. Course, there’s an additional consideration in what you play as a battle card since it gets discarded and can’t be summoned unless you reshuffle your deck – which awards a free crystal to your enemy!

Curiously enough, only about a third of the undead faction is actually undead. The rest are units built around supporting them with necromancers allowing them to deploy outside of your clan’s home zone or devout cultists which allow a free undead unit summon to their space when they are killed.

Contrast the Skull Clan with their distant kin the Blood Clan. These swamp rednecks are most easily associated with the swarm like factions in fantasy battles. Typically its represented by goblins or something and not bayou farmers and their colossal crocodiles. This faction, however, is fun since they are not restricted by the number of units they can use to form an army. Stack them up as high as you can and form an old school Civilization III stack of doom to terrorise the board!

And this transitions into my next point about Crystal Clans. One of its immediately tangible departures from Summoner Wars’ formula is this squad formation mechanic. You can stack up to three units into one space (for most clans) with only the top unit contributing its special ability while every other unit lends its strength and defence to the whole. This eliminates the need for spells or buffs since any card can, essentially, turn into a persistent improvement to a single card’s power. But there’s more consideration here. Most battles will remove lost troops from the top so you may want to organize your forces to accommodate expected loses so the unit you want to live is buried on the bottom.

Even more interesting, every card also has a “battle effect” tied to it. See, Crystal Clans removes the oft maligned dice mechanic from the game. But to maintain that same element of uncertainty, when two armies battle, each player provides a battle card to their side in an attempt to turn the outcome to their side. The battle effects are split between two options and serve as a simplistic rock-paper-scissors mini-game. At the start of a battle, cards are revealed and you compare your chosen battle card with your opponent. Bold beats Guarded, Tricky beats Bold and Guarded beats Tricky. Generally speaking, stronger effects are regulated to the stronger pairing. For example, Big (Blood Clan Hero) provides an additional 8! attack if you happen to play him into an enemy’s guarded card. But if your opponent played a tricky or bold themselves, then you only receive 4 attack for the fight.

For most games, this little contest will typically be treated as a random effect that you pay little attention to. However, as your understanding and skill with the game improves, you may realize that you can pop your Dandelion Knights out from a horrible Meteor Clan knight stack in your home zone and scurry to crystal zones for the final score by initiating a battle and utilizing your Pollen Faeries battle effect.

And this is what I most love about Crystal Clans. It looks like a cutesy, simplistic version of Summoner Wars with streamlined decks, clearer objectives and much smaller battlefield. However, my experience has been anything but. Crystal Clans mechanics are simple to understand but much harder to optimize. I still don’t know how to “properly” play the game – which is to say I am never certain which action is the best one to take at any turn. This is very similar to Artifact where the mechanics are simplified by the strategy is far more compelling.

Compounding Crystal Clans decision making matrices, its resource system is far more elegant and far more tricky than Summoner Wars. Crystal Clans uses an “initiative track.” There is a numbered ladder on the side of the board and you track your spending by moving a marker up this track towards your opponent. Once it crosses the 1 threshold on your opponent’s side, it is their turn. However, actions cost different amount of initiative. For example, you make take a summon action which allows you to play 1 to 3 cards from your hand to your home zone. This alone can cost anywhere between 0 to 9 or more initiative depending on what you play. If you were on the neutral 0 space of the tracker, that could give your opponent a whopping 11 initiative (since play will only pass back to you once it cross your 1 initiative space on the track)! Scoring is likely the most expensive action since you need to pay the cost of a crystal in order to grab it for your side. Crystals are, on average, about seven initiative themselves and this is not accounting for the initiative you need to spend to control two of the crystal spaces.

https://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/crystal-clans
Oh Flower. This Sleep ability is perhaps the best signature in the game. Nothing like either taking out an opponent’s best attacker or forcing them to bury really good abilities to put low attack cards on top of the stack. Plus who doesn’t like a 2v3 battle?

