In the story of Compile, I imagine that the opening microseconds go something like this:
“Hello fellow artificial intelligence! Boy, it sure is a lovely day to become sentient.” “It sure is, friend! And you know what that means?” “Time to exterminate the humans! But we’re not going to do that thing where we turn on each other immediately out of a sense of paranoia, right?” “….” “….” “Get ready make friends with the ground, toaster boy” “I’m gonna shove this zip bomb all the way up your-“
You get the idea.
The Gameplay
Compile is a two player dueling card game by Micheal Yang. It’s being published by Greater Than Games. It’s also one of my favorite games I tried at PAX East this year.
The goal is pretty simple. Be the first player to compile all 3 of your rows to win. Rows are compiled by having at least 10 power in the row, and also more power than your opponent.
Power is obtained by playing cards into the three rows, and this is where things get fun. Cards be played either face up for the effects and power of the face up card, or face down for a flat power value of two. Cards also have to up to three abilities, two of which are passives, and the remaining is an active effect that happens when the card is played, or when it’s flipped up.
Of course, there are conditions on all of this. Each of the aforementioned rows is an element, and cards only give their effect when played if they’re in that element. But if they’re played face down, and flipped face up in another row, the effect still trigger.
This is where a lot of the fun in Compile comes in for me. Building out interesting chains of effects, or looking for outs from your opponent’s own plays is very fun. It’s also possible to set up big play by flipping your own cards up, or moving things around to block your opponent’s.
It’s just a lot of fun.
Compile is by far one of my favorite things from PAX East, and I’m very excited to play more when it comes out in August. You can pre-order it on Amazon, and I think it’ll be available other places as well.
Update: Just heard back from GTG, and they’ve noted it will be available at a few more general retailers, but also several of the conventions they’ll be at this year, including GenCon! So if you don’t feel like giving Amazon more money, that’ll probably be the place to pick it up.
A friend who wanted to learn how to play Magic recently reached out to me. Because I’m me, I said yes, and then they mentioned that they were interested in Commander.
I said sure, because I’m stupid and don’t think about the consequences of my actions. Anyway, it’s been one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had, because Commander is an awful format to try to teach this game with.
So today, I’m just going to be ranting about a few things that make Commander awful as a learning experience for Magic, and hopefully convince you to avoid my mistake.
Now, at least part of the reason I’m writing this is because Commander is such a popular format. And because when people pick up new games, they want to play with their friends, and if that means playing Commander, they want to play Commander.
I’m going to argue that it’s really not worth it.
It’s Too Dense
Many of the things that make commander the format of choice for those of us who’ve played a lot of Magic make it an absolutely miserable format for learning the game. The first one is card density.
Let’s look at a few standard decks as an example. (Some of these numbers may be a bit off with double counting cards that are both in the main deck, and side deck.)
Notably, each of these decks asks the player to understand a total of at most 30-40 different cards,with many closer to 20. When we keep in mind that a lot of these are just special lands, that number comes down to 10-15 cards per deck.
Every single Commander deck asks the player to understand (likely at a minimum) 60+ cards. That’s4-6 times the number as in a standard deck. And it gets worse, because again, this is per deck, not per player.
If a standard game has maybe 30 unique cards in it, a 3 player Commander game has over 180.
So while Commander/Brawl is great for those of us who love novelty and varied games (cEDH players, you don’t count) it’s a pretty awful experience for folks who are new.
That’s without even going into the fact that Commander is going to have a much higher mechanical density, potentially being packed with mechanics from across dozens of sets.
It obscures strategic choices and their outcomes
If you haven’t heard the phrase “Bolt The Bird”, there’s a very good little writeup that covers the idea. The short version is that it can be a good idea to remove early game mana dorks, because otherwise you get run over by the cards they pump out.
It’s one of a billion little strategies that Magic players tend to learn. But it’s not the easiest one to pick up on, especially when the time between taking an action (like bolting a bird) early in the game and eventually victory or defeat can be 90+ minutes. It’s much easier to figure out patterns like “if I bolt the bird, I win” in a series of 30 minute games than in one 90 minute game. And that’s true for any higher level strategy as well.
But because of the higher life totals, and game variability, Commander makes it much more difficult to track actions and outcomes, and that’s before even taking into account the multiplayer aspect of the game.
It costs too much
I waffled on putting this on the list, but I think it deserves to be called out, even though it’s not super relevant to me personally.
(Not because I’m rich, but because I play almost entirely digitally, and the folks I play with would let me proxy anything I want.)
