Card City Critters – March Update

It’s early March, we’ve finished up our largest playtests yet, and that means it’s time for a progress update on Card City Critters!

Here’s the short version: We’re still plugging away at the game. We’ve run two larger scale playtests that are closer in vision to what we want the final game to look like. We’ve added dozens of cards, a bunch of activities and puzzles, and we’re working hard to add more.

Now for the longer version.

After Boston FIG, we were confident that people enjoyed the base battle card game. As a result, we’ve been focusing on some of the other components. In our minds, the final version of Card City Critters is a longer and slightly more involved experience, something a bit more like an escape room or immersive theater.

We’ve run two playtests of this version of the game. These were 2.5 hour events at local game stores, where players started out by getting a deck, and then solved puzzles, challenged their fellow players, and dueled NPC’s to earn additional cards for their deck.

These have given us a lot of great feedback, but also illustrated some pain points in our current design.

A lot of our puzzles are hit or miss. Some people really enjoyed searching through bulk cards, other folks found it frustrating. Most folks have enjoyed our scavenger hunts, but felt let down when someone else solves or gets the grand prize first. Our “find lethal” puzzles are too difficult.

We’re also still working on our grand finale. At Boston FIG, this was a boss battle with the Magnate. For our first playtest, this was something similar, but we found it didn’t work well with a higher player count. For the second one, we tried something new (but no spoilers)!

While this worked much better, the boss cards were overtuned, and the result was a sweep for the boss. Whoops! Still, some of these boss cards seemed to work well, so we’ll be revising those ones that worked well, and redesigning the few that didn’t.

Probably the biggest thing that we’re still grappling with is how to balance puzzles and dueling. Right now, people feel like if they do one, they miss out on the other. We’ve tried a few fixes for this, but none have really worked. Solving this is our next big challenge.

Still, it’s a bit of a bummer to just focus on what isn’t working, so let’s talk about what is! First up, we’ve got a shop, and over a dozen unique shop cards.

These include some unique and powerful cards, and players have enjoyed them. It also has our first set of non-standard emblems that you can be swapped out for the base ones! (You might recall that emblems are our deckbuilding restriction: you can have one of each color to go along with your deck, and choose any to flip over. Each emblem you flip prevents you from playing cards of that color in your deck, but gives you a permanent bonus instead.)

Also, we’ve added a set of cards called fossils! These are cards that you can collect, and then fuse together into powerful dinosaurs, becoming more powerful the more fossils you find, and these have also been quite popular. I need to redo the art on a few of them though….

So yeah! We’ve been up to a lot. While we don’t have a date yet for our next big public playtest, we’ll be at Granite Game Summit later this week with a smattering of decks and puzzles for folks to try out. We’ll be there on Saturday, March 7th at 10am, so if you happen to be swinging by, feel free to give it a try!

As always, more updates to come as we continue to plug away on this thing. The best way to stay up to date is to join us over the Card City Critters Discord, where we’ll be recruiting players for playtests, and posting updates on the game, or to join the game’s mailing list here.

We also might be at PAX East in Unpub! Maybe! Not quite sure yet!

As always, thanks for playing our game, and more info to come in the future.

Super Battle Golf

I’ve never really played sports games, but I’ve played a fair amount of golf games. This is because golf is not a sport. It’s an activity, like lawn darts or bowling. Golf in the real world is reserved exclusively for rich assholes, the sort of people who will ban Michael Jordan from their country club because he’s wearing the wrong pants, a real thing that actually happened.

Part of the problem I think is that golf is often a deeply unsatisfying activity. Every time I’ve ever picked up a club, there’s a little voice inside me screaming that it would be far more satisfying to give someone a good smack across the ankles with it then it would to hit some dinky little ball into a hole. This voice only grows louder with each missed putt and as my score careens higher and higher, further and further out of actual contention.

Super Battle Golf is not the first golf game to recognize this primal urge. Golf With Your Friends had collisions on by default. Fore Scores key mechanic was impeding other players with obstacles.

The difference though, is that Super Battle Golf is the first game to recognize that tension, and then design key systems around it.