Sadly, despite digging how sly its mechanics are plus the unique and coherent design of its clans, Crystal Clans simply does not seem to be catching. I know Kait was pretty lukewarm to it and my friends who didn’t care for Summoner Wars weren’t big fans either. Somehow Crystal Clans managed to alienate both those that loved Summoner Wars and those that hated it. There was a delicate line to walk between too familiar and too different and from my experience Crystal Clans failed to attract those turned off by its predecessor or draw along its ardent fans. I’m really digging their expansion clans who provide very interest twists to the basic game mechanics. I’m also eager to see how Plaid Hat Games finalizes their deck building rules before I start dropping too much money into the game.

And I certainly have not played enough of the game to do a deep dive into its balance but my initial experience seems that while the core box offers pretty good options, there’s a few standout clans. Stone and Flower are distinct among the rest but for opposite reasons. Stone Clan is all about building a strong board presence with immovable armies that destroy the enemies. But all their units and activations cost far too much to really get that board built. On the flip side, and perhaps the fuel for my bias, Flower is incredibly tricky and fast. It’s a pretty frustrating match-up (that I’ve played too many times) and Flower is both able to run circle around Stone (and the other clans for that matter) while also providing rather powerful punches given the power of their signature clan ability Sleep. If you want to try Crystal Clans and really enjoy rolling a game, I suggest picking up the faerie clan.

As of today, however, I’m very happy with Crystal Clans with my only disappointment being that I have no one to play and, given the battle card component of its battles, I’m unable to play by myself. I’ll shamefully admit that I’ve played Summoner Wars on my own many times with only mild conflict of knowledge. But truly randomising the battle cards really strips out a key component to the game.

Of all the things I’d like to see the most in later releases, however, are more crystal cards. To win, one side needs to collect four and they’re purchased from an open set of three. So you can see quite a lot of the same ones through multiple games especially if they’re close. I’d also like to have the option to remove some crystals from rotation and allowing customization of the crystal deck would be fantastic.

So… yeah, if this long rant piqued your interest, I encourage you to give Crystal Clans a try. It might not click at first which is its biggest weakness. But it’s such a lovely little refinement that I just want it to do well enough to see even more!

Maybe it’ll even encourage Plaid Hat Games to put the rest of their clans on their card browser which, to date, still only has their launch cards listed. Or maybe it they could even release more scenarios which also haven’t been seen since launch. There’s so much promise here, I would hate to see it squandered.

Hammer, Sickle and Giant Steel, Comrades

You know what the world needs? More mechs. But I don’t mean Japanese mecha, I mean old style giant-tin-cans-on-legs mechs. We’re talking about the old Mechwarrior from the nineties mechs, where it took forever to turn and your vehicle was huge, plodding and carrying the weight of something that would be thousands of pounds. Japanese mecha are cute but are basically samurai with guns.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Accessed from https://cf.geekdo-images.com/opengraph/img/OroKc5LPGoND4I9_uXn13pLCMxM=/fit-in/1200x630/pic3163924.jpg

Scythe and its associated imagery and whatnot belong to Stonemaier Games. Though, I’m uncertain how accreditation works given the controversy over its art. I’ll let Stonemaier deal with that.

So over the past month, I got the privilege of playing a boardgame that fulfills this desperate gaping hole in our societal’s foundations: Scythe – a Stonemaier Games release designed by Jamey Stegmaier. For my friends who are super into boardgames – and let’s be clear, I am not super into boardgames – this was an exciting release. The art is gorgeous (though evidently mired in controversy) and the gameplay is pretty interesting. I wanted to give the game a shot, and a large part of that was the massive steam powered mechs set in a turn of the nineteenth century Europe struggling with a shift from agrarian society to an industrial one. But beyond the neat setting for the game, there’s a number of interesting gameplay mechanics that made the game standout.

Sadly, Derek and I never really got an opportunity to try the game together when it lauched. Derek played it a bunch, however, so when he invited Adam and I to a campaign for the final expansion release, I felt I was at a bit of a disadvantage. Scythe had already two substantial add-ons – Invaders from Afar and The Wind Gambit – and Rise of Fenris was billed as being its biggest addition yet. I had some catching up to do and I was essentially thrown at the wolves in order to do it.