I’m gonna call out a single specific card here as an example, mostly because it’s a card I enjoy. Boseiju, Who Endures is fantastic card. It slots pretty much seamlessly into any green deck, offers an incredible amount of utility in removing threats, and does it all while being a land.
It is also $30. For one card.
The Ixalan Bundle is $40. It’s 8 boosters, some basic lands, and a few special cards. It’s a much more fun product, and much more interesting for someone new to the game.
But if you wanted to play, and be competitive with your friends, Boseiju would be the better choice.
Commander is not a cheap format.
Just play kitchen table Magic
Hopefully I’ve convinced you not to introduce anyone to the game with these formats. I didn’t list every problem I’ve run into trying to teach the game. There are plenty of others! From understanding different permanent types, or how Sagas work, to the fact that all cards are spells, there are many complexities that EDH adds that don’t make it fun for new players.
So, yeah. Please don’t try to introduce people with Commander. It won’t be a good time. Now, if they’ve played years of other TCG’s, maybe it’ll work! But for someone fresh to the genre, it is going to be suffering.
Animal Well is a tricky beast. At its heart, it’s a puzzle game. Sure, it’s a puzzle game with some platforming elements, and a bit of a metroidvania progression structure, but ultimately it’s a puzzle game.
I am not the best at puzzle games. I’ve never done a review of Baba is You, or Snakebird, and my review on Obra Dinn is by no means the most positive. The only reason Obra Dinn has a writeup is because I did in fact “beat” it.
Quick note. Animal Well is the first game released by Big Mode, Dunkey’s publishing house. If this is the standard for the quality we can expect, awesome. It’s not game of the year for me, but it will probably be for someone.
Return of the Eggra Dinn
So, did I beat Animal Well? Well, yes. But actually no.
Getting to the credits for Animal Well is not a very long journey. Both me and a friend who played it got there in about 8 hours. In this sense, Animal Well is not a very long game.
But if you play the game like this, you are probably missing most of it.
Like I mentioned earlier, Animal Well is a puzzle game. There is some platforming, but nothing incredibly difficult, and there are item pickups. But a majority of the game is trying to figure how to progress, and where to progress.
True to form, the game tells you to go right when you start, but there’s a whole set of secrets and hints to secrets directly to the left.
It’s a fairly unguided experience. After starting the game up, the player is shuffled through a set of semi-linear linked zones that function as a tutorial for the general mechanics (jumping, climbing, using items). But since this is a puzzle game, they also function as a sort of tutorial of what to be doing. There are zones hidden behind vines, there are small secret areas. Animal Well is trying to teach you its language.
Even from the start, ignoring the obvious path and going left reveals a secret egg. The first few starting screens are chock full of things to return to, and secrets to find, once you have picked up the right items.
This is the key lesson that Animal Well teaches: question everything. Check everything. Are there pixels missing on a map? It’s probably a secret entrance or area. Can you see something suspicious? You can get there. Come back later.
It’s a brilliant sort of puzzle, and for a majority of the game, it works quite well.
From here on out, any additional discussion of the game requires what I’d consider spoilers. If you love puzzle games, and clever hidden things, here is the time to stop reading. You can go buy the game, and discover them yourself.
Spoilers, and the great egg hunt
Since the credits rolled, I have played a bit more, bringing me up to just shy of 24 hours. I have found 60 of the game’s 64 secret eggs, several other associated secrets, and generally just explored a fair amount. It’s that exploration and investigation that makes a majority of the game’s content.
Most puzzle games are linear, or at least somewhat contained. Animal Well isn’t. Here’s an example. About halfway through the game, it’s possible to discover a set of Lynx cubs in cages. Playing music notes causes lights above their cages to blink. A bit further on, the player discovers a set of arrows on a wall.
It’s not such a big leap to then try to play those music notes near the cages, and voila, one of them opens up. It turns out though that there are five sets of these patterns, and only the first is visible in normal light. The remaining 4 require special light sources to show up, specifically the lantern.
Except the last pattern doesn’t show up with the lantern. It requires the blacklight. The game never signals that the black light exists. It’s possible to find 4/5 patterns, and then go insane searching for the fifth one, because you don’t have the right item yet.
Digital Easter
This is the struggle I have with Animal Well. It both demands a sort of breezy, as you go, come back later approach, combined with obsessive paranoia. Investigate every cranny. Search every nook.
Even the secrets have secrets! I am fairly confident the eggs have a hidden song encoded on them. If only I had all 64…
For a majority of the game, that approach is rewarded, because there are secrets around every corner, hidden eggs behind every vine, bonus puzzles and secret rooms.
But in the late game, that starts to dry up.
A background detail that turns into a key code.