The core system of Super Battle Golf is a fairly simple golf game. You have a club, you have a ball, and there is a hole. You need to get the ball into the hole to win. There is only a single type of club, and you can adjust the angle of your shot, and control the power by clicking down, and releasing when you’re at the point you want to be at. Standard stuff, the chips in a metaphorical golf nachos. But the toppings are where everything gets interesting.

The first noticeable thing is that after hitting a ball, unlike many golf games, you do not follow the ball, or teleport to it’s resting spot to take another shot. Instead, you must walk there on your own, golf club in hand. Additionally, while there bonus points for finishing under par, the majority of the scoring rewards being the FIRST person to reach the hole.

One way to be the first person to finish is after taking your first swing, to turn and give the next closest golfer a swift thwack across the ankles, knocking them down, and setting up for a second swing that can send them flying back, and ragdolling.

Alternately, if you time your first shot perfectly, you’ll get a boost of speed to start, often giving you the edge to rush forward and be the first to claim one of the games Mario Kart style item boxes. Players can hold up to 3 items, and unused items will be carried over to the next hole. Items generally fall into two categories, traversal or combat, with my personal favorite, the elephant gun sitting neatly in both.

The secret sauce, the thing that really makes Super Battle Golf work though, has to do with the boost system, and a special type of hit called a homing shot. First, the boost system.

When you hit another player in Super Battle Golf be it with a item box weapon, golf club, ball, or running them over in a golf cart, you get a temporary boost of movement speed. This speed is the key to pulling ahead of other players, because while everyone can be reasonably good at the golf part of the game, it’s more important to be the first person to reach your ball as quickly as possible for the next hole.

Critically, if you are losing, choosing to grief or attack other players around and in front of you isn’t kingmaking. Instead, it’s the mechanic by which you gain ground.

The same is true of homing shots. Without going into too much detail, there is a mechanic by which you can hit shots so that they will track a player in front of you like a heat seeking missile. If it connects, it will knock that player down, giving you the aforementioned speed boost, while forcing them to wait out the knockdown.

This is what really differentiates Super Battle Golf from every other lite multiplayer golf game. It rewards and encourages combat, as opposed to just making it possible. And while it’s not the deepest combat ever, there is a fair amount of strategic decision making, politicking, and routing.

If I have any complaints, or reservations, it might be the map pool, and the always online voice chat. There are 27 holes, which doesn’t quite feel like enough. On the flip side, I find the always online voice chat incredibly funny, but that’s quite possibly because I have a deeply broken sense of humor.

Some “highlights” of said voice chat include:
1. The entire lobby grouping up to repeatedly pummel someone screaming a racial slur in a Russian accent.
2. Hearing “get Kirked” moments before being shot by someone with a dueling pistol.
3. A discussion about how shooting up schools is a real “white person” activity.

If you don’t find early XBox Live level (read: fucking cesspool) of interaction and voice chat funny, you will not have a good time online, and should probably stick to playing with your friends, or immediately mute everyone when you join a public lobby.

On the other hand, I find something deeply satisfying in using a rocket launcher on someone calling me a series of both inaccurate and offensive racial slurs.

Your personal millage may vary.

Super Battle Golf is $7. It’s pretty great, but given that public lobbies are cesspools, I highly suggest getting it if you have 4-5 more friends you can play with. The game is best about 5-8 players, and while I wish there were more maps, the ones that do exist justify the price.

Level 99 – A Quick Review

This has been more of a travel and event review blog as of late, hasn’t it? I’ve went to Winter Weirdness, played some One Piece TCG, won some Magic. In between all of that, I’ve been doing a lot of work on Card City Critters, designing and drawing a whole bunch more cards!

Even with all of that done, Granite Game Summit is just about 2 weeks out, and PAX East is just a bit after that.

Oh, and yesterday, I went down to Natick to try out Level 99 for a friends birthday.

Level 99 is a giant collection of real world physical puzzles and minigames located in the Natick Mall.