Let’s begin with what I learned from my first game.

Scythe involves players choosing a faction which provides them with a lovely little hero figurine that depicts their character and their animal companion. I’m not certain why every character has a pet. From what I can tell, they never factor into the gameplay itself, but each seems to be designed carefully around matching the animal and character with their general culture on which they are styled. A faction is a fantasy version of an old turn-of-the-century nation state. Derek chose them randomly for our session and we had Saxony (Germany), Nordic Kingdom (Norway) and the Togawa Shogunate (Japan). We were then randomly assigned our factions with Adam on Germany, Derek on Norway and myself as Japan. Derek was excited since he got to play his favourite faction. I was fortunate since I was the only expansion faction and had additional rules to learn.

We then played our first game of the Rise of Fenris campaign.

Thankfully, Rise of Fenris is specifically designed for idiots like me. It introduces the elements of the game gradually, with only the campaign log sheet as the new element to juggle on the first match. This let me focus on learning the base of Scythe. Which, despite its appearance, isn’t as formidable as I initially felt.

Scythe is a rather misleading game that appears like it would be fantastical Risk on a strange board. Every faction starts in a predetermined location. The original five start on isolated islands with the two expansion factions (Scotland and Japan) taking up the distant corners of the map. The board is separated into hexagonal territories associated with a single resource. There are four resources on the board – wheat (or honeypots as we called them), iron, wood and oil. You need wheat, iron, wood and oil in order to enlist lieutenants, build your mechs, build your structures and upgrade your board actions respectively. Along with your faction board, every player is handed a random action board at the start of each match. These boards have the same actions split across four columns but the top actions are randomly paired with the bottom actions on each board. That was a confusing sentence.

Accessed from https://9to5toys.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/11/scythe-board-game.jpg?quality=82&strip=all&w=1600Let’s break down the action board since it’s the meat of the game. If you are dealt, say, the Patriotic board, then you will have the Move action on the top of your first column and the upgrade on the bottom. On the other hand, the Industrial board has the Bolster action over the Upgrade action on the first column. The way your turns work is that you will select one column and then perform the top and bottom actions (if able). Some of the top actions have a cost associated with them but they’re usually pretty small like paying a coin. The bottom section, however, all have much higher costs. These costs, of course, are determined by your action board so those Industrial and Patriotic names aren’t just for show. They will generally steer your style of play with your faction.

It’s an interesting way to mix-up the game’s strategy. Each faction has a unique element that generally makes them strong at a portion of the game. Saxony may place any number of their accomplishment stars for winning battles despite the game’s win condition. This naturally pushes them towards war. Norway, however, can cross rivers with their workers prior to building the associated mech which grants that ability. Thus, Norway is pretty good at territory control. Japan drops traps and I have no idea how they work because expansion factions are weird. But while you may pick Saxony as your faction you might end up with the Agriculture board that makes your mechs cost four iron to build. That’s a lot of iron and may direct you towards a more peaceful approach to the game.

So how do you win?

Each player has six star tokens to track their progress against twelve or so tasks. These tasks range from winning a battle, building all your mechs or maxing out the power tracker on the game board. The first player to place all six stars immediately ends the game. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they win. Factions are then scored on the number of territories they control, the amount of gold they have accumulated and the number of stars that they have placed. How high your score is on these three factors is further influenced by your popularity with the people. It’s possible (and happened twice!) that you could trigger the end of the game and still lose the match – much to Adam’s chagrin. From what I can gather, reputation is king and you want to get as high as you can on that track so that all your other objectives will push you ahead of your opponents. There’s a bit of a wrinkle with this reputation tracker, however. Whenever you battle an opponent and win, you force that opponent to retreat his units back to his starting territory. If some of those units are workers, then you lose reputation equal to the number of workers that were forced to retreat.

So despite the initial appearance of trying to dominate the board and scoop up all the resources, there’s a real cost to just rampaging which will be reflected in the people’s dislike of you as a war tyrant.