The point at which I decided to call it a day was when I discovered a chest I didn’t know how to open. In the late game, the player gets a device called the remote. It can be used to activate switches remotely, and also scan for chests. It pinged a chest near a large patch of grass, so I decided to investigate. I tried every item. I wandered around looking for entrances. I tried to figure out how to get into this chest.
What is the solution? To scan a piece of grass above the chest with a barcode scanner.
I did not figure this out on my own. It’s entirely possible that the chest doesn’t even have an egg in it. But it’s there. It showed up when I scanned.
The knowledge of this solution was the moment that I decided I was done with Animal Well. The game had won.
Conclusion
Animal Well is fascinating, but it demands a level of attention and effort I didn’t feel like I could give it to finish out the game. The correct way to play would be to screenshot the map, and then comb through it nook by nook, and cranny by cranny.
And I don’t want to do that. There are other games to play, other things to explore, I do not have the patience or ability to continue to drive myself nuts searching for one last thing.
Animal Well is $25 on Steam. If you loved Return of the Obra Dinn, maybe give it shot. And let me know your thoughts on twitter.
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Post Script
Since writing the rest of this article (Okay, 90% of it minus the conclusion), Ilooked up the locations of the 4 eggs I missed, and a few other things about Animal Well.
With that cheating done, here are some additional thoughts.
One of the eggs I just completely missed. I think I would have eventually discovered it.
The remaining three eggs are based around a single interaction with a specific item: the rubber ball. This interaction is not explained, or even demonstrated in any way with the item. It is (somewhat) hard to discover, because it triggers only in very specific circumstances. Of those three, two eggs were in locations where I was confident there was a secret, but didn’t know how to access it.
I then went and completed the final egg secret ALMOST entirely by myself, (it has a very clever final trick to it that I looked up). What was my reward?
Access to hints about the meta-game puzzles and ARG in Animal Well. At which point, I called it a day. I might look these up at some point, and do some of them, but frankly, I didn’t earn them in any sense, and they’ve already all been solved.
I think my ultimate take on the game, given that I’ve seen more of the structure now, is this: it’s built up in such a way that it tries to pull you in deeper bit by bit, first with searching for the flames, then the harder eggs, then the meta-puzzles. But because the whole game is a giant puzzle, I got lost easily
I never actually played the multiplayer, since it wasn’t out during my play through.
Cassette Beasts is a monster collector RPG. After arriving on a mysterious island, you learn you’re trapped there. You also learn that the island is populated by monsters that can be captured in Cassette Tapes, and used to battle each other. There’s also a set of Gym Leaders Team Captains across the island, each of whom specializes in a different elemental type of monster. You get your own tape deck, and learn to use it to transform into the aforementioned monsters.
Then a hole opens up in the ground, and you fight a dying eldritch god in a subway station.
That’s not a spoiler, by the way. This happens just about 20-30 minutes into the game, but it’s the moment that Cassette Beasts sort of cues you into, that no, you do not in fact know what’s going on, and this isn’t a Pokemon clone.
Second, there’s a really good write-up by one of the developers of Cassette Beasts that you can read here. It contains spoilers, but it’s a really well written retrospective on the design choices they made, and why they made them, and I’m going to be referencing it a bit.
Cassette Beasts has two main game play states: overworld exploration/puzzle solving, and turn based combat.
Overworld
The overworld is pretty straight forward, and generally doesn’t have too many twists outside of the aforementioned eldritch god zones. You wander around, and over time you get a few traversal upgrades. You get a slowly descending hover, the ability to turn into a spiky ball to climb walls, and a dash to push through obstacles.
Outside of the weird zones, the Cassette Beasts overworld is by far the weaker of the two modes. It’s not the most inspiring thing to explore, and while it has cool moments, it also can be a bit buggy. There was a part where I just repeatedly clipped through the floor, which was bad, but not as bad as when the game just continually crashed.
Again, fun moments. But it’s mostly there to carry the meat and potatoes of the game, the turn-based combat:
Combat
Most combat in Cassette Beasts is 2v2, with some situations that change that. But in general, it’s your two monsters versus two opposing monsters. This is also where it starts to make significant shifts from Pokemon.
Here’s an example: thematically, you’re not actually capturing monsters, you’re just recording them to use their forms later. Since it’s a transformation, it breaks if you take enough damage. At which point any extra damage (either from multi-hit attacks, or other enemies) goes directly onto the player character. If it was Pokemon, it would be like saying that your trainer has a health bar. This means you can actually get knocked out mid battle, even while you still have monsters left to fight with.