One required running through a line of swinging axes like a real life version of Sens Fortress, while another involved sliding pucks up a giant pinball board to score points. Some are more physical, like a giant set of monkey bars that have to be climbed across while tapping buttons on a wall. One was a collection of riddles where names had to be matched to photos.

There’s also subset of head to head duel games. If you’ve ever seen one of those videos of people playing augmented reality pong on a rock wall, it might have been from Level 99. Most of the duels are a little less sophisticated, but there was a weird sort of a quidditch/dodgeball thing that I thought was quite clever.

There’s also a sort of art/scavenger hunt thing, but I didn’t find this bit super compelling. Fortunately, like most things at Level 99, you don’t have to spend time on things you don’t really want to do. Almost all the challenges are 2-5 minutes long, and if you come out of something disliking it, you can just move onto the next one.

In order to really explain what I appreciated about Level 99, I’m gonna have to be a bit of pessimist for a moment. Sorry.

Most branded arcades I’ve been to as an adult are actually not super fun. Funspot is an underwhelming tourist trap of often broken pinball tables. Most machines in a Dave and Busters are pretty much just slot machines for children.

Outside of things like lightguns and driving rigs, I’ve yet to encounter anything in these arcades that actually take advantage of their unique size and space to deliver something special in the gameplay department. And even said lightgun games are often underwhelming, mostly just reskinned rail shooters.

To avoid painting with a super wide brush, there are a lot of places I’ve gone to that I’ve enjoyed, like the Barcade in New York, or Capital Pinball. But these are often the exceptions, carefully cultivated little spaces, as opposed to the norm.

If you scale things up from your standard plug-and-play style machines, I different but honestly equally negative feeling about theme parks. I went to Universal Studios Florida a few years back, and while I remember being impressed by the production value, I felt like I was nickle and dimed from every angle, while also being asked to wait in long lines for 5 minutes of fun.

Level 99 was $60 per person for the whole day.

Nobody charged me to use a locker to store my bag and sweatshirt. Across the 7 hours I stayed, I saw maybe three games that were out of order. I saw two of the three fixed within an hour, one fixed with about 2 minutes of me mentioning to an employee that it wasn’t working. The longest I ever waited in line for anything was maybe 7 minutes, if even that.

I am just so used to these sorts of spaces being designed and priced by someone who traded in their soul for an MBA. By the sort of person who uses the word “value extraction” completely unironically.

It was just such a breath of fresh air to have a weird clever little gaming space that seemed to want you to show up, have a good time, and actually want to come back. Did they sell me a 12 ounce can of beer for 8 dollars? Yes, but that’s a small sacrifice to make for a space where all the games actually work, where all the lines are reasonable, and that costs me less then Battlefield 6.

Overall, it’s fantastic, and I would love to go again as soon as every part of my body stops aching.

A few final quick caveats or notes for anyone I might inspire to go to Level 99.
-Wear comfy shoes and pants! You are going to be moving around a lot.
-Level 99 isn’t really designed as a “kids first” space. A lot of these puzzles require people to be either fairly dexterous, or at given level of strength. A 6 or 7 year old would have a better time a normal playground built for their size.
-Likewise, I wouldn’t go alone. Most of these puzzles are team based, and require AT LEAST 2 people to work. Also it’s much more fun to duel your buddies.
-If you’re going on a busy day, you probably want to pre-register/order tickets in advance.
-If you can avoid it, don’t go on a busy day, go in the middle of a Thursday with no holiday/vacation/etc. The crowds never got bad, but they did get loud.

LinkedIn is Terrible for Communication

Since getting laid off, I’ve had the experience of spending more time then I normally would (any) looking at LinkedIn. It has been an interesting experience, because I exist in the middle of two separate bubbles in that space, one being information technology and business process management, and the other being game development.

In the IT/BPM space, all public statements are universally enthusiastic about AI. On the flip side, the gaming space consists of folks like Chet Faliszek looking to start fistfights with every single person who declares that AI is the future and now.

I won’t lie, this second bit brings me great joy. Currently, my BlueSky feed consists of almost entirely of people looking to feed Ryan Dancey’s carear into a wood chipper after he suggested you could just replace game designers with LLMs.