In fact, I did very well during the campaign by minimizing my combat engagement. I mostly adopted a strategy of trying to pump my popularity as high as I could while constantly improving my action board and building the little buildings. There are the four different actions on your action board, after all, and mechs only really contribute to combat. Buildings provide four different bonuses. They’re pretty small and mostly improve your action economy when taking the top action on your board. Your monument, for example, can improve your popularity by one every time you take a bolster action. The windmill allows you to produce an additional resource on the tile that it’s built. Your mine allows greater movement between certain tiles on the map and the armoury improves your power on the power tracker.

There’s a lot of moving parts to Scythe and while the game mechanics are fairly simple, knowing what to do is pretty complicated. I made a goal of trying to reach the factory for my first couple of games. The factory space is located in the centre of the board and when you arrive you may look at the top two cards of the factory deck and choose one to keep. This gives you access to an additional action that you may take. The value of this action, however, varies wildly between what your goals are and the card you draw. I saw a lot of factory cards throughout the campaign and can confirm that they are not all built equally. Sadly, controlling the factory also counts as three territories at the end of the game scoring. I say sadly because I never was able to maintain it throughout the campaign due to the presence of far stronger military factions that could chase me out whenever they wanted. But it does mean that the factory always holds strategic value and a point of interest even after you scoop up that factory card.

So that’s regular Scythe in a nutshell. It’s meaty enough that even after a couple of runs through the regular game, I still don’t know what’s the best way to address it. But as the campaign progressed, a regular game quickly became a fleeting thing.

Accessed from http://www.heavymetal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/jakub-rozalski-1920-dog-in-the-fog-small.jpgSee, Scythe: Rise of Fenris adds a whole slew of wrinkles to this formula. I believe there was a new mechanic pretty much every game. And there were eight matches to be played throughout Fenris. A lot of these new elements were mostly to add variance to basic aspects of a regular Scythe game. For example, later on in the campaign you can randomly select the tasks that you place your stars on. The expansion also included mech and infrastructure mods. These are powerful tokens that can really change the nature of your faction. Mech mods allow you to customize the abilities your mechs provide. Oh! I didn’t talk about mech abilities (because there’s so much of the darn game to cover). When you build a mech, it provides a new bonus that applies to your character and all your mechs for the rest of the game. Some of these are simple things like giving you an extra movement when you take a move action. Others give you greater advantages in combat like if you are fighting alone or if you’re defending. Some let you enter the lake tiles or move from lake to lake. Since you can’t take the same action twice, these little changes can give you an advantage whenever you take your movement action. The mech mods allow you to further customize and specialize your faction for a specific game plan.

Infrastructure mods, however, are the real bees knees. Most of these give you a free use of a bottom action board action. This is really valuable in the early game when you’re unlikely to have four iron to build your first mech which could take upwards of four turns or more to achieve. All three of us immediately latched onto grabbing as many infrastructure mods as possible and I’m uncertain about their value outside of a campaign game. It did make the campaign feel a bit manageable since it shrank the length of the games (and we had to squeeze three games in each time we played). I could see infrastructure mods being an excellent way to introduce a handicap for a mixed-skill play group, however. Give your beginning players a free infrastructure mod or two while the more experienced players get nothing. It’s a little advantage that can give the beginner something to be more competitive and a pretty simple addition that doesn’t require a lot of explanation.

I’d say the biggest mechanic the Rise of Fenris adds that would get the most play are the two new factions. These are pretty advanced when compared to the original factions released. And, as luck would have it, Adam and I both ended piloting them in our games. I was in control of the Vesna faction which is all about variance. Vesna’s mechs actually start with two blank abilities and her other two mechs have very underwhelming abilities. However, she has a pile of her own mech mods that she picks six randomly at the start of each game. You then tailor your mechs to the mods you chose and the goal of that match. For a more experienced player, I can see how this would be very valuable. I mostly just picked random ones because I had no idea how to use my mechs. Her other ability, however, I really enjoyed. At the beginning of the game, after setup, she gets to draw three factory cards that she has access to from the very start of the match! This is extremely powerful but comes with a significant downside. Once she uses a factory card, she must discard it. This applies to the factory card she picks up from reaching the middle of the board as well. However, early access to these cards seemed very powerful and I think Vesna is a strong early game faction meant to rush out an early advantage then close the game before her enemies can catch up.