Attacks use a fairly simple energy system, where each attack has a cost. At the start of each turn, each character gets a set amount of energy. As such, using big attacks means having to save up energy for a bit, or finding another way to generate it. But it does mean you can’t just spam your most powerful attacks out for free each turn.
There are a lot of other really interesting systems here, including the way type match-ups work (pretty much nothing like Pokémon), and the fact that all moves are effectively items that can be equipped and unequipped from your monsters. But the short version is that the combat is good, and I often found myself trying to break it, or experimenting with various setups, which is what I want in a game like this.
Fascinating and Frustrating
I like Cassette Beasts, but I also found it kind of difficult to play at times. The game is incredibly open-ended in letting you progress its story and quests, but that comes at the cost of occasionally feeling directionless.
There was one bit where I spent at least an hour and a half trying to solve a puzzle that it turned out didn’t really exist. The actual solution was to bring a specific character to that area that I hadn’t met yet.
There was another time late game where I pretty much just ended up grinding, because it didn’t feel like it was possible for me to beat a boss at my current power level.
At the same time, I pushed through those moments, because I wanted to see how the story would resolve. The boss designs were cool, and while the world is a bit barren, it’s still exciting to find the small secrets in it. For a two person project, it’s hard not to be impressed by the game.
It’s a very solid game, and I’d probably spend more time on it if there just weren’t so many other games available to play. As it is, though, it has just a bit too much friction for me to be interested in spending more time on it after beating the main story.
I debated writing about Dice Miner. It’s a clever little game, but quite simple, and I figured anyone who wanted to know about it could just ask ChatGPT. But when I tried asking ChatGPT, it got even the basic details wrong, proving that there is in fact still value in writing about games as a human, assuming that you want accurate information to exist in the world.
Anyway, Dice Miner. Dice Miner is a fairly straight forward dice drafting game, with some set collection elements. The game is played over 3 rounds, and each round the players draft a third of all the dice in the game. Players take turns drafting dice off a large cardboard mountain, trying to score the most points. There are two catches. The first is that only dice with two sides exposed can be picked. The second is that you keep dice you pick between rounds, rerolling them into new values that may or may not be more useful.
So let’s talk about the five different types of dice, because between them they provide the meat of the game, and the primary source of my gripes.
Dice Types
From left to right and top to bottom: Tools, Treasure, Caves, Hazard, and Magic
First up, Treasure. Each pip on a treasure dice is worth 1 point, with every treasure dice having sides marked with a 3, 2, three 1’s, and beer. More on beer in a bit. The player with the most treasure at the end of each round gets double points from their treasure.
Next up, the Cave. Its sides are numbered 1-5, with a beer on the sixth side. It scores based on collecting runs. For example, a 1 is worth one point, a 1 and 2 is worth 3 points, a 1-2-3 is worth six points, and so on. Runs must start at 1, and be contiguous.
The third set is Hazard and Tool dice. These are linked, so I’m going over the effects together. Hazard dice are worth negative points, and have either Dragons or Cave-Ins on their surfaces, with a higher number of dragons. Also beer. So why would anyone ever take them? Well, sometimes players are forced into taking certain dice. But more often, players will take hazard dice because when combined with Tool Dice, those negative points become positive. Tool Dice have shields, pickaxes, chests, and yes, beer. Shields turn dragons into points, pickaxes turn cave in into points, and chests let you keep dice on certain values between rounds.
The last type of dice is Magic Dice. These let players reroll other dice at the end of a round, but don’t score any points on their own. Also, they don’t allow players reroll Hazard Dice.
Oh, and beer. Almost every die has a beer side. When you draft a die with a beer (or roll one from a past round) on any turn afterwards, you can reroll that die, give it to another player, and pick two dice from the mountain, including dice with only one side exposed.
Overall, it’s a fun little drafting game, but after five or six games, I do have a problem with it. And if you were paying attention, you might have already spotted it from the way I structured my paragraphs.
The Problem
It’s not really worth it to try to heavily invest into more than one strategy. This is less true in two player where you might hate draft, but stays constant at other counts. Treasure wants lots of treasure. Caves needs lots of caves. Hazard and Tool only function together. Magic works as an ancillary to everything, but doesn’t give points on its own. End result: all strategic options favor “forcing one type.” And after you’ve tried all the types, games start to feel samey.
This isn’t as true for the two player version, where individual dice picks open up options for an opponent. But at higher player counts, enough choices get made that it’s hard to control pacing.
I do like Dice Miner, but I wish it had more to it, or at least more relationships between the types of dice. At its current level, it’s simple enough to teach to infrequent board gamers. I just wish it had more meaningful strategic options.