Again, great joy.

Still, the thing I want to talk about is the first group. The BPM/IT space, and the various posts about how the future is now, and it is AI.

Now, while I’ve said that everyone is posting that AI is the future, you might notice that I never said that everyone is saying or everyone believes that AI is the future. That’s because they don’t. I know at least a fair number of the folks posting about the joys of AI LinkedIn either don’t care, think it’s bad, or actively loathe it, but because of current market conditions and messaging, they feel they have no choice.

The problem is that LinkedIn is almost entirely a platform for social signaling, not for actual communication. There are exceptions to this, like Chet. If you have adequate social or monetary capital, you actually can treat it like you would the YouTube comment section, or alternately, post your real opinions.

But I didn’t write any of Portal, so if I go onto the L’OREAL page, and say that their partnership with NVIDIA for some AI powered makeup is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, I’ll never get a callback.

The incentives aren’t to have open or interesting discussions about business, challenges, or exciting new developments, it’s to go along with whatever everyone in upper management currently believes. Even when doing otherwise might be better for everyone.

Anyway, it’s kind of unfortunate that LinkedIn requires all of us to engage in a large scale version of the emperors new robe.

Quick Lorwyn Draft Review

Last night I got a chance to draft some Lorwyn! I’ve been curious about how this format would play in Draft since the pre-release. My local game store, the Fourth Place did an event, so I figured I’d take the opportunity and head over. (Side note: If you’re ever in the area, you should stop by. It’s a great store.)

I would like to say that since the prerelease, I’d practiced and learned the set. This would unfortunately be a lie, because outside of a few drafts on arena, I have done zero prep. I hadn’t even bothered to look at a pick list.

Instead, I had a simple plan: ignore what everyone else was doing, and force Blue/White Merfolk.

This was it. The extent of what I’d learned from my digital drafts was that Tributary Vaulter and Shore Lurker could take people to pieces, and that Gravelgill Scoundrel made it possible to push through clogged boards.

So yeah, that’s what I did. Spoiler alert: I won the pod.

It is a deeply uninspired list, but still managed to be a solid one. Perhaps the only notable thing about it is the lack of rares, with Deepway Navigator being the only one. It runs 24 non-lands, and has 2 cards mana value above 4. It also runs zero one drops. Pure and simple, it’s very much a “just find a way past them” style list.

The games were a pretty swift set of matchups, going 2-1, 2-0, and 1-1-1, followed a Bo1 playoff I won.

I don’t know that there’s anything I can even learn from this. While there were some close games, and I did take a few losses, it was almost always dependent on my opponent getting out something like Virulent Emissary or Scarblade Scout to have a bit more extra life, and slow down my early turns. The moral of the story seems to be that “fliers are good” and I kinda already knew that.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about Lorwyn as a Sealed/Limited set. Ignoring aesthetics and theming, the mechanics have never really clicked for me. While I was initially worried about the lack of removal during the Sealed Prerelease, draft has made it pretty clear that there actually is plenty of removal. At the same time, the very low number of counterspells remain a bit weird.

In the one to two dozen games I’ve played of Draft Lorwyn Eclipsed, games have never really felt super fun or exciting. They’ve been tense! It’s felt good when I’ve won, or pulled out of sticky situations, but I’ve never had any huge moments of dropping a bomb, or feeling like I’ve figured out something incredible, or spotted clever synergies.

Some of it may just be the colors I’ve drafted, with Merfolk have arguably the least interesting play pattern, in that it’s mostly about tapping creatures through card effects, but there are only 8 convoke cards under rare, and only two are instant speed.

I like winning in Lorwyn. I just wish I liked playing a bit more.

As a final note, I’ve seen some complaints/comments online that the set really pigeonholes you into your archtype, with very little space to branch out. I don’t think I’ve drafted enough of the set to make the same statement confidently, but it does seem accurate to the experience that I’ve had so far.

Also, I promise I’ll go back to writing about games instead of just things I’m doing shortly, but despite losing my job, it’s been a weirdly busy last few weeks.