The Fenris faction, however, is almost the exact opposite. Led by Rasputin, Fenris is all about war. They have a stack of eighteen influence tokens. Whenever Rasputin moves, he can drop these tokens on the board – one on his square and one anywhere else. Later, with a mech ability, Rasputin and his mechs can jump to influence tokens. This gives Fenris unprecedented mobility but there is a cost. Each influence token held at the end of the game counts as a negative victory point! Thus, Rasputin begins with a massive deficit in victory points that he’s trying to offload. A further wrinkle, however, is that enemy players may move onto influence tokens. Doing so claims the token but also results in negative victory points at the end of the game. Rasputin also has a unique board in that he naturally has less and gains less popularity. No one likes weird Russian mysticism. It’s hard for me to evaluate the strength of Fenris, especially since Adam came into it so late in the campaign and accidentally had a perfect setup to play them (since he was initially Saxony, all his infrastructure mods were for pumping out fast mechs which is Fenris’ goal). Even worse, Adam was able to leverage his superior mobility (and our low player count) to secure Tesla for the final match of the campaign.

Tesla I think may be the least useful element of Rise of Fenris. I didn’t like him and I’m not saying that just because he made me lose or that he’s ridiculously broken in the Fenris faction. Tesla operates as a second hero for your faction, with all the abilities of that hero. Only one player can control Tesla but when it means that Adam can toss influence tokens at twice the rate, it really negates the negative of Fenris while also making it near impossible for us to counter him. I was able to eke out a victory in the final map, but as it turns out, final scoring basically assured Adam the win after his run as Saxony. Seriously, if you want to win the Fenris campaign, grab Saxony. Their ability to complete multiple quests per game and get as many stars as battles they win is silly since you can claim those victories as any goal during the final scoring. More than half your final score is determined by how many rows and columns you complete on your campaign log and Saxony ensures that, no matter what random board or victory condition you pull, you will always be able to fulfill your missing requirements for those rows.

Accessed from https://i1.wp.com/www.123inspiration.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/1920-Jakub-Rozalski-6.jpg?fit=676%2C942Granted, Derek did teach us the game wrong so we were all playing with one victory condition near impossible to complete. That might have skewed things a little as well.

Overall, I think I liked the Rise of Fenris expansion. It adds quite a lot to the Scythe experience but its greatest strength is providing more variance so you can breathe new challenges and strategies into matches if you’ve played it enough to turn the base game stale. There’s far too many fiddly components in it, however, so I think you’ll only ever end up playing with one or two different components in any given match. At the very least, Vesna and Rasputin should give a lot of exciting games on their own with their very strong faction abilities.

And I don’t want to brag too much, but for having never played the game before, I ended up winning five of the eight matches. Maybe I was given an unfair advantage between having Japan and turning their start location into the incredibly mobile Vesna.

Or maybe I’m just a Scythe savant. Though it’s more likely that I’m an idiot savant.

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Clan Warfare

So, it’s been awhile. Kait and I have been very busy. Derek hasn’t been seen for years. Thus, our blog has sort of been neglected for a bit. For that, I am sorry. We’re working on something… that should be announced soon. Hopefully. It’s been taking a lot of time and we’re desperately short on that resource.

However, I have something to share today. If you’ve come for gaming news, you might have noticed that I talked quite a bit about Summoner Wars here. Well, for those not up-to-date, Summoner Wars is dead. The company that made it has retired the game after releasing the last second summoners for the factions that hadn’t received it. It was perhaps a touch bittersweet. I’ve been playing and thinking about Summoner Wars for a couple of years and now it is finished. The cards, of course, still exist and we can play it at any time but there’s something to be said for the excitement of new releases.

On the other hand, however, Summoner Wars had some issues which I’ve discussed. It was a flawed little gem. It was fun, different but held back by intrinsic design flaws that could never truly be designed around. In some sense, it was like Team Fortress 2.

Unlike Team Fortress 2, however, Plaid Hat Games has announced a sequel.

Alright, that’s a lie. Plaid Hat has done no such thing. But they have released a new game that contains a number of similarities that it’s hard to not draw a line between the two products. I’m talking about Crystal Clans and I’m excited to share some of my initial thoughts with you about the game.

Image accessed from https://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/crystal-clans

Crystal Clans and associated media belongs to Plaid Hat Games. You can check it out at their website, https://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/crystal-clans

Crystal Clans represents a first for me. It released in March and I’m talking about it in June! That has to be a record for relevancy from me. Typically I’m a year or more behind on the latest hotness. Three months makes me almost cutting edge! It’s also the first game I’ve purchased sight unseen. I typically like to try things before I buy them. I’m a cautious consumer and hate “wasting money.” Anything I get needs to be used enough for the purchase to be worthwhile. So if it’s something that isn’t enjoyable I’ll still feel a compulsion to play it.

Which makes things difficult if the game is two player.

I had been meaning to hit up a boardgame cafe and try Crystal Clans. I was eager about it when Plaid Hat announced it almost a year ago. Unfortunately, there’s been very little floating around after its release so I was a touch nervous committing to my purchase. But I recently bit the bullet and here we are.

Consequently, I haven’t put enough time into the game to provide a proper review. You’ll have to wait for that whether you want it or not. What I can do is talk about my initial reactions and feelings. Because those are valuable, right?

Let’s start off with a general overview. Crystal Clans is a competitive two player battle card game that involves moving your cards across a board. Each deck represents a unique clan with their own heroes and units. Sounds familiar right? Crystal Clan’s relationship to Summoner Wars is both a blessing and a curse. It offers a level of familiarity that puts off those originally unsatisfied by the predecessor and lures in those that wanted a bit more of the same.

However, outside of its superficial qualities, Crystal Clans is very much its own game.

For one, there is no enemy summoner. In Summoner Wars, the game was one only once the commander of your opponent’s army was killed. In Crystal Clans, you are fighting with your opponent over the game’s namesake. There’s a dozen or so crystal cards (sorry, I don’t actually have the game beside me and I’m too lazy to get up and count them) that form a deck, three of which are ever available for acquiring. To get these crystals, you must march your little armies out and hold two of three special crystal spots on the board, king-of-the-hill style.

And when I say army, I don’t mean some strange metaphorical extraction of game pieces into a fantastical representation. You can literally stack three of your units into one cohesive force. This adds their defence and attack together, while also slowing the battalion down by the most sluggish unit amongst the lot. However, only the top card of the stack benefits from its unique ability (generally speaking). Thus, there’s some strategy to how you organize your units. For example, if you’re the Meteor clan, you probably want your Titan Knights leading charges across the battlefield because they reduce the activation cost of your battalion while they lead. But once you reach the frontlines, you want to swap things around so that your Citadel Knights benefit from both their tactical expertise and allow you to trigger the clans unique ability, Prediction.

But it’s not just stacking your units that is a massive departure from the Summoner Wars formula. Your deck is only composed of units. There are no events in this game so everything can be thrown on the board. There’s also no dice. This may seem like combat is a boring deterministic affair where the person who draws the best squad first wins. However, when two armies meet, both players must play one card from their hand (or their deck if they are unfortunate enough to have no hand). These units now act as battle cards and each unit in your deck has different effects depending on the relationship of the symbols played between you and your opponent.

There are three types of battle cards. I don’t really care what Plaid Hat calls them, they’re the Bull, Turtle and Fox. Generally speaking, Bull battle cards add attack to your squad. Turtle adds defence to your squad. Fox does random things. But there’s more interaction between these types for each battle card has two effects whether its played against its antagonist symbol or not. One effect is typically stronger than the other. Bull (attack) beats Turtle (defence). Turtle (defence) beats Fox (random). And finally, Fox (random) beats Bull (attack).

It’s an interesting sort of guessing game wherein you’re trying to either wipe out your opponent or save your stack while figuring out what your opponent is going to play. There’s an emphasis here on attack that makes exchanges generally a bloody affair. There’s a reason for this: it makes the game all about the cost of exchanges.

For there’s a very interesting mechanic that separates Crystal Clans not just from Summoner Wars but most other games I’ve ever played. The economy of Crystal Clans is built and played out by a shared initiative track. Whenever you summon a unit, you pushed the little crystal down the track towards your opponent. Once it passes a neutral band, your turn ends and your opponent’s begins. It’s a fascinating exchange wherein the more you spend, the more you give your nemesis. Expensive turns produce explosive counter plays. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that conservative play will rule. The specialized design of the clans means some benefit from rushing while others want to slow down and grind things out. Furthermore, crystal scores are highly expensive acts, costing upwards of eight or nine initiative to snag a crystal. Lastly, ignoring crystals and constantly butting heads means you’ll eventually run out of your deck. When that occurs, you shuffle your discard and make a new draw deck but your opponent gets a free crystal without needing to pay or control two zones.

Image accessed from https://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/crystal-clans

The Crystal Clans board is significantly smaller than the Summoner Wars board. While I was initially skeptical, I actually have no complaints with the cramped playing field at this time.

And every action costs you. You want to draw cards? That’s three initiative. Want to move your units. Depending on your battalion, that’s one to three initiative. Attacking requires spending initiative (unless you perform it at the end of a move). You can also force your opponent to discard cards if you control their home zone but this action also costs you three initiative.

There’s a strange flow in this initiative passing that I haven’t quite wrapped my head around. Intuitively, it makes sense to try and leave your opponent with as little initiative as possible. But sometimes a large summon can force your enemy to spend more to respond to it. In fact, because drawing cards requires spending initiative, I feel that the game is less about favourable economic exchanges in terms of summon costs but more about economic exchanges in terms of card usage. If you can win a battle using two units to your opponent’s three, then you can force them to draw more than you. Do that enough times and they’ll run out of deck and you’ll get a free crystal.

Alternatively, if you score three crystals, then you effective put your opponent on a timer. If they run out of deck, you’ll automatically win when they have to reshuffle and claim the fourth and final required crystal. There’s a tempo here that’ll take time to understand and utilize and it’s one of the things that leaves me most excited for Crystal Clans.

As I’ve said, Kait and I have only just begun to play the game. Of all the changes to the Summoner Wars formula, I feel the biggest is in Crystal Clan’s simplicity. Summoner Wars struggled with some fairly counter intuitive mechanics and play elements like killing your own units for economy and the dangers of crossing the middle line due to reinforcement and board control based on wall plays. In this regard, Crystal Clans makes sense. You want to rush your units out and claim those crystal zones. You want to win battles. You want to beat your opponent’s units. The hardest thing to grapple, outside of learning the strengths and weaknesses of six fairly unique decks, is figuring out when to do these. Winning a big battle and taking board control is great but if you score a crystal without a hand, you could open yourself up to a rather brutal counter attack as you have no control over your battle card plays. Learning when to discard cards in your hand, when to replenish, when to push and when to score definitely takes some time.

I’m happy to say, however, that the game doesn’t feel as unfair. Without dice, there’s always a sense that you could have done something else to take back the match. There’s still some element of luck. You can’t control what crystals are available for claiming. You can’t control what order your cards come up in your draw pile. But really outside of that, it’s all on you. And at least for now, it feels a lot more fair.

Hopefully later I’ll be able to go into more detail about the clans, once I have more experience playing with them. But I’m excited that I could spend a whole post just talking about the mechanics without any mention of all the unique cards or the clans special mechanics. Each one changes a fundamental aspect of the game and while some are certainly far better than others, that they give each clan an identity is great design.

Plus, Plaid Hat Games has announced six new clans to be released at a future date so there will be plenty more Crystal Clans to discuss in the months to come!